Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Maklī Necropolis, 1380–1660

Why did sultans and saints alike choose to be buried on a windswept plateau above the Indus delta? And what can six centuries of tombs at one of the world’s largest necropolises tell us about art, devotion, and power in South Asia?

BOOK SUMMARY:

Coming October 2026, Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Maklī Necropolis, 1380–1660 by Fatima Quraishi is an interdisciplinary study of the vast funerary site in what is now Sindh Province, Pakistan—known as “Little Mecca”—which grew over three centuries from a modest Sufi site into more than seventy monumental tombs and mosques and hundreds, if not thousands, of graves.

Maklī’s distinctive architecture sheds light on the intersection of transregional artistic styles through its accretional building practices by generations of craftspeople, and over its long history the necropolis became a site layered with multiple meanings, as regional elites and everyday Sufi devotees sought to be buried in the shadow of saints, and as the living visited to enact devotions and duty.

Using rarely consulted archives in Pakistan alongside close analysis of Maklī’s built environment, Quraishi understands the site as an artistic and architectural palimpsest, mutually established by elite patronage and humble devotions, where the passage of time merges with changes in religion and society to reveal the vibrant lives and afterlives of tombs integral to the communal life of the surrounding areas.

Winner of the 2026 Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities and published in the Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks series edited by Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence, Palimpsests Past and Present studies what has long been treated as an interstitial space between Central Asia and India, speaking to wider explorations of the borderlands of the premodern past.

PUBLISHER SUMMARY & PURCHASE:

• The University of North Carolina Press: https://uncpress.org/9781469697628/palimpsests-past-and-present/