Dissertation FINAL Revised

Tracing the Footsteps of the Prophet across the Indian Ocean: The Materiality of Prophetic Piety in Mughal India

Usman Hamid

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations University of Toronto

Tracing the Footsteps of the Prophet across the Indian Ocean: The Materiality of Prophetic Piety in Mughal India

Usman Hamid

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations University of Toronto

2021

Abstract

This dissertation adopts theoretical and methodological insights from the study of religious materiality to explore how Indian Ocean travel gave rise to religious discourses and practices in South Asia. It traces how the circulation of people, objects, and knowledge between North

India and the Hejaz led to new forms of Muslim piety in the imperial centers of the Mughal

Empire. A characteristic feature of this piety was belief in the auspicious nature of the Prophet

Muḥammad’s body. This belief was expressed both in scholastic discourse and ritual practice as evidenced by the history of Prophetic relics and tradition examined in this dissertation.

The introduction lays forth the concept of Prophetic piety and outlines what it means to study it from the perspective of material religion. It draws attention to the way material culture has been mobilized to preserve the memory of the Prophet Muḥammad. Chapter one looks at the arrival of a qadam or footprint relic associated with the Prophet to the court of the

Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), and focuses on the religious debates and royal rituals of

veneration it engendered. The analysis offers insight on the practice of religious inquiry at the

Mughal court and its role in the performance of sovereignty. Chapter two looks at the development of two monumental reliquary shrines, one in Delhi and the other in Ahmedabad, whose central relics shared a connected history. By focusing on the religious economy of the shrines, the chapter looks at how various actors invested in the shrine, including the Mughal court, Chishtī Sufis, and Sayyids, and how their interventions may have shaped devotees’ relic practices. Chapter three contextualizes these ritual practices at the reliquary shrines within new scholastic discourses that began circulating in seventeenth century Delhi. These discourses are found in the scholastic writings of North Indian Sufis who expressed a strong devotion to the Prophet and who had travelled to the Hejaz for pilgrimage and studying hadith. It is in their writings that we see clear expression of the belief in the auspicious nature of the Prophet’s body.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to begin by thanking members of my supervising committee, Maria Subtelny and

Karen Ruffle for their direction in seeing this project through and guiding my training as a scholar and teacher. I will forever be indebted to Maria Subtelny, whose seminars opened my eyes to the broader history of the Persianate world and its rich literary traditions. I will fondly remember the afternoons spent pouring over countless sources as she patiently guided me through the mystifying metaphors and elusive allusions. To Karen Ruffle I owe my orientation as a scholar and teacher. She has challenged me to think more sharply, more deeply, and more comparatively, proving me with a toolkit to make sense of the materiality of religion. I thank both of them, as well as Carl Ernst and Luther Obrock, for their generously reading this dissertation and offering the gift of feedback.

My journey through the doctoral program entailed mentorship and friendship from many, without whom I would have been adrift. I was fortunate to have Ajay Rao and Pasha M.

Khan as mentors who invested in me professionally and personally and I aspire to emulate their warmth and magnanimity. Malavika Kasturi, Bhavani Raman, Bart Scott, and Jo Sharma created opportunities and offered sage advice. Finally, this journey could not have possible, had it not been for Sajida Alvi who took a chance on me as an undergraduate.

For years the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations served as a collegial and stimulating environment and I have many fond memories of friendship and intellectual exchange with Adam Ali, Mustafa Banister, Lale Javanshir, Shuntu Kuang, Abolfazl Moshiri,

Sajjad Nejatie, and Parisa Zahiremami. At the University of Toronto Sanchia DeSouza, Mekhola

Gomes, Jairan Gahan, Candis Haak, Adil Mawani, Jonathan Peterson, Bogdan Smarandache were friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators. From further afield, Salua Fawzi, Eliza Tasbihi and Bariza Umar provided insight and support.

Arun Brahmbhatt deserve particular distinction for his continual and unflinching support and good judgement. David Wrisley has been a long-time friend, mentor, and confidant—I thank him for reminding me to see the big picture and to keep chugging along.

Their presence made completion of this possible. For being fellow travellers this past decade I thank Komail Aijazuddin, Matt Lemche, Greg Mendelson, and Fay.

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Anna Sousa, Maria Leonor Vivona, and

Michael Godwin for shepherding me through the hurdles of PhD program, and to Blair Kuntz for being a generous and obliging boss. This dissertation was completed after I joined Hamilton

College’s Asian Studies Program, where I have benefitted from insightful feedback, warm friendship, and sage mentorship from Thomas Wilson, Lisa Trivedi, and Abhishek Amar.

It is by convention alone that I thank my family at end of these acknowledgements; by right, they occupy pride of place. To my parents Tariq and Yasmin Hamid, who have always been supportive of me no matter what path I chose and who always were willing to make sacrifices to see me reach my goals. I thank my father for his indulging me in conversations about history, for his advice to preserve and look forward, and for accompanying me on my adventures in the field. To my mother I offer my thanks for her endless prayers, without which this project would have long languished. My brother Omar and sister Zainab were pillars of support, both materially and emotionally.

Acknowledgements are a bittersweet affair. We get a chance to acknowledge the contributions of those who brought us to this point, but no matter how complete a list of names, there are will be those who will be missing. I beg their indulgence.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction: Materializing Prophetic Piety ...... 1 I.1 Supplicating the Prophet ...... 1 I.2. Prophetic Piety ...... 5 I.3. Prophetic Relics and Tradition ...... 12 I.4. Tracing Prophetic Piety in Mughal India ...... 19 1. Relics Debated ...... 23 1.1. The Footprint of the Prophet at the Court of the Great Mughal ...... 23 1.2. Sources ...... 27 1.3. Historical Context: The Imperial Hajj ...... 37 1.4. The Relic at the Court of the Great Mughal ...... 47 1.5. Conclusion ...... 53 2. Relics Enshrined ...... 58 2.1. Reliquary Shrines of the Prophet in Mughal India ...... 58 2.2. The Reliquary Shrine in Ahmedabad ...... 69 2.3. Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf ...... 78 2.4. Conclusion ...... 114 3. Auspicious Corporeality ...... 116 3.1. The Prophet’s Body and the Sunni Hadith Tradition ...... 116 3.2. Visiting the Grave of the Prophet in Medina ...... 122 3.3. Introducing Madārij al-nubūvat va marātib al-futūvat and its Context ...... 126 3.4. Auspicious Corporeality ...... 137 3.5. Conclusion ...... 155 C. Conclusion: Traces in the Archive ...... 157 Bibliography ...... 166 Primary Sources ...... 166 Secondary Sources ...... 169

INTRODUCTION

Materializing Prophetic Piety

I.1 Supplicating the Prophet

To introduce the intersection of religious materiality, Indian Ocean circulation, and devotion to the Prophet Muḥammad we begin with two accounts recorded about the Mughal emperor Awrangzīb ʿĀlamgīr (r. 1068–1118/1658–1707). The first is from a work entitled

Maʾāsiṟ -i ʿĀlamgīrī (The glorious feats of the world conqueror), a chronicle documenting the reign of the Mughal emperor written by the historian Muḥammad Sāqī Mustaʿidd Khān. He narrates that on 1 Ṣafar 1096/7 January 1685, the Qāżī Shaykh al-Islām requested permission from the Mughal emperor Awrangzīb to undertake pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and

Medina. The emperor approved the request and bequeathed the Qāżī two soft shawls meant to be worn together and a work referred to as Risālah-i ādāb-i ziyārat (A treatise on the proper conduct of visitation [to the grave of the Prophet Muḥammad]). In addition, he was entrusted with a casket (ṣandūqchah) full of letters of supplication (ʿarżah-i niyāz) addressed to the

Prophet. This casket was to be taken to the Prophet’s tomb in Medina and opened before the door of the latticed enclosure. From it, he was to take out a pouch (kharīṭah), presumably full of the supplicatory letters, and deposit it beneath the lintel of the door. With these instructions and votive offerings in hand, the Qāżī Shaykh al-Islām was bid farewell.1

The other is found in a work entitled Javāhir al-tārīkh al-Makkī (The precious jewels of the Meccan history), written by one Muḥammad Bāqir bin Sharīf Iṣfahānī. In it, the author provides a list of gifts sent by the first six Mughal emperors to the holy sites in the Hejaz.

When going through his list, one is struck by the distinctiveness of gifts sent by Awrangzīb.

1 Muḥammad Sāqī Mustaʿidd Khān, Maʾāsiṟ -i ʿĀlamgīrī, ed. Āghā Aḥmad ʿAlī (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1870–71), 251.

While the previous emperors gifted objects such as candlesticks (qandīl), lamps (shamaʿdān), carpets (qālī), and of course money, Awrangzīb instead endowed manuscripts of the Qurʾān that he copied with his own hand (khaṭṭ-i mubārak-i khvud istiktāb namūdah).2 It is worth pausing here for a moment in order to consider how laborious and time consuming an act of piety and devotion it must have been for the emperor to have personally calligraphed multiple copies of the Qurʾān, verse after verse, page after page, chapter after chapter, in his own hand.

In these two brief but tantalizing episodes, we can make out the hazy contours of a distinctive expression of piety that I argue emerged in the late-seventeenth century in Mughal

India and focused on the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad, and which intersected with growing Indian Ocean travel in a myriad of material forms. In the two examples provided above this form of piety manifests materially in the sending of very particular forms of votive offerings to the grave of the Prophet Muḥammad. Both involved embodied actions that were being performed at a distance through the act of writing. These exertions were meant to elicit the fulfilment of a wish or perhaps religious merit. In both cases, material culture becomes a conduit through which supplication and devotion to the Prophet is expressed. Moreover, the site at which these pious expressions find fulfillment is at his grave in Medina, which sources often describe as the rawżah or garden, and which was part of the Masjid-i Nabavī complex.

It is perhaps tempting to dismiss these examples as not particularly indicative of larger patterns of piety on two grounds. The first is that the example is of an elite form of piety—after all, the person in question is the Mughal emperor—and the second is on account of which emperor we are talking about. Awrangzīb ʿĀlamgīr looms large in South Asian historical memory as the last Mughal sovereign to reign over the empire before it came apart at the

2 Muḥammad Bāqir bin Sharīf Isfahānī, “Javāhir al-tārīkh al-Makkī,” ed. by Rasūl Jaʿfariyān, Mīqāt-i ḥajj 59 (1386/2007), 94–95.

seams in the eighteenth century; and whose religious policies may have contributed to the disintegration of the Mughal dispensation.3

However, these criticisms only apply if we consider the actions of emperors as completely divorced from the broader social world in which they were embedded or if we see their actions as the products of their own genius instead of reflecting the cultural milieu in which they operated. Recent scholarship on the Mughal emperors has shown the limitations of such assumptions. This has been particularly true in the domain of studying the intersections of religion and politics. For instance in his work on the performance of sovereignty in the

Mughal empire, Azfar Moin demonstrates how kingly engagements with the messianic, ecumenical, and occult—which were previously interpreted as the idiosyncratic choices of individual emperors—were in fact carefully calibrated responses to a post-Mongol Persianate world where sovereignty and sainthood overlapped in significant ways.4 In a related vein of unpacking the juncture of religion and politics with respect to the figure of the Mughal emperor, Samira Sheikh shows that Awrangzīb’s prosecutorial response of putting to trial leaders of millenarian movements such as the Mahdavis or even the Sikhs was the result of a growing commitment to Hanafi legalism within the Mughal bureaucracy with the rise of particular network of Gujarati jurists.5 In both cases, religious policies and actions are made

3 For a recent revisionist perspective on his reign see Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (Stanford University Press, 2017). More recently, scholars have looked at his reign from the perspective of vernacular sources, which include the series of essays in “From Outside the Persianate Centre: Vernacular Views on ‘Ālamgīr’,” ed. Anne Murphy and Heidi Pauwels, special issue, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, no. 3 (2018).

4A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012).

5 Samira Sheikh, “Aurangzeb as seen from Gujarat: Shiʿi and Millenarian Challenges to Mughal Sovereignty,” in “From Outside the Persianate Centre: Vernacular Views on ‘Ālamgīr’,” ed. Anne Murphy and Heidi Pauwels, special issue, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, no. 3 (2018): 557–81.

sense of by situating them within broader intellectual and social trends. In thinking with these interventions, the question this dissertation proposes is, what new paradigms of piety may have inspired these two examples listed above of materially mediated expressions of devotion to the Prophet Muḥammad and how might such an inquiry contribute to the historiography of not only Mughal South Asia but also the broader Indian Ocean world?

This dissertation explores how the circulation of texts, objects, and people across the

Indian Ocean starting from the late-sixteenth century generated new forms of religious piety that focused Muslim devotion on the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad. The case studies that constitute subsequent chapters of this dissertation are geographically situated in the imperial and sub-imperial cities of the Mughal empire: Fatehpur Sikri, Delhi, and Ahmadabad. The chronological length of the case studies spans from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, the height of Mughal imperium. In adopting the theoretical lens of religious materiality, with its attention to the importance of bodies, place, and objects in understanding religious experience, this dissertation traces the contours of a piety I argue cohered around a deep belief in the auspicious nature of the Prophet Muḥammad’s body and its potential for satiating human need, healing sickness and injury, and aiding in achieving salvation. This piety was expressed both in textual discourse and ritual practice.

These included undertaking pilgrimage or visitation (ziyārat) to the grave of the

Prophet Muḥammad, or as in the case of Awrangzīb ʿĀlamgīr sending votive offerings, gifts, and letters of supplication. But it also manifested in the transmission of hadith knowledge, which involved the translation of tomes and tomes of hadith from Arabic to Persian, the preparation of new compendia of hadith, as well as the writing of sacred biographies, pilgrimage manuals, and treatises on correct belief. Most crucially for the purposes of this dissertation, it involved the collection and veneration of material traces (āsā̱ r) of the Prophet

Muḥammad. Once enshrined, these relics became sites of pilgrimage and supported by wide ranging patrons and overseen by generations of Sufis and Sayyids.

This chapter, which serves as the introduction to this dissertation, proceeds in three turns. It begins by outlining what is meant by Prophetic piety and offers a history of Muslim veneration of the Prophet Muḥammad in South Asia to better situate this dissertation’s contributions. It then turns to the question of religious materiality and looks at the category of relics in the study of religion and its application to the study of Islam. In doing so it also offers an explanation why the Prophetic tradition should be included in discussing relics and religious materiality. Finally, the it concludes with a brief outline of the chapters that follow.

I.2. Prophetic Piety

While it is a commonplace understanding that the veneration of the Prophet

Muḥammad has been an important component of Muslim piety across different periods and geographies,6 in recent years there has been increasing attention paid to its variegated historical reality and its social importance. It is well understood that the Prophet’s model has been integral to how many Muslims aspire to live their lives. Over the centuries, Muslims actively collected traditions about his life, things he said, did, or condoned. The verification of

Prophetic traditions came to be the center of a vibrant field of hadith scholarship, whose contours were shaped by not only internal epistemological concerns, but also by politics, sectarian divisions, and socio-economic change.7 Traditions of the Prophet inform debates in

Muslim jurisprudence but also on wide ranging issues such as cosmology, eschatology, rituals,

6 For an introductory survey to the topic see Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). For a recent collection of essays on the study of the Prophet see Jonathan E. Brockopp, The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

7 A recent study that attempts to historicize the hadith commentarial tradition is Joel Blecher, Said the Prophet: Hadith Commentary Across a Millennium (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).

corporeal self-fashioning, political thought, and metaphysics. Muslims encounter the Prophet not only through traditions but also through his remembrance in poetry and prose. Accounts of the Prophet’s life have been told in a multitude of languages and literary genres. It is therefore not surprising to see a diversity of ways in which Muslims have chosen to articulate their remembrance of the Prophet. These retellings of the Prophet’s life are shaped by their religious contexts and the aesthetic conventions of their literary medium.8 Attendant to the copious textual tradition is the rich visual culture of illustrated manuscripts depicting figural representations of the Prophet. The corpus of figural representations in manuscripts became a storehouse of images that informed and inspired later visual culture connected with the

Prophet. These include murals, posters, postcards, truck art, and keepsakes.9

In thinking about the history of Muslim devotion to the Prophet Muḥammad, Stefan

Reichmuth has suggested that in the early modern period we see the pervasive spread of what he calls Prophetic piety, which he explains as “the individual and collective attachment to the

Prophet, which found its expression in religious practice, discourse and institutional settings and which comes out in a wide range of literary genres like prayer, poetry, juridical and Sufi treatises, in the arts and even in the political sphere.”10 Reichmuth argues that this piety came to influence Muslim communal life in profound ways that shaped not only politics but also

8 See as just one example Sindhi and Urdu poems written in remembrance of the Prophet—see Ali Asani, “In Praise of Muḥammad: Sindhi and Urdu Poems,” in Religions of India in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 159–86. More examples from South Asia are discussed below.

9 For a recent survey of Muslim representations of the Prophet in visual and material culture see Christiane Gruber, The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). The work surveys a vast corpus of materials produced in the broader Persianate world but excludes South Asia entirely.

10 Stefan Reichmuth, “Aspects of Prophetic Piety in the Early Modern Period: Prophetic Piety and its Socio- Political and Individual Dimensions in the Early Modern Period,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 178 (2017): 129.

social institutions, networks, and spaces, as well as ideas about moral authority and ethical self-fashioning.

Politically, we see this in the rise of polities led by those claiming to be descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad such as the Saʿidian Sharīfs of Morocco and the Safavid Shahs of

Iran.11 On a social level, descendants of the Prophet came to form religious, scholarly, and commercial networks that crisscrossed the Indian Ocean and came to be anchored through the development of pilgrimage sites, often the tombs of Sayyids but also for relics of the Prophet and his descendants.12

On the question of moral authority, Reichmuth notes the scholarly consensus that from the seventeenth century on there was an increasing interest in the study of Prophetic traditions for the purposes of grounding Islamic jurisprudence more securely in hadith.13

Although Reichmuth does not draw attention to it, there is a strong Indian Ocean element to this story as the main center of hadith studies shifted away from the Mamluk cities of Egypt and Syria to the pilgrimage city of Medina in the early modern period and many of the scholars who came to study there arrived from Yemen, Gujarat, and Sindh, regions with whom them maintained these close ties.

Finally, a close intimate attachment to the Prophet was cultivated through the recitation and collection of praise poetry and illustrated prayer books, the performance of rituals including meditation and pilgrimage to the tomb of the Prophet in Medina, and through

11 Reichmuth, “Prophetic Piety,” 130–33.

12 Reichmuth, “Prophetic Piety,” 133–35. Here we may also mention the work of Enseng Ho, which I engage with in Chapter two—see Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

13 Reichmuth, “Prophetic Piety,” 133–36.

material objects and embodiment, particularly when emulating the Prophet’s model.14 In offering Prophetic piety as a concept, Reichmuth hopes that it “may help to bridge the sharp dichotomy of Sufi and anti-Sufi strands of Islamic doctrine and practice that still holds sway over the cultural historiography of these times; and it might open the way for a more balanced and differentiated picture of the dynamics and regional interconnections of Muslim culture.”15

I find his heuristic helpful, particularly considering the case of South Asia where Sufism has played an integral role in the development of Islam and Muslim communities.

In the context of early modern South Asia, it is beginning to appear that devotion to the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad was an important vector of conversion to Islam. The seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries saw the production of a number of different genres of devotional poetry written in praise, supplication, and remembrance of the Prophet

Muḥammad in a number of vernacular languages.16 This vernacular devotional poetry appears to have played an important role in mediating Islam for South Asians in their own language making the teachings of Islam more intelligible.

For instance, Sindhi poets like ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Bhaṭṭī (d. 1752), composed devotional poetry sung to the Prophet that collapsed the local and distant. His poems used local imagery and idiom to not only give expression to their affection for the Prophet but also to describe the city of Medina. This entailed not only incorporating local folkloric figures such as Sassui and

Puṅhuṅ from Sindhi romances into the poems but also adopting the literary tropes and moods common to a number of different traditions of South Asian devotional poetry. For instance,

ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Bhaṭṭī adopts the voice of the virahiṇī, a literary trope of a woman experiencing

14 Reichmuth, “Prophetic Piety,” 138–41. On the more material dimensions of this piety, see below.

15 Reichmuth, “Prophetic Piety,” 129.

16 Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger, chapters ten and twelve in particular.

the grief of separation from her beloved that originates in Sanskrit poetics and who appears in the devotional poetry of other South Asian traditions, particularly those associated with

Kṛṣṇa.17

Around the same time, the poet Umaṟup Pulavar (d. 1115/1703) composed the

Cīṟāppurāṇam, a Tamil purāṇa (lit. ancient [narrative]) about the Prophet’s life—the Tamil cīṟā coming from the Arabic word for biography, sīrah. The work was composed in the form of a kāppiyam (Sanskrit kāvya), highly literary poetry rich in imagery and metaphor.18 In composing the Cīṟāppurāṇam, Umaṟup Pulavar articulated a vision of the Prophet’s life using Tamil literary and linguistic conventions, in effect translating Islamic concepts using their conceptual equivalents from Indic religious traditions:19 the Prophet is called an avatāra (lit. descent but often taken to mean the material manifestation of a deity); the Qurʾān is referred to as śruti (lit. that which is heard, often used to refer to the Vedas); and descriptions of Mecca mirror visions of Hindu sacred geography found in Kampaṉ’s twelfth century retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa in

Tamil entitled Irāmāvatāram.20

We see a similar phenomenon in eastern India with the composition of the first biography of the Prophet Muḥammad in the Bengali language by one Saiyid Sultān (Sayyid

Sulṭān) (fl. 1615–46) during the seventeenth century. The work, entitled the Nabīvaṃśa (The

Prophet’s Lineage), retold in the form of an Indic purāṇa an account of Islamic cosmogony, pre-

17 Asani, “In Praise of Muḥammad,” 159–86.

18 Vasudha Narayanan, “Religious Vocabulary and Regional Identity: A Study of Tamil Cīṛāppurāṇam (‘Life of the Prophet’),” in India’s Islamic Traditions, 711–1750, ed. Richard M. Eaton (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 395.

19 Here I am citing specifically Tony Stewart’s ideas on translation and South Asian Islam—see Tony K. Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Muslim-Hindu Encounter Through Translation Theory,” History of Religions 40, no. 3 (2001): 261–87.

20 Narayanan, “Religious Vocabulary,” 404–5, 398–403.

Islamic prophets, and the life of the Prophet Muḥammad.21 Like the Tamil Cīṟāppurāṇam, the

Bengali Nabīvaṃśa translated Islamic teachings through the use of vernacular conceptual and generic conventions that were heavily indebted to Sanskrit knowledge systems and Vaiṣṇava and Nātha traditions.22 It has been suggested that the Nabīvaṃśa was intended not only to teach Bengalis the teachings of Islam in their vernacular tongue but also to compete with other devotional traditions and invite them to the Muslim faith—often by overlaying indigenous religious terminology and with Islamic concepts.23

The study of these devotional literary traditions has yielded insight on the broader world the texts inhabited. They have helped us think beyond categories such as syncretism for the study of Islam in South Asia, while also offering insight on religious strategies of conversion and community formation.24 Furthermore, they also shed light on the material practices of Prophetic piety. We know for instance that the Nabīvaṃśa was a text that was performed orally, probably in large gatherings. As Ayesha Irani notes, Saiyid Sultān called the work a nabīra pāñcālī, an epic that was sung in the manner of the Bengali Rāmāyaṇa and maṅgalakāvya, complete with particular rāgas for specific parts of the work.25 In the case of the

Cīṟāppurāṇam of Umaṟup Pulavar we also have oral traditions of its reception that highlight the affective impact the recitation of the work could have on listeners. In one account of the

21 On the Nabīvaṃśa see Ayesha A. Irani, “Mystical Love, Prophetic Compassion, and Ethics: An Ascension Narrative in the Medieval Bengali Nabīvaṃśa,” in The Prophet’s Ascension: Cross-Cultural Encounters with Islamic Miʿrāj Tales, ed. Christiane Gruber and Frederick Colby (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 225–51; and Ayesha A. Irani, “The Prophetic Principle of Light and Love: Nūr Muḥammad in Early Modern Bengali Literature,” History of Religions 55, no. 4 (2016): 391–428.

22 Irani, “Prophetic Principle,” 393.

23 Irani, “Mystical Love,” 228–89, 41–42; and Irani, “Prophetic Principle,” 427–28.

24 On the limitations of syncretism as an analytic and the potential of translation theory see Stewart, “In Search of Equivalence,” and Irani, “Prophetic Principle” specifically.

25 Irani, “Prophetic Principle,” 395–96

Cīṟāppurāṇam’s first performance, the narrative of the Prophet’s birth so completely captivated the wife of the patron sponsoring it that she neglected feeding her child who is said to have died.26

During the eighteenth century there was a growing emphasis on the model of the

Prophet and hadith in both Sufism and Islamic law in South Asia. For instance, in North India there was the emergence of a new form of piety that fused Sufism with devotion to the figure of the Prophet with a particular focus on his Sunnah and the study of hadith. As Mughal power receded, members of the Naqshbandī-Mujaddidī Sufi lineage articulated the idea of ṭarīqah

Muḥammadīyah or “Muhammadan Path,” in which the Qurʾān and hadith were privileged as the only authoritative sources for Muḥammadīs and their Sufi practices.27 This included figures such as Shāh Valī Allāh (1114–76/1703–62), Mirzā Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān (1111–95/1699–1781), and

Khvājah Mīr Dard (1133–99/1721–85).28 At the same time a number Sindhi scholars in the eighteenth century travel to the Hejaz for the study of hadith in order to give it more weight in their legal reasoning. This included figures like Abū al-Ḥasan al-Sindī al-Kabīr (d. 1726),

Muḥammad Ḥayāt al-Sindī (d. 1750) and Abū al-Ḥasan al-Sindī al-Saghīr (d. 1773), and their students.29 In both cases we see the increasing significance of hadith in the eighteenth century and interconnections between South Asia and the Hejaz.

This dissertation contributes to this body of scholarship by focusing on practices and discourses of Prophetic piety from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries from the

26 Narayanan, “Religious Vocabulary,” 396.

27 Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger, chap. 11.

28 See Homayra Ziad, “‘I Transcend Myself Like a Melody’: Khwājah Mīr Dard and Music in Eighteenth-century Delhi,” Muslim World 97, no. 4 (2007): 548–70; and Homayra Ziad, “Poetry, Muslim and the Muḥammadī Path: How Khvājah Mīr Dard Brought Three Worlds Together in Eighteenth-Century Delhi,” Journal of Islamic Studies 21, no. 3 (2010): 345–76, but especially pp. 362–64.

29 Reichmuth, “Prophetic Piety,” 136.

lens of religious materiality. It brings to the forefront the importance of material objects such as relics—a term I unpack in the next section of this chapter—in cultivating devotion to the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad. In doing so it offers a series of insights into how Muslims made sense of relics, whether through religious debates about their authenticity, or investing in their enshrinement and the subsequent religious economy that developed around them, or through the various devotional pious acts of supplication to them. It situates these practices within a broader political culture but also within scholastic discourses that emerged in seventeenth century North India with the transmission of hadith-based knowledge systems from the Hejaz. In doing so, it brings to the forefront everyday practices, the material conditions that shaped them, and the beliefs that animated and perhaps authorized such devotion.

I.3. Prophetic Relics and Tradition

The impetus to preserve the memory of an absent revered figure for any religious community entails the elaboration and maintenance of different forms of discursive and material practices that keep the memory of the holy alive.30 Such practices of preservation may lead to a host of developments: the stabilization of a devotional cult, the emergence of pilgrimage sites, different forms of religious economies, the elaboration of rituals and an enmeshment into the political.31 In the case of the Prophet Muḥammad, his memory was preserved through relics and traditions about his life. It is these technologies of remembrance that we turn to now.

30 David Morgan, “Material Culture of Lived Religion,” In Mind and Matter: Selected Papers of the Nordik 2009 Conference for Art Historians, ed. Johanna Vakkari (Helsinki: Helsingfors, 2010), 24.

31 Morgan, “Material Culture of Lived Religion,” 25.

In recent years scholars of different disciplinary backgrounds have started paying close attention to the study of relics in Islam. The term relic, borrowing Gregory Schopen’s succinct definition, is simply “something left behind”.32 Relics in general can consist of a whole host of material objects: from corporeal relics derived from the bodily remains of the holy, to a wide range of associative relics that may include objects of use, but also indexical traces that serve as a referent for those absent but which may have more ambiguous physical relation to their object.33 With the material turn in the study of religion and history, relics have emerged as a productive and capacious analytic, particularly with respect to the wide range of practices they give rise to.34

The study of relics allows us to side-step certain tensions in the study of religions predicated on overly simplified binaries, such as those of text and practice, elite and popular religion.35 Relics allow scholars to seriously contend with materiality in a number of important ways. As physical objects, relics have histories of circulation from one site to another that reveal the complex conditions in which they are exchanged. They are often housed in built environments where they are embedded in ritual, subject to veneration, and engaged with

32 Gregory Schopen, “Relic,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 256.

33 For a discussion of the term relic and how different traditions have categorized relics see—Anne Murphy, The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22–25. On the term indexical trace, its engagement with Charles Pierce’s semiotic theory, and application to the study of relics in Islam, and Shiʿism in particular see—Karen Ruffle, “Guises of the Protective Hand: The ʿAlam and the ‘Domestication’ of Qutb Shahi Shiʿism,” in “Reuse of the Past: Producing the Deccan, 1300–1700,” ed. Ajay K. Rao, special issue, South Asian Studies 32, no. 1 (2016): 57–58.

34 On relics see—Kevin Trainor, “Pars pro toto: On Comparing Relic Practices,” in “Relics in Comparative Perspective,” ed. Kevin Trainor, special issue, Numen 57, nos. 3–4 (2010): 267–83; and Alexandra Walsham, “Introduction: Relics and Remains,” in “Relics and Remains,” ed. Alexandra Walsham, suppl., Past and Present 206, suppl. 5 (2010): 9–36.

35 Trainor, “Pars pro toto, 269.

sensorially by devotees. Relics also reveal how broader religious ideas come to manifest and play out in particular local circumstances. Relics are also often a node in a network of social systems that include people of different political, economic and religious status. Various actors in their engagement with relics also further their social identities. Finally, because of their ability to mediate with the absent, relics evoke strong emotional response from devotees.36 It is worth noting here that although we as scholars tend to adopt an anthropomorphic perspective in the study of relics, such approaches can tend to overlook the agency and generative capacity of the objects themselves. For instance, when discussing the religious potency of relics, Kevin Trainor notes that it “is made apparent through distinctive forms of behaviour that they elicit and organize, ranging from gestures and postures of veneration to the construction of built environments within which relics function.”37 Note here the relic is shuffled off to the side as the object and not subject.38 While this dissertation tends to privilege human relic practice, this issue begs consideration going forward.

In the internal discourses of the Islamic tradition, relics of the Prophet are analogous to the category of material objects known as traces or vestiges, or in Arabic athar (pl. āthār) and

36 Trainor, “Pars pro toto, 281–82.

37 Trainor, “Pars pro toto, 271.

38 In her study of Shiʿi relics, Karen Ruffle has pointed to the limitations of approaches to the study of religious images and material culture that privilege the “needs, assumptions, desires, and expectations of their communities of response.” She notes “not enough attention is paid to the ways in which these objects are endowed with autonomy and agency that enables them to serve as a dynamic link between the mundane and the spiritual realms, the human, and the saintly or divine.” See Ruffle, “Guises of the Protective Hand,” 57. The recent turn to new materialism has put the challenged assumptions about the human-non-human divide, as well as pressed to the forefront the need to take the agency of the material world more seriously—see for instance Diane Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diane Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–43; and Tamsin Jones, “New Materialism and the Study of Religion,” in Religious Experience and New Materialism: Movement Matters, ed. Joerg Rieger and Edward Waggoner (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–23.

Persian asaṟ (pl. āsā̱ r).39 The use of the term āsā̱ r to describe relics of the Prophet is noteworthy given the use of the term in the literary tradition of Persianate Sufism. Attested to in the

Qurʾān with the verse “Behold the traces of God’s mercy (āthār raḥmat Allāh), how He revives the earth after its death (Q 30:50),” the term was used to refer to the manifest signs of God in the phenomenological world through which His existence could be perceived.40 Relics associated with the Prophet Muḥammad include a whole host of material objects. In the case of the Prophet’s corporeal relics we only hear of his nail parings and hair from his beard or head

(mūy). However, in the case of objects of use there are a plethora of items that are considered his relics, such as his pulpit (minbar), staff (ʿaṣā or qaḍīb), mantle (burdah), sandals (naʿlayn), toothpick (miswāk), seal (khātim), prayer mat (muṣallā), and weapons.41 Equally important are associative relics that index the memory of the Prophet Muḥammad such as qadams or footprint impressions preserved in stone, purported from when the Prophet stepped on it.42

The study of Muslim engagements with relics of the Prophet is still relatively new and we can only piece together a patchwork history of the topic. Accounts of the Prophet’s life preserved in the hadith tradition make note of how his followers would collect his hair, nails,

39 Christiane Gruber, “The Prophet Muhammad’s Footprint,” in Ferdowsi, the Mongols and the History of Iran: Art, Literature and Culture from Early Islam to Qajar Persia; Studies in Honour of Charles Melville, ed. Robert Hillenbrand, A. C. S. Peacock, and Firuza Abdullaeva (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 297.

40 Maria E. Subtelny, “The Traces of the Traces: Reflections of the Garden in the Persian Mystical Imagination,” in Gardens and Imagination: Cultural History and Agency, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2008), 22–23.

41 See David S. Margoliouth, “The Relics of the Prophet Mohammed,” Muslim World 27, no. 1 (1937): 20–27, and Josef W. Meri, “Relics of Piety and Power in Medieval Islam,” in “Relics and Remains,” ed. Alexandra Walsham, suppl., Past and Present 206, suppl. 5 (2010): 97–120, especially p. 119.

42 Gruber, “Prophet Muhammad’s Footprint,” 297–305.

sweat, and spit.43 A particularly important moment was at the farewell pilgrimage in the final year of his death when the Prophet sacrificed camels and distributed the hair shorn from his head at the completion of the hajj.44 Brannon Wheeler has suggested that the distribution and the collection of the Prophet’s body was a “sociogonic” act, an event that marked the start of a new social order for the Muslim community and “commemorating the origins of Islamic civilization”.45 For Wheeler the emerging practice of burial with relics of the Prophet and their installation in buildings such as madrasas and tombs, particularly for figures such as his

Companions, later sultans, jurists, saints, and martyrs, “served to mark and signify the territorial boundaries of civilization and law of revelation.”46 Although Wheeler does not engage with this issue, Adam Bursi has suggested that relics of the Prophet appear to have been collected for apotropaic and talismanic purposes,47 a contention that concords with Josef

Meri’s argument that the Prophet’s followers utilized them as a means of deriving barakah or blessings.48 Bursi has noted that given that the earliest traditions about the Muslim community collecting the Prophet’s relics were compiled in the ninth century, such accounts may have better reflected Muslim attitudes towards relics of the Prophet in the eighth century during

43 Brannon Wheeler, “Collecting the Dead Body of the Prophet Muhammad: Hair, Nails, Sweat and Spit,” in The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation, ed. Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 41–44.

