This dissertation is a study of praise literature written for Muhammad and the Prophetic Family (ahl-i bayt) in the Persian world of the 6th/12th-10th/16th centuries. It explores this vast but understudied body of literature (called manqabat) by looking beyond the texts and considering associated practices associated, such as street performances. Analyzing a wide range of poems as well as accounts of practices, I argue that pious praise poetry was a technology in service of expressing and experiencing a loving orientation towards Muhammad and his family, and that the habitual experience of this form of piety was a form of subjectivity-formation in the premodern world. I also posit that this form of pious love is not a “Shiʿa” phenomenon, not only because of its sheer prevalence across the Perso-Islamic world but also because Shiʿism as we recognize it post-dates the pious praise practices that I study. I show how in the early modern period, manqabat poetry and the emotional orientation that they evince becomes a way to imagine a transtemporal Shiʿi community.