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Part I
Historiography
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1 Intersections between Sufism and power
Narrating the shaykhs and sultans of Northern India, 1200–1400
Blain H. Auer
This study involves a critical re-evaluation of the literary modes of representation of the figures of the sultan and the Sufishaykh in the pre-modern Muslim world. It attempts to show how narrative frameworks from historiography and biography, depicting the lives of the Delhi sultans and Sufishaykhs of the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries, were interdependent. In biographical genres and in the recorded conversations of Sufishaykhs of the eighth/fourteenth century, images of the shaykh were crafted with literary techniques found in historiography. In historiography of the same period, sultans are depicted with images commonly reserved for Sufishaykhs as found in their recorded conversations and biographies. It is important to understand the intertextuality of these literary genres and to understand the relationships between image, authorship, and audience. These texts provide a means to understand the evolving connections between royal courts as they played a major role in the institutionalization of Sufi orders through patronage and conferred legitimacy. They also reveal the multitude of ways Sufi shaykhs reciprocated power by legitimating the authority of sultans.
An understanding of this historical relationship can help to unravel some fundamental questions in the study of this period in the history of Muslim South Asia. For instance, what were the sources of legitimacy for Sufishaykhs and Muslim rulers? What was the role of Sufishaykhs in establishing Islamic hegemony? What role did the courts of Muslim rulers play in the evolution and institutionalization of Sufiorders? In attempting to answer some of these questions this chapter offers new methods of interpretation for the study of the relationship between Sufism and power over the course of the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/ fourteenth centuries.
Conflicting images, genre, and authorship
In his remarkable study of the power and authority of pre-modern Moroccan Sufi shaykhs, Vincent Cornell makes the general and provocative statement that “Sainthood is a matter of discourse.” Employing the term “discourse,” Cornell acknowledges something frequently ignored or generally overlooked in the study of Islam and Sufism. Religious figures, in this case Sufishaykhs, pass through social, institutional, and literary processes to achieve their sanctified status. More importantly, the acknowledgment of their status, and the level and extent of their authority, has been the subject of intense debates, both internally within Sufi circles and external to them. This was clearly the case in regard to Sufism in pre-modern Morocco. It is equally the case in regard to Sufism as it developed in the context of Muslim South Asia.
The subject of the discourse under consideration is the relationship between Sufishaykhs and the sultans of Delhi. Of course, the historical trajectory of the northern Indian subcontinent was quite different from that of the Maghreb, which stood at the opposite end of the pre-modern Muslim world. Centers of Islamic authority had been founded in the imperial cities of Fes and Marrakesh long before the establishment of Sufi orders. The origin of Delhi as a center of Islamic authority dates back to the early seventh/thirteenth century when Shams al-Dīn Iltutmish (r. 607–33/1210–36) took the throne and established the lineage of the Shamsiyya sultans of India. Delhi, as a preeminent center of Islamic authority, was born in the context of increasingly institutionalized forms of Sufism. The coeval development of an Indo-Islamic sultanate based in Delhi and the establishment of Suficenters was unique to South Asia and perhaps had a more profound impact on the socio-political climate of the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries than anywhere else in the Muslim world.
It is no coincidence that during the time of the emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, the “founders” of what would become the two most important Sufiorders of South Asia, the Chishtiyya and Suhrawardiyya, established religious centers in India. One major difficulty in properly understanding the origins of these orders in South Asia is that there is no literary evidence pertaining to them from the period in which their purported founders lived. Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī (536–633/1141–1236) is said to have migrated from Chisht, a town located near Herat in eastern Afghanistan near the Ghurid capital, Fīrūzkūh. He settled in the town of Ajmer in India and his tomb became the site of an important pilgrimage center, at least by the mid-eighth/fourteenth century, when the sultan of Delhi, Muḥammad b. Tughluq (r. 724–52/1324–51), singled it out for his own pilgrimage. Muʿīn al-Dīn would become known, at least in retrospect, as the founder of the Chishtiyya order. The other shaykh, Bahāʾ al-Dīn Zakariyyā (578–661/1182–1262), was born in South Asia but travelled far and wide to complete his religious education. In Baghdad, he studied under the famous Sufi, Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (539–632/1145–1234), who is reported to have deputed him to represent the Suhrawardi order in South Asia. Bahāʾ al-Dīn Zakariyyā’s fame would spread as the founder of the Suhrawardi order in India.
These two figures have served as focal points in the understanding of the evolution of a vast network of Sufigroups that shared ritual practices, a common conception of genealogy, and the formal transmission of religious authority. They lived during the time when Shams al-Dīn Iltutmish was attempting to establish Delhi as a center of Islamic authority, and in later sources they are depicted as having had influence over him. The relationship between these men of power is the subject of considerable scrutiny and it stands at the crux of the social, cultural, and political issues that were integral to the various formulations of Islamic authority in the subcontinent.