44 Brannon Wheeler, “Gift of the Body in Islam: The Prophet’s Camel Sacrifice and Distribution of Hair and Nails at His Farewell Pilgrimage,” in “Relics in Comparative Perspective,” ed. Kevin Trainor, special issue, Numen 57, no. 3– 4 (2010): 341–88.

45 Wheeler, “Collecting the Dead Body,” 51; and Wheeler, “Gift of the Body,” 373.

46 Brannon Wheeler, Mecca and Eden: Ritual, Relics, and Territory in Islam (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 81.

47 Adam Bursi, “A Hair’s Breadth: The Prophet Muhammad’s Hair as Relic in Early Islamic Texts.” In Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Nathaniel P. DesRosiers and Lily C. Vuong (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 223.

48 Meri, “Relics of Piety and Power,” 103-5.

the Umayyad period when the dynasty sought to articulate a more distinctly Muslim identity in the Near East with a focus on the figure of Muḥammad.49

A number of scholars agree that relics of the Prophet were used as the ways to legitimate a dynasty and draw a material link back to the Prophet Muḥammad.50 According to

Tayeb El-Hibri, the ʿAbbasids sought to use the relics of the Prophet, particularly his mantle

(burdah) in public royal ceremony under the caliph al-Mutawakkil (r. 232–47/847–61) in order to position themselves as the heirs of the Prophet and to benefit from its talismanic powers.51

This political value of the relics is also evident from the way the Fatimids recorded the

“recovery” of a sword of the Prophet from their rivals, the ʿAbbasids.52 El-Hibri also notes that with the rise of the hadith movement, there was an increasing attention paid to every detail of the Prophet’s life including his body and his possessions.53 According to El-Hibri, while the

ʿulamāʾ could appreciate the value people put in the physical traces of the Prophet Muḥammad, as they themselves did with respect to his words, they appeared to have been more ambivalent when it came to the amount of reverence shown to relics, lest they become an alternate source of authority to their domain of hadith.54

Despite this ambivalence, relics continued to be installed or housed in madrasas. Take for instance the case of the Ayyūbid ruler of Damascus al-Malik al-Ashraf al-Mūsā (r. 626–

49 Bursi, “A Hair’s Breadth,” 227-28.

50 See for instance Meri, “Relics of Piety and Power,” 103, 112–15; and Wheeler, Mecca and Eden, 90–91.

51 Tayeb El-Hibri, “The Abbasids and the Relics of the Prophet,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 4, no. 1 (2017): 63; and Meri, “Relics of Piety and Power,” 115.

52 Paul E. Walker, “Purloined Symbols of the Past: The Theft of Souvenirs and Sacred Relics in the Rivalry between the Abbasids and Fatimids,” in Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam: Essays in Honour of Wilferd Madelung, ed. Farhad Daftary and Josef W. Meri (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 364–87.

53 El-Hibri, “The Abbasids and the Relics of the Prophet,” 85–87.

54 El-Hibri, “The Abbasids and the Relics of the Prophet,” 86, 88.

35/1229–37) who installed a sandal (naʿl) of the Prophet in the madrasa he built for the study of hadith. It was during this time that installed relics of the Prophet appear to have become sites of visitation (ziyārat) by people seeking blessings (barakah). 55 From the thirteenth century onwards there are many more examples of pilgrimage sites developing where relics, particularly qadams, were housed and more descriptions of Muslim demonstrations of reverence and supplication. For instance, in Mamluk Egypt relics of the Prophet were placed in the tombs of saints and sultans to impart blessings on those buried but also pilgrims who would come to view and touch the relic. Such developments, Iman Abdulfattah, suggests may have been the result of the popularity of Sufism.56

Shrines dedicated to the Prophet’s qadams, or footprints, in particular appear to have proliferated across North India especially in the areas that at one time constituted the Mughal provinces of Agra, Awadh, and Bengal. While a few of these shrines date from the Sultanate and early Mughal periods, most came to be established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when increasingly autonomous nawabs established their authority in the region.57

Here too scholars have suggested the importance of rulers in establishing these reliquary pilgrimage sites. Blain Auer for instance suggests that the Delhi sultan Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (r.

752–90/1351–88), who cultivated an image of himself as following in the model of the Prophet

55 Meri, “Relics of Piety and Power,” 107–8.

56 Iman R. Abdulfattah, “Relics of the Prophet and Practices of His Veneration in Medieval Cairo,” Journal of Islamic Archaeology 1, no. 1 (2014): 101.

57 Perween Hasan, “The Footprint of the Prophet,” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 335–43; and Jacqueline Louis Ganem, “Traces of the Prophet: A Study of Eighteenth-Century Qadam Rasūl Shrines in the Indian Subcontinent” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2006).

as an exemplary ruler, materialized this vision through the possession and enshrinement of a

Prophetic relic.58

One of the trends we see in the scholarship on Prophetic relics is its recurring intersection with hadith. The earliest record of Muslim relic practices stem from hadith, and hadith scholars themselves acknowledged their auspicious nature even if they were wary of their appeal. Madrasas where hadith was taught at times housed relics and these Prophetic relics became sites of pilgrimage. Some have even noted their conceptual similarity in that they are both means of preserving the remains of the Prophet, one material and the other textual.59 The remainder of this dissertation, which consists of three connected case studies, engages with many of the themes discussed in the above sections and it is to their introduction that this chapter now turns.

I.4. Tracing Prophetic Piety in Mughal India

Reflecting on methodology for the study of something as material as relics, Kevin

Trainor has good news for those who are trained as textualists. He writes:

The material remains that have been the focus of relic practices are often deeply textualized; relics seem frequently to enable the generation of accounts that trace their movement from time to time and place to place, and these accounts in turn serve to authorize the relics’ authenticity and power. While these textual accounts are frequently composed by religious elites, they nevertheless commonly testify to the

58 Blain H. Auer, Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam: History, Religion, and Muslim Legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 66–76. For a study of the shrine in question see Anthony Welch, “The Shrine of the Holy Footprint in Delhi,” Muqarnas 14 (1997): 166–78; and Ganem, “Traces of the Prophet,” 51–67. There is disagreement amongst historians as to when the structure housing the relic came to be viewed as a reliquary shrine and its relationship to Sultan Fīrūz Shāh. For instance, Ganem has argued that the structure only came to be viewed as a dargāh in the mid-seventeenth century, while its association with the Tughluq sultan dates from the nineteenth century—see Ganem, “Traces of the Prophet,” 51, 53, and 58. Chapter two deals with this shrine at length.

59 Wheeler, Mecca and Eden, 75.

deep complementarity of roles played by religious elites and ordinary people, and to the impact that relic practices have had on the contours of lived religion.60

For the Mughal period we are fortunate to have a wealth of sources, both textual and architectural, from which it is possible to discern the traces of Muslim relic practices and the broader discourses in which they were embedded. At its core is a study of two footprint relics that arrived in South Asia in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively. During the

Mughal period their origin narratives were intertwined and they also came to intersect through imperial patronage. They developed distinct economies with different actors investing in the site. We also see the emergence of overlapping but different repertoires of devotional practices for the relics. Although faint at times, and with dropped threads, we can nonetheless trace the history of these two relics and contextualize them by embedding them in broader discourses of Muslim scholarship. This requires the use of a wide variety of sources, including court chronicles, regional histories, polemical tracts, epigraphy, architectural site surveys, poetry, sacred biographies, prosopographies, travelogues, and legal compendia.

Chapter one looks at the reception of a footprint relic at the court of the Mughal

Emperor Akbar (r. 963–1014/1556–1605). It examines two hitherto unexamined sources to offer insight on how the authenticity of relics were debated and the logic behind why they were venerated. The two texts in question are Risālah-i qadamīyah by the Mughal court poet laureate

Fayżī (d. 1004/1595) and Tārīkh-i Gujarāt by the man responsible for bringing the relic to North

India, Abū Turāb. This examination offers fresh insight into understanding both the nature of religious debates that took place at the Mughal court, as well as their link to the performance of kingship. I show that the Mughal court operated on a principle of religious caution when adjudicating matters of belief and chose a number of different avenues to justify their support.

60 Trainor, “Pars pro toto,” 269.

The reception of the relic also offers us insight into how the Mughals, as compared to other

Muslim dynasties, incorporated relics as part of their practice of statecraft or lack thereof.

Chapter two examines court histories, regional histories, prosopopgraphies, travelogues, and site surveys of two reliquary shrines to reconstruct the history of what happens to relics once they are invested in a site and become the focus of pilgrimage. The first site examined is for the relic that Abū Turāb brought to the Mughal court and later installed in a qadamgāh in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The site continued to be the center of devotional activity until the eighteenth century when it died out with the extinguishing of Mughal rule in Gujarat.

The second site is the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf, said to house the relic brought during the reign of Fīrūz Shāh. The chapter looks at the broader economy of the shrine and traces the varying investments of Sayyids, Sufis, and the Mughal administration, as well as the repertoire of devotional practices that developed at each site. Engaging with theories from the study of religious materiality, the chapter offers tentative links between the history of the shrine’s economy and its rituals.

Chapter three concludes the dissertation by examining the arrival of hadith knowledge to Mughal North India from the Hejaz at the same time as Abū Turāb’s relic. It examines the writings of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddis ̱ Dihlavī (958–1052/1551–1642), a one-time member of

Akbar’s court and Fayżī’s once close friend. It situates the career and contributions of ʿAbd al-

Ḥaqq, who travelled to the Hejaz where he studied hadith before coming back and beginning a prodigious career as a hadith scholar and writer of many works on the life of the Prophet

Muḥammad. The life and writings of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq demonstrate a deep love for the Prophet

Muḥammad and a belief in the blessed nature of his body—what I refer to as auspicious corporeality. I argue that by looking at accounts of the Prophet’s body in the writings of hadith

scholars like ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq we can begin to make sense of the material dimensions of Prophetic piety as expressed in the practices of veneration in Chapter three.

CHAPTER ONE

Relics Debated

1.1. The Footprint of the Prophet at the Court of the Great Mughal

In Muḥarram 988/February 1580, the Mughal court of the emperor Akbar (r. 963–1014/1556–

1605) staged a spectacular royal procession to welcome to the imperial capital of Fatehpur

Sikri a remarkable object that began its journey across the Indian Ocean in the city of Mecca.

The object in question was a stone bearing the impression of a foot, purportedly that of the

Prophet Muḥammad. The person responsible for bringing the relic to the imperial court was a man named Abū Turāb, a sayyid and important nobleman from the Mughal province of Gujarat whom the emperor had appointed a few years prior in 985/1577 as the Amīr-i ḥājj, that is, the leader of the Mecca-bound pilgrimage caravan patronized by Akbar.

The arrival of the footprint relic was met by considerable pomp and ceremony. Those present that day recorded in detail the displays of veneration and piety mixed with royal grandeur. The activities began outside the city where the relic was housed in royal tents.

Akbar and his court set out before daybreak to offer the morning prayer in the presence of the relic before bringing it back to the city, carrying it one by one starting first with the emperor, followed by members of his court. Once the object was brought to the city, it was conveyed to the harem where the women of the royal household greeted it before it was installed in the city near the congregational mosque so that, by the emperor’s own orders, those attending the

Friday prayers could visit the relic after and be ennobled by performing certain rituals of veneration.

Recalling the episode some years later, Akbar’s official court historian, Abū al-Fażl

ʿAllāmī (958–1011/1551–1602), included a remarkable assessment of the royal proceedings. He wrote while the emperor carried out the royal procession and showed the object great

deference, he did so fully aware of the fact that it was baseless (nā-aṣlī), and not only that, but that “acute experts had demonstrated its worthlessness (nāsaragī).” Instead, Abū al-Fażl narrates, the emperor had staged the entire royal procession ostensibly for the sake of Abū

Turāb’s reputation, lest he be mocked for his gullibility and “that the reverence due to that simple-minded sayyid might not be spilt on the ground, and that jovial critics might not break into smiles.”1

Abū al-Fażl’s assessment is sure to strike the reader as puzzling as it raises two important and related lines of questioning. First, what kind of inquiry took place at the Mughal court about the object in question that it was found to be nā-aṣlī? The details surrounding such an inquiry are not to be found in the Akbarnāmah or the other chronicles documenting Akbar’s reign that were produced by members of his court. Certainly, Abū al-Fażl offers no clue as to who was involved, what were the terms of debate that came to this conclusion, or how such a line of reasoning was arrived at.

Second, why did Akbar stage the royal procession despite knowing that it was nā-aṣlī?

The logic offered by Abū al-Fażl, namely that Akbar did so to protect Abū Turāb’s reputation, would strike readers of Mughal history as surprising. After all, the procession to welcome the relic to the capital was a considerable undertaking that mobilized the court in a public display of piety. It involved various members of the royal court, it employed imperial accoutrements, and the emperor’s own participation. Surely, Akbar’s reasons could not have been simply to save face for a nobleman who, although not a bit player in the Mughal dispensation, was at the same time certainly not one of its key figures.

1 Abū al-Fażl ʿAllāmī, Akbarnāmah, ed. Aḥmad ʿAlī and ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1877–87), 3:281; H. Beveridge, trans., The Akbar Nama of Abu-l-Fazl: History of the Reign of Akbar Including an Account of His Predecessors (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1897–1939; Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 2005), 3:329–30. Citations refer to the Sang-e-Meel edition.

To pursue these two lines of investigation is to seek answers into how those living in sixteenth century Mughal India perceived relics associated with the Prophet Muḥammad—at least within the context of a North Indian Indo-Muslim royal court that, although nominally

Sunni-oriented, was receptive to members and ideas of other Islamic and non-Islamic traditions. Understanding the context behind the claim that the object was baseless whilst at once honouring it with public rituals of veneration allows us to understand the kinds of religious and political arguments such relics engendered.

The mention of a religious inquiry no doubt evokes in the reader’s mind the famed

ʿIbādatkhānah (the house of worship), the site in Akbar’s imperial capital where religious debates between scholars of various traditions are said to have taken place. The construction of the ʿIbādatkhānah began in 982/1575 and was completed the following year. At first it appears to have been a place for the emperor to partake in nighttime assemblies where he would undertake acts of religious devotion in the company of other religious men but over time there would also be discussions on matters of religious belief. Over the course of the following few years, members of different religious traditions were invited to participate including Sunnis, Shiʿahs, Brahmins, Jains, Jews, Jesuits, and Zoroastrians and debates on matters of theology and ritual would take place. According to this timeline, the ʿIbādatkhānah remained an active site of religious disputation and discussion when the relic arrived at the

Mughal court.2

In recent years scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the subject of inter- religious engagements at the Mughal court and in doing so have begun to upend some commonplace understandings about the institution of the ʿIbādatkhānah. As Audrey Truschke

2 Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi, “Religious Disputations and Imperial Ideology: The Purpose and Location of Akbar’s Ibadatkhana,” Studies in History, n.s., 24, no. 2 (2008): 196–202.

has noted, scholars have tended to conflate the wide-ranging engagements amongst various religious traditions that took place under the auspices of not only Akbar’s court but also that of his successors with the particular institution of the ʿIbādatkhānah.3 Furthermore, as Rajeev

Kinra points out, the focus on Akbar as being unique amongst the Mughal emperors in handling South Asia’s diversity with “absolute civility”—his translation for the term ṣulḥ-i kull—misses the considerable engagements that continued under the direction and patronage of not only the courts of his successors but also numerous members of the royal household, the nobility, and bureaucrats.4

On the other hand, others have offered new ways to think about the institution of the

ʿIbādatkhānah. In his work on Mughal sovereignty, A. Azfar Moin has suggested that instead of thinking of the ʿIbādatkhānah as the site where the emperor entertained and encouraged debates on matters of religion for the express purpose of promoting peace amongst his subjects, it was instead the site where Akbar enacted a form of sacred kingship that entailed adjudicating religious disputes and imposing order.5 Indeed, Moin highlights the performative and theatrical element of the religious disputes that took place at the ʿIbādatkhānah, drawing attention to one particular example when he encouraged a trial by fire to resolve a debate between Muslim theologians and Jesuit priests.6

The study of the relic’s arrival and the inquiry that took place thus offers an opportunity for us to think more deeply about some of these scholarly debates about Akbar’s

3 Audrey Truschke, “Dangerous Debates: Jain Responses to Theological Challenges at the Mughal Court,” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 5 (2015): 1316.

4 Rajeev Kinra, “Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility: The Global Historical Legacy of Mughal Ṣulḥ-i Kull,” Medieval History Journal 16, no. 2 (2013): 253, 263–68.

5 A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012), 130–69, but especially pp. 133, 149–52.

6 Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 146–52.

ʿIbādatkhānah. Previous studies of the ʿIbādatkhānah and the debates that took place there have largely centered on narrative accounts found in the writings of one courtier, ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn

Mulūk Shāh Badāʾūnī (947–1024/1540–1615). While his account of the ʿIbādatkhānah offers much about the political background to the disputations and the kinds of topics that were discussed, it does not provide much in terms of the contours of debate or the details of the actual arguments presented.7

By examining two different kinds of sources—one a historical narrative and the other a textual record of a religious inquiry—we will not only be able to shed new light on some of the ways pre-modern Muslims thought about relics associated with the Prophet Muḥammad but also be able to speak more substantively about the modes of debate and disputation that took place at Akbar’s court on matters of Islamic belief and practice. Before turning to an account of the relic’s arrival and the forms of religious argumentation that followed, a few words about the two main sources used in this chapter is germane.

1.2. Sources The arrival of the object to Fatehpur Sikri is mentioned in a number of sources produced by those associated with the Mughal court. Some of these have been noted and discussed in previous studies.8 These include the three most often cited chronicles of Akbar’s reign, written by members of his court, namely: the Akbarnāmah (begun 998/1590), the official history of Akbar’s reign written by the emperor’s confidant Abū al-Fażl ʿAllāmī (958–

7 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbar’s Reign, with Special Reference to Abu’l Fazl (1556–1605) (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1975), 104–40. For one exception that looks at debates concerning Mahdavi teachings based on records of the conversations the Mahdavi community itself preserved, see Derryl N. MacLean, “Real Men and False Men at the Court of Akbar: The Majalis of Shaykh Mustafa Gujarati,” in Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, ed. David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 199–215.

8 Ganem, “Traces of the Prophet,” 21–35.

1011/1551–1602);9 the Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī (c. 1001/1593), a history of Muslim political dispensations in the Indian Subcontinent starting from the tenth century written by the imperial paymaster Khvājah Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad Muqīm al-Haravī (d.

1003/1594);10 and the Muntakhab al-tavārīkh of the aforementioned ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Mulūk

Shāh Badāʾūnī, who began his clandestinely written history in 999/1590.11 Also known are the descriptions of the relic’s arrival and its subsequent life in eighteenth-century Ahmadabad that are contained in the Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, a regional history of Gujarat written by ʿAlī

Muḥammad Khān.12 ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān was the title of Mirzā Muḥammad Ḥasan, who oversaw the collection of tax revenues in Gujarat as the last Mughal dīvān before Marathas conquered it in 1171/1758.

This study brings to bear two sources that scholars have not previously examined in the context of the object’s arrival. The first is a work known as Tārīkh-i Gujarāt (The history of

Gujarat), written by the man responsible for bringing the relic to India, Abū Turāb.13 Although

Abū Turāb belonged to a family of sayyids—that is, those who claimed descent from the

9 Abū al-Fażl, Akbarnāmah, 3:281–82; Beveridge, trans., The Akbarnama, 3:329–31.

10 Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad, Ṭabaqāt-i Akbarī, ed. B[rajendranath] De and M. Hidayat Hosain (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1927–35), 2:366; Brajendranath De and Baini Prashad, trans., The Ṭabaqāt-i–Akbarī of Khwāja Niẓāmuddīn Aḥmad (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1927–39), 2:557–58.

11 ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, ed. Aḥmad ʿAlī, intro. Tawfīq H. Subḥānī (Tehran: Anjuman-i Āsā̱ r va Mafākhir-i Farhangī, 1379–80/2000–1), 216. The work was highly critical of Akbar and thus written in secret. When the work was discovered during the reign of Akbar’s successor, Jahāngīr, Badāʾūnī’s children were summoned to court to account for their father’s work.

12 Mirzā Muḥammad Ḥasan ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān Bahādur, Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, ed. Sayyid Navāb ʿAlī (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1928), 1:138–40; M. F. Lokhandwala, trans., Mirat-i-Ahmadi: A Persian History of Gujarat (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1965). 119–20; and idem, Khātimah-i Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, ed. Sayyid Navāb ʿAlī (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1930), 24–25; Syed Nawab Ali and Charles Norman Seddon, trans., Mirat-i-Ahmadi: Supplement (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1928), 23–24.

13 Shāh Abū Turāb Valī, [Tārīkh-i Gujarāt] A History of Gujarat, ed. E. Denison Ross (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1909), 95–100.

Prophet Muḥammad—we know little of his family history before his grandfather, Mīr ʿInāyat al-Dīn Sirr Allāh, who was also known as both Hibbat Allāh, as well as Sayyid Shāh Mīr.14

According to one eighteenth century source, his family were known as Salāmī sayyids on account of the fact that one of their ancestors (ajdād) once heard a voice reply to salutations

(salām) from the tomb of the Prophet.15 His grandfather fled his native city of Shiraz during the tumult that arose on account of Iran’s conquest by the first Safavid ruler Shāh Ismāʿīl I (r. 907–

30/1501–24) and arrived in Gujarat where he is said to have taught and written some unnamed works.16 He had two sons, Shāh Kamāl al-Dīn Fatḥ Allāh and Quṭb al-Dīn Shukr Allāh, the latter being the father of Abū Turāb.17 Abū Turāb is said to have gained influence amongst the

Gujarati nobility and was amongst those who invited Akbar to annex the Sultanate.18 Under

Akbar he received a number of high positions. In addition to Amīr-i Ḥājj, he also became the

Amīn of Gujarāt, that is he was tasked with collecting revenues there. There is some confusion about the date of his death, with some stating he died in 1003/1595 while others writing that he was still alive in 1005/1596–7.19

14 Ṣamṣām al-Dawlah Shāh Navāz Khān, [and ʿAbd al-Ḥayy], Maʾāsiṟ al-umarā, ed. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm and Mirzā Ashraf ʿAlī (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1888–91), 3:280–81; H. Beveridge and Baini Prashad, trans., The Maāth̲ ̲ir-ul- umarā (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1911–52), 1:142. It should be noted that our sources interchangeably use the titles Mīr and Shāh to for both Abū Turāb and his uncle.

15 Shāh Navāz Khān, Maʾāsiṟ al-umarā, 3:281–82; Beveridge and Prashad, trans., The Maāth̲ ̲ir-ul-umarā, 1:142. It should be noted that the name Salāmī could also indicate that they were at some point from Baghdad, known as Madīnat al-Salām.

16 Shāh Navāz Khān, Maʾāsiṟ al-umarā, 3:281; Beveridge and Prashad, trans., The Maāth̲ ̲ir-ul-umarā, 1:142.

17 Shāh Navāz Khān, Maʾāsiṟ al-umarā, 3:281; Beveridge and Prashad, trans., The Maāth̲ ̲ir-ul-umarā, 1:142. Both Abū al-Fażl and Shāh Navāz Khān who follows him mistake Kamāl al-Dīn to be Abū Turāb’s father. However, Abū Turāb himself points out that he was the son of Quṭb al-Dīn—see Shāh Abū Turāb Valī, [Tārīkh-i Gujarāt] A History of Gujarat, ed. E. Denison Ross (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1909), 16–17.

18 Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20–27, but especially p. 25.

19 Shāh Navāz Khān, Maʾāsiṟ al-umarā, 3:285; Beveridge and Prashad, trans., The Maāth̲ ̲ir-ul-umarā, 1:144.

Much of what we know about Abū Turāb comes from his work Tārīkh-i Gujarāt. The unique manuscript copy of the work is housed today in the British Library and was copied in

1151/1738–9 with no indication of where and for whom the work was copied.20 It was published by Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1909, although few scholars have examined this edition or made use of it.21 While the work is known by the title Tārīkh-i Gujarāt on account of it being written on the flyleaf of the manuscript, the manuscript also lists the title Tārīkh-i Sulṭān Bahādur

Bādishāh-i Gujarāt on the following page, referring to Sultan Bahādūr Shāh (r. 932–43/1526–37), the last prominent ruler of Muzaffarid Sultanate of Gujarat. The work lacks any sort of introduction, beginning instead—after a formulaic praise of God and the Prophet

Muḥammad—with a discussion of the Mughal emperor Humāyūn’s (913–63/1508–56) relationship with Sultan Bahādūr Shāh. It then continues into the reign of the Mughal emperor

Akbar up until 992/1584 where it comes to an abrupt stop with the short-lived conquest of

Ahmedabad by Muẓaffar Shāh III (d. 1001/1593), the last of the Muzaffarid sultans.

Written in simple Persian prose, the work documents the local Gujarati politics from the vantage point of an insider, often inserting himself in key moments and emphasizing his own role—despite his affectation of the conventional humble title of faqīr. While the cautious reader might take some of the author’s claims with a grain of salt, the work is nevertheless significant for understanding the circumstances under which the relic arrived to India, the nature of the inquiry that took place the Mughal court, the kinds of rituals of veneration that

20 Charles Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian manuscripts in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1879–83), 3:967– 68.

21 Shāh Abū Turāb Valī, [Tārīkh-i Gujarāt] A History of Gujarat, ed. E. Denison Ross (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1909). While I have consulted a microfilm of the work all citations refer to the published edition.

were performed in its honour, and the events that led to its eventual installation in a domed reliquary structure in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.22

The second hitherto unexamined work that this chapter draws on is the Risālah-i qadamīyah (The treatise of the footprint relic).23 The authorship of the work is attributed to Abū al-Fażl’s brother, Abū al-Fayż (954–1004/1547–95), who was better known by his takhalluṣ (pen name) Fayżī, which meant the recipient of divine favour. Later on in his career, in 1002/1594, he would change that takhallus to Fayyāżī, which meant the one who is most favoured by divine favour. In order to better contextualize the Risālah-i qadamīyah it is necessary to understand the author’s position at the royal court and how his literary output was tied to larger imperial projects and ideologies.

Fayżī entered Akbar’s court in 975/1567 and rapidly gained the emperor’s favour.24 This is reflected in a number of ways. First, on numerous occasions he was given important duties within the royal household. For example, he served as tutor for not one but two of Akbar’s sons. First Prince Daniyāl and then later as tutor for Salīm, who would become the emperor

Jahāngīr (r. 1014–37/1605–27).25 Second, Akbar appointed Fayżī to a number of significant administrative positions, such as when he made him ṣadr over the regions of Agra, Kalpi, and

Kalinjar in 989/1581 and later when he sent him as his envoy to the rulers of Khandesh and

Ahmednagar in 999/1591, where he remained until his return to court in 1001/1593.26 Third,

22 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 95–100.

23 Abū al-Fayż Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah: Dāstān-i intiqāl-i sangī bā nishān-jā-yi pā-yi ḥażrat-i rasūl ṣallā Allāhu ʿalayhi va ālihi az Makkah bih Hind,” ed. Rasūl Jaʿfariyan, Mīqāt-i ḥajj 63 (1387/2008): 30–43.

24 Z. A Desai, “Life and Works of Faiḍi,” Indo-Iranica 16, no. 3 (1963): 8; Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History, 89, 92.

25 Desai, “Life and Works,” 8, 10.

26 Desai, “Life and Works,” 9, 12. For a discussion of the embassy see—Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Deccan Frontier and Mughal Expansion, ca. 1600: Contemporary Perspectives,” in “Between the Flux and

and perhaps as the greatest marker of his eminence amongst the luminaries of Akbar’s court, the emperor appointed Fayżī as his poet-laureate in 996/1589 when he gave him the title malik al-shuʿarāʾ (lit. king of poets).27

Fayżī’s literary output was closely tied to serving the imperial court. For instance, when

Akbar decided that he wanted to deliver the khuṭbah, the sermon for the Friday prayer, in the congregational mosque in Fatehpur Sikri on 1 Jumādā I 987/26 June 1579, he recited Fayżī’s verses on the pulpit.28 On a number of occasions Fayżī was also called upon to rework texts that

Akbar had personally commissioned. The first was the official court chronicle written by

Fayżī’s brother Abū al-Fażl, the Akbarnāmah. Commissioned in in 998/1590, Abū al-Fażl was given access to administrative records as well as personal accounts written by members of the royal court and household in order to compose the history. Abū al-Fażl composed five different drafts of the work, some of which circulated widely, and in the later drafts it was Fayżī who contributed to embellishing the text’s language, at least for half of the first volume, which covered everything up to and including the first decade of Akbar’s reign.29

The second was the Persian translation of the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata called the

Razmnāmah (The Book of War). Akbar took a keen interest in the Sanskrit epic and scholars have drawn attention to the fact that the translation of the work involved numerous important luminaries at court including both Abū al-Fażl and Fayżī. While the former wrote the extensive preface to the Razmnāmah, Fayżī was asked to rework the entire text in his literary style. Although, he only completed work on the first two books of the eighteen book

Facts of Indian History: Papers in Honor of Dirk Kolff,” ed. Jos Gommans, special issue, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47, no. 3 (2004): 368–78.

27 Abū al-Fażl, Akbarnāmah, 3:535.

28 Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History, 145; Desai, “Life and Works,” 8–9.

29 Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History, 262–65.

epic, his reworking of the epic included embellishing the prose with ornamental and metaphoric language, placing greater emphasis on Akbar as the text’s patron through inserting panegyrics and references to the emperor, and inserting his own verses to create a prosimetrical text.30

In addition to these, Fayżī left behind a considerable body of work in Persian that demonstrates the connections between his literary output and the ideologies and interests of the royal court. The best known of these are his poetic dīvān,31 two masnav̱ īs,32 and a collection of his letters.33 One of his masnav̱ īs deserves a brief but special mention because it demonstrates how his poetic output was shaped not only by prevailing literary trends but also his royal patron’s interests. The work is entitled Nal-Daman, based on the story of Nala and

Damayantī from the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata. According to Fayżī, his decision to set the story into the form of a Persian masnav̱ ī, particularly Niẓāmī Ganjavī’s Laylī va Majnūn, was because

Akbar himself ordered that he write an account of “love as it happened in India.”34 Moreover, the work also served as a work of political advice.35 We are still in the process of fully

30 Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016), 101–4, 133–37.

31 He named his dīvān Ṭabāshīr al-subḥ (Morning Lights) and he appears to put together at least two editions of it. Desai, “Life and Works,” 19–22. For the most recent publication of the work see—Abū al-Fayż Fayżī, Kulliyāt-i Fayżī, ed. A. D. Arshad (Lahore: Idārah-i Taḥqīqāt-i Pākistān, Dānishgāh-i Punjab, 1967).

32 In 993/1585 Fayżī conceived of writing his own quintet (khamsah) based on that of Niẓāmī Ganjavī. Only two were completed, Markaz al-advār, which was assembled posthumously by Abū al-Fażl, and Nal-Daman, based on the story of Nala and Damayantī from the Mahābhārata. In addition, he planned to pen Sulaymān va Bilqīs, Haft Kishvar, and Akbar-nāmah—see Desai, “Life and Works,” 22–28. Of these Nal-Daman has been published, for which see—Abū al-Fayż Fayżī, Nal-Daman-i Fārsī. Lucknow, Maṭbaʿ-i Asadi, 1287/[1871].

33 Abū al-Fayż Fayżī, Inshā-yi Fayżī ed. A. D. Arshad (Lahore: Majilis-i Taraqqī-i Adab, 1973).

34 Cited in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Love, Passion and Reason in Faizi’s Nal-Daman,” in Love in South Asia, ed. Francesca Orsini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 111.

35 Alam and Subrahmanyam, “Faizi’s Nal-Daman,” 123.

appreciating Fayżī’s oeuvre and intellectual engagements. For instance, the recently brought to light Sharīq al-maʿrifah (The illuminator of gnosis), a Persian prose work attributed to Fayżī said to be an ishrāqī commentary on Vedanta.36

Fayżī authored not only works in Persian but also in Arabic. In fact, his works in Arabic demonstrate his considerable linguistic ability in the language, for in both works Fayżī limits himself to using only those words that contain no dotted letters of the Arabic alphabet. The first is a treatise on ethical maxims entitled Mawārid al-kilam silk durar al-ḥikam (The wellspring of words threaded with the pearls of wise sayings), which he composed in 985/1577, while the second is a voluminous commentary on the Qurʾān entitled Sawāṭiʿ al-ilhām (Rays of inspiration), which he finished composing in 1002/1593.37 This skill in Arabic is in full display in the Risālah-i qadamīyah.

It is worth noting that Fayżī’s rank as one of the most lauded poets of Indo-Persian was confirmed even by his severest critics. Contemporaries like ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Mulūk Shāh

Badāʾūnī and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddis ̱ Dihlavī (958–1052/1551–1642) praised his mastery across a number of poetic genres literary qualities despite their considerable misgivings about Fayżī’s moral character. For example, ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī writes “in the separate branches of the arts (funūn), that of poetry (shiʿr), the enigma (muʿammā), prosody (ʿarūż), rhyme (qāfīyah), chronogram (tārīkh), philology (lughat), medicine (ṭibb), and epistolary (inshāʾ) he has no equal

(ʿadīl) today.”38 Similarly, even though ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq lamented that Fayżī had “fallen into a pit of disbelief and deviation (hāviyah-i kufr va żalālat),” so much so that “the tongues of the people

36 Carl Ernst, “Fayzi’s Illuminationist Interpretation of Vedanta: The Shariq al-maʿrifa,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, no. 3 (2010): 356–64.

37 Desai, “Life and Works,” 32–35. For the title of his earlier work see Abū al-Fayż Fayżī, Sawāṭiʿ al-ilhām (Lucknow: Naval Kishore Press, 1306/[1889]), 8. For a recent addition to his Qurʾān commentary see—idem, Sawāṭiʿ al-ilhām fī tafsīr kalām al-malik al-ʿallām, ed. Murtażā Āyat Allāh-zādah Shīrāzī (Qum: [n.p.], 1996).

