NON-FICTION: A HISTORY OF SYNCRETIC MYSTICISM.

Dr Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro, an anthropologist by education and profession, has become a household name for his immense contributions to scholarship on the heritage and culture of Sindh.

His latest book, Saints, Sufis and Shrines: The Mystical Landscape of Sindh, once again shows the amount of fieldwork conducted to pen down the folklore, legends and stories about the saintly figures of the region and to document the built form through photographs.

Kalhoro has been researching Pakistan's south-eastern province since 1998 and this book is the result of those 24 years of hard work. The first of a three-part series, which intends to familiarise readers with both the more well-known as well as lesser-known saints associated with Sindh from the 13th to the 20th centuries, it will pique the interest of local and foreign scholars alike with its almost 55 essays on the shrines dotting the region.

Saints, Sufis and Shrines is geographically expansive and the essays are arranged roughly chronologically. Although the author mentions the target audience that is expected to benefit from this book - historians, anthropologists, sociologists and scholars of comparative religion - it is written in a manner that even laypersons with some interest in the subject will be able to grasp the content easily. Most advantageously for the book as well as its readers, each essay works as a standalone piece and can be read independently.

Part hagiography, part documentation and part journey through the landscape, focusing on its many shrines, it serves up a thorough ethnographic testimonial that reveals many aspects of the unique and shared culture of these spaces.

Anthropologist Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro's latest erudite book will pique the interest of local and foreign scholars and interested laypersons alike with its almost 55 essays on the shrines dotted across Sindh

In chapters spread over two to three pages each, Kalhoro gives background information on the individual saints, what silsila or Sufi order they belonged to, who were their teachers or pirs and who became their disciples and gaddi nasheens [spiritual successors]. He also narrates interesting anecdotes that have been passed down generations - the oral tradition in these places is very strong and imbues life to the ethnographic study.

As well as chapters on such popular Sufis as Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai and Abdul Wahab - better known as Sachal Sarmast - we have accounts of saints many might...