In Islamic contexts across West Asia and the Indian Ocean world, Muslims linked their historical lives, work, and objects to the supernatural and spirits. In this context, the supernatural is a window into the mentalité of historical actors from the Islamic past. The substantive content of dreams, miracles, jinn, spirit intercessions, astrology, miracles and magic is a rich object of historical investigation and reveals relations, attitudes, and social changes that are otherwise inaccessible to the historian. This is a point of emphasis for the panel: the supernatural is not merely evidence for claims of charisma and legitimacy nor a window into the nature of authority; rather, it provides its own histories and, in fact, operates as its own language.

The first paper opens the panel with an investigation of dreams, visions, and miracles in late medieval Persian history-writing. It focuses on the interactions between Sufi hagiography and court histories in Anatolia and how this interaction not only provided new modalities of legitimation, but also opened new arenas for competition that reveal strands of influence and reception that have otherwise escaped the notice of historians.

The second paper examines nineteenth-century Malay historical texts concerning firearms that were passed down, physically, by the Prophet Muhammad to his heirs in the early modern and modern Malay world, along with the expertise to mediate the supernatural nature of guns and bullets. This paper considers what such Islamic texts reveal about linearity and time, and of the relationship of the supernatural to material life, and accounts for the historical significance of rumors, divination and even alternative conceptions of time and chronology.

The final paper engages narratives around enslavement and the supernatural in nineteenth and twentieth century Iran. This author looks to the abolition of slavery in 1929 and traces how the process of abolition as one of erasure allowed Iranians to relegate the enslavement of people almost entirely to the realm of the mythic and supernatural, enmeshing it with popular religious beliefs in the enslavement of jinn, or genies. This paper offers an analysis for the blurring of myth and memory around enslavement in modern Iran.

The continuing resonance of the supernatural and spiritual also lies in its evolution in time and space – its basis of constant renovation and innovation in the substance of dreams, miracles and magic. Together, these papers discuss the historicity of the supernatural and its importance in understanding global pasts and presents.