38 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:205.

of religion (ahl-i dīn va millat) and the friends and affiliates of the Prophet (dūstān va muntasibān-i janāb-i nabūvat) keep unpolluted (pāk dārad) from bearing the names of him and his unfortunate party (jamāʿat-i shuʾm),” he admitted that “in linguistic purity (faṣāḥat), rhetoric (balāghat), vigour (matānat), and concreteness (raṣānat) of discourse (sukhan), he was the most distinguished of the age (mumtāz-i rūzgār).”39

Fayżī’s rhetoric and poetic skill in Persian, his skill in Arabic and the language of the

Qurʾān, and his ability to marry court interests with his literary skill are on display in the

Risālah-i qadamīyah. The Risālah is not a well-known work of Fayżī’s. Modern scholarship on

Fayżī makes no mention of it,40 even though Dara Nusserwanji Marshall had long ago listed it amongst the poet’s work in his bibliography of manuscripts dating from the Mughal period.41

This oversight is not surprising given that of the vast number of works attributed to Fayżī only a few received mention in early modern biographies of the poet. To date, the only mention of

Fayżī’s authorship of the Risālah-i qadamīyah from a Mughal era work is found in ʿAlī

Muḥammad Khān’s Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, the aforementioned regional history of Gujarat written in the eighteenth century. The fact that the Risālah-i qadamīyah passed the notice of biographers writing in the Mughal heartland of North India suggests that perhaps the work may have only circulated locally in Gujarat.

39 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddis ̱ Dihlavī, Taẕkirah-i muṣannifīn-i Dihlī, ed. Shams Allāh Qādirī (Hyderabad: Maṭbaʿ-i Tārīkh, [n.d.]), 20–21. For his part Fayżī appears to have held ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī and ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq in high regard for much of his life, for which see—Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History, 330–33.

40 See for instance, Desai, “Life and Works,” 19–35; Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, s.v. “Fayḍī, Abū l-Fayḍ”; Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. “Fayżī, Abu’l-Fayż”; and Gerald Grobbel, Der Dichter Faiḍī und die Religion Akbars (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2001), 28–32.

41 D. N. Marshall, Mughals in India: A Bibliographical Survey, vol. 1, Manuscripts (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967), 144 (entry no. 468, xi).

To date, only three manuscripts of the work are known, two of which were used by

Rasūl Jaʿfariyān in his edition of the work.42 Apart from a brief autobiographical aside, where he cites a couplet (bayt) that he composed during a visit to the shrine of the footprint relic in

Delhi,43 the author provides no indication of his own identity in the text. The author’s identity is surmised by the attribution given in the manuscripts. Certainly, the high literary style of the work suggests it was penned by a figure of considerable poetic skill. The work contains an ingenious use of imagery and wordplay, ornamented prose, and sophisticated poetry. Although the work begins and ends by no means abruptly—it starts with a lengthy praise of God and the

Prophet Muḥammad and concludes with a number of quatrains about the relic in question— there is none of the prefatory material to clearly indicate who wrote it, why, and for whom.

According to ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān, the work was written at the behest of the Mughal emperor. When describing the relic in the eighteenth century, he wrote: “A detailed account of the aforementioned qadam is contained in a separate treatise (risālah), which was composed on

[royal] order and is known as Risālah-i qadamīyah.”44 In another section of his work, where he discusses the important shrines of Ahmadabad, he indicates that the author (muṣannif) of the

Risālah-i qadamīyah was “Shaykh Fayż,” and includes two rubāʿīs by the poet he found in the work—of which only one is cited in the published version.45

Given what we know about Fayżī, his relationship with the court, and the text, we may surmise two things. First, the work was probably written either by Fayżī or at least revised by him. Second, given the position of the author and the received narrative that Akbar

42 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 32.

43 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37.

44 ʿAlī Muḥammad, Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 1:139.

45 ʿAlī Muḥammad, Khātimah-i Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 25.

commissioned it, the Risālah on some level must reflect the court’s official position on the relic—at least at the time that it was written. The question of who the intended audience of the work was is a matter of speculation. The limited circulation and knowledge of the work suggests that perhaps the Risālah was written to be kept with the relic, as the official document that outlined the Mughal court’s position on it.

Having surveyed the main sources for reconstituting the history of the relic’s arrival, let us now turn to the circumstances under which it arrived in Fatehpur Sikri, followed by an account of the inquiry that took place at the royal court.

1.3. Historical Context: The Imperial Hajj

The story of the relic’s arrival to India begins in some ways with the Mughal conquest of the Sultanate of Gujarat, which occurred over a two-year period starting in 980/1572.

Gujarat had a long history of contacts between the maritime Sultanate, the Hejaz, and the

Ottoman capital beyond.46 This included diplomatic exchanges, donations for the holy sites in the Hejaz, and, the movement of religious scholars. In some ways, in conquering Gujarat the

Mughal court inherited much of the financial, scholastic, and political networks between the

Hejaz and Gujarat. Soon after the Mughal conquest of Gujarat, Akbar permitted the continuation of monies to be sent by local endowments intended for the Ḥaramayn.47

However, at this point, the Mughal court had little direct contact with the Hejaz save for occasional gifting.48 This all changed when Akbar’s aunt, Gulbadan Begum, decided to undertake the hajj. Starting in 983/1575 when the women of the royal household set out for hajj, until 990/1582 when they returned, the Mughal court would expend considerable

46 See for instance Alam and Subrahmanyam, “A View from Mecca,” 268–318 and Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 55–56, 59–65, and 120–24.

47 M. N. Pearson, Pious Passengers: The Hajj in Earlier Times (London: Hurst & Company, 1994), 123–24.

48 See for instance Isfahānī, “Javāhir al-tārīkh,” 94.

financial and human resources in funding hajj caravans, negotiating with the Portuguese for safe travel, and ensuring the security of hajj pilgrims.49

Some scholars have viewed Akbar’s patronage of the hajj as an appeal towards what they view as Islamic orthodoxy and a gesture of the court’s Sunni Muslim identity. Writing about the important role of royal women in the undertaking, Ruby Lal notes that the

“pilgrimage is likely to have helped reinforce the Islamic face of the empire,” for it “was one among the many pietistic activities supported by the emperor—part of a series of moves that he and others in his court may have found necessary for the consolidation of Muslim support in this uniquely polyglot empire.”50 Meanwhile, Munis Faruqui has suggested that it was part of

“the emperor’s attempt to forge the image of an arch-typical Sunni-Muslim monarch” in the face of opposition from his stepbrother Ḥakīm Mīrzā (960–93/1553–1585).51

Such claims, although at first commonsensical, are predicated on the belief that there was a Sunni orthodox faction at the Mughal court to whom Akbar had to appeal and that it valorized the pilgrimage to Mecca. Such assumptions are not borne out from evidence. While it is true that there were numerous members of court who aspired to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca, leading members of the ʿulamāʾ who occupied positions of political authority and had the support of other fellow religious elites were far more circumscribed in their calls for the

Mughal emperor to support the hajj. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of the fatwa issued by Mullā ʿAbd Allāh Sulṭānpūrī (d. 990/1582).

Those who knew Mullā ʿAbd Allāh Sulṭānpūrī described him as being amongst the scholastic luminaries of the age who was peerless amongst contemporaries, especially when it

49 Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 208–13.

50 Lal, Domesticity and Power, 212.

51 Munis D. Faruqui, “The Forgotten Prince: Mirza Hakim and the Formation of the Mughal Empire in India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 48, no. 4 (2005): 516.

came to his knowledge of Arabic, the principles of Islamic jurisprudence, history, and the traditional sciences (az fuḥūl-i ʿulamā-yi zamān va yagānah-ʾi dawrān khuṣūṣan dar ʿarbīyāt va uṣūl al-fiqh va tārīkh va sāʾir naqlīyāt).52 According to ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī, he constantly endeavored to give currency to the sharīʿah, was a zealous Sunnī, and trenchant in his persecution of Shīʿīs (dar tarvīj-i sharīʿat-i ghurrā hamīshah saʿy-i balīgh mī namūd va sunnī mutaʿaṣṣib būd, khaylī az mulāḥidah va ravāfiż bih saʿy ū bih jāy-ī kah jihat-i īshān āmadah sākhtah būdand raftand).53 In addition to being a well-recognized Sunnī partisan, he was an important figure in the Punjab and thus was received well by whoever was in power in North India.

Badāʾūnī described him as being a leading pillar of the ʿulamāʾ of Punjab (ʿulamā-yi panjāb kah

ʿumdah-ʾi īshān makhdūm al-mulk būd).54 In addition, he received the title Makhdūm al-mulk

(master of the realm) from Humāyūn and was appointed to the office of Shaykh al-Islam under the Surs.55

According to ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī, Mullā ʿAbd Allāh Sulṭānpūrī is said to have issued a fatwa declaring the hajj no longer obligatory (farż), deeming it practically sinful (mustawjib-i bazakarī) on account of the fact that the two routes to Mecca had become restricted. His reasoning was that pilgrims travelling the overland route through Safavid Iran would be forced to hear the improprieties (nā-sazā) of the Qizilbash, that is, the ritual cursing of the first three orthodox Caliphs, while the sea route from Gujarat necessitated the use of passports

52 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:48.

53 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:48

54 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:42.

55 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:48

(ʿahd-nāmas) issued by the Portuguese bearing the image of Mary and Christ, which was equated to idol-worship (but-parastī).56

Given the fatwa and position of Mullā ʿAbd Allāh Sulṭānpūrī amongst the religious elite of Punjab—a province whose local notables the court remained vigilant about appeasing given its proximity to Ḥakīm Mīrzā’s base in Kabul—as well as his position as a staunch partisan of

Sunnī doctrine, it appears unclear which stakeholders Akbar may have been attempting to win over as an “arch-typical Sunni-Muslim monarch” by patronizing the hajj.

In Rajab 985/September 1577, Abū Turāb was summoned to the royal camp at Ajmer where he was appointed Amīr-i ḥājj.57 He was entrusted with the gold and goods that were bound for Mecca and Medina.58 Abū Turāb recalled the procession of royal elephants, laden with gifts and gold, that carried him on his way.59 Like the previous year, when Akbar issued a general order to the effect that anyone who wished to go on hajj would have their expenses paid from the royal treasury,60 the emperor once again issued a similar order.61 Describing the emperor’s actions, Fayżī wrote that it was “because of [Akbar’s] lofty consideration that each year several thousand people, both rich and poor, were ennobled by the privilege of undertaking the pilgrimage.”62

56 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 2:139–40. The fatwa is dealt with in greater detail in Badāʾūnī’s catechism Najāt al-rashīd, in his section on the hajj, for which see ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī, Najāt al-rashīd, ed. by Sayyid Muʿīn al- Ḥaqq (Lahore: Idārah-i Taḥqīqāt-i Pākistān, Dānishgāh-i Panjāb, 1972), 182–191.

57 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 95. For the month, see Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 2:174.

58 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 95.

59 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 96.

60 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 2:165.

61 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 2:174.

62 Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah,” 34.

To what degree such offers were sincere and the numbers quoted above are true is not clear. To be sure, there remained numerous hurdles for those who requested to go on pilgrimage, not all of which were financial, or at least, not directly. ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī recorded his own frustrated efforts to go on pilgrimage when Abū Turāb was appointed Amīr-i

Ḥājj. When news went out that people could go with the Mughal caravan on imperial coin,

ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī petitioned the ṣadr al-ṣudūr, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Nabī, to obtain permission for him to leave as well. ʿAbd al-Qādir Badāʾūnī recalled their conversation:

When I petitioned Shaykh ʿAbd al-Nabī to obtain permission for myself to take leave, he asked me, ‘is your mother still alive?’ I replied ‘yes’. He asked, ‘is there any brother who would come to her service?’ I replied, ‘no, I am the sole mean of support for her.’ He replied that it would be better if permission to leave was obtained from mother.’ That permission never came. At the recollection of the memory years later, Badauni confessed a deep disappointment that he “was unsuccessful in that happiness,” but such disappointment paled in comparison to the pained regret of his mother who, he described poetically, “gnaws the back of the hand of repentance with the teeth of sorrow,” for not allowing him to go.63

Other aspirant pilgrims were held up at the port of exit as their finances were looked into. Port officials sent off inquiries to the Mughal court if a rather well-heeled family suddenly arrived to ready to set off to Mecca. Take for instance the case of Bāyazīd Bayāt, who had served high-ranking members of the royal court before entering the service of the royal household, and who was held up for two years at Surat before he was finally permitted to leave for the Hejaz. Bāyazīd Bayāt received permission to leave for pilgrimage in Muḥarram

986/March–April 1578, some six months after Abū Turāb was appointed Amīr-i ḥājj. When he arrived in Surat local officials were perplexed by the amount of gold and jewellery that Bāyazīd had with him and sent off inquiry to the Mughal court. The court in return issued a farmān to

63 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 2:174.

detain Bāyazīd and investigate the matter. As a result, his goods were inventoried and the details sent to Fatehpur Sikri. Although the Mughal emperor cleared him of any wrongdoing, for the next year Akbar did not permit him to leave and sent numerous entreaties for him to return to court and receive a stipend instead. When it became clear that Bāyazīd could not be deterred he was finally given permission to leave.64 While the cases of Bāyazīd and Badāʾūnī’s are hardly sufficient evidence for a Mughal policy to dissuade members of court to leave for hajj, they are noteworthy.

When Abū Turāb reached Gujarat, he met first with Vazīr Khān who happened to still be there, after which the newly appointed Mīr-i ḥājj left for the port of Surat, where the local

ḥākim and jāgīrdār, Qilīch Khān, presented him with all kinds of supplies.65 Abū Turāb and

Iʿtimād Khān boarded a ship that belonged to the emperor and set sail for the Ḥaramayn.66 The journey must have been both smooth and swift, for Abū Turāb detected in it the work of divine providence. He wrote of the journey, “By the grace of God, despite it being the end of the season, such that all the ships had set sail, and this ship being behind all others, it arrived at the port of destination before every one of them.”67

Finally, in the month Ẕū al-Ḥijjah, in the year 986/1579 Abū Turāb joined countless pilgrims as they circumambulated the Kaʿbah and performed the rituals instituted by

Muḥammad on his farewell pilgrimage in 10/632—the same pilgrimage at the conclusion of which he distributed his shorn hair to those assembled.68 That year the pilgrimage was

64 Simon Digby, “Bāyazīd Beg Turkmān’s Pilgrimage to Makka and Return to Gujarat: A Sixteenth Century Narrative.” Iran 42, no. 1 (2004): 164–65.

65 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 96.

66 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 96.

67 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 96.

68 Wheeler, “Gift of the Body in Islam,” 341–88.

particularly auspicious for it was “the great hajj” or the ḥajj-i akbar. This special designation was reserved for those pilgrimages when the ninth of Ẕū al-Ḥijjah, the Day of ʿArafah, fell on a

Friday, as it did the year Abū Turāb went for pilgrimage (6 February 1579).69 Abū Turāb assiduously noted this fact in his history: “By good fortune, the hajj that year was the ḥajj-i akbar, as the [Day of] ʿArafah was a Friday and His Excellency [the Prophet] has related, a pilgrimage whose [Day of] ʿArafah is on Friday is equal to seventy pilgrimages of [whose Day of

ʿArafah fall on] other days.”70

The serendipity of the term hajj-i akbar calls for notice. On the one hand it meant “the

Great (akbar) Hajj” but it also could be taken in the sense, “Akbar’s Hajj”. Such a play on the name of the emperor would have appealed to his tastes, for at this very time he was toying with idea of stamping coins with the benediction: Allahu akbar (God is most great), or ‘God, He is Akbar’. Such taste for ambiguity was au courant at the Mughal court. And Abū Turāb certainly played to this in his own writing. In his history, Abū Turāb clearly linked his good fortune at performing the particularly auspicious hajj with the emperor’s largesse. He wrote, “The faqīr

[referring to himself], successfully attained the good fortune of performing the ḥajj-i akbar on account of the felicitous favour of generous and munificent emperor (faqīr bi-dawlat-i guẕārdan- i ḥajj-i akbar az yumn-i ʿināyat-i pādishāh-i sakhā-pīshah-i karam-gustar bahrahmand gasht).”71

69 ʿArafah is the name of a mountain located near Mecca and is a site on the annual hajj pilgrimage. On the ninth day of Ẕū al-Ḥijjah, pilgrims gather on the plain in front of the mountain and perform the vuqūf (“standing [before God]”), one of the necessary rites of the pilgrimage. The mountain is where the Prophet Muḥammad is said to have delivered his farewell pilgrimage in 10/632. For this and Abū Turāb’s claim about the Day of ʿArafah being exceptionally auspicious when it fell on a Friday see—Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, s.v. “ʿArafat.”

70 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 99–100.

71 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 96.

At the hajj he distributed alms and charity to those “adorned with the attribute of deservingness” in accordance with royal dictates.72 Chief amongst beneficiaries of Akbar’s largesse were the Sharifs of Mecca, whom Abū Turāb described as the “sultans of those precincts.”73 The royal gifts sent by Akbar were clearly intended to promote the Mughal emperor within the Ḥaramayn, for his actions earned public recognition and praise within its precincts. According to Fayżī and Abū Turāb, sermons about Akbar’s beneficence, mention of his good name, and prayers for the perpetuity of his rule were delivered from atop the pulpits of the Ḥaramayn. In particular, the Fāṭiḥah was recited continuously and assiduously after the five daily prayers “to increase his awe and majesty and pray for the continuation of his good fortune” and for “the well-being of the emperor who is the asylum of the world.”74 The fact that sermons were read in the name of Akbar is noteworthy given that the Hejaz was under

Ottoman authority and the Sultan in Istanbul was the chief patron of the pilgrimage sites providing both gold and goods.

In addition, it is also possible that the money sent by Akbar was intended not only for the Sharīfs and residents of the Ḥaramayn but also for members of the royal family that had encamped at Mecca. Based on records of official correspondence housed in the Ottoman state archives, it appears the presence of the Mughal royal family in the Ḥaramayn had become an issue of concern for the authorities in Istanbul. In their correspondence, they refer to the

Mughal royal family who had stayed in the Ḥaramayn as mujāvirs, that is, shrine residents.75

72 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 96.

73 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 96.

74 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 34–35 and Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 96.

75 Farooqi, “Six Ottoman Documents,” 38–39, 41.

When the Mughal sources refer to the distribution of gifts to the mujāvirs of the Ḥaramayn, perhaps it is prudent to recognize this gloss.

What is less clear however is whether Akbar’s largesse and the subsequent public appreciation of it were intended solely for political reasons (and if so, it is not made explicit what these might have been) or for devotional reasons, or perhaps both. Needless to say, there was a reciprocal relationship between the emperor and the Sharīfs that was constituted in equal measure by financial incentives and religious merit, perhaps analogous to the “army of prayer” that the Mughal rulers mobilized through their patronage of religious figures in

Hindustan. It was within the context of such an economy of piety and commerce that the footprint relic circulated.

It was after completing the great hajj that Abū Turāb acquired the relic. The precise circumstances by which the relic came into Abū Turāb’s hands are not clear. Certainly, it required “much effort and diligence, and spending considerable money,” as Abū Turāb wrote in his history, but beyond that he does not provide any further information.76 Fayżī, for his part obfuscates the entire episode by describing it in exceptionally dense prose marked by multiple clauses laden with digression:

When that sayyid (siyādat-maʾāb, lit. person endowed with sayyidhood), after performing the rituals of the greater and lesser pilgrimage (ḥajj va ʿumrah), and distributing presents, desired to set forth on the path of “The return is all the more praiseworthy,” (paraphrase of the Arabic proverb al-ʿawd aḥmad), the Sharīfs of the precinct of the Kaʿbah (Ḥaram) and the grandees of the noble household, to whom the governorship of the two noble sanctuaries (Ḥaramayn-i Sharīfayn) has come, generation after generation from the time of the Sayyid of the world [i.e., the Prophet]—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace—until our time, based upon the foundation of love and the bond of friendship that they have for His

76 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 97.

Majesty the Shadow of God, may his exalted shadow be forever, and for the continuation of the benefits of good fortune’s favours and the continuation of kind favours and munificence for which they have been singled out, with the approval of the doctors of Islam and the scholars of learning, for the sake of good fortune and blessing (tayammun va tabarruk), they dispatched by means of that sayyid the imprint (nishān) of the foot (qadam), twin of the [Divine] Throne, of his Excellency the Sayyid of Creation— may the most perfect of salutations and blessings be upon him.77 According to Fayżī, the relic was given as a gift from the Sharīfs of Mecca as a result of “the foundation of love and the bond of friendship” between them and the Mughal emperor. It is not clear whether the considerable expenditure that Abū Turāb mentioned was part and parcel of the money distributed to the Sharīfs and those who lived in the Ḥaramayn, or whether it required additional sums of money, which came from either the royal treasury or Abū Turāb’s own pocket.

It is possible that the gift was sent in order for the Sharīfs to hedge their bets politically and not be entirely dependent on the Ottomans for support. The presence of the royal household, which stayed for a number of years in Mecca, must have appeared as a serious investment on the part of the Mughal emperor in patronizing the hajj. In addition, it is possible that the relic was meant also as an offering to counteract Ottoman hostility towards the long- standing presence of the royal household in the Hejaz. N. R. Farooqi has brought to light transcriptions of official Ottoman correspondence detailing the court’s frustration with the

77 Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah,” 35–36. Abū Turāb does not clearly indicate whether the thirteenth months it took to return to Surat was from the time he set out for his journey or from the time he completed the hajj. However, given the dates, we can assume it is the latter. It is not from the time he left Ajmer in Rajab 985/September 1577 for thirteen months would correspond to Shaʿbān 986/October 1578, which is before the dates for the great hajj of 9 Ẕū al-Ḥijjah 986/6 February 1579. If it referred to thirteen months after performing the great hajj, then he would have returned in Muḥarram 988/February 1580. This seems the correct date as he was at the Mughal court with the relic in the winter of 987/1580.

presence of the Mughal pilgrim camp, ostensibly because of the drain on their resources.78

Regardless, the Sharīfs were to find themselves frustrated in their relations with the Mughal court. After the return of the royal women, the Mughal court halted its support of the

Ḥaramayn. The Sharīfs registered their frustration with the Mughal emperor by sending a letter, the response to which was penned by Abū al-Fażl and preserved in his correspondence.79

It appears that the Sharīfs not only miscalculated the intent of the Mughal court’s patronage of the sites, but also how the gift of a footprint relic might be received. It is to the reception of the qadam at the court of the Mughal emperor that the chapter now turns.

1.4. The Relic at the Court of the Great Mughal

News of the footprint relic’s arrival reached the Mughal court soon after Abū Turāb’s returned to Gujarat some thirteenth months after he performed the hajj. Upon his arrival, he stopped in Surat for a few days in order to make preparations for his journey to the imperial court.80 Before setting off, he sent a letter (ʿarżdāsht) to the Mughal court relaying the good news of the relic’s arrival. By his own account, he had been effusive in his praise of Akbar in the letter, whom he addressed as being blessed with victory (fīrūz-humāyūnī). He thanked the

Mughal emperor for his fortunate guidance (rah-namūnī-ʾi bakht), which made the great boon

(dawlatī-i ʿaẓīm) possible, that is, acquiring the relic. He added: “The gratitude for this favour

(niʿmat), however it should be expressed, would remain insufficient.”81

Before he could reach Fathpur Sikri, an order (farmān) arrived from the Mughal court.

In it, the emperor is said to have expressed his intention to honour and exalt (tawqīr va taʿẓīm)

78 Farooqi, “Six Ottoman Documents,” 32–48.

79 Mansura Haidar, trans., Mukātabāt-i-ʿAllāmī (Inshāʾi Abuʾl Faẓl): Daftar I (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1998), 1–7.

80 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 96.

81 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 97.

the relic by performing the rituals of welcoming the object (marāsim-i istiqbāl), described therein as qadam-i saʿādat-tawʾam (lit. the footprint that is a twin to felicity). Using similarly lofty terms such as qadam-i fayż-ʿalam (lit. the footprint that is marked by grace) to describe the object, the farmān is said to have contained orders for Abū Turāb to find “an unpolluted place” some five kurohs from the city, a distance of roughly 15–20 km, where he was to keep the object. In Abū Turāb’s record of it, the farmān described the object as the impression of

Prophet’s blessed foot (nishān-i pāy-i mubārak-i hażrat). It further added that after depositing it at in an unpolluted location, he was then to come to the court in order that, to quote the text,

“we may ascertain the veracity of its conditions from you (aḥvāl-i ān-rā az shumā taḥqīq kunīm).”82

It is at this point that some form of inquiry took place into the object brought by Abū

Turāb. None of the sources provide where this investigation might have taken place but given the fact it took place at the imperial capital of Fatehpur Sikri at the height of the debates and discussions taking place at the ʿIbādatkhānah it is entirely possible that it was the site of the inquiry. Regardless, what may we reconstruct about the religious inquiry? Abū Turāb provides an elliptical account of it in the Tārīkh-i Gujarāt:

When the faqīr was ennobled by [having] the honour of kissing the [royal] carpet, he was asked whether this qadam is [of the] left [foot] or right. The faqīr replied that it is [of] the right [foot]. [Akbar] said, if it is [of the] right [foot] then the authentication is positive (taḥqīq rāst ast) for that qadam that Haẓrat Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān had brought is an impression of the left foot (nishān-i pāy-i chap).83

Satisfied, the Mughal emperor is said to have at this point given orders to make preparations for the royal procession.

82 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 97.

83 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 97.

In Abū Turāb’s account, the inquiry into the relic hinges on the question of its relationship to another relic—one said to have been brought to India by the Suhravardī Sufi

Shaykh Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Bukhārī (707–84/1308–84), better known by his title Makhdūm-i

Jahāniyān Jahāngasht, during the reign of the Delhi Sultan Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (r. 752–

90/1351–88). The relic was said to have been installed over the cenotaph of Fīrūz Shāh’s son

Fatḥ Khān who died at a young age. The site is believed to have been a madrasa initially, which during the Mughal period developed into a shrine or dargāh.84 The question of whether

Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān actually brought the relic is far from settled. In her study of the

Sufimaster, Amina Steinfels has noted that early accounts of Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān make no mention of his bringing the relic and the earliest account in hagiographic tradition of him doing so dates from the seventeenth century.85 The question of how and why this narrative emerged is outside the scope of this present study and merits further examination, but for the purposes of this chapter what is noteworthy is that this claim was made already in the late sixteenth century.

What is curious about the inquiry and Abū Turāb’s account is that he does not make the explicit link in his own writing between the relic in Delhi and the one he brought. While Abū al-Fażl writes that Abū Turāb had claimed that the footprint relic he brought was the counterpart (ham-dast) to the one brought by Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān,86 in his own history, Abū

84 Previous studies of the site include Anthony Welch, “The Shrine of the Holy Footprint in Delhi,” Muqarnas 14 (1997): 166–178; Ganem, “Traces of the Prophet,” 51–67; and Blain H. Auer, Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam: History, Religion, and Muslim Legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 66–76. The development of the site is the subject of the next chapter.

85 Amina M. Steinfels, Knowledge before Action: Islamic Learning and Sufi Practice in the Life of Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Bukhārī Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012), 131–32.

86 Abū al-Fażl, Akbarnāmah, 3:281; Beveridge, trans., The Akbarnama, 3:329.

Turāb does not explicitly state that the qadam he brought was a companion of the one brought to India earlier. Instead, as he often does, he writes rather elliptically:

Since an impression (surāgh) from the foot (qadam) of the Chief of prophets, may God bless him and his family and grant them peace, was found in the Qubbah-i ʿAbbās, may God be pleased with him, which is in the courtyard of the Masjid al-Ḥaram; and it was heard that his grace Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān had brought a qadam of his Excellency [the Prophet] during the reign of late Sultan Fīrūz Shāh to Ḥażrat-i Delhi; much effort and diligence was shown and considerable money spent until it was acquired.87

While Abū Turāb’s account lacks details beyond Akbar asking which foot left the impression on the stone that was brought to Fatehpur Sikri, the Risālah-i qadamīyah offers insight into the kinds of factors that were at play in evaluating the relic. In the Risālah, Fayżī presented the core of the problem regarding the relic in the following words:

In the books of authentic Traditions (kutub-i ṣaḥīḥah) it is mentioned that the miracles (muʿijzāt) of his Excellency the Messenger, may God bless him and his family and grant them peace, and blessings of God be upon the imams of rightful guidance,88 are more numerous than can be counted; and which the writings of the account keepers of traditions (muḥāsibān-i akhbār) and the extractors of traces (mustakhrijān-i āsā̱ r) have enumerated; and which adorn many thousands of widely circulated (mabsūṭ) books on accounts of the sanctified biography of his Excellency; and so many pages and books have been composed on his blessed life from beginning to end and despite all of this, it is acknowledged that they fall short in inquiring into the conditions and giving an account of the perfections of his Excellency. And from those lengthy books, which consist of forty volumes and some of which are less than that, and the titles of which are found in histories of Imām Yāfiʿī, Shaykh Ibn Kathīr, and others, none reached the shores of Hind. And in the biographies and the abridged treatises that are current in these lands, not a word of acceptance or denial, or disavowing or corroborating is seen.

87 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 96–97.

88 The blessings on the Shiʿi Imams is mentioned in only one of the two manuscripts used by Rasūl Jaʿfariyān—see Fayżī, “Risālah,” 42n25.

Therefore, it is necessary to be cautious about any conjecture that denies this miracle and to avoid the supposition of criticism.89

The problem concerned the economy of knowledge. According to Fayżī, in the works available in India, there was “not a word of acceptance or denial, or disavowing or corroborating.”

However, he hedges this issue by describing how the canonical works of Sunnī hadith (kutub-i

ṣaḥīḥah) mention that the Prophet’s miracles (muʿijzāt) far exceed what can be enumerated. He emphasizes that despite the many works documenting the sanctified behaviour and events of the Prophet’s life (ẕikr-i ahvāl-i quds-minvāl), “they fall short in inquiring into the conditions and giving an account of the perfections of his Excellency.” It is for this reason, he writes, that

“it is necessary to be cautious about any conjecture that denies this miracle and to avoid the supposition of criticism.”

Fayżī then reveals Akbar’s own calculation in venerating the relic. According to Fayżī

Akbar was ambivalent about the relic’s veracity and potency but deemed it worthy of veneration on the basis of religious caution (iḥtiyāṭ). He writes: 90

The core of the matter, which His Majesty the Shadow of God, may his exalted shadow be forever, stated in his eloquent tongue, is thus: “Although the truth about its soundness (ṣiḥḥat) has not reached us from books of authentic traditions, it is nevertheless fitting on account of good conduct (ḥusn-i adab) to strive on the path of caution by fully honouring it and bring forth practices that ennoble it, because if it is really the impression of the purest foot (nishānah-ʾi qadam-i aṭhar) of that Commander, may God bless him and his family and grant them peace, then the obligations of exaltation would have been fulfilled. If in fact it is not so, then the veneration demonstrated merely on good intentions will be reason for beautiful rewards and much recompense before God. The sincere support for that Commander, May God bless him and his family and grant them peace, is reason enough for exaltation.” And in the

89 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37–38.

90 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 38.

Traditions, it is stated, “Even if you think of him in a stone, [there will be profit for you].”

Akbar’s decision to venerate the relic may have as much to do with wishing to err on the side of caution, as it had to do with local political considerations. In his discussion of the relic’s arrival Abū al-Fażl includes a long digression that obliquely refers to those who had been doubting Akbar’s sincere belief in Islam based on the nightly discussions on matters of religion that took place at the royal court.91 Certainly, this became the received view of eighteenth century historians who saw Akbar’s veneration of the relic as politically expedient.

In his prosopography Maʾāsiṟ al-umarāʾ, Shāh Navāz Khān writes that it was widely rumoured that the reigning king (padishah-i vaqt), that is Akbar, claimed prophethood (daʿvā-yi nubūvat dārad va muddaʿī-ʾi risālat ast) and held Islam in low esteem (dīn-i Muḥammadī […] nā-sitūdah mī-

91 In a section that remains to be studied at length, Abū al-Fażl writes:

Immediately the cup of the fancy of the short-thoughted was filled with dust, and the wicked and seditions sank into the pit of shame. The vain thinkers and ill-conditioned ones who had been agitated on account of the inquiries into the proofs of prophecy, and the passing of nights (in discussion), and the doubts—of which books of theology (kalāmī kutub) are full—were at once made infamous in the market of ashamedness, while those who had spoken idly and foolishly of the semblance of religion and piety in the spiritual and temporal pontiff, became ruined in realm and religion. The agitation of that day casts no cloud on the inner mind of that banquet-adorner of world-knowledge, nor has he any delight today from the fact of that crew’s having sunk their heads in the collar of shame! The plant of the power of such a whole-hearted one increases from day to day, and from time to time fresh fortune brings the news of success. Profundity of thought always prevails, and the wonders of fortune increase watchfulness.

Ever march along the road of nobleness,

Ever cheerfully imprint the page of Time,

Casting a frank glance on the horizons,

Regarding as a spectacle the ways of the world.

What cares the right-thinking God-fearing man for joy or sorrow? But the sincere disciples of a new devotion acquired strength, and provision for the road was furnished to the general public.

See—Beveridge, trans., The Akbarnama, 3:330–31.

dānad).92 Indeed, as proof, Shāh Navāz Khān paraphrased Abū al-Fażl’s own account of the relics arrival in the Akbarnāmah, focusing particularly on the idea of the welcome as an artifice to silence detractors.

1.5. Conclusion

Reading the Risālah-i qadamīyah we begin to get a sense of the nature of the debate that took place upon the arrival of the qadam. In the absence of hadith concerning the footprint relic, the Mughal court chose to practice caution and venerate the object. While there were political considerations at play in this choice, the Mughal court adopted a pragmatic attitude with respect to the potential authenticity and veracity of Prophetic relics.

The debate over the nature of the relic also allowed Akbar to exercise his own judgement in the matter of settling religious debates. In his study of Mughal kingship, Azfar

Moin has argued that Akbar’s adjudication of religious debates was his way of performing the role of the saintly sovereign. After all, he had himself claimed the title of mujtahid; a title usually reserved for legal scholars whose knowledge allowed them to practice ijtihad, that is, independent reasoning and hermeneutics in order to derive rulings on matters for which there is no suitable precedent.93

Moin also points to an important aspect of Akbar’s overseeing of religious debates and inquiry—their performativity and the very embodied way in which questions of faith could ultimately be settled. He explains the necessity of taking “seriously the sensuous and performative way in which the king preferred to “know both the sacred and the profane.” He writes, “Akbar was not simply a detached observer of the sacred theatre he had organized. He

92 Shāh Navāz Khān, Maʾāsiṟ al-umarā, 3:284; Beveridge and Prashad, trans., The Maāth̲ ̲ir-ul-umarā, 1:144.

93 Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 139, 151–52.

participated in it bodily.”94 By understanding that Akbar enacted his sovereign persona through embodied action, we begin to understand why Akbar publicly demonstrated veneration for the relic in the procession staged to welcome the object.

