94 94 DOI: 10.4324/9780429275364-9 7 THE MAKING OF QĪ Z B Ī B Ī IN CENTRAL ASIA’S ORAL SHRINE TRADITIONS From the Great Lady to a fourteen-year-old virgin Aziza Shanazarova This chapter explores the shrine of Aghā-yi Buzurg, a female Suf master active in the early sixteenth century in Bukhara, and its history. It does so by tracing the continuation of people’s interest in her legacy and sanctity into the present, and in connection to the reproduction of the Maẓhar al- ʻajā’ib, a devotional work written in the second half of the sixteenth century to expound upon Aghā-yi Buzurg’s teachings by her disciple Ḥāfẓ Baṣīr (Shanazarova 2019; 2020). I start by examining the Ḥikāyat-i Qīz Bībī (“The Story of a Virgin Girl”), an account of Aghā-yi Buzurg which is largely based on the combination of borrowed elements from the oral traditions narrated at the saint’s shrine in Bukhara, and Ḥāfẓ Baṣīr’s Maẓhar al- ʻajā’ib. Although the Maẓhar al- ʻajā’ib contains the death account of the saint at an advanced age, in the Ḥikāyat-i Qīz Bībī, Aghā-yi Buzurg is depicted as a fourteen-year-old chaste girl who surpasses her contemporary prominent public fgure and religious scholar Mīr-i ‘Arab. This account, then, reminds us of the importance of female age in the study of women and gender history in Islamic communities (Shanazarova 2019: 140–153). But also, it throws light on the portrayal of Aghā-yi Buzurg as the “Other” in the context of Central Asia in the oral traditions; this is seen as necessary to frame her spiritual victory over Mīr-i ‘Arab’s authority, as it is narrated in the Maẓhar al- ʻajā’ib (MS IVRUz 8716, f. 178b). The emphasis on Aghā-yi Buzurg’s interces- sory role on behalf of people living in the vicinity of her shrine – located at the site where she is said to have disappeared, according to the Ḥikāyat-i Qīz Bībī – reveals the targeted audience of this narrative, i.e., shrine visitors. Consequently, the second part of the article explores the shrine of Aghā-yi Buzurg and its history based on the examination of the tombstone, the panja, 1 and the waqf document endowed to the shrine. Even though there are reports about Aghā- yi Buzurg’s tomb recorded in the eighteenth-century Naqshbandī hagiographic compendium entitled Tadhkira-yi Ṭāhir Īshān in addition to the Tarjuma-yi ḥal-i Aghā-yi Buzurg, this chapter observes the correlation between the revival of the manuscript reproductions of the Maẓhar al- ʻajā’ib from the second half of the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries (Shanazarova 2020: 6–8), and the restoration and development of Aghā-yi Buzurg’s shrine during the same period in Bukhara. Aghā-yi Buzurg’s shrine, locally known as that of “Qīz Bībī,” is located in