What we know about Sufishaykhs and Muslim rulers from South Asia is primarily constructed out of literary writings that fall into three genres broadly conceived: history (tārīkh), biography (siyar), and the conversations of shaykhs (malfūẓāt/majālis). History writing was, of course, an ongoing literary activity of Muslim courts that began as early as the second/eighth century. One of the first histories of significance from the Delhi Sultanate was the universal history of Minhāj Sirāj Jūzjānī (b. 589/1193), the Ṭabaqāt-i Nāṣirī. It was a universal history of Islam beginning with tales from the life of the prophet and father of humanity, Adam, and ending with the exploits of Nāṣir al-Dīn Maḥmūd Shāh (r. 644–64/1246–66), sultan of Delhi and Jūzjānī’s patron. If history was the premier literary mode of representation for Muslim rulers in South Asia, then biography was the purview of Sufishaykhs. However, writings pertaining to Sufi orders as they would develop in South Asia do not appear until the eighth/ fourteenth century. These writings take general shape in two prominent literary genres. One form is the biographies of Sufishaykhs, sometimes referred to as siyar or taẕkira. The most famous and widely read of the biographies of Sufi shaykhs written in Persian is the Taẕkirat al-awliyāʾ by Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. ca. 617/1220). In South Asia, the first of these kinds of biographical works to impact the literary culture of the Delhi Sultanate was the Siyar al-awliyāʾ of Mīr Khwurd (fl. 752–90/1351–82).
Another layer in this literary tradition was the recorded didactic conversations of shaykhs known as malfūẓāt or majālis. This tradition is exemplified by works such as Amīr Ḥasan Sijzī’s (655–737/1257–1336) Favāʾid al-fuʾād, which documents the teaching sessions of the most famous Sufishaykh of the day, Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ (ca. 640–725/1243–1325). There are also important but lesser known works such as the Durar-i Niẓāmī by ʿAlī b. Maḥmūd Jandar, a major source utilized in the composition of the Siyar al-awliyāʾ. Another extremely important work is Ḥamīd Qalandar’s Khayr al-majālis, which records the sayings of Naṣīr al-Dīn Maḥmūd Chirāgh-i Dihlī (d. 757/1356), perhaps the most prominent successor to Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ.
It is within the pages of the Sufibiographies and the conversation of shaykhs that the stock imagery of the pious Sufishaykh was crafted. Stories about Sufi shaykhs emphasized their divine inspiration (ilhām), poverty (faqr), the protection (wilāya) they offered through God, their marvelous powers (karāmāt) and their chosenness by God. These kinds of texts are frequently collectively referred to as hagiography, a term that carries with it the nineteenth- and twentieth-century pejorative baggage of being “untrue,” and they are often contrasted with the “true” narratives found in other types of historiography. However, the generic distinctions made between the hagiography and historiography of the eighth/ fourteenth century cannot be accepted outright, as will be seen. Carl Ernst has commented upon this artificial distinction, saying, “The polarity between mystical and royal historiographies should not be taken as absolute and exclusive, but as a symbiotic relationship.”
Courts, Suficircles, and patronage
In addition to understanding genre when interpreting discourses on the relationship between Sufishaykhs and Muslim rulers it is also important to pay attention to authorship and audience. The authors of the histories of the Delhi sultans and the biographies of Sufishaykhs shared discursive spaces. Both court historians and the biographers of Sufishaykhs were prominent members of Muslim courts, holding high offices, mingling at the elite levels of society. In fact, in many cases authors who chose Sufishaykhs as the subject for their literary endeavors also wrote works dedicated to the lives of sultans. Though it is difficult to trace the patronage of the works dedicated to Sufishaykhs, it is unlikely that these literary endeavors would have been created without, at least, indirect court patronage. There certainly was a shared audience for both historical and biographical works: the court, the literate, and a notion of posterity. Ultimately, the primary audiences of the histories of sultans and biographies of shaykhs differed completely. Simply put, one was, literally, dedicated to sultans and the other to shaykhs.
The long-lasting interactions between royal courts, Sufi circles, and the literary culture are no better exemplified than in the life of Amīr Khusraw (651–725/ 1253–1325). Amīr Khusraw authored some of the most important historical works on the Delhi sultans produced in the late seventh/thirteenth and early eighth/ fourteenth centuries, in both prose and verse. He prominently served at the pleasure of no fewer than five sultans of Delhi, from Jalāl al-Dīn Fīrūz Shāh (r. 689–95/1290–6) to Ghiyā
al-Dīn Tughluq Shāh (r. 720–4/1320–4). At the same time he was a close associate of the most influential Sufi shaykh of his day, Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ. He wrote “dedications” to Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ in a number of his writings. Moreover, the
Afżal al-favāʾid, though likely a spuriously attributed work, is supposedly the sayings of the shaykh as collected by Amīr Khusraw, and the collection represents a testament to the fame of the relationship between the two.
Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ’s influence at the royal court extended far beyond Amīr Khusraw. There was also Amīr Ḥasan Sijzī, the author of the most famous collection of conversations of Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ, the Favāʾid al-fuʾād. Like Amīr Khusraw, Amīr Ḥasan held court appointments under a variety of sultans of Delhi. As court poet, his dīvān is full of praise poems dedicated to the sul...