To welcome the relic, Akbar staged a spectacular procession that began at a short distance outside of the city. Akbar sent orders that an advance camp (pīsh-khānah) be set up with all its considerable accoutrements of tents (bārgāh-hā), hangings, (sarāpardah-hā), and canopies (sāybān-hā) at the site where Abū Turāb had left the relic. In addition, he commanded members of his court, his leading amīrs, and his soldiers to gather to greet the qadam. On the day of the procession, they set off in the dark before dawn so that they could offer the morning prayer at the site where the qadam was placed. Once there, first the emperor approached the relic “seeking blessings” (tabarruk justah).95 It is unclear what the rituals of veneration may have looked like. However, Fayżī wrote in the Risālah-i qadamīyah that Akbar was “ennobled by the honour of kissing (sharaf-i tasḻ im va taqbīl)” the object.96 After which the amīrs, high ranking officials (arkān-i dawlat lit. pillars of the state), the sayyids, judges, and Sufi shaykhs, each undertook visitation (ziyārat) to the relic in accordance with their station. Finally, the soldiers were given permission to circumambulate (ṭavāf) the relic.97 Abū Turāb noted the great deal of attention that was paid to the proper rituals of venerating the relic. He wrote: “On account of the extreme humility and respect in honouring and ennobling this impression marked by grace (nishān-i fayż-nishān) no detail was left unattended to.”98

94 Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 151.

95 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 97.

96 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 36.

97 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 97.

98 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 97–98.

After performing the rituals of visitation, Akbar threw a feast. Afterwards, the emperor is said to have wrapped the relic in his own cloak, and carried it on his own shoulders for nearly a hundred steps towards the city.99 According to Fayżī, after the emperor, the sayyids were called forward to carry the relic for the next stage of the procession on its journey to the city, and that they were chosen on account of their “personal proximity” (qurb-i ẕātī) to the

Prophet Muḥammad.100 Abū Turāb writes that then the grandees, the ʿulamāʾ, the great amīrs then carried the relic to the city, hand in hand, shoulder-to-shoulder, likening the image of tightly huddled men to a bouquet of flowers, as they each placed the relic on their shoulders one by one and brought it to the city.101 Once it was brought to the city, the relic was conveyed to the Ḥaram and Akbar gave orders that the women of the royal household “may be ennobled by acquiring the good fortune (saʿādat) from visitation (ziyārat)” to the qadam.102

After completing the prerequisites of visitation and welcoming the relic (lavāzim-i ziyārat va istiqbāl), Akbar ordered that the relic be transported to the Gujarati pavilion (maḥall-i

Gujarātī), which was assigned to Abū Turāb for his dwelling. There he was to keep the relic. By

Akbar’s reasoning, since the dwelling was in the same neighbourhood (javār) as the congregational mosque of Shaykh Manṣūr-i Shaykh Salīm, each Friday, after the congregational prayer, people should gather and circumambulate (ṭavāf) the relic.103

In addition, Akbar had his poet laureate compose the Risālah-i qadamīyah. The text served to not only provide a textual account of the circumstances surrounding the relic’s arrival to India but also the debate that it engendered and the logic of the emperor in deciding

99 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98.

100 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 36.

101 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98.

102 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98.

103 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98.

to venerate the object. In doing so, he left behind a document that offers insight on the terms of the religious debate that took place at court and the significance of caution as a principle in

Akbar’s approach to questions of religion.

CHAPTER TWO

Relics Enshrined

2.1. Reliquary Shrines of the Prophet in Mughal India

The relic that Abū Turāb brought to Fatehpur Sikri did not remain long in Akbar’s imperial capital. When Abū Turāb returned to Gujarat in 988/1580, the sayyid took the qadam with him. In the old Gujarat Sultanate’s capital of Ahmedabad, he constructed for it a sizable building (Fig. 2.1), which both he and later visitors described in their writing as a gunbad

(dome). In this domed structure he housed the qadam alongside other relics, specifically, the

Prophet’s hair, which he had inherited from his forefathers.1 Inside this structure Abū Turāb is said to have built for himself a tomb, and the qadam is said to have been placed upon his cenotaph.2

In the eighteenth century, the Maratha invasions of Gujarat led Abū Turāb’s descendants to abandon the qadamgāh built by their forefather and we are told that they brought the relic into the city of Ahmedabad proper. Once it began being kept in their personal care, the relic continued to be seen by visitors but it lacked the ritual festivities that were once performed around it when it had been at the qadamgāh. This shift in relic activities is recorded in ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān’s account in the Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī and the Khātimah-i Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, discussed in the previous chapters. From his brief account, we are able to glean some details about the kinds of ritual activities that must have once animated the site and connected the qadam to the supplicants who came to it for succor.

1 See for instance Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 99; ʿAlī Muḥammad, Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 1:139; and ʿAlī Muḥammad, Khātimah-i Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 25.

2 Z. A. Desai, “The Major Dargahs of Ahmadabad,” in Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, ed. Christian W. Troll (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 94.

ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān writes that when Abū Turāb enshrined the relic at the qadamgāh, the site he built was “a place of visitation (mazār-gāhī),” which became “a site of circumambulation for all people (maṭāf-i ʿālam).”3 It is worth noting here that the ritual of circumambulation had imperial precedent for Akbar ordered the people of his imperial city to perform ṭavāf around relic after the Friday prayers.4 Perhaps the most tantalizing piece of information he reveals is something he heard from some of the grandsons (nabāʾir) of Abū

Turāb:

Once or twice a year, on the blessed days (ayyām-i mutabarrakah) of the Noble Birth [of the Prophet] (mawlūd-i sharīf) and the tenth of ʿāshūrā, water akin to perspiration (āb bi- masā̱ batah-i ʿaraq) would become manifest (ẓāhir) in the impression of the tip of the blessed toe (az nishān-i sar-i angusht-i mubārak) and trickling down it would gather in the place of the heel. The [exudations] would be collected in glass vials as a blessing (tabarruk). However, for quite some time this has not come to be.5

It is possible to unpack some important information compacted in ʿAlī Muḥammad

Khān’s account of the relic when it was at the qadamgāh. For one, we know the kind of processions that visitors must have undertaken when they came to see the relic. In approaching the relic, they must have circumambulated around it as one does the Kaʿbah when going for pilgrimage. Based on the mention of the miraculous appearance of exudations akin to perspiration, we get a sense of the days that would have been prominent on the reliquary shrine’s festive calendar. The first being the 12th of Rabīʿ I, the day of the Prophet’s birth (mawlūd-i sharīf), while the other being the tenth day of Muḥarram or ʿāshūrā, the day that commemorated the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson’s Imām Ḥusayn. Given that Abū

3 ʿAlī Muḥammad, Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 139.

4 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98.

5 ʿAlī Muḥammad, Khātimah-i Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 25–26.

Turāb and his descendants claimed sayyid status and therefore descent from the Prophet

Muḥammad, the fact that these two days were the highlights of the reliquary shrine’s ritual calendar is unsurprising. We also get a sense of the religious economy of the site as supplicants would come to the shrine, likely with votive offerings, and collect the water that would run down the stone bearing the impression of the Prophet’s foot as it was considered blessed

(tabarruk). What is conspicuous in ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān’s account is the significance of the physical site, the qadamgāh, in the miraculous functioning of the relic—suggesting perhaps that it is not just the object that is significant but the space as well when it comes to rituals and encountering relics.

Fig. 2.1. Abū Turāb’s Tomb, photographed by Thomas Biggs, mid-nineteenth century. British Library, Digital Store 10057.f.17. Creative Commons. https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11073698643/

From the seventeenth century onwards, relics of the Prophet proliferated across

Mughal India. Many of these were in the possessions of individuals, some of whom were royals or amīrs, while others were religious figures such as Sufis and sayyids.6 We know from the textual record that these included not only qadams but also hairs (mūy) of the Prophet, said to have been taken from his beard.7 At times, the sources are less clear in identifying the kinds of objects involved. In these cases, they are simply referred to as relics or ‘traces’ (āsā̱ r),8 or more simply as blessed objects (tabarrukāt).9 What is of particular interest is the way in which these objects were kept, displayed, and incorporated into public ritual. Relics in the possession of private individuals would sometimes be kept in royal treasuries or small reliquary chests that were brought out for public viewing during important festive days that commemorated the life

6 For one account of a qadam circulating in the treasuries of a number of Mughal nobility and their family members see—ʿAbd al-Sattār b. Qāsim Lāhūrī, Majālis-i Jahāngīrī: majlis-hā-yi shabānah-ʾi darbār-i Nūr al-Dīn Jahāngīr; az 24 Rajab 1017 tā 19 Ramażān 1020 H.Q., ed. ʿĀrif Nawshāhī and Muʿīn Niẓāmī (Tehran: Mīrās-̱ i Maktūb, 2006), 18.

7 The Naqshbandī Sufi master and scholar Shāh Valī Allāh (1114–76/1703–62) includes a particularly interesting episode in his account of his father, Shāh ʿAbd al-Raḥīm (d. 1131/1718), in Anfās al-ʿārifīn. In it he describes his father receiving a visitation from the Prophet Muḥammad in a dream during a bout of serious illness. After the Prophet held ʿAbd al-Raḥīm in his healing embrace, Shāh Valī Allāh’s father is said to have requested from the Prophet the noble hair (mūy-i sharīf) of his beard. The Prophet is said to have given him two hairs from his beard (liḥyah), which, when ʿAbd al-Raḥīm awoke, he found on his bed. According to Shāh Valī Allāh people would come to visit (ziyārat) the hair relics, some of whom appear to have doubters (munkarān)—See Shāh Valī Allāh, Anfās al- ʿārifīn (Delhi: Maṭbaʿ-i Aḥmadī, 1315/1897), 40–41.

8 For instance, the emperor Awrangzīb ʿĀlamgīr (r. 1068–1118/1658–1707) is said to have blessed relics (āsā̱ r-i mubārak) of the Prophet, which on special days he would visit (ziyārat) and keep watch over all night (shab zindah dāshtan) in order to obtain good fortune (saʿādat)—see Muḥammad Sāqī Mustaʿidd Khān, Maʾāsiṟ -i ʿĀlamgīrī, ed. Āghā Aḥmad ʿAlī (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1870–71), 460–1; Jadunath Sarkar, trans., The Maāsir-i- ʿĀlamgiri: A History of the Emperor Aurangzib-ʿĀlamgir (reign 1658–1707 A.D.) (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1947), 274.

9 Dargāh-Qulī Khān, the eighteenth-century visitor to Delhi, recorded much information about the city’s religious landscape. In his account of the activities that took place on the 12 Rabīʿ I, he recounted the gathering that took place at the dīvān-khānah of the amīr Khān-i Zamān Bahādur where “noble relics (āsā̱ r-i sharīf)” would be kept in a chest (ṣandūq), which would then be opened so that pilgrims (zāʾirān) could look at the “blessed objects (tabarrukāt)” and offer prayers—see Dargāh-i Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī: Fārsī matan aur Urdu tarjamah, ed. and trans., Khalīq Anjum (New Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqī-i Urdū, Hind, 1993), 75–76.

and memory of the Prophet and members of his family. At times, these relics were involved in devotional activities but remained sequestered from public viewing.

Other relics had a much more public life. Some of these were housed in built environments of larger religious institutions such as royal congregational mosques,10 or the shrines of Sufi poets and shaykhs.11 Others still were installed in monumental reliquary shrines that had been expressly developed to display the relic and function as a site of ritual activity centered around these sacred objects.12 While some of these monumental reliquary shrines

10 Both the royal congregational mosques of Delhi and Lahore, which were built by the emperors Shāh Jahān (r. 1037–68/1628–58) and Awrangzīb respectively, house relics associated with the Prophet and his family, the ahl-i bayt. In the case of the congregational mosque in Delhi, which is known as the Masjid-i Jahān-numā, the relics are housed at present in a white marble reliquary shrine referred to as the Dargāh-i Āsā̱ r Sharīf, which is located in the northeast corner of colonnades surrounding the mosque’s courtyard. The reliquary shrine, which measures just under eleven feet in width and eight feet in depth, is said to date from the late nineteenth-century. Prior to this location, the relics were kept in another room located in the northwest corner of the mosque’s colonnades. This previous location was also referred to by mid-nineteenth century writers as Dargāh-i Āsā̱ r Sharīf. While the earliest textual record for these relics dates from the nineteenth century, based on epigraphic evidence we know that the objects were on display as early as the seventeenth century. A donative inscription dating from the reign of Awrangzīb, which is preserved only in an English translation, records the construction of red sand stone screen in front of the original site of the reliquary shrine by one Almās ʿAlī Khān, who was believed to be a eunuch—see Ganem, “Traces of the Prophet,” 35–38; Carr Stephen, The Archaeology and Monumental Remains of Delhi (Ludhiana, [1876?]), 253; and Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, Āsā̱ r al-ṣanādīd, ed. Khalīq Anjum (New Delhi: Urdu Academy Delhi, 1990), 3:66.

The royal congregational mosque in Lahore, known as the Bādshāhī Masjid, also houses relics associated with the Prophet and the ahl-i bayt. Unlike those in the Masjid-i Jahān-numā in Delhi, the relics’ arrival to the mosque is more recent and their display follows conventions associated more with museum than shrines. Thus, we find the relics encased behind glass with labels accompanying them bearing a brief description of the object in question. The relics are said to have been brought to the Bādshāhī Masjid in the late-nineteenth-century—Sachiyo Komaki, “Islam and the Self-Representation of Punjabi Muslims in Pakistan: Case Study of the Exhibition of Holy Relics in the Badshahi Masjid,” Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 22 (2004): 105–20.

11 One particularly intriguing example that merits further study is the qadam affixed over the cenotaph of Sayyid Maqbūl-i ʿĀlam (1581–1635) in Ahmedabad. Maqbūl-i ʿĀlam was a descendant of Burhān al-Dīn Quṭb-i ʿĀlam (d. 857/1453), who himself was the grandson of Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān—see Desai, “Major Dargahs of Ahmadabad,” 89.

12 I distinguish here a monumental reliquary shrine—that is a built environment which primarily functions as site to display one or more relics and be the focus of ritual activities—from smaller reliquary shrines that occupy a part of an often much larger built environment whose primary function is not necessarily to house a relic. Thus,

were small in scale and part of larger pilgrimage networks or shrine-complexes,13 others developed into independent shrine-complexes that were important pilgrimage sites in their own right, drawing pilgrims from far and near who came specifically to visit a relic of the

Prophet.14

The emergence of reliquary shrines has raised questions about how Prophetic relics came to be enshrined in monumental built environments. The involvement of royal figures in the establishment of these sites has led scholars to think deeply about the power of material objects to legitimate political authority.15 In her wide-ranging study of reliquary shrines devoted to footprints of the Prophet Muḥammad in eighteenth century North India, Jacqueline

while the small reliquary within the Masjid-i Jahān-numā in Delhi is certainly a shrine by definition, it differs from monumental reliquary shrines. In using the term “monumental reliquary shrine” I follow Jacqueline Ganem’s practice in her study of eighteenth century qadam rasūl shrines—see Ganem, “Traces of the Prophet,” passim.

13 For example, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a reliquary shrine for a qadam of the Prophet was built on the road leading to the shrine of the saint Sayyid Sālār Masʿūd Ghāzī (404–24/1014–33) in Bahraich. Its location has meant that it has developed into a site where pilgrims to the saint’s shrine visit and stay around, and not only that, but also that the origins of the relic have been incorporated into the oral narratives of Sālār Masʿūd Ghāzī’s life that are performed at festivals commemorating the saint—see Tahir Mahmood, “The Dargah of Sayyid Salar Masʿud Ghazi in Bahraich: Legend, Tradition and Reality,” in Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, ed. Christian W. Troll (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 33; and Shahid Amin, Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 134–35, 216.

14 Take the case of monumental reliquary shrine built for a hair of the Prophet in Hazratbal, Kashmir at the turn of the eighteenth century—see Muhammad Ishaq Khan, “The Significance of the Dargah of Hazratbal in the Socio- Religious and Political Life of Kashmiri Muslims,” in Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, edited by Christian W. Troll (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989): 174–75.

15 This is true not only for scholarship on Muslim polities in South Asia but also beyond. In the context of the medieval Arabo-Islamic world, a number of scholars have argued that by undertaking practices such as the acquisition, procession, and enshrinement of relics, Muslim rulers attempted to legitimate their authority by demonstrating a tangible link between themselves and the paradigmatic figures of the Prophet Muḥammad, and in the case of Shīʿī dynasts, members of the ahl-i bayt—see Brannon Wheeler, Mecca and Eden: Ritual, Relics, and Territory in Islam (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 71–75, 78–81, 87–91, 94–98; Josef W. Meri, “Relics of Piety and Power in Medieval Islam,” in “Relics and Remains,” ed. Alexandra Walsham, suppl., Past and Present 206, suppl. 5 (2010): 97–120; and Tayeb El-Hibri, “The Abbasids and the Relics of the Prophet,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 4, no. 1 (2017): 62–96.

Ganem has suggested that the ideological pressures that resulted from the waning Mughal dispensation and increasing British encroachment led those Muslim polities emerging from the empire’s regional centers to employ relics as “a source-material of ideology […] in the formation of a state identity [… which] not only legitimized their rule, but consolidated and realigned competing Muslim (Sunnī, Shīʿī, Ṣūfī) and Indic (Śaivas, Vaiṣṇavas) identities.” 16 In a similar interpretive vein, Blain Auer has suggested that the monumental reliquary shrine for the footprint of the Prophet in Delhi, whose arrival was attributed to Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān, was an attempt to legitimate the authority of the Sultan by linking it materially with the memory of the Prophet.17 Such interpretations for the emergence of monumental reliquary shrines largely view relics as what Anne Blackburn refers to as “a core technology of state,”18 and, in turn, see the enshrinement of relics as a praxis of legitimizing imperial power and authority.

In the Mughal context, the question of whether or not we should read the enshrinement of relics as material expressions of imperial ideology meant to legitimate the authority of the emperor is complicated because of the diffuse nature of power in the empire.

In his study of the Mughal province of Gujarat, Farhat Hasan highlights “the negotiated character of state power,” whereby “the success or the failure of the state in specific functional and institutional contexts was determined by the participation of the local power-holders and the support of the pre-existing, if still largely primeval, civil society.”19 The consent and

16 Ganem, “Traces of the Prophet,” 3.

17 Auer, Symbols of Authority, 74–76. To what degree the location already functioned as a pilgrimage site as Auer argues remains open to debate, an issue this chapter deals with later.

18 Anne M. Blackburn, “Buddha-Relics in the Lives of Southern Asian Polities,” in “Relics in Comparative Perspective,” ed. Kevin Trainor, special issue, Numen 57, no. 3–4 (2010): 319–20. According to Blackburn, relics were a conspicuous recipient of state patronage in moments of political unrest, transition, and celebration.

19 Hasan, State and Locality, 126–27.

participation of the ruled within the political system necessarily involved the creation and articulation of a shared system of norms and values between state and society that outlined a set of mutual obligations and responsibilities. Hasan writes “it was these ideological relations between state and society that determined ‘the moral economy of the state’, that is, the system of norms that determined what was legitimate (and desirable) and illegitimate (and undesirable) in the exercise of state power.”20 Keeping Hasan’s insights in mind, the argument that the Mughal rulers sought legitimacy through acts of enshrining the Prophet’s relics first needs to take account of how the will of the Mughal court enacted at these sites through intermediaries and make sense of their agenda and expectations.

In this chapter I do not wish to argue that relics and their enshrinement were matters wholly detached from questions of sovereignty and power. In point of fact, such an argument would be incorrect. Rather, I wish to move away from a framework that reduces the development of monumental reliquary shrines to simply a praxis meant to legitimate power.

Rather than focusing on these sites as tools of legitimation, I wish to focus on how these sites developed and what that reveals to us about the kinds of people who were invested in these sites. The use of the term invest is purposeful because in order for sites like monumental reliquary shrines to function, they required the expenditure of time, effort, and capital from a host of various people, whether they be trustees who oversaw the administration of the shrine, ritual functionaries who conducted devotional activities there, patrons who committed resources to developing the built environment and paying for its operational costs, supplicants who made donations of food, pilgrims who made votive offerings, and devotees who purchased land to be buried in the shrine’s environs. In paying special attention to how investments in

20 Hasan, State and Locality, 2. For a discussion of the term ‘moral economy’ see James G. Carrier, “Moral Economy: What’s in a Name,” Anthropological Theory 18, no. 1 (2018): 18–35.

these sites were articulated in both texts and inscriptions, I argue that the development and longevity of monumental reliquary shrines required both initiative and cooperation from a wide-ranging cast of social actors whose investments in these sites were rooted in a variety of concerns that went beyond legitimizing Mughal authority. In moving away from seeing these shrines as merely material expressions of a political ideology emerging from an imperial center, we can begin to understand the economy of piety that operated in these sites.

Thinking about the broader economy in which these relics were embedded also helps us make sense of the different rituals that took place there and the variation we see in the practices performed. In thinking about how religious experiences are mediated, it is important to remember that the form that the mediation takes place—whether it is the kinds of rituals, embodied practices, processions, votive offerings, or souvenirs—are shaped by a variety of factors that are normalized to the point of invisibility. Here Birgit Meyer’s idea of “sensational form” as a way to conceptualize the sensorial religious experience of encountering relics at the shrines is helpful, for as she points out:

Sensational forms are relatively fixed modes for invoking and organizing access to the transcendental, offering structures of repetition to create and sustain links between believers in the context of particular religious regimes. These forms are transmitted and shared; they involve religious practitioners in particular practices of worship, and play a central role in modulating them as religious moral subjects and communities.21

In applying this concept, we may say the different ways in which Muslim experience various relics of the Prophet constitute distinct sensational forms. In framing relic centered religious experiences as sensational forms, it is possible to historicize how particular relic practices were established, authorized, and perpetuated. In doing so, we are able to make sense of why

21 Birgit Meyer, “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium,” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 19, no. 1 (2011): 29–30.

Muslims may interact with one relic in ways that differ greatly from the way in which they interact with another, even if they may venerate them both with equal regard.

Thinking materially about the sites, I find Marian Burchardt’s idea of “infrastructuring religion” particularly generative to think with, which refers to the “ways in which religious life is premised upon the production, maintenance and working of mundane materials that link spaces into networks of provision and make possible the circulation of energy, goods, coded meanings and bodies.”22 As Burchardt explains, “religion is mediated not only by ritual or sacred objects but routinely also by infrastructures – building materials for temples, roads used for processions, water used for religious hygiene, electricity that serves to illuminate prayer rooms and powers the microphones, which amplify the holy spirit.”23 The web of relations between these infrastructures may be thought of as an assemblage, which permit particular forms of religious practices to take place when in alignment.24 Although Burchardt’s focus is on the way urban infrastructures and their bureaucratic logics shape religious experience, his ideas are useful to think with in the context monumental reliquary shrines devoted to the Prophet Muḥammad in Mughal India. After all, as this chapter will show, these shrines required a host of people, objects, and infrastructures to work in concert to afford the kinds of religious experiences recorded in our sources.

This chapter traces the histories of two shrines centered around the two related relics introduced in the previous chapter, that is, the aforementioned relic that Abū Turāb brought in the sixteenth century and its companion housed in Delhi. In tracing these histories, I highlight the role of sayyids and Sufis in overseeing these religious sites, as well as the role of

22 Marian Burchardt, “Assembling the Profane Materialities of Urban Religion,” Material Religion 15, no. 5 (2019): 627.

23 Burchardt, “Assembling,” 627.

24 Burchardt, “Assembling,” 627–28.

the Mughal court in patronizing and supporting them. I examine the two sites together not only because of their shared narrative origins and histories but also for their methodological complementarity. For the relic enshrined in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, we have a rich set of textual materials that document its origins, its initial investiture, as well as its final days in the eighteenth century, but we lack epigraphic and textual evidence to document the site’s history in between these initial and final moments.25 In contrast, while the origins for the reliquary shrine in Delhi are hazy at best, epigraphic and textual sources provide us with a rich understanding of the site’s history during the Mughal period, well into the eighteenth century—the end point for this chapter.26 Taken together, the two sites furnish us with a richer understanding of how the Mughal administration patronized the sites and the ways in which religious intermediaries like Sayyids and Sufis (particularly the Chishtīs) maintained the sites and cultivated particular devotional practices there.

In doing so, I wish to draw attention to a series of developments. The first concerns the way in which relics came to be linked to expressions of Mughal sovereignty and power both in not only the textual accounts of these sites but also in the material record through donative inscriptions that adorned the built environments housing these relics. The second concerns the way in which the relics, both in written accounts and material practice, were mobilized as social evidence of descent from the Prophet Muḥammad and articulating sayyid identity. The third concerns the ways in which we begin to see the Mughal administration’s involvement through the diffuse network of people who were involved in the site’s administration and patronage. In its conclusion, this chapter also highlights how religious experience of devotees,

25 For example, we have Abū Turāb’s history, Fayżī’s Risālah, and ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān’s Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī with its extensive and separately published Khātimah—all of which have been discussed in Chapter one.

26 For studies of this site see Welch, “Shrine of the Holy Footprint,” 166–178; Ganem, “Traces of the Prophet,” 51– 67; and Auer, Symbols of Authority, 66–76.

as seen through rituals and other practices at the shrines, were informed by the ways in which various actors made investments in the shrine.

2.2. The Reliquary Shrine in Ahmedabad

Much of what we know about the establishment of the reliquary shrine to house the qadam that arrived at Akbar’s court comes from Abū Turāb’s account in Tārīkh-i Gujarāt.

Additional information concerning its enshrinement and ritual life are also preserved in the works of the eighteenth-century Mughal bureaucrat ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān, namely, his history of Gujarat entitled Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī and its supplemental gazetteer of the province, the

Khātimah-i Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī. Unfortunately, we are reliant on the textual record for the site’s history because of its poor state of preservation. When the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) published its account of the site well over a century ago in 1905, it was already in a derelict state and had been since 1888 when it was surveyed. The ASI noted in its survey that all but one stone latticework screen were missing, the flooring had been dug up, the main tomb had been stripped bare of its marble covering, and the brick mosque that was built next to the site was in a state of “complete ruin.” As a result of this, no inscriptions of the site have been recorded.27 The only record of an inscription is preserved in Abū Turāb’s own account.

The impetus to establish a monumental reliquary shrine appears to have been from

Abū Turāb. According to both him and ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān, when Abū Turāb was deputed to return to Gujarat he requested that he be allowed to take the qadam back with him. According to Abū Turāb, he is said to have appealed to Akbar for permission to take the relic for the benefit of the empire for he argued that establishing the qadam in Ahmedabad would bless the emperor’s dispensation and keep it firmly established. He writes:

27 Jas Burgess, Muhammadan Architecture of Ahmedabad (London, 1900–5), 2:50–52.

It was petitioned (iltimās) that since in the region of Hindustan (mamālik-i Hind) one qadam of His Excellency [the Prophet], which was brought by Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān and is in Delhi, is sufficient (kāfī), it would not be farfetched (baʿīd nīst) if this second qadam were to be in Gujarat, which is also under the dominion of his most exalted excellency [Akbar], so that from the good fortune (yumn) of these two qadams the realm and vicegerency (mulk va khilāfat) of his excellence, the world conquering king, be made firm, and from the blessings (barakat) of these two relics, which bear the fruits of divine favour (asaṟ -i fayż-samaṟ ), the extent of the empire (mamlakat) of the True Caliph (khalīfah bi-ḥaqq) increase day by day.28

It is worth noting that Abū Turāb does not attempt to cast either the relic or its enshrinement as tools of legitimation for the Mughal emperor, whom he refers to as the True

Caliph (khalīfah bi-ḥaqq) and the world conquering king (pādishāh-i ʿālam-gīr). Instead, he links it to ideas of power and sovereignty. This connection between relics and imagined geographies of power and authority has been noted for an earlier time period in the Muslim world. In his study of relics of the Prophet Muḥmmad, Brannon Wheeler has drawn attention to the fact that the growing geography over which such objects circulated was coterminous with the expanding frontiers of Muslim authority, such that “the Prophet’s relics served to mark and signify the territorial boundaries of civilization and the law of revelation.”29 In Abū Turāb’s account we find clear reference to how the extent of Akbar’s empire may increase and its foundations become firm through the blessed and auspicious nature of the relics, with one

28 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98.

29 Brannon Wheeler, Mecca and Eden: Ritual, Relics, and Territory in Islam (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 71–98, but especially p. 81. This link between the expansion of a political dispensation and the circulation of relics also holds true for Western Europe in the medieval period. Patrick Geary has noted the high demand for relics from the mid-eighth to the mid-ninth centuries—the period during which time the Carolingian empire expanded into northern and eastern Europe, bringing with it conversion to Romano-Frankish Christianity. See Patrick Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 176.

established in the heartland of Hindustan in the old Sultanate capital of Delhi and the other in maritime province of Gujarat in its old Sultanate capital of Ahmedabad.

Abū Turāb’s strategy appears to have been successful for he writes that Akbar accepted his request, although, according to ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān, it was only after repeated entreaties

(takrār-i iltimās) that he received royal consent.30 Furthermore, ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān frames

Abū Turāb’s petition differently, writing that he requested that “since Gujarat is the Gate to

Mecca (darvāzah-i Makkah), could he be permitted to convey the qadam to Gujarat, establish a pilgrimage site (mazār-gāhī), build a domed edifice (buʿqahʾi va gunbadī), and be assigned its trusteeship (tawliyat).”31 Despite their discrepancy, the impetus to establish the pilgrimage site appears to have been Abū Turāb’s in both accounts.

After bringing the relic to Ahmedabad Abū Turāb set to work on establishing a monumental reliquary shrine for the qadam. The process is said to have taken six years. In

994/1585–6 work completed on not only “a noble building (ʿimāratī ʿālā)” to keep the relic but also “a pure mosque (masjid-i ṣafā) that was constructed opposite (muqābil) the shrine.”32 No other information is provided about the mosque and unfortunately little information about it is recorded by later authors. ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān does not mention it in his description of the reliquary shrine and when the Archaeological Survey of India visited the site it was said to be already in state of complete ruin. The only piece of information recorded by the

Archaeological Survey of India was that the mosque was located north-west of the shrine and was made of brick.33

30 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98; and ʿAlī Muḥammad, Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 1:139.

31 ʿAlī Muḥammad, Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 1:139.

32 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98–99.

33 Burgess, Muhammadan Architecture of Ahmedabad, 52.

The reliquary shrine that Abū Turāb built came to house not only the qadam that he brought to India but also other another set of relics. The relics in question were hair from the

Prophet’s head, which he also refers to as “traces” (mūy-hā-ʾi sar-i mubārak kah āsā̱ r mī- gūyand).34 The “truth (ḥaqīqat)” about these hair relics, Abū Turāb reveals, was that he

“received them from his forefathers by way of inheritance (irs).”̱ 35 In the Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, Abū

Turāb then includes verses he composed to commemorate the construction of the site. Due to the fact that there are no inscriptions preserved from the site, it is unclear whether these verses were inscribed at the shrine but certainly they appear to be in the style of an inscription: they name the patron, provide an explanation for why the site was built, explain its function and the history of the sacred objects it contained, and provide a date for when the construction finished. Regardless, they constitute an important expression of self from Abū

Turāb that closely associated the relics and shrine to his sayyid identity:36

Shah-i ẕī jāh Abū Turāb Valī naqd-i sibṭayn-i khātim-i amjad asaṟ -i maqdam rasūl-i amīn yāft andar ḥaram za fayż-i abad dāsht āsā̱ r-i Aḥmad-i mukhtar kah rasīdah bi-irs ̱ abā ʿan jad kard āsā̱ r rā qarīn-i asaṟ tā rasad fayż-hā bi-kull Aḥmad sākht bahr-i ziyārat daw nishān gunbad-i ʿālī za fażl-i ṣamad sāl-i itmām-i ān za hātif-i ghayb gunbad-i Shāh Abū Turāb āmad

34 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98.

35 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 99.

36 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 99.

The honourable Shāh Abū Turāb Valī The descendant by both grandsons of the Most Laudable seal [of Prophets] Found the trace of the footstep of the Trustworthy Messenger In the Ḥaram on account of endless divine grace He possessed traces of Ahmad, the Chosen One Which he received as inheritance from his forefathers He put the traces together with the trace So that everyone could receive the graces He built for undertaking pilgrimage to each of the signs A lofty dome by the grace of the Eternal One A voice from the Unseen gave the date of its completion as “The dome of Shāh Abū Turāb [i.e. 994/1585–6].”

Whether or not these verses constituted an inscription on the site, they are particularly noteworthy of the claims they make and the way in which they invoke the relics of the

Prophet and their enshrinement by Abū Turāb. The verses begin by clearly delineating Abū

Turāb’s sayyid identity, drawing descent from both grandsons of the Prophet Muḥammad, name Ḥasan and Ḥusayn. In the Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, Abū Turāb gives a clear gloss of his use of the terms used to describe the relics: “the qadam of his Excellency, which is called asaṟ , and the hairs from the noble head, which are called āsā̱ r.”37 In the verses, Abū Turāb signals to his finding the footprint “trace (asaṟ )” in Mecca and receiving the “traces (āsā̱ r)” as inheritance from his forefathers. He then proceeds in his verses to explain that he built the domed structure in order to make a site of pilgrimage (ziyārat) and put the two relics together. Finally, he affirms his own close connection to the site with the fact that the chronogram for the date the site was constructed is contained in the phrase “the dome of Shāh Abū Turāb.”

37 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98.

In the Tārīkh-i Gujarāt Abū Turāb goes to further pains to make claims on the relic he brought but unlike in the verses, he is does not take sole credit for it but instead pays due deference to the Mughal emperor’s role. Referring to himself as a fakir (faqīr) he writes:

The truth about the traces (āsā̱ r), which are the hairs of his Excellency, the asylum of Prophecy, may God bless him and his family and grant them salvation, is that the fakir received them by way of inheritance from my forefathers. And this qadam, which is itself a trace (asaṟ ), which the fakir himself brought from the Honourable Mecca to Gujarat. This humble supplicant received the good fortune of obtaining these two felicitous [objects] (saʿādat). I write these few words as a way of offering thanks for the royal favour (niʿmat-i pādishāhī) granted, for these good deeds (ḥasanāt va mabarrāt), which this slave had not entertained in his wildest imagination (vahm va qiyās), were performed by this abject person (kamīnah) because of the compassion and benevolence of the exalted emperor for it was he who sent money as charity (maṣdar-i khayrat-i akbariyah) to those noble sites (amkān-i sharīfah). The reward (sav̱ āb) for spending one dirham or dinar in that place is equal to that of spending one hundred thousand in the way of God in some other place. Coincidently, the hajj that year was the ḥajj-i akbar for the [day of] ʿArafah was Friday. His Excellency [the Prophet] has said that the hajj, whose [day of] ʿArafah falls on a Friday, that is equal to seventy other hajj pilgrimages. I have presented whatever has been mentioned for these are not small favours that one should be silent (sākit) about.38

Abū Turāb acknowledges the key role played by the emperor in being the source of the money sent to the Sharīfs that made it possible for him to go to Mecca. What is noteworthy is that at no point does he give the emperor credit for the actual relic coming to India. While the emperor made it possible for him to travel the Hejz, the relic was brought by his own exertions, as he has amply made clear elsewhere in the Tārīkh-i Gujarāt.39

38 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 99–100.

39 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 97.

