INDIAN SUFISM SINCE THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Sufism is often regarded as standing mystically aloof from its wider cultural settings. By turning this perspective on its head, Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century reveals the politics and poetry of Indian Sufism through the study of Islamic sainthood in the midst of a cosmopolitan Indian society comprising migrants, soldiers, litterateurs and princes. Placing the mystical traditions of Indian Islam within their cultural contexts, the study focuses on the shrines of four Sufi saints in the neglected Deccan region and their changing roles under the rule of the Mughals, the Nizams of Haydarabad and, after 1947, the Indian nation. Of particular interest is the book’s focus on religion in princely Haydarabad, examining the vibrant intellectual and cultural history of this independent state. However, close attention is also paid to the effects of British colonialism on Sufi individuals and institutions in India. Against these settings, the place of Sufis and their followers in the Indo-Persian and Urdu literary traditions is analysed, showing a popular religious tradition supported by a literature no less than an architecture of sainthood. In this way, an overview of the main developments of devotional Islam in South Asia over the past three centuries is presented from a regional perspective. Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century is essential reading for scholars with interests in Sufism, Islam, India and cultural studies. Nile Green is Milburn Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Manchester University. His wide-ranging research interests focus on Sufism and the history and ethnography of Islam in South Asia, Iran and Afghanistan. ROUTLEDGE SUFI SERIES Series Editor: Ian Richard Netton Professor of Arabic Studies University of Leeds The Routledge Sufi Series provides short introductions to a variety of facets of the subject, which are accessible both to the general reader and the student and scholar in the field. Each book will be either a synthesis of existing knowledge or a distinct contribution to, and extension of, knowledge of the particular topic. The two major underlying principles of the Series are sound scholarship and readability. 1 BEYOND FAITH AND INFIDELITY The Sufi poetry and teaching of Mahmud Shabistari Leonard Lewisham 2 AL-HALLAJ Herbert W. Mason 3 RUZBIHAN BAQLI Mysticism and the rhetoric of sainthood in Persian Sufism Carl W. Ernst 4 ABDULLAH ANSARI OF HERAT An early Sufi master A.G. Ravan Farhadi 5 THE CONCEPT OF SAINTHOOD IN EARLY ISLAMIC MYSTICISM Bernd Radtke and John O’Kane 6 SUHRAWARDI AND THE SCHOOL OF ILLUMINATION Mehdi Amin Razavi 7 PERSIAN SUFI POETRY An introduction to the mystical use of classical poems J.T.P. de Bruijn 8 AZIZ NASAFI Lloyd Ridgeon 9 SUFIS AND ANTI-SUFIS The defence, rethinking and rejection of Sufism in the modern world Elizabeth Sirriyeh 10 REVELATION, INTELLECTUAL INTUITION AND REASON IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MULLA SADRA An analysis of the al-hikmah al-‘arshiyyah Zailan Moris 11 DIVINE LOVE IN ISLAMIC MYSTICISM The teachings of al-Ghâzalî and al-Dabbâgh Binyamin Abrahamov 12 STRIVING FOR DIVINE UNION Spiritual exercises for Suhrawardi Sufis Qamar-ul Huda 13 A PSYCHOLOGY OF EARLY SUFI SAMA Listening and altered states Kenneth S. Avery 14 MUSLIM SAINTS OF SOUTH ASIA The eleventh to fifteenth centuries Anna Suvorova 15 SUFI VISIONARY OF OTTOMAN DAMASCUS ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, 1641–1731 Elizabeth Sirriyeh 16 SUFI RITUAL The parallel universe Ian Richard Netton 17 EARLY MYSTICS IN TURKISH LITERATURE Mehmed Fuad Koprulu Translated, edited and with an Introduction by Gary Leiser & Robert Dankoff 18 INDIAN SUFISM SINCE THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Saints, books and empires in the Muslim Deccan Nile Green INDIAN SUFISM SINCE THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Saints, books and empires in the Muslim Deccan Nile Green I~ ~~o~;~~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2006 by Routledge Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2006 Nile Green Typeset in Garamond by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, Chennai, India The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN13: 978–0–415–39040–8 (hbk) FOR MY PARENTS, GEOFFREY AND OLIVIA GREEN CONTENTS List of figures xi Preface xiii Acknowledgements xvii A note on transliteration and names xxi List of abbreviations xxiii Map 1 xxv 1 Muslim mystics in an age of empire: the Sufis of Awrangabad 1 2 The poetry and politics of sainthood in a Mughal successor state 46 3 The Sufis in the shadow of a new empire 82 4 Saints, rebels and