Ali Gibran Siddiqui is the Leon B. Poullada Postdoctoral Research Associate in Central Asian Studies at the Department of Near Eastern Studies. As a historian of Islamic Central Asia, he is interested in the economic, political, and social lives of Naqshbandi Sufis in the Timurid and Mughal Empires. His PhD dissertation at The Ohio State University reappraised the role of the Naqshbandi Sufi ṭarīqa across Central Asia and India as an example of a trust network that used ritualized notions of trust and exclusivity to monitor the trans-regional movement of goods and peoples. His current projects include a book on Hisari Naqshbandi Sufis and their complex imaginings of sovereignty in Mughal India and an article on the narrative tropes about Sufi jade mining monopolies in sixteenth-century Kashghar furnished in South and Inner Asian historical writing. He is also co-authoring a critical translation of the Persian-language hagiography and mahoutry manual, the Gajrajnama, and collaborating with art historians at The Louvre to develop a typography of Mughal chilanum daggers.