The claims made in the Tārīkh-i Gujarāt of course do not agree with the account provided in Fayżī’s Risālah-i qadamīyah where the arrival of the relic is directly linked to the money sent by Akbar. In the Risālah Fayżī makes the case that based on verses from the Qurʾān, it is clear that God rewards those who spend by way of charity. He then explicates that the

Mughal emperor was in the habit of sending annual gifts to the Ḥaramayn and the Sharīfs as part of this charity.40 He then situates the arrival of the relic within this religious economy of gifting and honouring between Akbar and the Sharīfs. He writes that “based upon the foundation of love and the bond of friendship that [the Sharīfs of Mecca] have for His Majesty

[…] and for the continuation of kind favours and munificence for which they have been singled out […] and for the sake of good fortune and blessing (tayammun va tabarruk), they dispatched by means of that sayyid the imprint (nishān) of the foot (qadam).41

Abū Turāb’s elision of the emperor’s role with respect to the relic becomes all the more apparent when we consider the eighteenth-century account provided by ʿAlī Muḥammad

Khān. In both the Tārīkh-i Gujarāt and the verses examined, Abū Turāb clearly takes the credit for constructing the edifice in which the relic came to be housed. Likening the dome built to house the relic to the Maqām-i Ibrāhīm in the courtyard of the Masjid-i Ḥaram in Mecca, he writes that “it was built by the most truthful of the supplicants (ṣādiq-tarīn-i ahl-i duʿā),” referring to himself.42 Likewise, he picks as a chronogram for the site’s completion one that closely affiliates the shrine with him “the dome of Shāh Abū Turāb (gunbad-i Shāh Abū

Turāb).”43 One may imagine that if the verses served as an inscription, the erasure of the

40 Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah,” 34

41 Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah,” 35–36.

42 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 99.

43 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 99.

emperor and any praise for him in them, would have projected the idea to pilgrims to the site that the relic’s arrival and the construction of the reliquary shrine was on account of Abū

Turāb’s personal piety and wish to extend his good fortune to those who visited the site. In addition, the verses would have also erased any indication that the relic’s arrival was linked to the emperor Akbar’s charity. This information would have stood in stark contrast with the account of ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān who in the Khātimah-i Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī writes that the domed structure was built in accordance with royal commands (ḥasb al-ḥukm al-ʿālā).44 Given the way the construction of the site and its memorialization took place locally in Gujarat at the hands of imperial intermediaries, the enshrinement of the qadam in Ahmedabad, although framed in a way that appealed to emperor’s sense of sovereignty with reference his ever-expanding domain, cannot be reduced to being seen as an act of imperial legitimation—and if we do then we are permitted to have serious doubts about the efficacy of such a message.

It is then fair to ask what may we make of Abū Turāb’s actions and motivations in investing and building this site. One way of thinking of this issue is to take seriously the question of how sayyid identity was constructed in the pre-modern period. To be a sayyid (pl. sādāt) is to claim descent from the Prophet Muḥammad. As such, sayyid status is a socially constructed phenomenon that is rooted in the particularities of its historical and cultural context. It requires public recognition if it is to have any meaning or value. As Kazuo Morimoto puts it, such “pedigree is a capital that can be acquired or rediscovered, even legally when not only the claimant but also the people around do, in fact, consider the claim to be legitimate and relevant.”45 Such claims to sayyid-hood might be made in a number of ways. For instance,

44 ʿAlī Muḥammad, Khātimah-i Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 25.

45 Kazuo Morimoto, “Toward the Formation of Sayyido-Sharifology: Questioning Accepted Fact,” Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 22 (2004): 95. Morimoto has made a similar argument in the case of Safavid claims to sayyid status,

in his study of the diaspora community of sayyids from the Ḥaḍramawt in Yemen, who circulated and settled all over the Indian Ocean, Enseng Ho has demonstrated the importance of textual and ritual practices such as the production of genealogies and performance of pilgrimages to the tombs of holy ancestors in reproducing Ḥaḍramī sayyid identity.46 Looking at Abū Turāb’s textual production we may begin to get a sense of the way in which material objects such as relics played in the construction of social identities in daily life in late sixteenth century Gujarat. In building a reliquary shrine in which he housed not only the relic he brought back from Mecca but also the ones he is said to have received as inheritance from his forefathers, he is making a material claim to his sayyid-identity—one that is inscribed in text and verse.

After the establishment of the reliquary shrine in Ahmedabad, the record for what happened afterwards is scant. We know that descendants of Abū Turāb oversaw the site and its ritual activities until the eighteenth century. We may guess that the rituals instituted by Akbar for the relic in Fatehpur Sikri were continued in Gujarat for ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān refers to the site as a locus of circumambulation (maṭāf).47 We see devotees undertaking similar practices of circumambulation in the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf, which will be discussed below. However, in anticipation of a more detailed discussion below, it is possible to tentatively argue that the practice of ṭavāf at Abū Turāb’s qadamgāh was instituted because of the Mughal emperor Akbar.

However, it appears that the most important days of the festive calendar at the qadamgāh, when visitors could potentially witness a miracle of holy perspiration from the stone relic and

for which see—Kazuo Morimoto, “The Earliest ʿAlid Genealogy for the Safavids: New Evidence for the Pre-dynastic Claim to Sayyid Status,” Iranian Studies 43, no. 4 (2010): 460.

46 Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 322.

47 ʿAlī Muḥammad, Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 139.

potentially partake in consuming the blessed exudation, were closely tied to the memory of the Prophet and his family, which offered another opportunity to reaffirm and perform sayyidhood.

Some of these claims are strengthened when we compare and contrast our information about the monumental reliquary shrine that developed around the qadam’s companion piece in Delhi. It is this reliquary shrine, known in the sources as the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf, that we now turn to.

2.3. Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf

It will be recalled that when Abū Turāb brought the qadam to the Mughal court, it was claimed that the object was the companion (ham-dast) of another footprint relic that had arrived to India during the reign of the Sultanate ruler Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (r. 752–90/1351–88) and was enshrined in Delhi. While the arrival of Abū Turāb’s relic in the sixteenth century and its enshrinement are well documented in the textual record, we are on less sure footing when it comes to understanding the history of the relic that was brought two centuries earlier and the process by which a reliquary shrine developed around it.

The scholarly consensus, insofar as there is one, holds that the relic in question was gifted to the Delhi Sultan Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq by the ʿAbbasid Caliph in Mamlūk Cairo. The date and name of the Caliph in question are not known. Later, after the death of his son Fatḥ Khān in 776/1374, Fīrūz Shāh is said to have built him a tomb and installed the relic on top of it.48

48 Anthony Welch’s excellent study of the site’s architecture has become the authoritative source for other scholars in interested in its history. For his account of the site’s history see Anthony Welch, “The Shrine of the Holy Footprint in Delhi,” Muqarnas 14 (1997): 170–71. For examples of the scholarly community’s reliance on Welch’s account of the site’s history see for instance Auer, Symbols of Authority, 75, 178n100-1; and Gruber, “Prophet Muhammad’s Footprint,” 301, 305n25.

Jacqueline Louis Ganem has raised serious and credible doubts about the accuracy of such a narrative. She rightly points to the reliance on nineteenth century sources in the reconstruction of this historical narrative. Ganem argues against its fourteenth century origins, suggesting instead that the shrine was a seventeenth century development after the construction of the royal city of Shahjahanabad by the Mughal emperor Shāh Jahān (r. 1037-

68/1628-57), in turn making the connection to Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq a later invention.49

Then there is the matter of the man who is said to have brought the relic to Delhi. As discussed in the previous chapter, a number of sources attribute this feat to Jalāl al-Dīn

Bukhārī, better known by his honorific Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān Jahāngasht (707–85/1308–84). A sayyid, a scholar, and a Sufi shaykh initiated in the Suhravardī lineage, Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān is said to have brought the relic to Delhi on his return from the Hejaz during one of his many travels. However, here too, something is amiss. For one, during this time period the ʿAbbasid caliphate had relocated to Mamluk Cairo following the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols a century prior.50 If the relic at the site in question was indeed brought by Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān from the Hejaz, then it could not have been the one gifted to Fīrūz Shāh by the Caliph, since the latter was in Cairo at the time. Second, references to Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān’s involvement with the relic’s arrival only begin to appear in the Mughal period. Earlier accounts of

Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān’s life written by his followers, as well as his biographies in Mughal era

Sufi taẕkirahs, all fail to mention his role as the bearer of a Prophetic relic from the Hejaz to

Delhi.51 While trying to make sense of the origins of the relic are beyond the purview of this dissertation, it is possible for us to make sense of the kinds of interventions that took place at

49 Ganem, “Traces of the Prophet,” 51–62, but especially pp. 58–60.

50 On the ʿAbbasid caliphate in Cairo see Mustafa Banister, “‘Naught Remains to the Caliph but His Title’: Revisiting Abbasid Authority in Mamluk Cairo,” Mamluk Studies Review 18 (2014–15): 219–45.

51 Steinfels, Knowledge before Action, 131–32.

the site during the Mughal period and what that tells us about the relationship between the court, the shrine, and those involved in its day-to-day operations. In order to do so, it is necessary first to understand what the site may have looked like before the sixteenth century, the earliest moment in the site’s history for which we have evidence of it becoming a reliquary shrine.

The Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf is located in the Paharganj area of New Delhi. In the last century it has faced considerable encroachment and deterioration. When the ASI conducted its examination of the site in the first quarter of the twentieth century, it noted the presence of recently built private homes within the shrine complex while a number of structures, including tombs, had become dwellings for local residents.52 Recent studies of the shrine note the continued pace of recent construction within the shrine complex as new developments crowd out the site (See Fig. 2.2).53

Historians seeking details about the Tughluq origins of the reliquary shrine of Delhi are bound to be frustrated by its faint traces in both the architectural remnants of the site and contemporary textual sources. For example, the site lacks any inscriptions from before the sixteenth century, which I discussed late in the chapter. However, based on the design, historians of Sultanate architecture have identified a number of structures that can be said to date from the Tughluq period.

The first are the battlement walls that enclosed the entire shrine complex or precinct

(see Figs. 2.2 and 2.3). The parapeted walls made of stone and mortar with their four gateways lend the shrine a certain fortified impression, leading one art historian to evocatively call it “a

52 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments, 2:241, 246, 249.

53 Welch, “Shrine,” 168.

veritable little citadel of God on the outskirts of Delhi.”54 At the corners are turrets that are said to have been capped off with red sandstone chhatris.55 According to Anthony Welch, the gateways are built in the same style as the gateway of the tomb of Ghiyās ̱ al-Dīn Tughluq (r.

720–25/1320–25) built at Tughluqabad in southern Delhi.56

Fig. 2.2 Eastern gateway to the shrine complex. Photography by Varun Shiv Kapur, 13 September 2012. Copyright: CC 2.0. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/varunshiv/7987919665/in/album-72157631540035341/

54 Welch, “Shrine,” 179.

55 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments, 2:241, and Welch, “Shrine,” 168.

56 Welch, “Shrine,” 170.

Figure 2.3 Eastern gate. Photography by Varun Shiv Kapur, 13 September 2012. Copyright: CC 2.0. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/varunshiv/7987919665/in/album-72157631540035341/

In addition to the walls, archaeological surveys and studies of the site record the existence of step-wells or baolis, one inside the north gate and the other outside the south gate, whose construction is attributed to Fīrūz Shāh; though it is unclear how conclusive the evidence for such an attribution is given the lack of inscriptions and their current state of

reuse and dilapidation.57 Most of the structures that remain or whose presence was recorded by surveys and studies were located in the western part of the enclosed precinct.58 This includes not only the main reliquary shrine itself, but also a number of tombs and mosques.

One mosque is said to have been built during the Tughluq period while the other dates to the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar.59 The Tughluq mosque is located some fifteen yards north of the main reliquary shrine.60

Figure 2.4. Courtyard in front of the entrance to the main shrine. Photography by Varun Shiv Kapur, 13 September 2012. Copyright: CC 2.0. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/varunshiv/7987919665/in/album-72157631540035341/

The main shrine as it stands today has been built and renovated multiples times over the centuries. It too is a walled structure, with a courtyard in front of its entrance, which today stands derelict (see Fig. 2.4). The shrine itself consists of a central pillared pavilion with a half wall flanked on both sides by arcades dated by art historians to the Tughluq period and it faces

57 Welch, “Shrine,” 171, 179n19. Also see Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments, 2:246.

58 Welch, “Shrine,” 171.

59 Welch, “Shrine,” 172.

60 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments, 2:244-45.

a hall built in Mughal fashion. The site has undergone considerable changes in the past two centuries. Whereas a recent photograph of the shrine (Fig. 2.5) depicts a whitewashed building with columns painted in green (a colour associated with the Prophet Muḥammad, particularly in South Asia today), early nineteenth century illustrations depict an all-white building with multi-coloured inlay work.61

Figure 2.5. Central pavilion of the shrine. Photography by Varun Shiv Kapur, 13 September 2012. Copyright: CC 2.0. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/varunshiv/7987919665/in/album-72157631540035341/

Due to the considerable renovation to the central shrine from the seventeenth century onwards, it is difficult to determine what the structure may have looked like during the

Sultanate period and what function it may have served. Although there are no Sultanate era

61 Welch, “Shrine,” 174.

inscriptions dating from the site, art historians agree with eighteenth century accounts of the site that the cenotaph within the structure belongs to Fatḥ Khān and the structure was likely constructed at the same time.62 It was this central site that became the main shrine and centre of ritual activities.

The arcades flanking the central shrine are noteworthy. Anthony Welch has noted that the pillared arcades on the sides of the main shrine structure, which today are littered with graves (see Fig. 2.6) resemble those of the Ḥawż-i Khāṣṣ madrasa built by Fīrūz Shāh.63 The walled madrasa complex overlooked a massive royal reservoir (ḥawż-i khāṣṣ) and included the madrasa itself, a garden, and like the site of the reliquary shrine, it too had an important tomb, namely, that of Fīrūz Shāh himself.64 According to Welch, it is quite likely that what became the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf may have actually been a madrasa in the fourteenth century.65

The identification of the site with a madrasa appears in line with what we know about

Muslim relic practices from the medieval period. In his work on the Prophet Muḥammad’s relics, Brannon Wheeler has argued that Prophet’s relics demarcated the expanding territory of where his teachings and model held authority.66 This was particularly true, he argues, in the case of qadams.67 The Prophet’s relics, particularly his footprint, came to be “used in the

62 Welch, “Shrine,” 175 and Ganem, “Traces,” 52.

63 Welch, “Shrine,” 173.

64 Anthony Welch. “A Medieval Center of Learning in India: The Hauz Khas Madrasa in Delhi,” Muqarnas 13 (1996): 167–68,

65 Welch, “Shrine,” 173.

66 Wheeler, Mecca and Eden, 71.

67 Wheeler, Mecca and Eden, 78.

foundation of buildings, such as mosques and madrasas, which are physical manifestations of the territorial distribution of Islam and of the preserved chain of transmission from him.”68

Fig. 2.6. Interior of the Arcades. Photography by Varun Shiv Kapur, 13 September 2012. Copyright: CC 2.0. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/varunshiv/7987919665/in/album-72157631540035341/

It is therefore quite likely that rather than a reliquary shrine, the site may have functioned as a madrasa that included the tomb of the prince as well as the relic. Indeed, this position is one adopted by Jacqueline Ganem in her study on qadams and reliquary shrines. She has suggested that in the seventeenth century the site “witnessed the ideological refabrication

68 Wheeler, Mecca and Eden, 81. See also Meri, “Relics of Piety and Power,” 112.

of the Tughluq-period madrasa complex into a qadam rasūl shrine complex.”69 While Ganem’s dating for the transformation of the madrasa to a reliquary shrine is at least a century too late,70 as this chapter shows below, her call for adopting a chronological approach to understanding the site’s history is helpful, particularly as it challenges the idea that Fīrūz Shāh was attempting to create a pilgrimage center as some have suggested.71

We are on sounder footing as we consider the reliquary shrine in the early modern period. For one, a greater number of dated inscriptions are recorded. In the early twentieth century, the ASI published a list of inscriptions found within the shrine’s precincts that provide some clues as to the kinds of devotional activities that must have taken place there.72

The earliest of these pre-date Mughal rule in Delhi and suggests that by the mid-sixteenth century, the site had started to become the center of a growing necropolis.

The earliest example of such funerary architecture is the tomb of a man named Ḥusayn

Khān, who died in 947/1540-1. Little is known about Ḥusayn Khān for his name does not appear in contemporary historical sources consulted. However, a few details about his life can be inferred from the inscription on his tomb:

ān … javān bi-ṣūrat va sīrat-i shujāʿatī ay dil bi-khayr raft az īnjā bi-ān-jahān

69 Ganem, “Traces,” 51.

70 Elsewhere Ganem notes that Welch argues that the site was referred to as a madrasa in Sultanate era texts and Mughal era inscriptions—see Ganem, “Traces,” 52. This contention is not to be found in Welch’s article and appears to a misreading of his work—compare Welch, “Shrine,” 171, 173–74. At no point does Welch note any reference to the site in Sultanate writings and the seventeenth century Mughal inscription in question appears to refer in general to madrasas, pulpits (minbar), and courts (bārgāh) where praise to the Prophet is read—see Welch, “Shrine,” 174 and Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments, 2:242. It is possible that the inscription is referring specifically to this site as a madrasa, minbar, and bārgāh but even then, there are earlier works that already refer to the site as a qadamgāh.

71 Auer, Symbols, 76.

72 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments, 2:241–50.

nā-gah rasīd tīgh-i qażā bar sar-ash bih bīn az kāsah-i shahādat sharbat chashīdān kushtand bī darīgh darīgh-az kushtash khalaqī za mātamash shudah dar shūr va dar fighān tārīkh-i raftanash za khirad khvāstam biguft bi-shumār gū kah ḥayf javānī-i Ḥusayn Khān

That … youth, valorous in appearance and disposition, O heart, happily departed from here to that world. See how suddenly the sword of fate came upon his head, He drank from the cup of martyrdom. He was killed ruthlessly, grief from his killing Caused people to cry and lament from mourning him I asked wisdom for the date of his departure, it said Calculate and say “What a shame for [the lost] youth of Ḥusayn Khān!” 73

Based on the inscription one may put forward a few details about the person entombed. For one, Ḥusayn Khān appears to have been someone who was cut down in the prime of his life and met his end by violent means. Furthermore, he was undoubtedly someone who belonged to a well-heeled family for he did not receive a nameless grave. Indeed, those he left behind spent a substantial sum on constructing his tomb, which the Archaeological Survey of India noted as being 17 feet in diameter with a domed roof supported on eight hard stone pillars.

The grave itself was made of red sandstone and west of the tomb was attached a small mosque measuring 45 feet by 10 feet.74

73 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments, 2:247. The date calculated by the ASI is 967/1559–60, but this may be incorrect. The chronogram ḥayf javānī Ḥusayn Khān gives 947/1540-1. It is worth noting that the final line does not scan correctly and thus there might be an elision in the original verses that was effaced by the time the ASI recorded the inscription.

74 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments, 2:247.

In addition to developing a necropolis, by the second half of the sixteenth century the reliquary shrine had developed a community of custodians who lived in its precincts and looked after the site. This community of mujāvirān were sizable and resourceful enough that at some point during Akbar’s reign they got together and built a small mosque within the shrine complex’s walls just west of the northern gate. The Archaeological Survey of India published the inscription that was on the red sandstone installed in the mosque’s central mihrab.

Although partially obliterated by the vicissitudes of time, the donative inscription nonetheless expresses the community’s efforts to contribute to the shrine complex: “… by the efforts of the custodians of the footprint reliquary of the asylum of Prophecy, the peace… Akbar… the slave…

Ḥusayn (bi-saʿy-i mujāvirān-i qadamgāhī-i risālat-panāh ṣallā… akbar… al-ʿabd…ḥusayn).75 It is important to note here that the donors of the mosque clearly identify themselves as the mujāvirān of a reliquary shrine or qadamgāh (literally “the place of the foot”). The inscription suggests that at least by the time this mosque was built, the primary significance of site was related to the relic and not a madrasa.

As the shrine complex developed, it required administrators to oversee its daily affairs.

It was in this regard that the shrine of the footprint relic came under the purview of the

Mughal court. In the case of the shrine of the footprint relic, the Mughal court appears to have played a role in the appointment of custodians. We have record of at least one such occurrence from the late sixteenth century in the latter part of Akbar’s reign. According to ʿAbd al-Qādir

Badāʾūnī a man known by the epithet Quṭb-i ʿĀlam was appointed to the trusteeship (tawliyah) of the shrine in accordance with royal decree (ḥasb al-amr) sometime after 989/1589.76

Although little is known about Quṭb-i ʿĀlam himself, an examination of his familial background

75 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments, 2:245. I

76 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:75.

suggests that the Mughal court was sensitive and responsive to the religious sensibilities and social landscape of local communities when it came to appointing custodians to the reliquary shrine.

Quṭb-i ʿĀlam was the son of Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz bin Ḥasan Ṭāhir, one of the leading shaykhs of the Chishtī Sufi community in Delhi of his time.77 Born in Jawnpur in 898/1492–3,

ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz accompanied his father to Delhi when he was only one and a half years old and he lived in the city for the remainder of his life, some seven decades, until his death on 6 Jumādā

II 975/8 December 1567.78 During his time in Delhi, he founded a Sufi lodge (khānaqāh), in whose courtyard he was eventually buried in a tomb (marqad).79 Residents of the city recalled

ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz’s piety, asceticism, and deep devotion. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq relates how his father recalled that “in the days of being a youth, whenever my gaze fell upon the beauty of the shaykh, an involuntary state of weeping (ḥālat-i bukāʾ) would overcome [me] on account of the true essence of desire and detachment (maʿnī-i shawq va ghurbat) that could be seen on his face

(ṣūrat-i ū mushāhada mī-uftād).”80

ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was regarded as an important Chishtī shaykh of his time. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq writes that in his time ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was a reminder (yādgār) of the great Chishtī Shaykhs of the past.81 According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq: “in Delhi, it was by his presence (vujūd) that the chain of guidance and shaykhs (irshād va mashīkhat) remained afoot.”82 He embodied all the noteworthy qualities that typified the great Chishti Sufi shaykhs of the city. He was said to be deeply

77 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 563.

78 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 564.

79 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 564.

80 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 564.

81 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 563.

82 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 563.

learned in matters of lawful conduct (sharīʿat), the practice of the Sufi path (ṭarīqat), and the reality of existence (ḥaqīqat).83 Like the great Chishtī masters of Delhi’s Sultanate past he was amongst the ahl-i samāʿ—those who favoured audition as a mode of inspiring ecstatic experience, often in vocal devotional performances accompanied by music.84 His spiritual eminence and importance to the residents of Delhi was even recognized by those living outside the city. Badāʾūnī describes him as an exemplum of men of imagination (qidvah-i ahl-i khayāl) and an exordium to the shaykhs who are men of perfection (sar-daftar-i mashāʾikh-i arbāb-i kamāl).85 In a poem written to commemorate the date of his death, which is cited by Badāʾūnī,

ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz is referred to with epithets such as the beloved of the world (ʿazīz-i jahān), axis of

Delhi (quṭb-i dihlī), and the axis of the Sufi path (quṭb-i ṭarīqat).86

In addition to being the son of an important Shaykh of a Sufi lineage, Quṭb-i ʿĀlam was someone familiar to the Mughal administrative apparatus. He was, after all, employed as a soldier in Delhi (shīvah-i sipāhīgarī ishtighāl dāsht). It was only after the death of his father’s leading successor (aʿẓam-i khulafāʾ),87 Shaykh Chāyan Ladah88 Suhinī, in 998/1589 that Quṭb-i

ʿĀlam left imperial service (mulāzimat) and was appointed to his position as the trustee of the shrine.89 Despite his connections to imperial service, Quṭb-i ʿĀlam was generally well regarded by his contemporaries, even those who were at times wary of the Mughal court. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq

83 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 563.

84 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 563.

85 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 2:74.

86 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 2:74.

87 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 564.

88 The exact name is unclear. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq gives Jāʾīladah, whereas Badāʾūnī gives both Chānī Ladah and Chāyan Ladah—see ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 564; Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 2:199 and 3:74 respectively.

89 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:75.

describes Quṭb-i ʿĀlam as scholarly and learned (ʿālim va fāżil), someone who possessed praiseworthy ethics and laudable attributes (ṣāḥib-i akhlāq-i ḥamīdah va ṣifāt-i pasandīdah).90 It was hoped that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. Badāʾūnī writes, “If it please God most great, may he be adorned with the ethics (akhlāq) of his great father.”91

What is interesting to note is that while he is described as being his father’s true successor (khalaf-i ṣadīq)92 and as someone who “placed the foot of truth and rectitude on the prayer mat of his father (qadam-i ṣidq va istiqāmat bar sajjādah-i pidar nihādah),”93 Quṭb-i ʿĀlam was not amongst his official successors. Contemporaries only noted Shaykh Chāyan Ladah

Suhinī and Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ghanī Badāʾūnī as amongst his father’s successors (khulafāʾ).94

Shaykh Chāyan was particularly distinguished amongst ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz’s successors and followers for his unanimity (ittiḥād), distinction (ikhtiṣāṣ), discretion (maḥramīyat) and honour (ʿizzat) and was the one deemed to take his place as locum tenens (jā-nishīn).95 It was Shaykh Chāyan and not ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz who initiated him in his father’s lineage. When Shaykh Chāyan fell ill in

989/1589, he called for Quṭb-i ʿĀlam who at the time was in Delhi. When he came to see him,

Shaykh Chāyan is said to have placed before him all the material accoutrements that marked one as a Shaykh (sāʾir-i lavāzim-i mashīkhat). These included a cloak and staff (khirqah va ʿasā), which Shaykh Chāyān claimed were given as a trust (amānat) by his father. Giving these to

Quṭb-i ʿĀlam, he declared him more worthy of possessing them. Soon after he died. 96

90 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 564.

91 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:75.

92 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:75.

93 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 564.

94 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 564 and Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:75.

95 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 564.

96 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:75.

Quṭb-i ʿĀlam’s appointment as trustee of the shrine was not the only connection between the site and the Chishtī network; ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz’s other leading successor Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ghanī Badāʾūnī had also taken up residence at the shrine complex, at least as early as

1003/1594–5, which is within a five year period since Quṭb al-ʿĀlam’s appointment as custodian.97 ʿAbd al-Ghanī is said to have taken up residence at the qadamgāh, specifically at a mosque that was known as Khān-i Jahān’s mosque.98 In the sixteenth century this mosque was thought to have been built during the reign of Fīrūz Shāh (masjadī ast az ʿimārat-i Fīrūzī).99

According to Anthony Welch, there exists a Tughluq era mosque within the walls of the shrine complex that,100 which may very well have been the very site of ʿAbd al-Ghanī’s residence.

ʿAbd al-Ghanī would have been a notable presence at the shrine. Descriptions of ʿAbd al-Ghanī highlight his tendency to be overcome by a state of ecstasy (ḥāl bar ū ghālib mī-āmad), as well as his commitment to self-abnegation, despite his having a large family (ʿiyāl bisyār dārad).101 He was said to have been like the eighth century ascetic Ibrāhīm ibn Adham in his renunciation (tark) and tenth century ecstatic Abū Bakr al-Shiblī (247–334/861–945) in detachment (tajrīd).102 Compared to Quṭb al-ʿĀlam’s function and role at the shrine, which as guardian would have been to oversee its affairs and tend to its good financial management,

ʿAbd al-Ghanī’s presence at the shrine would no doubt have added to the ecstatic mood of the shrine.

97 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:76.

98 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:76.

99 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 564.

100 Welch, “Shrine,” 142.

101 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:75–76.

102 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:75.

One particular episode from the life of ʿAbd al-Ghanī also offers an illustrative example of how members of the Mughal administrative center attempted to encroach upon the affairs of the shrine beyond the appointment of custodian and the ways in which residents used the networks available to them to counter these attempts. The episode is recorded in ʿAbd al-Qādir

Badāʾūnī’s biographic sketch of ʿAbd al-Ghanī’s life in his history Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, which he wrote in 1004/1595.103 Badāʾūnī knew ʿAbd al-Ghanī personally and came from the same hometown (thus the shared gentilic). Despite his withdrawal from society ʿAbd al-Ghanī was familiar with members of the Mughal ruling elite. When he first arrived to Delhi after his marriage seeking a means of subsistence (kafāf), he entered the service (mulāzimat) of Tātar

Khān, then governor (ḥākim) of the province.104 There in Delhi, he began to study with ʿAbd al-

ʿAzīz and was in his service (khidmatash).105 As a result of his being enraptured by God (jaẕbah-i

ʿināyat-i azalī), he gave up all other occupations and spent his time practicing austerities and self-disciplining exercises (mujāhadat va riyāżat) at the khānaqāh of his master ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz.106

After attaining perfection (kamāl), he took up residence at the mosque of Khān-i Jahān at the qadamgāh and kept himself busy in prayer and devotion (iʿtikāf).107

Despite his withdrawal from service and time spent in devotion, ʿAbd al-Ghanī continued to have contact with those involved at the Mughal court. In 1003/1594–5 ʿAbd al-

Raḥīm Khān-i Khānan, one of the leading members of the Mughal nobility, sought advice

(iltimās-i naṣīḥatī) from ʿAbd al-Ghanī, who told him to follow the Sunna of the Prophet (itbāʿ-i

103 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:269.

104 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:75.

105 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:75–76.

106 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:76.

107 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:76.

sunnat-i Muḥammadī).108 A year later in 1004/1595, at the time Badāʾūnī was writing his history,

ʿAbd al-Ghanī was summoned to Lahore, where the imperial court had shifted for some time.

The order (farmān) summoning him was issued at the instigation of Aḥmad Ṣūfyak and

Ḥisāmak Banārasī, who Badāʾūnī seems to suggest were newly converted Muslims (naw maẕhab- i naw muslim). The shaykh is said to have written to Badāʾūnī asking for his help in dissuading them from their request, which he is said to have been successful in.109

Although we only know a sliver of information concerning the Mughal court’s involvement in the affairs of the shrine in the sixteenth century, the information available and examined present a complex picture. The court appointed the trustee of the shrine who had been in imperial service but also who had deep roots in Delhi society, with particular connections to the Chishtī community. While members of the Mughal court could attempt to interfere with the affairs of the shrine, those at the shrine had their own connections to the

Mughal administration and mobilized those to thwart such interferences.

In addition to appointing custodians to oversee the shrine, the Mughal court also created endowments to help support the shrine. According to the Risālah-i qadamīyah the

Mughal emperor Akbar created an endowment (vaqf) of several villages for the mujāvirān to maintain the site.110 Fayżī also describes the site where the “blessed facsimile (timsā̱ l-i mubārak)” was kept as having lofty buildings erected there by the emperor.111

By Akbar’s reign the site had developed into a shrine and one with ties to the Mughal court. Its court-appointed trustee was the son of a local notable figure, its new constructions

108 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:76.

109 Badāʾūnī, Muntakhab al-tavārīkh, 3:76.

110 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37.

111 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37.

was paid by locals, and Mughal patronage for the shrine was enacted through endowments.

Based on the shrine’s donative inscriptions, during the seventeenth century the shrine would go on to cultivate a cosmopolitan network of patrons that included Abyssinian military elites from the Deccan, members of the royal establishment, and semi-anonymous private donors.

The prominence of the shrine in the seventeenth century, evidenced by its ability to attract a wide network of patrons, can be explained by two possible reasons: its proximity to the newly constructed capital of Shahjahanabad in the mid-seventeenth century and the concomitant ascension of the Mughal emperor ʿĀlamgīr. The remainder of the chapter explores how different actors made investments into the shrine and how these related to what we know about the rituals and festive practices that came to be performed at the site.

In the seventeenth century there is the development of the what would become the most important ritual spot in the reliquary shrine. The evidence is an inscription dated

1067/1656–7 that was found over a shallow tank, which was built specifically for the display and washing of the footprint relic. It would be the focal point of the ritual of visiting the shrine: to touch the black stone of the relic and to collect the water that ran off from washing it to heal the sick. Figure 2.7 below shows a photograph of the water tank taken in 2012. The water tank for the relic is said to have been built over Fatḥ Khān’s cenotaph.112 The occupant of the other grave is unknown. The metal grill around the water tank bordering the cenotaph is new for the photographs in Welch’s study show the grill to be made of stone. In the photograph hang twin images of the green dome of the Prophet’s mosque in Medina where he is buried and thus the site of ziyārat and the Kaʿbah, the site of the hajj.

112 Welch, “Shrine,” 175 and Ganem, “Traces,” 52.

Figure 2.7 Interior of the Qadam Sharīf. Photography by Varun Shiv Kapur, 13 September 2012. Copyright: Creative Commons 2.0. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/varunshiv/7987919665/in/album-72157631540035341/

One can get a sense of how important this part of the shrine must have been to visitors since it is the only part illustrated in the earliest manuscript of Mirzā Sangīn Beg’s Sayr al- manāzil, written and copied in 1821, documenting Delhi’s monuments. The illustration in the manuscript is captioned as the ḥawż-i qadam sharīf (the reservoir of the noble footprint) and it depicts the white stone tank full of pink flowers floating in the water with green leaves scattered about an ewer placed beside it.113

The inscription documented by the Archaeological Survey of India is particularly fascinating because it shows the circulation of the Risālah-i qadamīyah as Fayżī’s verses from the treatise are found repeated in the donative epigraph for the water tank. The first two verses of the following inscription are Fayżī’s:

Bar zamīnī kah nishān-i kaf-i pāy-i tū būd

113 Sayr al-manāzil of Mirzā Sangīn Beg (1821). Fol. 78a Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Sprenger 234, 208Bl

sālhā sijdah-i sāḥib-naẓarān khvāhad būd chū Yūsuf dar qadam-gāh-i Muḥammad maḥjar rā ba-tawfīq-i khudā sākht pay-i tārīkh-i itmām-i bināyash shanīdam hātifī guftah bi-jā sākht

In the place that bears the impression of the sole of your foot, For many years, it will be the place of prostration for those who possess insight When Yūsuf at the place where the footprint of Muḥammad is kept, built a sanctum with the grace of God. For the date of completion for its construction, I heard an invisible voice say “Well done!” (1067/1656-7).114

The inscription unfortunately provides no information about the patron named Yūsuf. While the inscription was found on the tank,115 it is possible that its construction was part of a larger renovation program. The inscription’s use of the word maḥjar, which refers to the “sanctum” leaves some ambiguity as to the extent of which the aforementioned Yūsuf’s patronage of the shrine went. Furthermore, it is unclear whether Yūsuf had access to the Risālah-i qadamīyah or whether Fayżī’s poetry circulated popularly at the site on account of its devotional nature.

Nonetheless, we see here the faint but legible trace of the Mughal court’s connection even when mediated by others.

The Archaeological Survey of India noted two other inscriptions from the seventeenth century. The first was on a marble slab over the eastern entrance at the northeast corner of the shrine. It declared the Muslim profession of faith and linked by donative logic the pious proclamation of God’s unicity and the role of the Prophet Muḥammad as the conduit of divine

114 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments 2:242–43.