revivalists 103 5 The Awrangabad saints in the new India 134 Conclusions 158 Glossary 162 Notes 164 Bibliography 186 Index 200 ix FIGURES 1.1 The mausoleum of Awrangzeb’s wife (Bibi ka Maqbara) in Awrangabad 2 1.2 Throne (masnad ) of Nizmm al-Mulk at Nawkhanda Palace, Awrangabad 17 2.1 Panchakkl, the shrine of Shmh Musmfir and Shmh Palangphsh 58 2.2 The tombs of Shmh Musmfir and Shmh Palangphsh 60 3.1 Shrine attendant (khmdim) before the tomb of Shmh Musmfir 92 4.1 The mausoleum of Nizmm al-dln Awrangmbmdl 107 4.2 A Sufi pilgrim at the shrine of Nizmm al-dln Awrangmbmdl 114 5.1 Miniature painting of Shmh Nnr at the math of Mmnpnrl in Dawlatabad 137 5.2 Sufi musicians singing qawwmll at Khuldabad 141 xi PREFACE ...a qalandar without equal, an enlightened dervish, a griffin on Mount Qaf, a holy hawk in the space of divine intimacy, he was always busy in the remembrance of the Truth and is among the fakirs and great ones of the Sufi path.1 The mystical Muslim tradition known in the West as Sufism was intimately associated with the cult of the saints (awliym) from early in its history.2 Yet the dichotomy once drawn by an earlier generation of scholars between an ‘authentic’ sophisticated and tex- tual Sufi tradition and a ‘decadent’ popular and non-literate tradition of the veneration of living or dead saints has done much to obscure the actual nature of Sufis and Sufism in the different societies of the past.3 In many ways this problem was engendered by an over-reliance upon written materials (especially poetical and doctrinal works) without reference to their wider contexts. But this model of Sufism as primarily (or even ide- ally) the pursuit of the erudite hermit rather than a shared and collective phenomenon rooted as much in social as in individual dispensations has proven to be as influential as it is distorting. For if ‘real’ Sufism was this learned and didactic quest for divine union, then any persons and practices linking Sufism with less elevated and more worldly concerns needed necessarily to be marginalized as peripheral or ‘inauthentic’. Over time, this individualist model led to a widening of the separation between Sufism and its cultural contexts, for in practice it was often these very ‘debased’ saintly prac- tices that formed the bonds tying Sufis and their multifarious practices to their wider social environments. While little work has been done on saintly or other shrine cults in the early centuries of Islam, it may have been partly in the face of widespread compe- tition for saintly status and confusion regarding its precise criteria that such early Sufi writers as Tirmidhl (d. c.295/908) wrote their handbooks of the stages of the path to sainthood (walmyat).4 Both the cultural geography and the religious forms of the Near East prior to the rise of Islam were characterized by an abundance of saintly cults of one kind or another.5 However sensitive to the ‘originality’ and integrity of Islam, the idea of a complete hiatus of such religious activity with the rise of Islam that was only to be followed a few centuries later by a kind of saintly re-awakening runs contrary to the developmental history of religious traditions as extended cultural phenomena as opposed to abstracted sets of limited theological ideals. While sudden religious xiii PREFACE transformations may typify the life of prophets, they rarely characterize the life of whole peoples. While scholars once saw such early texts as those of Tirmidhl as the proof of a chronologically earlier tradition of ‘authentic’ mystic pursuits, it seems possible that the presence of miracle-working holy men already formed the wider religious context within which such early theorists were writing. At what point Muslim intellectuals chose to dignify such figures in writing, and describe them through the vocabulary of Sufism (tasawwuf ), is another matter. Yet Tirmidhl’s own tomb soon became the focus of a robust saintly tradition. And by the turn of the eleventh century other early Sufi writers like Sulaml (d. 412/1021) and Hujwlrl (d. 465/1072) were more candidly describing the shrines of earlier Sufis and pilgrimages to them and doing so, moreover, in terms of a normative practice. With a few notable exceptions, until the 1990s the scholarly marginalization of Sufi shrines and the variety of activities surrounding them continued, phenomena which traditional scholarship had regarded as related only tenuously to Sufism if related to it at all. Yet despite the concentration of many scholars working earlier in the twentieth century upon individual ‘mystical’ writers as exemplars of the Sufi path, there were relatively few among these great literary luminaries who were not them- selves the centre of shrine cults in their own right.