David Brophy's superb new translation of Muḥammad Ṣadiq Kashghari's In Remembrance of the Saints (Taẕkira-i ʿAzīzān) brings an important source on eighteenth-century Central Asian and Chinese history to a general audience. The text is an eighteenth-century hagiography focused on the Isḥaqiyya line of the Naqshbandiyya Sufi brotherhood, one that details the politics of the Junghar confederation and culminates in the Qing conquest of what became Xinjiang. Brophy's translation cross-references all of the available manuscripts, and the introduction and endnotes discuss discrepancies between them in some detail. The content and tenor of the original work run the gamut from miraculous accounts of early Sufi saints to harrowing political intrigue still in living memory at the time of writing. For a sense of flavor: there is a governor who tries to betray a city by surreptitiously tunneling under the walls (pp. 190–91) and a saintly mother who earned the nickname...
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