115 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments 2:242.

revelation to the emperor ʿĀlamgīr through the beneficence of those employed in his imperial household:

Lā ilāha ilā Allāh Muḥammad rasūl Allāh Muḥammad Mīr taḥvīldār-i chīnī-khānah-i ʿĀlamgīr shāhī

There is no god but God [and] Muḥammad is the Messenger of God, Muḥammad Mīr, the custodian of the emperor ʿĀlamgīr’s porcelain room.116

Unfortunately, despite knowing his position within the Mughal emperor’s household, little about the life of Muḥammad Mīr is known. It is suggested by Welch and Ganem that the assembly hall or majliskhāna (see Fig. 2.8) facing the main entrance to the shrine, which was built during the seventeenth century, was through the donation of Muḥammad Mīr.117

Fig. 2.8 Northeast corner of the shrine with a view of the majliskhāna and the domed entrance. Varun Shiv Kapur (13 September 2012), CC 2.0. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/varunshiv/7987919665/in/album-72157631540035341/

116 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments 2:242.

117 Welch, “Shrine,” 172, and Ganem, “Traces,” 55.

During the mid-seventeenth century, when the emperor ʿĀlamgīr had pitched his royal tents in the imperial capital of his father Shahjahanabad, it was not just members of his royal household that were stationed in the vicinity of the shrine and developed relationships with it.

With him came a variety of new social groups, including Ḥabshīs or Abyssinian military elites.

These new groups belonged to a wider network of people—at least much wider than the previous Delhi residents who donated and ran the site. A more extensive inscription, this time found on the inside of the entranceway into the reliquary shrine’s inner sanctum (andarūn bar- pīshānī-i darvāza-i maḥjar-i dargāh-i sharīf nivishtah), was recorded by both the Archaeological

Survey of India and Mirzā Sangīn Beg in his Sayr al-manāzil. The patron behind the donative inscription clearly wished to be remembered and identified. It lists that he is Abyssinian as well as his father’s name. It reads:

Rahī gum-kunān rahnumā-yi Muḥammad hidāyat dihandah hidā-yi Muḥammad khvush ān madrasa minbar va bargāhī kah dar vay bi-bāshad saṉ ā-yi Muḥammad shikastah dilānrā shudān marhamī dil-i dardmandān darā-yi Muḥammad ʿarsh gashtah dar zīr-i pā-i ū musallam har ān kū shudah khāk-pā-yi Muḥammad man-am az sagān-i sag-i kū-yi ū118 shudah Shīrvān az gadā-yi Muḥammad ʿurf Shīrvān Khān ibn Rayḥān Khān Ḥabshī [Bāratī]119 būd bi-tārīkh-i bist va siyyum Rabīʿ al-S̲ānī sanah-i 1082 īn abyātahā dar taḥrīr āvard.120

118 The inscription as recorded by the ASI notes a final -īm after ū, but there is no indication of this in the 1821 manuscript of Mirzā Sangīn Beg’s Sayr al-manāzil. 119 The word was noted by ASI to have been effaced but is indicated in Mirzā Sangīn Beg’s Sayr al-manāzil. 120 Archaeological Survey of India, List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments 2:242; and Mirzā Sangīn Beg, Sayr al- manāzil, fols. 77b–78a.

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The guide of those who have lost their way is Muḥammad The guide for those who give guidance is Muḥammad Happy are the school, the pulpit, and the court In which praises of Muḥammad are read out For the broken hearted he is a balm For the hearts of the afflicted he is a medicine The Throne [of God] remained unblemished underneath his foot, Each of whom who has become the dust under the foot of Muḥammad I am one of the [lonely] dogs of his lane Shīrvān has become a supplicant of Muḥammad He is known as Shīrvān Khān, the son of Rayḥān Khān the Abyssinian [Bāratī] wrote these lines on 23rd of Rabīʿ II of the year 1082 (29 August 1671).

While the extent to which these inscriptions indicate a broader program of renovation and addition to the reliquary shrine is unclear, it is fair to ask why the site came to receive such attention. There are two possible reasons why the shrine of the footprint relic may have received an uptick in patronage activity in the seventeenth century. The first stems from the development of a new imperial capital by the Mughal emperor Shāh Jahān (r. 1037–68/1628–

58) named Shahjahanabad not far from the shrine, while the second from the prevailing political circumstances and particular expressions of piety of the early years of emperor

Awrangzīb-ʿĀlamgīr’s reign (r. 1068–1118/1658–1707).

Today’s Delhi is a conglomeration of multiple urban settlements that were established over the course of a millennium west of the Yamuna River by successive Rajput, Sultanate,

Mughal, and British dispensations.121 The Tughluq Sultans in particular contributed to the

121 For a brief history of the urban environment that was to become the modern city of Delhi see Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639–1739 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5–13. For a recent study of how court politics and urban settlements shaped one another during the Sultanate period, see Sunil Kumar, “Courts, Capitals and Kingship: Delhi and Its Sultans in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries CE,” in Court Cultures in the Muslim World: Seventh to Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Albrecht Fuess and Jan-Peter Hartung (London: Routledge, 2011), 123–48.

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development of Delhi’s urban landscape. Ghiyās ̱ al-Dīn Tughluq (r. 720–25/1320–25), the founder of the dynasty, established a walled city named Tughluqabad. It included a citadel for the sultan and his household, residences housing the establishments of the nobility, a marketplace, and presumably houses for a sundry other members of medieval urban society. It also included a palatial fortress built by his successor Muḥammad bin Tughluq (r. 725–52/1325-

–51) named ʿAdilabad. Muḥammad bin Tughluq established Jahanpanah when he enclosed settlements between the Rajput city of Delhi and Siri, which had been founded by ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn

Khalajī (r. 695–715/1296–1316).122

Fīrūz Shāh (r. 752–90/1351–88), who appears to have taken a particularly keen interest in monumental architecture and the material legacies of past rulers, undertook the most impressive urban development project from amongst his fellow Tughluq sultans. Fīrūz Shāh choose a spot far north of the previous settlements and dubbed his city Firuzabad. It included a citadel, now Firuz Shah Kotla, and its urban spread was said to have been considerable.

Devastated by Temür’s sack of Delhi in 801/1398, it was on the site of Firuzabad that Shāh

Jahān built his imperial capital in the first half of the seventeenth century.123 Indeed, the ruins of Firuzabad are said to have been quarried to reuse its materials in the construction of

Shahjahanabad.124 Work on the city began in the spring of 1049/1639 and continued for almost a decade as a host of walls, gardens, and thoroughfares were constructed along with the royal citadel and the many mansions of the Mughal nobility. The city was finally inaugurated on 6

Rabīʿ II 1059/19 April 1648.125 The development of a new imperial capital would surely have

122 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 10.

123 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 11.

124 Ebba Koch, “The Delhi of the Mughals Prior to Shahjahanabad as Reflected in the Patterns of Imperial Visits,” in Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 174.

125 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 30–31.

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been a boon to the shrine, for the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf was located only one and a half miles south of the Lahori gate of the emperor Shāh Jahān’s new walled city.126

Despite its proximity to the newly constructed imperial capital, the reliquary shrine appears to have received little attention from members of the Mughal court in the first half of the seventeenth century. Take for instance the construction of the reservoir (ḥawż) and sanctum (maḥjar) in 1067/1656-7. We know little about who the patron was and how he was connected to the shrine. Could one consider it an individual act of piety by a near anonymous donor?

The second concerns the proclivities and preferences of the Mughal emperor ʿĀlamgīr.

ʿĀlamgīr is commonly understood to have been more austere, more orthodox, more Sunni, in both his personal life and politics. Common tropes for describing his piety includes his sending of gifts to the Hejaz, the copying of Qur’ans in his own hand, and the promotion of Islamic law and jurisprudence. We know more about Awrangzīb’s engagement with relics than we do earlier Mughal rulers. For instance, on the occasion of the Prophet’s mawlid and ʿurs in

1114/1702, the emperor Awrangzīb had the relics brought out, placed within royal tents, and where he kept vigil through the night with them. One historian noted that “on the twelfth day of the month of Rabī al-Ākhir [sic] screens (sarāpardahā) were placed around the tent of the blessed relics (khaima-i āṡār-i mubārak). His majesty obtained felicity (iḥrāz-i saʿādat namūdand) with the good fortune of visiting (ziyārat) and keeping night vigil (shab-zinda dāshtan) there.”127

In comparison to the pomp and show of Akbar’s display of veneration, Awrangzīb’s pales in comparison, indicative of Awrangzīb’s less grand performance of kingly piety. It is possible that these were the very relics that he received as gifts in 1075/1665 from the Sharīfs in Mecca

126 Blake, Shahjahanabad, 61.

127 Mustaʿidd Khān, Maʾāsiṟ -i ʿĀlamgīrī, 460–1.

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in exchange of embassies. In the eighth year of Awrangzīb’s reign Sayyid Yaḥyā, an envoy sent by the Sharīfs of Mecca, presented to the Mughal emperor a gift of three Arab horses and certain “blessed items” (tabarrukāt) on account of his having sent to the Hejaz gifts worth

660,000 rupees four years earlier in the hands of one Ḥājjī Aḥmad Sayyid.128

By the eighteenth century, in many ways the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf had been domesticated within the predominant paradigm of Muslim religiosity in the city of Delhi, namely, Sufi devotion. Delhi is rich in the number of holy saints buried within its environs. It is worth remembering that Delhi had been an important Sufi centre and place of refuge since the thirteenth century when many of the Muslim cities of Central and West Asia witnessed depredations and wholesale destruction at the hands of the invading Mongols. It was during this time period that the city became an important centre for the Chishtī Sufi lineage. The earliest of the great Chishtī masters was Quṭb al-Dīn Bakhtiyār Kākī (d. 633/1235), whose shrine in Mehrauli, Delhi, became an important pilgrimage site by the fourteenth century, during which time the city also hosted the much revered Chishtī Shaykh Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ

(d. 726/1325). The final Sultanate era Chishtī Sufi master whose shrine lent the city great sanctity was Naṣīr al-Dīn Maḥmūd (d. 75/1356), whose title was “Chirāgh-i Dihlī,” that is, the lamp of Delhi.

The sanctity offered to the city of Delhi on account of the saints buried there was reflected first and foremost in its sobriquet, hażrat-i Dihlī.129 But the clearest expression of the city’s sanctity in relation to the holy dead buried there is to be found in a seventeenth century source which compared Delhi to the holy cities of the Ḥaramayn. Interestingly, the author in

128 Sāqī Mustaʿidd Khān, Maʾāsiṟ -i ʿĀlamgīrī, 49; Sarkar, trans., Maāsir-i-ʿĀlamgiri, 32.

129 Raziuddin Aquil, “Hazrat-i-Dehli: The Making of the Chishti Sufi Centre and the Stronghold of Islam,” South Asia Research 28, no. 1 (2008): 23–48.

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question was not someone who belonged to the Chishtī initiatic lineage but instead to the

Naqshbandī. His name was Muḥammad Ṣādiq Dihlavī Kashmīrī Hamadānī. Initiated into the

Naqshbandī order by Khvājah Muḥammad Bāqī Billāh (971–1012/1564–1603) and a student of

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddis ̱ Dihlavī, Muḥammad Ṣādiq completed his most famous work Kalimāt al-

ṣādiqīn in 1023/1614. The work is a hagiography of all the saints who have been buried in the city of Delhi, focusing primarily on their teachings and where they are buried. In the introduction, Muḥammad Ṣādiq writes that “after the Ḥaramayn Sharīfayn, if nobility (sharafī) and greatness (buzurgī) is in any city, it is in this noble city which is distinguished from all other cities and is exceptional from other cities. It is therefore that the common people (ʿavām) say that Delhi is a miniature Mecca (khurd-i Makkah).”130 The emphasis on the connection between Delhi as the final resting place of holy persons and its sanctity is further developed when he writes that “because this city has always been the resting place (maskan) of those dear and chosen by God (ʿazīzān va barguzīdgān-i ilāhī) and those near and approved by kings

(muqarrabān va maqbūlān-i pādishāhī) each place a special sign and distinct blessing (asaṟ ī-i khāṣṣ va barakatī-i judā).”131 It is worth noting that Muḥammad Ṣādiq takes special note of certain sites in the city for their special status and amongst them the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf holds pride of place. He writes: “the qadamgāh of his excellence, the refuge of prophecy (risālat- panāh), may God bless him and grant him peace, the Hawż-i Shamsī, Masjid-i ʿīdgāh, the mosque of Khvājah Muʿīn al-Dīn, the Khānaqāh of Ḥażrat Sulṭān al-Mashāʾikh [Niẓām al-Dīn

Awliyāʾ], and Fīrūzābād Delhi, in relation to the rest of the places of the city are more distinguished in blessedness (barakat-i makhṣūṣ) and more famous.”132 Even though the

130 Muḥammad Ṣādiq Dihlavī Kashmīrī Hamadānī, Kalimāt al-ṣādiqīn: Taẕkirah-ʾi ṣūfīyān-i madfūn dar Dihlī tā sāl 1023 hijrī qamarī, ed. Muḥammad Salīm Akhtar (Islamabad: Markaz-i Taḥqīqāt-i Fārsī-i Īrān va Pākistān, 1988), 4.

131 Muḥammad Ṣādiq, Kalimāt al-ṣādiqīn, 4.

132 Muḥammad Ṣādiq, Kalimāt al-ṣādiqīn, 4.

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reliquary shrine was distinguished for its blessedness, if we look at the sites that are included in that group there is a strong connection to the Chishtī lineage: Khvājah Muʿīn al-Dīn was the founder of the lineage in India and Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ was Delhi’s most famous Chishtī Sufi master.

One of the ways the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf operated as a Sufi shrine is in the context of its ritual festive calendar. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Dargāh-i

Qadam Sharīf had a bustling festive calendar that attracted large crowds of people both from the city of Delhi as well as regions much further afield. A survey of the important festive days for the reliquary shrine reveals to us the way in which the site was embedded in the religious landscape of Delhi and the way in which time and place came to intersect in commemorating the Prophet. In the same way that the ritual calendar of the qadamgāh in Ahmedabad housing the qadam brought by Abū Turāb reveals how the site emphasized the sayyids’ credentials and located it within a ahl-i bayt devotional milieu, looking at the important festive dates for the

Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf reveals how the footprint relic came to be embedded within a Delhi based Chishtī Sufi devotional context.

The reliquary shrine had its own calendric rhythm that dictated when visitors came to the site. Thursdays in particular seems to have drawn large numbers of pilgrims. One eighteenth century visitor to Delhi, Dargāh-Qulī Khān, noted that, “on Thursdays the courtyard of the dargāh became so full with the crowds of visitors (hujūm-i zāʾir) that one reached the object of circumambulation (maqṣad-i maṭāf) with a great difficulty.”133 But the busiest time for the shrine was the month of Rabīʿ I.

The twelfth of Rabīʿ I is an important day in the Muslim festive calendar. According to tradition, it is the date given for both the Prophet’s birth and death. It is therefore not

133 Dargāh-Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, 51.

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surprising then that while discussing the twelfth of Rabīʿ I, Dargāh-Qulī Khān refers to festivities at the reliquary shrine as the ʿurs of the Prophet Muḥammad.134 In South Asia, and northern Indian Sufism in particular, the ʿurs ritual commemorates the death anniversary of a

Sufi saint with the word ʿurs (wedding) metaphorically referring to the union between the saint and the Divine Bridegroom. The ʿurs is a particularly interesting ritual for as Nile Green notes, “as much as it was a temporal ritual of commemoration and recollection, of remembering the deeds of the blessed man and his original client community, the ʿurs was also a spatial ritual of enshrinement and emplacement, of making Muslim space around the grave of a blessed man. It was, then, a ritual of securing space across time,” and “sacralization of locality.”135 The fact that the date was commemorated as an ʿurs as opposed to the mawlūd-i sharīf—as in the case of the qadamgāh in Ahmedabad—suggests then that the reliquary shrine in Delhi and its activities had to some degree taken on a Sufi devotional flavour. This is not surprising given the trustees of the shrine were at some point being appointed from families that had links to the Chishtī Sufi lineage.

According to Dargāh-Qulī Khān, day and night, the shrine would be replete with throngs of people, including both medicants and pilgrims (fuqarāʾ va zuvvār) coming from far away to visit the shrine.136 The sheer number of those coming to circumambulate around the relic (ṭāʾifān) would get so plentiful that unless one arrived before morning, no place to sit could be found.137 The wide reach of the shrine during the month of Rabīʿ I continued well into the nineteenth century. According to Mirzā Sangīn Beg, “from the first of the month of Rabīʿ I

134 Dargāh-Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, 75.

135 Nile Green, Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 33.

136 Dargāh-Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, 51.

137 Dargāh-Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, 52.

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to the twelfth, crowds of people from the city and its environs would remain at the praiseworthy shrine (dargāh-i mamdūḥ) and medicants (faqīrān) from surrounding and faraway places keep arriving and stay for the twelve days.”138 The presence of the mendicants in particular seems to have been a prominent feature of the gatherings for by the mid-nineteenth century one contemporary, Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, noted that “every year on the 12th of Rabīʿ I there is a large fair (mela) and everyone gathers here and thousands of malangs come and perform dhammāl in front of the entrance.”139

Organizing the ʿurs would have been a considerable undertaking given the vast numbers of pilgrims that it attracted. Such a large undertaking involved not only organization but also material exchange, of food, gifts, and votive offerings. Shrines such as a the Dargāh-i

Qadam Sharīf were the epicenter of material circulation. Pilgrims needed to be housed and fed, while at the same time the shrine would have received considerable sums and items as votive offerings for those seeking particular forms of intercession. This reciprocal relationship between supplicants, trustees, custodians, and those seeking charity would have formed the basis of what David Morgan terms the material economy of the sacred.140 We can find evidence for this from sources written in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. According to Dargāh-

Qulī Khān the rich (aghniyāʾ) would donate so much food stuff (maṭʿūmāt va tanaqqulāt) as votive offerings (naẕr) that it would be sufficient provisions (ẕakhīrah) for several days.141 In point of fact, Dargāh-Qulī Khān writes that it was from these donative offerings of food that

138 Mirzā Sangīn Beg, Sayr al-manāzil, ed. Sharīf Ḥusayn Qāsimī, 60.

139 Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, Āsā̱ r al-ṣanādīd, ed. Khalīq Anjum, 3:327.

140 David Morgan, “Material Culture of Lived Religion,” in Mind and Matter: Selected Papers of the Nordik 2009 Conference for Art Historians, ed. Johanna Vakkari (Helsinki: Helsingfors, 2010), 27.

141 Dargāh-Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, 52.

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the mendicants and poor (fuqarāʾ va masākīn) would be fed.142 In addition, ziyārat to the reliquary shrine was also an opportunity for pilgrims visiting the shrine to take something back with them. For instance, Mirzā Sangīn Beg writes that during the ʿurs the mendicants

(faqīrān) who would come to the dargāh and stay there for the twelve days of Rabīʿ I would engage in commerce, selling signet rings made of agate (nagīnah-hā-yi ʿaqīq) and other items.143

In addition to commemorating the memory of the Prophet at his ʿurs, the Dargāh-i

Qadam Sharīf was also prominent in more cross-confessional festivals such as Basant. In point of fact, according to Dargāh-Qulī Khān, the reliquary shrine held pride of place in the month of festivities that accompanied the springtime festival of Basant. On the first day of month of

Basant various groups of devotional singers such as qawwālān and naghmah-sarāyān would gather at the dargāh and perform songs and then over the course of the next few days they would gather and perform at other prominent Sufi Chishtī shrines.144

Based on Dargāh-Qulī Khān’s account of the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf we are able to sketch in broad strokes the contours of the site’s ritual life. We know based on his account that pilgrims coming to the see the relic circumambulated in the shrine’s courtyard around the central structure housing the qadam. Indeed, the relic was referred to by Dargāh-Qulī Khān as the “intended object of circumambulation (maqṣad-i maṭāf).”145 In this regard, the Delhi dargāh was similar to the qadamgāh built in Ahmedabad for its counterpart relic in that pilgrims approached the site by circumambulating it. Dargāh-Qulī Khān’s contemporary ʿAlī

142 Dargāh-Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, 71–72.

143 Mirzā Sangīn Beg, Sayr al-manāzil, ed. Sharīf Ḥusayn Qāsimī, 60.

144 Dargāh-Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, 71–72.

145 Dargāh-Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, 51.

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Muḥammad Khān referred to the “a site of circumambulation for all people (maṭāf-i ʿālam).”146

What are we to make of this ritual?

Based on contemporary evidence, we know that the Mughal emperor Akbar instituted the ritual of circumambulation around the footprint that been brought to his court near the end of the sixteenth century. The first time it was instituted was when the relic was to be processed to the imperial capital of Fatehpur Sikri and Akbar gave orders for his soldiers to circumambulate around the it.147 The second time it was after the relic was brought to

Fatehpur Sikri and installed in the Gujarati pavilion when Akbar gave orders for the people of the city to circumambulate (ṭavāf) around it after they had performed the Friday prayer at the congregational mosque of the Chishtī Shaykh Manṣūr-i Shaykh Salīm.148 Given the fact that the trustees of the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf in Delhi were appointed by members of the Mughal administration, it is quite possible that the ritual of circumambulation was instituted at the dargāh after this time period.

The rituals of circumambulation were not instituted in a vacuum; rather, they appear to have been part of a larger effort to associate the footprint relic—both the qadam that Abū

Turāb brought and the one in Delhi—with the Black Stone of the Kaʿbah. This association is made clear in both the Risālah-i qadamīyah authorized by the Mughal court and written by

Akbar’s poet-laureate Fayżī, as well as the epigraphic program of the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf itself. In his description of the site, Fayżī declared the reliquary shrine to be “a Kaʿbah for the high and low,” as well as “the Kaʿbah of hopes (āmāl) and the qibla of good fortune (iqbāl).”149

146 ʿAlī Muḥammad, Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 139.

147 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 97.

148 Abū Turāb, Tārīkh-i Gujarāt, 98.

149 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37.

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Fayżī wrote of his own visit to the site, stating “this humble author has on many occasions been ennobled by the honour of visiting that place,” and declaring that he had written the following verses when there:

dar zamīnī kah nishān-i kaf-i pāy-i tū būd sālhā sijda-i ṣāḥib-naẓarān khvāhad būd

In the place that bears the impression of the sole of your foot, For many years, it will be the place of prostration for those who possess insight.150

Through his writings Fayżī linked the reliquary shrine and its relic to the Kaʿbah, the house of

God and the direction in which all Muslims turned to pray. It is noteworthy given the site’s association with members of the Chishtī lineage that Fayżī makes special note of the “masters of insight (ṣāḥib-naẓarān) referring to Sufis, for whom the place where the relic is displayed becomes a site of prostration, as if in ritual prayer.

Fayżī includes another set of devotional verses but it is unclear who the author for these is. He attributes these verses to “the tongue of the unseen (lisān al-ghayb) and the interpreter of the royal secrets (tarjumān-i asrār-i khāṣṣ),” who is said to have visited the neighbourhood of the reliquary shrine once whilst in the retinue of the Mughal emperor.151 It is quite likely this was Fayżī himself. These verses operate similarly as the first set, likening the reliquary site to the Kaʿbah. However, they also make a number of additional claims. The first concerns the sacredness of Delhi as a site, likening it to the sanctum of the Kaʿbah:

ḥażrat-i dihlī malāʾik maṭāf Kaʿbah quds ast za bahr-i ṭavāf

Angels circumambulate about Delhi the excellent,

150 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37.

151 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37.

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The Kaʿbah is sacred on account of circumambulation.152

The verses continue by providing the logic for why the relic allows for the creation of sacred space in Delhi that is akin to the Kaʿbah, and in doing so, they make a special case for why rulers in particular might choose to forgo the pilgrimage to Mecca in favour of pilgrimage to the reliquary shrine:

qiblah-i jān Kaʿbah-i ahl-i safā raftah dar ān jā qadam-i Muṣṭafā tavāf-i ḥaram-ash hama rā dar khvār istikhāṣṣa kah bar shah ḥajj-i akbar ast

The qibla of the soul is the Kaʿbah for the people of purity, Muṣṭafá’s foot (qadam) went there, Circumambulating its sanctuary (ḥaram-ash) is suitable for all, Especially for the king, it is the great hajj (ḥajj-i akbar).153

It would be fair here to ask whether Fayżī’s poetry connecting the relic to the Kaʿbah had any circulation outside the text that he wrote. As it turns out, Fayżī’s poetry was incorporated into the epigraphic program of the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf. When the Archeological Survey of India conducted its study of the site, it recorded the same aforementioned verses by Fayżī in the inscription on the walls of the water tank in which the relic was kept, bathed, and displayed.154

One of the practices that took place at the qadamgāh in Ahmadabad was the collection of water that miraculously exuded from the footprint relic once or twice a year. As previously noted,

ʿAlī Muḥammad Khān wrote that, “on the blessed days of the Noble Birth and the tenth of

ʿāshūrā, water akin to perspiration would appear in the impression of the tip of the blessed toe

152 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37.

153 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37.

154 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37.

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and advancing down it would gather in the place of the heel; these would be collected in glass vials as blessed (tabarruk).”155

Contemporary and later accounts of the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf in Delhi do not mention any similar accounts of miraculous exudations appearing but they too note the practice of supplicants coming to collect water that had come into contact with the stone footprint. It too would be collected based on the belief that it was blessed (tabarruk). In his account of the

Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf, Dargāh-Qulī Khān notes how people would come to the shrine and collect the water used to wash the stone not only to restore their health (ʿāfiyat) but also to take it back with them to bless those who were far away.156 Mirzā Sangīn Beg, writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century provides more details and tells us that the qadam was kept within a tank-like enclosure made of marble which would be full of milk (shīr), sugar

(shakkar), rose water (gulāb), water (āb), and flowers (gul-hā).157 According to him people would come and drink from that water (āb) as a blessing (tabarruk).158 He then includes a couplet in

Urdu without revealing its context:

O Khiżr of the heart, salvation comes from drinking this The water (pānī) of the Noble Footprint is water of life (āb-i ḥayāt).159

Although Mirzā Sangīn Beg does not furnish any information as to the source of this couplet,

Sayyid Aḥmad Khān writing a few decades later explains that supplicants would they recite

155 ʿAlī Muḥammad, Khātimah-i Mirʾāt-i Aḥmadī, 25–26.

156 Dargāh-Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, 52.

157 Mirzā Sangīn Beg, Sayr al-manāzil, ed. Sharīf Ḥusayn Qāsimī (New Delhi: Ghalib Institute, 1982), 59; Shama Mitra Chenoy, trans., Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond: Mirza Sangin Beg’s Sair-ul manazil (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), 77.

158 Mirzā Sangīn Beg, Sayr al-manāzil, 59.

159 Mirzā Sangīn Beg, Sayr al-manāzil, 59.

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these verses as they came to collect the water.160 He too reiterates that supplicants would come to collect the water as a blessing (tabarruk) and that it was the water used to wash the stone.161

2.4. Conclusion

In surveying the history of how these two monumental reliquary shrines developed we begin to get a better sense of those invested in such objects. We also begin to see how the

Mughal court’s policies in the development of monumental reliquary shrines was mediated by a series of actors with their own agendas and networks. In requesting permission to take the qadam to Ahmedabad, Gujarat and establish a pilgrimage site for it, Abū Turāb presented it as an opportunity for Akbar to expand and make firm the vast domain of his empire. While linked to the rhetoric of imperial power, on the ground the establishment of the site was also a means for Abū Turāb to make claims to his sayyidhood, and in doing so he downplayed the role of the emperor in securing funding for the construction of the site.

In the case of the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf we see that the Mughal court’s intervention in the site included the appointment of trustees and the development of the site through financial patronage. However, the court was careful to appointment someone with a close familial and initiatic link to an important local Chishtī Sufi shaykh and saw its efforts to remove other members of the lineage from the site frustrated. Even in this case, we see how the court’s intervention did not rise to the level of the Mughal ruler but a middling class of bureaucrats. In the late seventeenth century as the site developed in proximity to the newly established Shahjahanabad, members of Awrangzīb’s establishment supported the site through personal patronage, expanding the site’s network of patrons.

160 Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, Āsā̱ r al-ṣanādīd, ed. Khalīq Anjum (New Delhi: Urdu Academy Delhi, 1990), 3:327.

161 Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, Āsā̱ r al-ṣanādīd, 3:327.

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Finally, when thinking of the kinds of rituals that took place with the relics, we can see how they were shaped and informed by the various actors who were invested into these shrines. While we do see a shared repertoire of practices, the circumambulation, the collection of some kind of liquid that was in contact with the stone relic, and the commemoration of the

Prophet’s date of birth and death, we see also variation. The Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf functioned in similar ways to other Sufi shrines, perhaps in part because of the city it was in, perhaps because of the appointment of trustees associated with the Chishtī Sufi lineage. Meanwhile, the qadamgāh in Ahmedabad did not have this Sufi veneer, but instead was much more linked with ahl-i bayt oriented piety. Moreover, we see the traces of the Mughal court influences, but I argue a much richer history of the relics, their shrines, and the pious devotions they engendered can be written if we do not reduce these sites to expressions of political legitimacy.

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CHAPTER THREE

Auspicious Corporeality

3.1. The Prophet’s Body and the Sunni Hadith Tradition

One of the more poignant exchanges in the religious economy unpacked in the previous chapter is the plaintive desires of the supplicants who came to the qadams with the hopes of healing either themselves or loved ones by drinking the water that came into contact or “perspired” from the relics. No less poignant is the fact that numerous devotees chose the precincts of the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf as their final resting place in the hopes of attaining salvation. In the Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, Dargāh-Qulī Khān writes “in order to obtain reward in the

Hereafter (masvaḇ āt-i ukhrawvīy), the fortunate (saʿādatmandān) purchase places for high sums in the precincts of this shrine to make their final resting place. Thus around [the shrine] are several tombs (maqbarah) while the graves of the poor (qubūr-i ghurabāʾ) are beyond calculation.”1 In considering these relic practices, it is fair to ask how might we understand this twin search of healing and heavenly reward amongst devotees. While the previous chapter has offered suggestions on why particular festive days may have been privileged or why certain rituals such as circumambulating the relic may have arisen, it is less clear why devotees might have considered exudations or water used to wash the relic to be healing, or proximity to the trace of the Prophet’s foot as particularly auspicious for attaining salvation.

This chapter suggests the answer may lie in an unexpected place but one that when considered reveals new dimensions about the intersection of Prophetic piety, religious materiality, and Indian Ocean travel. As discussed in chapter two, when faced with the question of the qadam, the Mughal court sought recourse to the Sunni hadith tradition as a

1 Dargāh-Qulī Khān. Muraqqaʿ-i Dihlī, 52.

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source of authority but lacked the textual corpora to do so. In Fayżī’s conceptualization of it, it was a textual tradition, made up of “the writings of the account keepers of traditions (qalam-i muḥāsibān-i akhbār) and the extractors of the traces (mustakhrijān-i āsā̱ r).”2 Fayżī emphasized the voluminousness of its textual production, which was said to have constituted “many thousands of widely circulated (mabsūṭah) books.”3 This textual tradition, which was made up of “so many pages and ledger books,” focuses on the “blessed biography (siyar-i barakāt)” of the

Prophet, offering “accounts of the sanctified conditions of his excellency (ẕikr-i aḥvāl-i quds- minvāl-i ān ḥażrat)”.4 These works varied in size and form, some of which were “lengthy books, which consist of forty volumes and some of which are less than that,” and included multiple genres including “biographies and abridged treatises (kutub-i siyar va rasāʾil-i mukhtaṣar).”5

The Sunni complexion of this textual tradition is indicated by the authorities cited by

Fayżī. He invokes the authority of the kutub-i ṣaḥīhah, (“The Sound Books”) a term used to refer to the six collections of Prophetic traditions that are deemed canonical within the Sunni tradition for the soundness of their chains of transmission. These included the two works commonly referred to as the al-Ṣaḥīḥayn; namely, Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī’s (194–

256/810–70) work al-Jāmiʿ al-musnad al-ṣaḥīḥ al-mukhtaṣar min umūr Rasūl Allāh wa sunanihi wa ayyāmihi (The abridged authentic compilations of the affairs of the Messenger of God, his sunnah and campaigns”) and Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj’s (206–61/821–75) al-Musnad al-ṣaḥīḥ. The other four, often referred to as the four Sunans, included the compilations of Muḥammad b.

Yazīd Ibn Māja (d. 275/889), Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī (d. 275/889), Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī

2 Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah,” 37. In invoking Talal Asad’s idea of a “discursive tradition,” I wish to draw attention to the way in which Fayżī acknowledges the authoritative nature of these texts

3 Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah,” 37.

4 Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah,” 37.

5 Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah,” 37–38.

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(d. 279/892), and Aḥmad b. Shuʿayb al-Nasāʾī (d. 303/915).6 Other authorities that he invokes are Imām Yāfiʿī (c. 698–768/c. 1298–1367), known for his commitment to Sufism and the study and teaching of hadith in the Hejaz, and the Damascene Qurʾān exegete, hadith scholar, historian, and Shāfiʿī jurist ʿImād al-Dīn Ismāʿīl b. ʿUmar Ibn Kathīr (c. 701–74/c. 1301–73).7

The issue for Fayżī, and the Mughal court whose interests he represented, was a lack of access to large parts of the tradition. As he explains it, for all the many “lengthy books, which consist of forty volumes and some of which are less than that, and the titles of which are found in histories of Imām Yāfiʿī, Shaykh Ibn Kathīr, and others, none reached the shores of Hind.”8

He does not say there was no hadith-based knowledge, for he notes the existence of

“biographies and the abridged treatises that are current in these lands,” but the materiality of hadith knowledge, made up of pages and pages of multivolume tomes, clearly imposed limitations to its availability.9 Materiality then plays a critical role in the economy of knowledge—a point that merits further study elsewhere.

This would change in the seventeenth century for the same circuit of Indian Ocean travel that spanned from North India to the Hejaz through Gujarat, which was responsible for the circulation of the qadam discussed earlier, would bring to Delhi knowledge systems based on the study of hadith. The transmission of this knowledge occurred not only in the form of embodied learning but also physical books. One important vector of this knowledge transmission was ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddis ̱ Dihlavī (958–1052/1551–1642), a one-time member of

6 Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, s.v. “Canon and canonization of ḥadīth,” by Stijn Aerts. For al-Bukhārī and Muslim see Brown, Canonization, 65-71 and 81–86.

7 Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, “al-Yāfiʿī,” by E. Geoffroy; and Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, s.v. “Ibn Kathīr, ʿImād al-Dīn,” by Younus Y. Mirza.

8 Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah,” 37–38.

9 Fayżī, “Risālah,” 37–38.

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Akbar’s court and Fayżī’s once close friend. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlavī is widely credited in modern scholarship for reviving the study of hadith in North India.10 While it is fair to question the degree to which he is solely responsible for reviving hadith scholarship, as well as to question the geographic reach of his work, he is certainly amongst the earliest scholars from North

India who travelled to the Hejaz to study hadith before returning and producing a vast corpus of writings based on the tradition that dealt with the Prophet’s life.

