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The debate within: a Sufi critique of religious law, tasawwuf and politics in Mughal India
Muzaffar Alam
Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
This essay is an effort to understand the position taken by the celebrated seventeenth-century ChishtÄ« Sufi āAbd al-RahmÄn ChishtÄ« in his MirāÄt al-AsrÄr, a hagiographical dictionary (tazkira) of past Sufi holy men. I have read this tazkira together with āAbd al-RahmÄnās other writings but focused in particular on his long preface to this work in which he elaborates his definition of tasawwuf and asks what the real religion of the Sufi should be. āAbd al-RahmÄn also undertakes a far-reaching reassessment of key elements in the wider traditions of Indian Islam. Drawing on a range of Indian and Middle Eastern influences, he rejects the narrow law-centred formulation of the NaqshbandÄ«s and offers a distinctive vision of ChishtÄ« spiritual support at the heart of the Mughal political order. His work opens up for us the wider landscape of religious debate and contestation that characterized Indian Islam during the Mughal era, which later generations of historians have overlooked in their preoccupation with more āconservativeā strains of Muslim thought.
If a prophet had been sent to this community
[Muslims], he would have practiced the Hanafī law.
Shaikh Ahmad SirhindÄ«, MaktÅ«bÄt
The Sufi has no mazhab.
Abd al-RahmÄn ChishtÄ«, MirāÄt al-AsrÄr
In the development of Indian Muslim religious learning and Sufi thought, seventeenth-century Mughal India occupies a special position. Several important Sufi orders flourished: the NaqshbandÄ«, SuhrawardÄ«, QÄdirÄ« and ChishtÄ«. Arriving from Central Asia alongside the Mughal regime, the NaqshbandÄ«s established an especially important branch in India, known as the MujadiddÄ«, by one of the best known Indian Sufi and religious thinkers, Shaikh Ahmad SirhindÄ« (d. 1624). This Indian branch eventually spread far beyond the subcontinent to nearly the entire Islamic East. The period also witnessed the rise of another well-known religious thinker, Shaikh āAbd al-Haqq Muhaddis DehlavÄ« (d. 1642), one of the few Indian Muslim scholars to visit Hijaz and receive training in advanced religious learning. Upon his return to India, DehlavÄ« established his own institutions to disseminate religious learning, to which his own particular contribution was his rejuvenation of the science of hadÄ«s. A member of the QadirÄ« order, DehlavÄ«ās AkhbÄr al-AkhyÄr, a tazkira of South Asian Sufis, is amongst the oft-cited Sufi texts.1 These two figures dominate the history of seventeenth-century Muslim religious culture in India.
This essay, however, will take as its starting point an oft-overlooked religious discourse initiated by a ChishtÄ« shaikh. Much as SirhindÄ« revitalized the NaqshbandÄ« order in the seventeenth century, the ChishtÄ«s also rearticulated their ideology in significant new ways, partly in reaction to the formulations of the NaqshbandÄ« order. Integral to this discourse is the problem of the Sufiās relationship to a specific religious jurisprudential school (mazhab). In this debate, the ChishtÄ«s not only reacted to their political and religious environment but also re-read and redefined the Islamic past and Muslim religious traditions. Yet, this train of seventeenth-century thought is practically untouched by modern South Asian scholarship. Indeed, one of our best authorities projects the ChishtÄ«s during the Mughal era as virtually inactive, reviving only later in the eighteenth century.2 Even for the NaqshbandÄ«s, scholarship has been largely confined to the NaqshbandÄ« reaction to Akbar (d. 1605).
Our primary source for the ChishtÄ« view of this period comes from the writings of Shaikh āAbd al-RahmÄn (d. 1683). Hailing from Awadh, āAbd al-RahmÄn was a major Shaikh of the SÄbirÄ« branch of the ChishtÄ« silsila with close family connections to two eminent saints of the ChishtÄ« SÄbirÄ« order, Shaikh Ahmad āAbd al-Haqq of Rudauli (d. 1434) and Shaikh āAbd al-QuddÅ«s GangohÄ« (d. 1537).3 āAbd al-RahmÄn was thus a prime spokesman for his order and presents a lucid view of the ChishtÄ« position.
Shaikh āAbd al-RahmÄn ChishtÄ«ās MirāÄt al-AsrÄr
āAbd al-RahmÄn wrote prolifically, with five of his books bearing the word MirāÄt in the titles.4 Here, we will discuss primarily his MirāÄt al-AsrÄr, one of the most comprehensive biographical dictionaries of the Sufis written during the seventeenth century, covering about a 1000 years from the time of the Prophet down to the date of the completion of the compilation (AH 1065/AD 1654), which took about 20 years (AH 1045/AD 1635āAH 1065/AD 1654). Bruce Lawrence has analysed this text focusing on its Indo-Persian flavour.5 The book reads like a definitive statement on the legitimacy of the ChishtÄ« ideology and pr...