Bringing this scholastic tradition into conversation with accounts of Muslim relic practices might at first seem odd but historical precedent suggests that the circulation of the

Prophet’s relics and reports of his life in the form of hadith tend to occur concomitantly and often act synergistically in cultivating devotion to the Prophet Muḥammad. This is particularly true of the early period of Muslim history. In his study of early hadith literature, Brannon

Wheeler notes that the dispersal of the Prophet’s physical remains and relics, such as his hair, nail cuttings, and preserved impressions of his feet in stone, was carried out by his

Companions and early followers. These objects circulated across an ever-increasing territory where Muslims came to establish communities. Along with the dispersal of his remains, his companions and followers brought with them the Sunnah, that is the oral and textual record of the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muḥammad.11 This Sunnah, as Adam Bursi also notes, included numerous accounts of Muḥammad’s companions and followers collecting, venerating, and using Prophetic relics. These reports of Muslim devotion to the Prophets remains, Bursi writes, circulated at a time when there was an increasing focus by the

ʿUmayyads to materially mark the nascent Muslim community’s connection with the Prophet

Muḥmmad through a number of methods. This included not only relic veneration, but also

10 Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History, 43–44; Rizvi, Muslim Revivalist Movements, 135.

11 Wheeler, Mecca and Eden, 75.

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ʿUmayyad use of formulaic declarations of Muḥammad’s prophethood in inscriptions, official documentation, and coinage. The dissemination of his biography occurred concurrently with the patronage of his grave in Medina. Although Bursi does not use the vocabulary of religious embodiment or materiality, he demonstrates that hadith was put to use in authorizing a materially oriented veneration of the Prophet Muḥammad at a time that the Muslim community was increasingly distinguishing itself from other monotheistic communities in

Late Antique Near East.12 Given the history of intersections between accounts of the Prophet’s body, its uses in hadith and Sunnah, and histories of materially oriented practices of veneration in the early period of Islam, examining descriptive accounts of relic veneration in

Mughal Delhi contemporaneous with emerging forms of hadith-based scholarship about the

Prophet offers us a richer perspective on Muslim attitudes towards Prophet’s body and relics.

In this chapter I argue that hadith scholarship articulated a vision of the Prophet where his body was deemed auspicious and capable of imparting healing and salvation to members of the

Muslim community who sought recourse to it. This belief in the auspicious corporeality of the

Prophet, which came to circulate in seventeenth century Delhi, I suggest, helps contextualize the relic practices mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. In making this argument, I do not claim that the transmission of hadith-based scholarship directly informed Muslim relic practices. Instead, what I wish to draw attention to is to show the manner in which Muslims engaged with relics of the Prophet echoed deeply accounts of how early Muslim believers sought help from his actual body. The fact that the relics and traditions circulated the Indian

Ocean at the same time is noteworthy.

12 Adam Bursi, “A Hair’s Breadth: The Prophet Muhammad’s Hair as Relic in Early Islamic Texts,” in Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Nathaniel P. DesRosiers and Lily C. Vuong (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 219– 31.

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In the historiography of South Asian Islam, the circulation of these scholars and their efforts in promoting the study of hadith has largely been seen as a project of Islamic revivalism that began in the seventeenth century. This is certainly the characterization of historians such as Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, and Scott Kugle who see the emergence of hadith scholarship in North India, particularly Delhi, as a reaction against kinds of religious discourses and practices that emanated from the Mughal court.13 In this chapter, my aim is not to enter into this debate with its centripedal focus directing us back to the figure of the emperor, but rather to explore how ideas about the auspicious nature of the Prophet

Muḥammad’s body were elaborated in these texts and the echoes we find between these discourses and the ritual practices that focused on Prophetic relics. In point of fact, scholars who went to study hadith in the Hejaz were part and parcel of a broader devotional movement focused on the Prophet Muḥammad that saw his corporeal body as an efficacious medium to attain blessings in this world and salvation in the next. Indeed, their writings make clear that they evinced a strong belief in the auspicious nature of the Prophet’s body and the supplicatory potential of visiting his grave in Medina.

In this chapter I examine ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddis ̱ Dihlavī’s writings about the Prophet

Muḥammad, paying particular attention to the way he discusses his body. I demonstrate that he uses the Sunni hadith tradition to present the Prophet’s body as auspicious, capable of healing and offering salvation in the hereafter. This chapter proceeds in three turns. First, I discuss how the Prophet’s body played a role in ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s own life, particularly with his dedicating his life to studying hadith. Second, I introduce ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s biography of the

13 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Muslim Revivalist Movements in Northern India in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1965; repr., New Delhi: Munshiram Manhorlal, 2014), 135–75; Scott Kugle, “ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlawī, An Accidental Revivalist: Knowledge and Power in the Passage from Delhi to Makka,” Journal of Islamic Studies 19, no. 2 (2008): 196–246.

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Prophet entitled Madārij al-nubūvat va marātib al-futūvat (The degrees of prophecy and the ranks of nobility) and situate it within the constellation of similar works in North India, the

“biographies and the abridged treatises” that Fayżī says were “current in these lands.” Third, I present ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s vision of the Prophet’s auspicious body and focus on the question of exudations, contact, and proximity to his material being.

3.2. Visiting the Grave of the Prophet in Medina

Born into a notable Sufi family of Delhi, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq travelled to the Hejaz after a brief period at the Mughal court, where he had made close friendships with Fayżī and the imperial paymaster Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad (d. 1003/1594). The son of an ecstatic and experiential Sufi who composed devotional poetry in Hindavī, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq would achieve fame for his prolific production of Persian texts upon his return to Delhi that translated Arabic knowledge systems stemming from hadith scholarship. This included numerous collections and commentaries on hadith, a massive biography of the Prophet Muḥammad, a sacred geography cum pilgrimage manual to Medina, and works of theology and ritual practice. In addition, he authored collective biographies of Hindustan’s Sufi shaykhs and the learned scholars of the Hejaz. Over the course of his long career he also composed numerous letters to members of the Mughal nobility, other Sufis and members of the ʿulamāʾ, and even a mirror for princes work of advice for the Mughal emperor Jahāngīr (r. 1015–37/1605–27).

Belief in the auspicious nature of the Prophet’s body is a running theme in ʿAbd al-

Ḥaqq’s work and nowhere is this more apparent than in ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s own account of how he ended up becoming a hadith scholar and the role ziyārat (visitation) to the Prophet’s grave played in it. In a work entitled Zād al-muttaqīn fī sulūk ṭarīq al-yaqīn (Provisions for the pious on

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the conduct of the path of certitude) composed in 1003/1594–5,14 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq recounts his time with his shaykh and teacher ʿAbd al-Vahhāb in Mecca. According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, when he first left India for the Hejaz, his intention was simply to travel first to Medina from Jedda to visit the grave of the Prophet and then, if possible, go to Mecca the following year.15 Indeed, he expresses that in his state of enrapturement (dīvāngī), he had wished to not undertake the hajj or take the title of a ḥājjī but only perform the ziyārat to the grave of the Prophet.16

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq writes that while he was with his teacher ʿAbd al-Vahhāb at first, his purpose in life was unclear to both men. As it happened, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq first ended up undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca with his master, much to his own bitter disappointment.

Indeed, in Zād al-muttaqīn, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq quickly glosses over the hajj and offers a much more detailed account of his waiting to undertake ziyārat to Medina, the rituals and benedictions he was taught to perform by his master, and his actual experience there. In the Zād al-muttaqīn,

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq pointedly noted that it was his master, ʿAbd al-Vahhāb, who told him that upon visiting the grave of the Prophet he would receive glad tidings (bashārat) about his purpose

(maqṣūd) and that he would be ennobled by the witnessing of perfect beauty (jamāl ba-kamāl).17

He is said to have further added that upon ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s return he would turn his attention to his disciple’s state (ḥāl) and whatever was wished for him would indeed happen.18

14 While the original Persian work has not been published, it has been translated into Urdu twice. In writing this section I have compared both translations—see ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn fī sulūk ṭarīq al-yaqīn, trans. Masʿūd Anvar ʿAlavī Kākūravī ([n.p.]: printed by the author with the support of National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language, 2009), 77; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn fī sulūk ṭarīq al-yaqīn, trans. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥalīm Chishtī (Karachi, [n.p.] 1998), 44.

15 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 216; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 218.

16 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 216; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 219.

17 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 217; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 219.

18 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 217; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 219.

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ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq describes his experience at the grave of the Prophet as one that had an important impact on him. He describes experiencing the happiness of being in the presence

(ḥāżirī) of the Prophet’s sanctuary and feeling ennobled by it.19 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq writes that on

Thursday evenings (shab-i jumʿah), the covering on the inside of holiest shrine (mazār-i aqdas) would be lifted up, presumably permitting view of the grave. It was on this occasion that he stood before the site and recited a panegyric (qaṣīdah) he wrote for the Prophet.20 He writes that when he reached one of the final verses, he recited it repeatedly until he began to cry uncontrollably and ended up with hiccups from sobbing.21 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq writes with satisfaction that it was a sign that the panegyric was heard with approval (pasandīdagī) and acceptance (qabūliyat), and that he would obtain his intended goal (maqṣūd).

As proof of this, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq then relates two episodes in which the Prophet

Muḥammad appeared to him in dreams. The first dream took place either the 17th or 18th of

Rajab 998/22nd or 23rd of May 1590 when he was at the mosque near the shrine (mazār) of the

Prophet’s uncle Amīr Ḥamzah near Jabal Uḥud.22 In his dream, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq writes that he saw one of the doors of the Prophet’s tomb (hujrah-i sharīf) open and standing there was the

Prophet.23 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq writes that as he entered the tomb (rawżah) from the door that was close to the Prophet’s prayer niche (miḥrāb), the Prophet took ten or twelve steps, if not more, to welcome (istiqbāl) our author as a welcomed guest (mihmān).24 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq describes how he fell to the Prophet’s feet (qadam), before he was lifted up by the Prophet, his head cradled

19 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 227; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 221.

20 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 227; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 221.

21 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 227–28; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 221.

22 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 228; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 222.

23 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 228; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 221.

24 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 228; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 221.

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by the Prophet’s arm, and embraced.25 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq writes that the Prophet smiled (tabassum) and gave glad tidings (bashārat).26 The second dream that ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq describes took place while he was at the tomb (rawżah) of the Prophet and it lasted a brief moment, which ʿAbd al-

Ḥaqq points out in the context of Sufi thought lasts for a long time.27 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq further adds that the moment (lamḥah) was marked (makhṣūṣ) with such pleasure (laẕẕat) that it defied explanation.28

Reading ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s account, one cannot help but be struck by the significance of visiting the grave of the Prophet in his conception of how he became a hadith scholar. It was his primary reason for wishing to travel to the Hejaz, it was there that he had a vision of the

Prophet, where he came in intimate contact with him in his dream, and it was through this experience that he came to understand his purpose—that is to become a scholar of hadith. It should also be noted that ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s experience was deeply mystical, embodied, and affective—his uncontrollable tears and hiccups, the dream of being cradled by the Prophet, and the brief but powerful moment (lamḥah) in which he had a vision of the Prophet.

This emphasis on the body of the Prophet and visiting his grave is a running theme in a number of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s works. In his monumental biography of the Prophet Muḥammad,

Madārij al-nubūvat va marātib al-futūvat (The steps of prophecy and the ranks of nobility), ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq outlines in luxurious detail the Prophet’s body and its blessed nature. In the opening chapter, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq mobilizes hadith after hadith to elucidate for his readers the auspicious nature of the Prophet’s body and its exudations. His body was a source of healing, sustenance,

25 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 228; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 222.

26 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 228; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 222.

27 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 228–29; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 222.

28 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Kākūravī, 229; ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Zād al-muttaqīn, trans. Ḥalīm, 222.

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and even salvation for the early Muslim community.29 In the same biography, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq puts forth a vigorous moral argument beckoning Muslims to visit the grave of the Prophet—an argument that he carries forth in his work Jaẕb al-qulūb ilá diyār al-maḥbūb (The heart’s attraction for the home of the beloved).30 Indeed, he makes the case in a number of these works for a special form of intercession on the Day of Judgement that would be afforded to those who experienced proximity to the grave of the Prophet.

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s ideas and emphasis on visiting the grave of the Prophet Muḥammad were neither singular nor idiosyncratic. Indeed, such ideas came to be codified during the reign of the emperor Awrangzīb in the Ḥanafī fiqh compendium Fatāwá-i ʿĀlamgīrīyah sponsored by the Mughal court. In the second volume of the work is the discussion on the hajj.

In its concluding portion of that chapter, the compilers of the Fatāwá-i ʿĀlamgīrīyah included an extensive discussion on the necessity of visiting the grave of the Prophet, deeming it obligatory for those who undertake the hajj.31 The section covers the reasons why Muslims should undertake ziyārat and the way in which they should do so. Further research needs to be carried out to understand the connection between the chapter on the ādāb-i ziyārat in ʿAbd al-

Ḥaqq’s Jaẕb al-qulūb ilá diyār al-maḥbūb and the section in Fatāwá-i ʿĀlamgīrīyah.

3.3. Introducing Madārij al-nubūvat va marātib al-futūvat and its Context

While the history of Muslim scholarship on the life of the Prophet Muḥammad in pre- colonial South Asian remains to be written, thanks to the efforts of Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi we are on somewhat more certain footing when it comes to having a general understanding of

29 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat. 2 vols. Lucknow: Naval Kishore, 1880.

30 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Jaẕb al-qulūb ilá diyār al-maḥbūb. Lucknow: Naval Kishore Press, 1869.

31 Fatāvá-i Hindīyah al-maʿrūf bih fatāvá-i ʿĀlamgīrīyah, trans. Amīr ʿAlī, ed. Abū ʿUbayd Allāh (Lahore: Maktabah-i Raḥmānīyah, [n.d.]), 2:113-16.

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what may have circulated in North India in the sixteenth century.32 Take for instance the mid- fourteenth century text Ṣaḥīfah-i naʿt-i Muḥammadī (‘The book in praise of Muḥammad’) written by the historian Żiyāʾ al-Dīn Baranī (c. 684–758/1285–1357).33 The work is known to have circulated in the early modern period, although perhaps not widely given the limited number of known manuscripts.34 Baranī wrote the work soon after his seventieth birthday when he had been imprisoned by the Sultan of the day Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (r. 752-790/1351-88). In the preface to the work, he wrote that he composed the text after his seventieth birthday, as he became weak and fearful of the Day of Judgement. In the hopes of winning salvation, he decided to put together a book in praise of the Prophet by translating works of tradition into

Persian, “so that the blessing of the work might be with him at the time of death.”35

The work is divided into five chapters (bāb), each with several sections (faṣl). The first chapter, divided into fifteen sections, gave an account of the Prophet’s qualities, such as his

“extraordinary wisdom, deep knowledge, gnostic apprehension, and ethical and moral excellence”.36 The second chapter, which covered the Prophet’s behaviour, physical appearance, and personal effects in eleven sections, discussed his “renunciation, piety, liturgical practices, food and drink, dress, sense of humour,” as well as “details of his head and

32 Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, “Muḥammad in South Asian Biographies: Changes in Islamic Perceptions of the Individual in Society,” in Self and Biography: Essays on the Individual and Society in Asia, ed. Wang Gungwu (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975), 99–122.

33 The work has been recently published but I have not had the opportunity to close analyze the text. See Żiyāʾ al- Dīn Baranī, Naʿt-i Muḥammadī ṣallalláhu ʿalayhi va sallam: fī naʿt al-Nabī ṣallalláhu ʿalayhi va sallam, edited by Aḥmad Ḥasan, preface by Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAzīz al-Dīn Ḥusayn (Rampur: Raza Library, 2014).

34 The earliest known manuscript of the work survives from the late seventeenth century. Part of the collection of the Rampur Raza Library, the manuscript was copied in 1083/1672 by Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad of Akbarabad. See S. Nurul Hasan, “Sahifa-i-Naʿt-i-Muhammadi of Zia-ud-Din-Barani,” Medieval India Quarterly 1, nos. 3–4 ([1950?]): 100.

35 Hasan, “Sahifa,” 100.

36 Hasan, “Sahifa,” 101.

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beard, his collyrium, comb, mirror, ring, weapons and his horses”.37 The third chapter, which consisted of nine sections, covered historical details such as “his letters to kings and heads of tribes,” and “his commandments, precepts, and travels.”38 The fourth chapter appears to have been longest. Divided into twenty-one sections it gave “an account of his miracles and ascension (miʿrāj)”.39 The final chapter, which consisted of seven sections, dealt with obligations Muslims had to the Prophet, “including obedience to his positive and negative commands, ensuring and maintaining veneration of and respectfulness towards the Prophet, an exaggerated devotion to him, and acting in accordance with his Traditions”.40

Contemporaneous to the Ṣaḥīfah-i naʿt-i Muḥammadī would have been Baḥr al-ansāb (Sea of genealogies) written by Sayyid Muḥammad.41 A disciple of the Chishtī saint Naṣīr al-Dīn

Maḥmūd Chirāgh-i Dihlī (d. 757/1356), Sayyid Muḥammad lived a prodigious life that spanned well over a century—if one sixteenth century biographer is to be believed—for he is said to have seen the reigns of both Muḥammad Tughluq (725–52/1325–51) and Bahlūl Lōdī (r. 855–

94/1451–89).42 According to Rizvi, he translated the Baḥr al-ansāb into Persian from an Arabic work written by his father Sayyid Nāṣīr al-Dīn Jaʿfar Ḥusaynī, which sought “to portray

Muḥammad as a Ṣūfī in essence”.43 It is unclear how widely read or deeply known the Baḥr al- ansāb was in the sixteenth century for the same biographer described the text not so much as a

37 Hasan, “Sahifa,” 101.

38 Hasan, “Sahifa,” 101.

39 Hasan, “Sahifa,” 101.

40 Hasan, “Sahifa,” 101.

41 The work remains unpublished.

42 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 274.

43 Rizvi, “Muḥammad,” 106–7. Unfortunately, Rizvi mentions neither the source of this information nor whether the work is extant.

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biography but a work “in which an account of the genealogy of the family of the Prophet has been conveyed and the connection to his forefathers has been established (bayān-i nasab-i ahl-i bayt risālat kardah ast va nisbat-i ābā va ajdād-i khvud rā sā̱ bat namūdah).”44

Then there was the late-fifteenth century work Bayān-i ḥaqāʾiq-i aḥvāl-i sayyid al- mursalīn (‘An account of the realities of the life of the chief of messengers’) a prosimetric work written by the Sufi poet and biographer Ḥāmid b. Fażl Allāh Jamālī (d. 942/1536). The work consists of seven parts and is made up of masnav̱ īs interspersed with prose. The titles of the seven sections speak to the esoteric and theosophical nature of the biographic poem: the first is entitled Miṣbāḥ al-arvāh (The lamp of the spirits), the second Aḥkām al-muḥibbīn (Ordinances for lovers), the third Nihāyat al-ḥikmat (The goal of wisdom), the fourth Bidāyat al-maḥabbat

(The commencement of love), the fifth Hidāyat al-maʿrifat (The guide to gnosis), the sixth Fatḥ al-abvāb (The opening of doors), and seventh Sharḥ al-vāṣilīn (Commentary on those who are united with God).45 According to Rizvi the work represents a “poetic representation of the commentaries” of the theosophist Ibn al-ʿArabī.46

A final work worth noting was the Siyar-i nabavī written by Sayyid ʿAbd al-Avval b. ʿAlī al-Dīn b. Ḥasan Ḥusaynī.47 Written for its desired apotropaic effect of thwarting a plague and averting the march of the Mughal emperor Humāyūn, who was on his way to Gujarat, the work is said to have been a summary of an earlier work entitled Ṣifr al-saʿādah by Majd al-Dīn

Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Fīrūzābādī (729–817/1329–1414).48 This work, also known as Ṣirāt al- mustaqīm, was written by al-Fīrūzābādī to offer guidance to its readers about how to fulfill their

44 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Akhbār al-akhyār, 274.

45 Rizvi, “Muḥammad,” 107.

46 Rizvi, “Muḥammad,” 107.

47 The work remains unpublished.

48 Rizvi, “Muḥammad,” 107. No further information about the author or the work is provided.

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religious obligations based on the Prophet’s model. Made up of five chapters, the work covered topics such as ablutions, fasting, prayer, pilgrimage, Friday service, the glorification of God, and the Prophet’s mode of conduct, with the author providing relevant hadith to support these claims.49

If we are to consider this brief survey of the works that were in circulation in sixteenth century North India there are certain broader trends we notice. For one, none of the works aim to be encyclopaedic biographies of the Prophet that are rooted in hadith scholarship. Second, a number of them appear to be written either to present the Prophet as a Sufi or act as commentaries that explicate Sufi ideas. Without having examined these works in detail, one may only conjecture the reason why these two trends may be but perhaps it should come as no surprise given the importance of Sufism in the Sultanate period and its role in the spread of

Islam.

One work that was not produced in South Asia but was clearly being invoked by ʿAbd al-

Ḥaqq was a biography of the Prophet produced in late fifteenth century Herat entitled Maʿārij al-nubūvat fī madārij al-futūvat, written by the preacher Muʿīn al-Dīn Muḥammad Amīn b. Ḥājjī

Muḥammad al-Farāhī al-Haravī, also known as Muʿīn al-Miskīn (d. 908/1501). The reader will note the similarity of the work’s name with ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s biography Madārij al-nubūvat va marātib al-futūvat.50 Muʿīn al-Miskīn’s Maʿārij al-nubūvat consists of four volumes bookended by a short introduction and conclusion. It begins in the first volume with a meditation on the idea of nūr Muḥammad, the belief that the Prophet was created as a primordial light before his

49 Vivian Strotmann, Majd al-Dīn Al-Fīrūzābādī (1329-1415): A Polymath on the Eve of the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 190–92.

50 The work was lithographed and published in the nineteenth century as Muʿīn al-Dīn Farāhī, Maʿārij al-nubūvah fī madārij al-futūvah, 4 vols. in 2 (Lucknow: Naval Kishore Press, 1875–82).

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human birth,51 then proceeds with a narrative of the Prophet’s life from the time of his birth to his first revelation in the second volume, followed by the period before his migration in the third, and up until his death in the fourth. The conclusion is largely a discussion of the

Prophet’s miracles.52

Despite invoking its Timurid antecedent, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s work is altogether entirely different in logic and style. In her study of the Maʿārij al-nubūvat Özgen Felek notes that Muʿīn al-Miskīn was a celebrated preacher in Herat whose fame led him to preach at many private gatherings (majālis). Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī, a contemporary and important figure in Herat’s literary and political scene, described him and audience as “dīvānah” and “ʿāshiq” clearly suggesting an ecstatic Sufi flavour.53 According to Muʿīn al-Miskīn he preached his work in a series of fifty gatherings on the life of the Prophet and he often described his narrative in the

Maʿārij al-nubūvat as qiṣṣah—often used to describe narratives that were performed.54 In comparison to the lively prose of Muʿīn al-Miskīn, which were interspersed with long poems,

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s work is a dryer, more scholastic work that spends more time on offering varying traditions that conflict or agree on any matter than on developing narrative. It is to the work in question that we now turn.

Despite being one of his more famous works, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s biography of the Prophet

Muḥammad has received little scholarly attention. In fact, there is even uncertainty as to the

51 As he put it, “the account of the creation of the light of that chief (ījād-i nūr-i ān surūr)—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace—from the time of the creation of the form of the light (az ḥīn-i ījād-i khalqat-i nūr) until the time of the birth of the Prophet—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace,”—see Farāhī. Maʿārij al-nubūvah, 1:174.

52 Also see Felek, Özgen, “Reading the Miʿrāj Account as a Theatrical Performance: The Case of Maʿārij al-Nubuwwa,” in The Prophet’s Ascension: Cross-Cultural Encounters with Islamic Miʿrāj Tales, ed. Christiane Gruber and Frederick Colby (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 271.

53 Felek, “Miʿrāj Account as a Theatrical Performance,” 274.

54 Felek, “Miʿrāj Account as a Theatrical Performance,” 274.

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correct title of the work. The text of the 1880 lithograph edition printed by Naval Kishore gives the name of the work as Madārij al-nubūvat va darajāt al-futūvat (The steps of prophecy and the stages of nobility).55 However, a different name is provided by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq in his annotated bibliography, Taʾlīf qalb al-alīf bi-kitābat fihrist al-tavālīf (Intimacy with the gentle heart by recording a list of compositions). In it he lists the work as Madārij al-nubūvat va marātib al- futūvat (The steps of prophecy and the ranks of nobility).56 While there is little semantic difference between marātib and darajāt to help us discern which title might have been intended by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, the former would seem more correct for two reasons. First, it is the title he uses in his bibliography, and second, it fits the pattern of rhyming titles more precisely that he, and many other authors, favoured (madārij rhymes more closely with marātib than darajāt).57

The Madārij al-nubūvat was a massive undertaking by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq. Its size alone suggests it must have been a daunting task, especially given the fact that unlike many of his other sizable works it was neither a translation nor a commentary of an earlier text. By ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s own estimate, to copy a manuscript of the work, a scribe would have had to transcribe some fourty-two thousand lines (bayt).58 The Naval Kishore lithograph published in the late nineteenth century ran some 1,355 pages, while a recent edition of the Urdu translation comes in at 1,380 pages.59 The challenge posed in producing a work of this

55 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat (Lucknow: Naval Kishore, 1880), 1:3.

56 Husain, ed., “Auto-bibliography,” 47.

57 Scholars have often listed the title of the work simply as Madārij al-nubūvat—see for instance Niẓāmī, Ḥayāt, 198– 200; and Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, s.v. “ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Muḥaddith Dihlavī,” by Scott Kugle.

58 For ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s use of the word bayt to describe the number of lines see Akhtar, “Introduction,” 213n41.

59 Ghulām Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 2 vols (Lahore: Shabīr Barādarz, 2004).

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magnitude is alluded to in ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s introduction where he explains how the work came about.

It has been argued that ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq wrote the Madārij al-nubūvat as a result of the particular intellectual and religious milieu engendered by policies and practices of Akbar’s court. Khaliq Ahmad Nizami makes this case based on a particularly opaque passage in ʿAbd al-

Ḥaqq’s introduction where the author, making use of densely packed metaphors and rhyming prose, describes his motivations and the circumstances under which the work was produced.60

The section merits a close reading for it also sheds light on the intended audience of the work.

Understanding for whom the work may have been addressed serves to better situate the broader arguments of this chapter within the wide social world of early seventeenth century

North India.

In his introduction ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq confessed his long-held desire to write a work that documented the life of the Prophet and explained the traditions associated with his life. He framed this wish not as a scholastic aspiration but instead as a desire to fulfill an obligation of service he owed to the Prophet:

The reason for assembling and composing this book, which is titled Madārij al-nubūvat va darajāt al-futūvat is that for years, the ardent desire of my soul and in keeping with my experience of my belief (shawq-i jān va ẕawq-i īmān-i marā) was to write a book on the biography of the Chosen One and a commentary on Prophetic traditions (siyar-i Muṣṭafavī va sharḥ-i aḥādīs)̱ —may God bless him and his family and grant them peace— through which this slave fulfills the obligation of service due to him (ḥaqq-i khidmat-i ān bi-jā āvardah va chākarī kardah) and engages himself in completing and bringing it to a conclusion.61

60 Niẓāmī, Ḥayāt, 199.

61 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:3; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:13.

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Perhaps it was because of the daunting nature of the work that ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq sought the help of his son Nūr al-Ḥaqq (983–1073/1575–1663), himself a gifted poet and traditionist.62 However, despite his help, the intended goal of completing the work was not reached:

[My] dear son, the light of the eye of knowledge and insight (nūr-i dīdah-ʾi dānish va bīnish), Nūr al-Ḥaqq—may God favour most exalted, glorified and honoured, favour him with his infinite bounty—was asked to assist and collaborate (muʾayyid va muwakkid) on it but on account of it not being ordered [by God], that is to say, divine assistance was not obtained, the unveiling of the beauty of the intended goal came to a standstill (jilwah-ʾi jamāl-i shāhid-i maqṣūd dar tawaqquf).63

Instead, it was on account of a perceived need that provided ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq with the final push to complete the work.

Since deviation (inḥirāfī), on account of the corruption of the age, had found its way in the prevailing disposition of some of the deluded dervishes of the time; and the intellect (idrāk), on account of the dullness of the mirror of innate aptitude and the narrowness in the capacity of perception (tīragī-i āʾīnah-i istiʿdād va tangī-i hawṣalah-ʾi idrāk), no longer knew the highest rank and holiest station of Muḥammad (pāyah-i arfaʿ va maqām-i aqdas-i muḥammadī), to which no one can obtain a path; and deficiency appeared in fulfilling the obligations of the faith; and there came deviation from the road of right religion and the straight path (jādah-ʾi dīn-i qawīm va ṣirāt-i mustaqīm); it became necessary to fulfill the obligation of advising (ḥaqq-i naṣīḥat) these Muslims about whatever has been written about the affairs and holy attributes of that chief of prophets, leader of the friends [of God] (imām-i awliyā), the most glorified of messengers, master of all the quarries of knowledge from the very beginning to the end, the fountain of the bounty of prophets and messengers, the cause of each virtue and perfection, the manifestation of every beauty, both witness and witnessed, both cause and desired effect, and to make aware those who are without news of his

62 Niẓāmī, Ḥayāt, 257–61; and Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India (Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2004), 2:96–97.

63 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:3; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:13.

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conditions, to awaken those asleep from their sleep of neglect, to bring seekers (ṭālibān) to the path, and to bring lovers (ʿāshiqān) to desire and delight.64

While ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq certainly bemoans what he sees as a corruption of the age (fasād-i zamān), he appears to be more pointed with respect to whom he is addressing. Amongst them are Sufis who appear to harbour certain heretical ideas. These ideas appear to concern issues about the special status of the Prophet. His comment that no one could attain the Prophet’s status may have been an allusion to the millenarian and messianic ideas that appeared to have taken hold amongst the mystics of his time.65 The most famous of these was the Naqshbandī-Mujjadidī Sufi master Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī (971–1034/1564–1624), who made a number of claims that appeared to posit him as equal in rank to the Prophet, all of which ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq took serious issue with in his correspondence with the shaykh.66 The fact that he makes pointed references to a certain “dullness of the mirror of innate aptitude (tīrgī-i āʾīnah-i istiʿdād)” and a

“narrowness in the capacity of perception (tangī-i hawṣalah-ʾi idrāk),” using Sufi technical vocabulary, further suggests an intended audience of mystics or at least mystically minded members of the Muslim scholarly class. Furthermore, his desire to bring seekers (ṭālibān) to the right path (rāh) and bring to lovers (ʿāshiqān) delight and desire (ẕawq va shawq)—all terms that are suffused with meaning in Sufi devotional vocabulary—suggests a specifically Sufi audience.

One of the other noteworthy things about the introduction is how much primacy hadith are given as a source. In the first chapter examined, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq invokes a number of different authorities many of whom belong to the Sunni tradition, many of which were

64 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:3; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:13.

65 For a survey of messianic and millenarian movements and thought in Mughal India see Moin, Millennial Sovereign.

66 Yohanan Friedmann, Shaykh Aḥmad Sirhindī: An Outline of His Thought and a Study of His Image in the Eyes of Posterity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971), 88–91.

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devotional in nature.67 For instance there are the canonical works on Sunni hadith like the

Ṣaḥīḥ of Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870) and the Ṣaḥīḥ of Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj (d.

261/875), but there were also works like the Kitāb al-shamāʾil, written by the great traditionist of the Sunni tradition Muḥammad ibn ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī (210–79/825–92). The work is a collection of traditions that describe the Prophet.68 It is the earliest work on the shamāʾil, that is, a description of the Prophet’s inner qualities and outer beauty.69 There is an esoteric devotional inflection as seen by the inclusion of the work Nawādir al-uṣūl fī maʿrifat aḥādīth al- rasūl of Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad al-Tirmidhī al-Ḥakīm, an eminent theosophist who died in the early third/tenth century.70 Also cited was the Kitāb al-sunan al-kabīr [?] by the Shāfiʿī jurist and Ashʿarī theologian Abū Bakr Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn al-Bayhaqī (d. 384–458/994–1066).71 One noteworthy work cited was al-Shifāʿ bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-Muṣṭafá written by the Malikī jurist and traditionist al-Qāḍī ʿIyād b. Mūsá (476–544/1088–1149), which “aimed at bolstering the superiority of the Prophet’s rank with respect to competing figures of authority.”72 Although a

67 I have found at least twenty-one references to other works he appears to have consulted. However, I need more time to correctly identify these and then draw conclusions as to the corpus of literature he was appearing to distill. Not all sources were written by traditionists, for example, he frequently cites the fifteenth century poet Jāmī.

68 On the author see Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, s.v. “al-Tirmid̲h̲ī.” For the reference to this work see ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:22; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:33.

69 Schimmel, And Muhammad is His Messenger, 33.

70 See Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, s.v. “al-Tirmid̲h̲ī,” and Bernd Radtke and John O’Kane, The Concept of Sainthood in Early Islamic Mysticism: Two Works by Al-Ḥakīm Al-Tirmidhi (Richmond: Curzon, 1996), 1–3. For the reference to this work see ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:26; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:37.

71 Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, s.v. “al-Bayhaqī, Abū Bakr.” For the reference to this work see Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:19.

72 On the author see Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, s.v. “ʿIyāḍ b. Mūsā.” On the aim of his work see Delfina Serrano Ruano, “Why Did Scholars of al-Andalus Distrust al-Ghazāli? Ibn Rushd al-Jadd’s Fatwā on Awliyāʾ Allāh,” Der Islam 83, no. 1 (2006): 147. For the reference to this work see ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:X; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:19, 34.

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fierce critic of Sufis, his work gained widespread popularity amongst mystics and non-mystics.

The work was so highly regarded in the pre-modern period that it came to viewed as possessing talismanic power.73 Finally, a number of Mamluk era works are also cited, which reflects the popularity of the authors in sixteenth century Hejaz when ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq studied there. These included the Fatḥ al-bārī, a commentary on the Ṣaḥīh al-Bukhārī, which was completed in in 842/1438 by the influential traditionist, teacher, historian, and chief judge Ibn

Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (773–852/1372–1449),74 and al-Mawāhib al-ladunīyah bī-al-minaḥ al-

Muḥammadīyah (completed in 899/1474), a history of the Prophet by the Cairene traditionist

Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Qasṭallānī (851–923/1448–1517).75 Having outlined the work’s antecedents, its intention, and sources, let us turn to what the work had to say about the

Prophet’s body.

3.4. Auspicious Corporeality

The discussion of the Prophet’s physical features has pride of place in ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s

Madārij al-nubūvat as he begins his work, after his brief introduction, with the Prophet’s excellent and perfect qualities (fażāʾil va kamalāt).76 In this section, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq offers a lush description of the Prophet’s corporeal body. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq offers hadith after hadith that he

73 Schimmel, And Muhammad is His Messenger, 33.

74 Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, s.v. “Ibn Ḥad̲jar̲ al-ʿAsḳalānī.” For a study and translation of the prolegomena to the work, Hady al-sārī, see Mohammad Fadel, “Ibn Ḥajar’s Hady al-Sārī: A Medieval Interpretation of the Structure of al-Bukhārī’s al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ: Introduction and Translation,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 54, no. 3 (1995): 161–97. For recent studies of the composition of the Fatḥ al-bārī see Joel Blecher’s studies “Ḥadīth Commentary in the Presence of Students, Patrons, and Rivals: Ibn Ḥajar and Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī in Mamluk Cairo,” Oriens 41, nos. 3–4 (2013): 261–87; and “Revision in the Manuscript Age: New Evidence of Early Versions of Ibn Ḥajar’s Fatḥ al-bārī,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 76, no. 1 (2017): 39–51. For the reference to this work see ʿAbd al- Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:5; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:16.

75 Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, s.v. “al-Ḳasṭallānī.”

76 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:4; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:15.

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uses to offer all possible perspectives on how the Prophet looked, sounded, walked, sat, laughed, took care of his bodily functions, and so on. However, it would be a mistake to see

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s discussion of the Prophet’s body as simply a rote regurgitation of all hadith on any given physical aspect. Instead what is noteworthy is how much the physical body is tied to

Muslim discourses on themes as wide-ranging as Islamic cosmology and prophetology.

Perhaps as example, we may take his discussion of the Prophet’s face given it is the first feature discussed in Madārij al-nubūvat and it vividly shows how ideas about creation, the

Prophet, his body, and his community were tied together. He wrote “his noble face (vajh-i sharīf-i vay)—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace—was the mirror of divine beauty (mirʾāt-i jamāl-i ilāhī) and the manifestation of his infinite lights (maẓhar-i anvār-i nā- mutanāhī-vay).”77 In describing the Prophet’s face as the “mirror of divine beauty” ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq invokes particular cosmological and prophetological themes within the broader the Muslim imagination. The idea finds its roots in a ḥadīth qudsī—a specific category of traditions whose verbal expression is attributed to the Prophet but are believed to originate from God—that claimed “I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known; therefore, I created the world.”

Based on this tradition, Muslim theosophers, mystics, and poets envisioned that “God, longing in His pre-eternal loneliness to be known and loved, created Muḥammad as the first mirror for

His light and His beauty, a mirror in which He can look at Himself full of love.”78

As the “mirror of divine beauty,” the Prophet’s face came to be viewed in the tradition as exceptional in its beauty. In his discussion of the Prophet’s face, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq offers a number of traditions related by Companions of the Prophet who were witness to the exceptional beauty of his material form. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq related one tradition narrated by Barāʾ

77 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:5; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:15.

78 Schimmel, And Muhammad is His Messenger, 131.

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bin ʿĀzib, who described the Prophet as “the most beautiful faced and good natured of people

(khūb-rūy va khvush-khūytarīn-i mardum).79 Another tradition included by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq went further in its comparative scope and placed the Prophet’s beauty above not only all people but all objects in creation. This tradition, quoted in Arabic, was narrated by Abū Hurayrah, who said: “I did not see anything more beautiful than the Messenger of God (mā raʾāyatu shāyʾan aḥsana min rasūli allāhi).”80 In quoting this hadith, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq noted that this second tradition was of even a broader scope for it attested that “his goodness and beauty were supreme over all things (khūbī va ḥusn-i vay fāʾiq bar hamah-i ashyāʾ būd),” since Abū Hurayrah used the word thing and not person: “He said ‘I did not see anything (shāyʾan)’ and not ‘any person or any man (insānan yā rijālan)’.”81

Attendant to this cosmology is the idea of the nūr Muḥammad glossed above, to which

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq gestures when he describes the Prophet’s face as the “manifestation of his infinite lights.” Light appears as a common motif in descriptions of the Prophet’s body, as well as discussions of his pre-corporeal existence.82 In Sufi thought, the nūr Muḥammad is a primordial light that stands before God as a column in adoration and pre-dates the creation of

Adam.83 In the Madārij al-nubūvat ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq grounds these Sufi ideas in Sunni hadith. For the claim that Muḥammad was the first in creation (ījād), he quotes “the first thing Allah created was my light (awwalu mā khalaqa allāhu nūrī).”84 For the claim that Muḥammad was first in

79 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:5; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:15.

80 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:5; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:15.

81 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:5; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:15.

82 See for instance U. Rubin, “Pre-Existence and Light: Aspects of the Concept of Nūr Muḥammad,” Israel Oriental Studies 5 (1975): 62–119.

83 Schimmel, And Muhammad is His Messenger, 125–26.

84 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:2; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:12.

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prophethood (nubūvat), he cited the hadith: “I was a prophet when Adam was still kneaded in his clay (kuntu nabīyan wa inna ādam lamunjadilun fī ṭīnatihi).”85

Given ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s commitment to the principle of Prophetic light and thus the idea that his corporeal form was the material embodiment of the nūr Muḥammad, how does it shape his image of the Prophet’s body in his biography? One indication is found in ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s discussion of the Prophet’s shadow, or lack thereof. He writes: “The Prophet cast no shadow, neither under the sun nor the moon (na-būd mar ān-ḥażrat rā sāyah nah dar āftāb va nah dar qamar).”86 I should note here that every now and then, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s personality shines through. For instance, he betrays his punctiliousness when he expresses his surprise that previous authors did not cover the full range of possible circumstances under which the

Prophet did not cast a shadow. He writes, “It is astonishing that these great scholars (ʿajab ast az īn buzurgān) do not mention the lamp (chirāgh) [as a possible source of light]! ”87 He clarifies the matter by offering his own gloss explaining that “One of the names the Prophet is Light

(nūr) and light has no shadow.”88

According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, as the embodiment of light, those who witnessed the

Prophet’s physical form attested to his face’s beauty, luminosity, and capacity to soothe. A number of traditions evoked the image of the sun when it came to descriptions of the

Prophet’s face. One tradition cited by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq described the Prophet’s face as “bright and luminous as if the sun were travelling across it.”89 Another hadith described the experience of

85 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:2; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:12.

86 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:26; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:37.

87 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:26; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:37.

88 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:26; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:37.

89 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:5; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:15.

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seeing the Prophet in the following words: “When you see him, it is like seeing the rising sun.”90

Perhaps more than the sun, the image of the moon was evoked in descriptions of the

Prophet Muḥammad. Quoting from Bukhārī’s corpus of canonical hadith, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq relates a hadith where a companion of the Prophet named Barāʾ bin ʿĀzib was asked “Was the luminous face (rūy-i rawshan) of the Prophet like a sword (shamshīr) in terms of lustre, weight, brightness (lamaʿāt va saq̱ ālat va rawshanī)?” He is said to have replied, “No, in fact it was like the moon (qamar).”91 In another version of the same hadith, this time found in the canonical collection compiled by Muslim, Barāʾ bin ʿĀzib is said to have replied, “No, in fact it was like the sun and moon (āftāb va māh).”92 The mention of the sun and the moon offers ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq the opportunity to compare the efficacy of using the two images as similitudes for the

Prophet’s face. According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, while the sun certainly exceeded the moon with respect to brightness and lustre (sharq va lamaʿāt), it possessed a certain beauty and grace

(malāḥatī), that is not the sun. Moreover, he adds, malāḥatī is a quality (ṣifatī) that brings pleasure to the eye and the heart.93

Here ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq makes a subtle but important shift. He is not only concerned with the question of how the Prophet’s physical body appeared, how it embodied the nūr

Muḥammad, or its degree of luminosity, but also the effect it had on those who witnessed its radiance. That is to say, he is concerned with the impact the material body of the Prophet had on those who perceived it sensorially, in this case visually. The significance of a sensorial

90 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:5; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:15.

91 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:5; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:15.

92 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:5; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:15.

93 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:5; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:15.

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engagement with the body of the Prophet and its beneficial effects is alluded to by ʿAbd al-

Ḥaqq when he makes an elliptical reference to the practice of his followers intently watching his face. The comment comes after ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s citation of a hadith that describes the

Prophet’s face as being like the full moon (qamar-i laylat al-badr).94

The tradition ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq cites is related by Abī Isḥāq, who related that a woman from

Hamadan once told him that she had performed the hajj with the Prophet. Abī Isḥāq asked her to describe his face, to which she responded “Like the full moon and I never saw before him and after him [any] similar to him—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace.”95

After quoting this tradition, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq adds the following: “And for the desirous seeker (bar

ṭālib-i mushtāq), who is always busy in contemplating (murāqabah) his world-adorning beauty

(jamāl-i jahān-ārāy-i vay), on the night of the full moon may they neither become negligent nor free themselves of this witnessing (mushāhadat) for this is real vision (dīdār-i naqd ast).”96 Here

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq links Sufi meditative practices directly with accounts of the Prophet’s physical features found in hadith.

In relation to this, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq cites another tradition, this time providing both the original in Arabic and a Persian gloss. The hadith is attributed to Abī Hālah, who is said to have related “The Messenger of God (rasūl Allāh)—may He bless him and grant him and his family peace—grandest of grandees (fakhaman mufakhkhaman), his face shone like the full moon.”97

The Persian gloss that follows is instructive not only because it translates every word, even those that might be considered loan words or at least intelligible to any Persian reader—and

94 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:6; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:17.

95 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:6; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:17.

96 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:6–7; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:17.

97 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:7; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:17.

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certainly those who had read his work so far—but also because in his act of translation, he not only translates the hadith linguistically but also conceptually, by foregrounding the visionary perception (naẓar) and his follower’s identities as viewers (naẓẓāragiyān): “The Messenger of

God (payghambar-i khudā), glorious amongst the great, glorified, and awesome (ʿaẓīm-i buzurg va muʿaẓẓam va muhīb), in the eyes of witnesses (naẓar-i naẓẓāragiyān) his blessed face used to shine

(mī-durukhshīd) like the shining of the moon (māh) on the night of the fourteenth.”98 This diglossia is noteworthy and demonstrates how ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s biography of the Prophet and his description of the Prophet’s features follow a subtle agenda—one that appears to lay special emphasis on materiality, both with respect to the Prophet’s corporeality but also sensorial engagements with it.

At this juncture, having centered the act of witnessing, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq returns to why the tradition privileges the simile (tashbīh) of the moon over the sun. He explains that “The moon acts benevolently (birr mī kunad) on the eye (dīdah) with its light (nūr) and forms intimate association (uns mī-gīrad), and the heart (dil) finds pleasure (laẕẕat mī yābad) by witnessing it (bi- mushāhadah-ʾi vay). Moreover, it is possible to look towards it (naẓar kardan bi-vay), as opposed to the sun which dazzles the eye (khīrah mī-girdānad naẓar rā) and does not give delight to the heart (ẕawq namī bakhshad dil rā).”99 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s description of the moon’s effects is suffused with the vocabulary of Sufism. It linked the sensorial vision with contemplative vision, with the eyes being the organs for the former and the heart for the latter.100 The act of witnessing

(mushāhadah) thus referred not only to a sensorial perception but also the practice of spiritual

98 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:7; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:17.

99 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:7; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:17.

100 On the heart in Sufi thought see Maria E. Subtelny, “Templificatio hominis: Kaʿba, Cosmos, and Man in the Islamic Mystical Tradition,” in Weltkonstruktionen: Religiöse Weltdeutung zwischen Chaos und Kosmos von Alten Orient bis zum Islam, ed. Peter Gemeinhardt and Annette Zgoll (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 206.

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contemplation.101 The preceding discussion already anticipates the beneficial relationship between the Prophet’s body and his followers. Let us now turn to the discussion of touch.

In the Madārij al-nubūvat ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq includes numerous traditions that attest to the beneficial relationship of mutual touch between the Prophet and those around him. Through his touch, the Prophet imparted blessings on people and objects and, at the same time, those around him benefitted from his auspicious body through tactile perception. With respect to the Prophet’s touch, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq wrote “Know that the attributes (ṣifāt), traces (āsā̱ r), and blessings (barakāt) of the miracles (muʿjizāt) of the noble hands (yad-i sharīf) are greater than that which can be written.”102

In his discussion of the Prophet’s blessed hands (dast-hā-yi mubārak) in the opening chapter of Madārij al-nubūvat, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq relates a number of traditions that prominently feature how touching the Prophet’s hands engaged multiple faculties of sensory perception— tactioception and olfacoception. In a tradition said to come from the canonical collection of hadiths compiled by Muslim, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq relates that “The Prophet rubbed (masḥ) Jābir bin

Samurah’s cheek (rukhsār). Afterwards, Jābir said, ‘I found his noble hand (dast-i sharīf) cold

(sardī) and fragrant (būʾī) as if it was taken out of a perfumer’s tray (ṭablah-i ʿaṭṭār).’”103 In another tradition, which according to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq is found in the works of Bayhaqī and

Ṭabarānī, relates the effect of touching the body of the Prophet. According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq,

Wāʾīl bin Ḥajjar related that “Whenever I shook hands with the Prophet (muṣāfaḥah mī kunam man ān ḥażrat rā), my hand would rub up against his body (badan). Afterwards, whenever I

101 On witnessing (mushāhadah) see Subtelny, “Templificatio hominis,” 205.

102 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:24; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:35.

103 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:24; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:35. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq refers to this tradition once, see ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:30; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:41.

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smelled my hands, they were better than the scent of musk.”104 Yet another tradition relates that Yazīd bin al-Aswad said “the Prophet gave me his hand and I found his hand to be colder than ice (barf) and more fragrant than musk.”105 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq clarifies that the coolness of the

Prophet’s hand (burūdat-i dast-i sharīf) was not a negative quality but a positive one. According to him it was a sign of his body’s good health (nishān-i ṣiḥḥat-i badan-i ān), which was warm and temperate (garam va muʿtadil), and not one that produces chills and sweating (khunuk va ʿaraq

ālūdah mī bāshad) on account of a cold disposition (sardī-i mizāj va burūdat-i ṭabīʿat).106

The Prophet’s touch, mediated by his hand, not only produced coolness and a sweet scent but it was also efficacious for his community. There are numerous traditions that relate how the Prophet helped his community in difficult times through a touch that provided healing, sustenance, and necessities of fulfilling ritual obligations. These traditions are not found in ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s opening chapter on the Prophet’s features, but instead in sixth chapter

(bāb) of the first part (qism) of the first volume (jild) of the Madārij al-nubūvat that are concerned with the miracles of the Prophet.107

One of the ways in which the Prophet’s body was marked as auspicious was the way in which it came to provide for community in their times of need, particularly at moments where there was a deprivation of water. In the Madārij al-nubūvat, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq documents numerous traditions about the Prophet’s body producing water for his followers to drink and carry out ablutions (Arabic wuḍū; Persian vużū) for ritual prayer. Not only did the auspicious body of the

Prophet sustain and satiate thirst but it also permitted Muslims to fulfill their ritual

104 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:24; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:35.

105 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:24; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:35.

106 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:24; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:35.

107 The chapter begins on ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:209; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:229.

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obligations. According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, one of the famous and well attested miracles of the

Prophet involved the springing forth of water from between his fingers (chashmahā ast az miyān aṣābiʿ-i mubārak-i vay).108 In a tradition that ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq assures is found in the al-Ṣaḥīḥayn, the companion of the Prophet Anas b. Mālik related:

I saw the Messenger of God—may God bless him and his family—when the time for afternoon prayers (namāz-i dīgar) approached and people were looking for water for albutions (āb-i vużū) but could not find it. Water for ablutions had been brought near the Prophet, and he placed his blessed hand in the water vessel and he gave orders to the people to perform ablutions from it. Then I saw that water had come out like a spring from between his blessed fingers (angushtān).109

According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq it was then asked of Anas how many people there were who performed ablutions from that water and he replied three hundred.110

In addition to providing the requirements for performing ritual obligations, the

Prophet’s body also offered sustenance in times of stress when no water was to be found, particularly during battles. The Companion of the Prophet Anas bin Mālik related another tradition that testified to the Prophet’s miraculous ability to produce water from his hands, this time with the purpose of quenching the thirst of the camels and beasts of burden of his followers. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq writes:

In a hadith of Ibn Shāhīn, which has come from Anas, it is said “I was with the Messenger of God—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace—on the expedition to Tabuk, when Muslims said ‘O Messenger of God, our camels and animals (chāravā-hā) are thirsty.’ He said, ‘Can you give whatever little extra water (āyā hibbat chīzī az ziyādatī-i āb)?’ Afterwards, people came with some water in an old waterskin (mashk-i kuhnah). He gave the order to bring a cup and afterwards poured the water in it

108 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:220; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:240.

109 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:220; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:241.

110 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:220; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:241.

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and placed the palm of his own blessed hand (kaf-i dast-i mubārak-i khvud) in the water.” Anas then said, “I saw that out came springs (chashmahā) from between the fingers (az miyān-i angushtān) of the Prophet—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace—and we then gave water to the camels and the animals and we carried off the remaining water in it [the waterskin].”111

The Prophet tended to the needs of his community through his body, and specifically his hands, not only by producing water to meet ritual needs and to satiate thirst, but also by healing. Amongst the Prophet’s miracles was his ability to heal injuries, cure afflictions, and offer freedom from spiritual possession through his touch. Take for instance ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s account of the Prophet healing Qatādah bin al-Nuʿmān during the battle of Uḥud:

On the day of Uḥud Qatādah bin al-Nuʿmān received a wound on his eye such that it fell out of his face. Qatādah came to the Prophet and said “O Messenger of God, I have a wife who I love. I am afraid to come into her view spoiled and odious (pīd va makrūh).” The Prophet then took his eye in his blessed hand and placed it in its socket (payghūlah) and said “God, cover his eye with an external form (bi-pūshān chashm-i ū rā ḥilyah).” Afterwards that eye became the better, more beautiful, and stronger of his eyes (bihtarīn va zībātarīn va bīnātarīn-i chashmān-i ū) and it never ached when pain came to the other eye.112

The Prophet not only healed Qatādah bin al-Nuʿmān through his touch and prayer but contact with his hand made his eye the better of the two.

Another tradition told on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās relates how the Prophet came to free a boy of possession by his touch. According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, this tradition was found in the work of ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Raḥman Dārimī (d. 255/869).113 In it Ibn ʿAbbās related that a woman came to attend on the Prophet with her son in tow. She told the Prophet, “O Messenger

111 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:220; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:241.

112 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:239; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:259.

113 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:239; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:259.

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of God, this son of mine has been possessed (junūn dārad) and it stings him (mī-gazīd ū rā). When it is time for breakfast and dinner, he disrupts my time.”114 The Prophet is then said to have rubbed (masḥ kard) the boy’s chest, at which point he vomited (qay kard). According to Ibn

ʿAbbās, out came from his stomach something that looked like a black puppy (sag-bachah-i siyāh) that skittered away (mī-davīd).115

The Prophet’s body could also rid people of other ailments that afflicted them.

Substances such as water that came in contact with him could serve as the conduit of his miraculous abilities in the same manner as his touch did. A tradition about a child who was cured of his inability to speak testifies to the auspicious potency of the Prophet’s body.

According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, a Khathʿam woman came to the Prophet with her son who could not speak (takkalum namī-kard). The Prophet is said to have looked for some water, gargled it

(mażmażah kard), and washing both his hands with it (shast har daw dast-i sharīf) and then given it to the boy to drink. The boy is said to have gotten well (bih shud) right away and become intelligent, so much so that he exceeded others in intelligence (ʿāqil shud chunānkah fāżil shud bar ʿuqūl-i mardum).116

In addition to healing injuries, freeing others of possession and other physical problems, the Prophet could also heal more mundane ailments. Such encounters with the

Prophet’s healing touch left a trace on those who came into contact with him. These traces could be imbuing of particular attributes, such as intelligence in the preceding case of the child who could not speak, or in other cases, the imbuing of the Prophet’s scent, as the next example demonstrates. The tradition involves one ʿUtbah bin Farqad Sulamī who came to the Prophet

114 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:239; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:259.

115 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:239; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:259.

116 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:239; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:259.

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to be healed of an illness and in the process left with the fragrant trace of the Prophet’s touch.

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq narrates:

It has been related by Umm ʿĀṣim, the wife of ʿUtbah bin Farqad Sulamī that “We were four women with ʿUtbah and each one of us were always to go close to him with perfume more fragrant than the other. We used many perfumes but none of us ever reached the scent of ʿUtbah. ʿUtbah never used perfume except only to the extent of rubbing oil (duhn) on his hand and wiping it on his beard and he smelt sweeter than us all. [...] The wife continued that “One day I told ʿUtbah that we make the effort in using perfume (khvushbūy) but you smell better than us. What is the reason for this?” He replied, “In the time of the Prophet—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace—I was gripped by blisters (basṟ ī),” and basṟ ī are small blisters (ābilah-rīzah) that cover the body, “after I came near to the Prophet—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace—and complained about this illness to cure it. [The Prophet] said, ‘take the dress off your body.’ After becoming naked, I sat before him—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace—and then the Prophet blew on his hand (damīd ān-ḥażrat bar dast-i khud) and passed the blessed hand (dast-i mubārak) over my back and stomach. From that day this scent developed for me.117

The connection between the Prophet’s touch and imparting the fragrant scent associated with the Prophet is clearly articulated in another place in the Madārij al-nubūvat. In the opening chapter of the work, in his description of the Prophet’s features, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq included a note that stated: “Each child over whose head the Prophet—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace—placed his blessed hand became distinguished (mumtāz) and well known (maʿrūf) from amongst the young boys on account of a good scent.”118

In the tradition of the child who was unable to speak, the water that came into contact with the Prophet’s mouth and hands plays a key role in facilitating his cure. Substances that

117 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:29; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:40.

118 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:30; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:41. Read khvush for “bi-būy-i khvus” in the text.

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came into contact with the body of the Prophet appear as efficacious a medium to effect miraculous cures, impart blessings, and imbue recipients with positive attributes and sensorial traces such as the Prophet’s scent, as his own physical touch. This included not only water used to rinse his mouth and wash his hands, but also objects that came to be used by the

Prophet. Such objects of are sometimes referred to as associative relics.119 With respect to this,

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq provides a number of examples in demonstration of “the miracles and blessings

(karāmāt va barakāt) of the Prophet in objects (chīzī) that he touched (lams kard) and came in contact with (mubasharat kard).”120

One example of this category of objects were the Prophet’s clothes. According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Asmāʾ bint Abī Bakr, the daughter of the Prophet’s close companion and successor, took out a robe (jubbah-i ṭayālisah) that she claimed the Prophet used to wear. According to

Asmāʾ bint Abī Bakr, the robe would be washed for the sick (bīmārān) and the washing water would be given to those seeking a cure (shifā).121 Another example of an object of use was a drinking bowl (kāsah) of the Prophet. According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq water would be poured into it and then given to those seeking a cure.122 In the same discussion ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq includes the

Prophet’s hair which tucked away in the cap of Khālid bin Walīd, who would never go into battle without that cap for it was said to give him victory.123 Related to this discussion of efficacious media for the transmission of the Prophet’s blessings and miracles are his exudations.

119 Anne Murphy, The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 23.

120 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:244; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:264.

121 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:244; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:264.

122 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:244; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:264.

123 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:244; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:264.

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The blessings imparted by the Prophet’s body had multiple media through which to reach his followers. The auspicious nature of the Prophet’s body could have positive effects for his followers not only when they came in contact with his corporeal form and through objects that he touched, but also from his exudations. In point of fact, his saliva was particularly efficacious in healing sickness and injury and satiating thirst and hunger. In the opening chapter of the Madārij al-nubūvat, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq described the Prophet’s noble saliva (āb-i dahan- i sharīf) as “a cure (shifāʾī)” for those who were sick and injured (khastagān) as well as those who were heartsick (dildādagān).124 As an example, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq cites the well-known hadith of the

Prophet healing ʿAlī’s eyes of their injury by rubbing his saliva into them.125 In his discussion of the Prophet’s miracles later on in the Madārij al-nubūvat, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq describes how a man was cured of ascites (ʿillat-i istisqā) by ingesting earth (khāk) that the Prophet had taken into his hand and spat on.126

In addition to curing illness, the Prophet’s spittle was also capable of satiating thirst and hunger. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq offered two traditions to attest to this. According to the first tradition, “Once some infants who were still nursing (ṭiflān-i shīr-khvār) were brought to the

Prophet; he dribbled his saliva into their mouths and then they were satiated (sīrāb shudand) and did not drink any milk that day.”127 The second tradition involved his grandson. According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, “One day, Imām Ḥusayn the Chosen One (mujtabá)—may God be pleased with him—was extremely thirsty (sakht tishnah būd). The Prophet placed his noble tongue (zabāb-i sharīf) in his mouth and all that day he was satiated (sīrāb būd).”128

124 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:11; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:22.

125 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:11; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:22.

126 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:239; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:260.

127 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:11; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:22.

128 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:11–12; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:22.

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In addition to being able to heal and satiate, the saliva of the Prophet became a site of sensorial engagement with his followers. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq included two traditions that described how the Prophet’s saliva mixed with the water in two wells to turn sweet in both taste and fragrance. According to the first tradition: “A bucket (dalvī) of water was brought near the

Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace. After drinking water from it bucket, some saliva fell into it and the water was tossed into a well. Then, the scent of musk (būy-i mushk) began to emit from it.”129 The second tradition stated that: “In the house of Anas [bin Mālik] was a well. The Prophet dropped some saliva of his into it and henceforth, there was no well in

Madinah that was sweeter (shīrīn-tar) than that.”130

In ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s description of the Prophet’s body, his fragrant scent is a motif that occurs repeatedly. In addition to the senses of sight, touch, and taste, the Prophet’s followers frequently encountered his auspicious body through their olfactory sense. The sense of smell has played an important role in the religious imagination of Muslims. In Persian mysticism, the olfactory has been shown to be the paramount mode of spiritual perception, for it was through scent that the memory of the Divine Beloved was evoked.131 In Islamic medical and horticultural literature, the olfactory can be an important mode of affecting mood and bodily disposition. Aromatics can serve as powerful exhilarants, inducing specific moods such as joy and pleasure. Exposure to such fragrances can have medicinal effects such as facilitating

129 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:11; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:22.

130 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:11; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:22.

131 Maria E. Subtelny, “Visionary Rose: Metaphorical Interpretation of Horticultural Practice in Medieval Persian Mysticism,” In Botanical Progress, Horticultural Innovation and Cultural Changes, ed. Michel Conan and W. John Kress (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2007), 13–35, but especially 22–24.

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respiration, serving as antidotes, refreshing the spirit and body, adjusting one’s humours, and so on.132

In ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Madārij al-nubūvat the scent of the Prophet serves two main functions.

First, his scent serves as a marker of the auspicious nature of his body. Second, the olfactory is an important mode of sensorial engagement that evokes the memory of the Prophet’s body and its ability to impart blessings. In the opening chapter of Madārij al-nubūvat, ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq remarks that “one of the astonishing aspects (ṭabaqāt-i ʿajīb) of the Prophet is [his] fragrant scent (ṭīb-rīḥ).”133 He explains that this scent “was from his essence (ẕātī) [...] and not from the use of external perfume (ṭīb az khārij) for no perfume could compare with it.”134 The Prophet’s scent was exceptional and a number traditions exist to testify to this claim. ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq included one by the companion Anas bin Mālik, which related “I had not smelt any pleasing smell (būy-i khvush), neither musk nor ambergris, that was sweeter (khvushbūtar) than the scent of the Messenger.”135

While scent was a motif that occurred in ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s discussion of the Prophet’s touch, it was in the context of fluid emanations from his body that his fragrance was most elaborately discussed. These included the Prophet’s saliva, sweat, and even urine. Given the preceding discussion of saliva, a few words on sweat are warranted.

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq also provides examples of how members of Muḥammad’s community collected his sweat and anointed themselves with it for perfume. In one tradition, a man wished to send his daughter to her husband’s house but he lacked perfume. He came to the

132 Ali Akbar Husain, Scent in the Islamic Garden: A Study of Literary Sources in Persian and Urdu, 2nd ed. (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 71–83.

133 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:29; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:40.

134 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:29; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:40.

135 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:29; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:40.

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Prophet in the hopes of procuring some. Unfortunately, there was none to be had. However, the Prophet sought a vial and after washing (pāk kard), he took drops of his sweat (ʿaraq) from his noble body (jasad-i sharīf) and put them in the vial, which he then gave to the man and told him to use as perfume.136 Another tradition that comes from Anas which ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq cites relates:

One day the Prophet—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace—came to our house and took an afternoon nap (qaylūlah). Afterwards, the Prophet began to perspire because he sweat a great deal in his dream. My mother, who is Umm Sulaym, grabbed a vial (qārūrah) and took the sweat from the noble body and poured it in. Afterwards the Prophet awoke and asked “O Umm Sulaym, what are you doing?” She replied, “O messenger of God, this sweat of yours that I have gathered is to perfume myself.”137

In another tradition, even the sweat from the Prophet’s armpit is said to have been sweet and smelt like musk. According to ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, several companions had related the following tradition: “the Messenger of God—may God bless him and his family grant them peace—drew me towards him and then [something] like the fragrance of musk (būy-i mushk) wafted towards me from the sweat of the Prophet’s armpits (ʿaraq-i baghal-hā-yi ān-ḥażrat).”138

One way in which scent is used as a vehicle for memory with respect to the Prophet is the way in which it is mobilized in legends associating the rose with his sweat. The rose most closely associated with the Prophet was the pink Damask rose (Rosa damascena), referred to in

Persian as the gul-i Muḥammadī or the Muhammadan rose.139 On account of its exceptional

136 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:29; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:40.

137 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:29–30; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:41.

138 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:21; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:32.

139 Subtelny, “Visionary Rose,” 15.

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fragrance, it was used as a source for distilling rosewater (gulāb) and rose oil (ʿaṭr).140 The origins of the rose in Islamic legends are tied with the account of the Prophet’s heavenly ascent (miʿrāj), during which a drop of his sweat is said to have fallen on the ground and created the rose.141 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq includes traditions about the origins of the rose in his discussion of the Prophet’s sweat and its sweet scent. He provides a number of them with one even providing a way for Muslims to continue to gain access to his scent, and in turn engage sensorially with the Prophet’s body:

Know that several hadiths have come that the red rose (gul-i surkh) was born of the sweat (ʿaraq) of the Prophet—may God bless him and his family and grant them peace. Elsewhere it has come that “the white rose (gul-i safīd) was born of my sweat (ʿaraq-i man) on the night of the heavenly ascent (shab-i miʿrāj) and the red rose from the sweat of Gabriel and the yellow rose (gul-i zard) is from the sweat of Buraq.” It is also related that he said “After returning from the heavenly ascent a drop of my sweat fell upon the ground and from there grew the red rose. Whoever wants that they should smell my scent (būy-i ma-rā) they should smell the red rose.”142

3.5. Conclusion

In the previous chapter we saw how in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the qadam at the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf was kept in a tank on top the cenotaph full of milk (shīr), sugar (shakkar), rose water (gulāb), water (āb), and flowers (gul-hā), which Mirzā Sangīn Beg wrote, was drunk as a blessing (tabbaruk).143 In describing it, he declaimed:

O Khiżr of the heart, salvation comes from drinking this

140 Subtelny, “Visionary Rose,” 15.

141 Schimmel, And Muḥammad is His Messenger, 34–35; and Subtelny, “Visionary Rose,” 15.

142 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq, Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:30; Muʿīn al-Dīn, trans., Madārij al-nubūvat, 1:41.

143 Mirzā Sangīn Beg, Sayr al-manāzil, ed. Sharīf Ḥusayn Qāsimī (New Delhi: Ghalib Institute, 1982), 59; Shama Mitra Chenoy, trans., Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond: Mirza Sangin Beg’s Sair-ul manazil (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), 77.

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The water (pānī) of the Noble Footprint is water of life (āb-i ḥayāt).144

Reading the Mirzā Sangīn Beg’s description, it is hard not to see the echoes with ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s account of the Prophet’s body. In using the Madārij al-nubūvat to contextualize the relic practices described at the start of the chapter I do not intend to argue that devotees at the shrine of the Prophet’s footprint would have read this work. Instead, my aim has been to show how these practices can be situated within a broader constellation of ideas that circulated contemporaneously in Delhi—however rarefied and scholastic.

It is noteworthy also how the circulation of knowledge, objects, and people across the

Indian Ocean came to engender religious devotion in interlocking ways. As hadith scholarship was transmitted, it was translated into Persian and put to use to in local debates, as ʿAbd al-

Ḥaqq’s introduction to the Madārij al-nubūvat shows. On many occasions, the work appears to merge the Sunni hadith tradition with a kind of devotionalism that is linked with Sufism, but with the focus being the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad. A reading of the Madārij al-nubūvat demonstrates the significance of the Prophet’s body as a medium for his followers to attain blessings, healing, satiation, acumen, and salvation. The devotee’s sensorium in particular appears to be shaped with the olfactory mode being invoked prominently. Many of the topics discussed in this chapter no doubt invites more examination, but for the purposes of this dissertation they point to the very material form of Prophetic piety that had emerged in the wake of Indian Ocean travel in the Mughal Empire.

144 Mirzā Sangīn Beg, Sayr al-manāzil, ed. Sharīf Ḥusayn Qāsimī, 59.

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CONCLUSION

Traces in the Archive

In the Risālah-i qadamīyah, Fayżī often utilizes a rhetorical device common in premodern Persian literature that involved the use of rhyming pairs of words—quite often synonyms—to establish a rhythm in the prose that, when read aloud, lends itself to a high rhetorical style. One striking example is his description of hadith scholars as “the account keepers of traditions (muḥāsibān-i akhbār) and the extractors of the traces (mustakhrijān-i

āsā̱ r).”1 In establishing an analogous relationship between akhbār and āsā̱ r, Fayżī pithily communicates to his reader the idea that Prophetic traditions were discursive analogs to his material traces. Fayżī’s conceptualization accords with Brannon Wheeler’s observation that hadith can be seen as textual counterparts to Prophetic relics and that their geographic spread often overlaps.2 It is no surprise then that as the Mughal empire developed and tapped into existing networks of politics and piety across South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean world, there emerged the concomitant circulation and veneration of relics on the one hand and the transmission and translation of hadith on the other, both key technologies of cultivating devotion to the Prophet Muḥammad in early modern North India.

This dissertation demonstrates the importance of taking seriously the circulation of people, objects, and ideas across the Indian Ocean for understanding Mughal history and

Muslim devotion in South Asia. Early modern travel between North India and the Hejaz engendered distinct religious discourses and practices connected to Muslim veneration of the

Prophet. Like the lenses at an optometrist’s, which bring into focus when stacked together, the

1 Fayżī, “Risālah-i qadamīyah,” 37.

2 Wheeler, Mecca and Eden, 75.

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preceding case studies allow us to see how belief in the auspicious nature of the Prophet’s corporeal body were shaped distinctive practices of Prophetic piety in Mughal India. Relics that came from the Hejaz were installed in shrines that became centers of ritual, devotional, and charitable activity. Such sites were invested in materially and spiritually by ordinary supplicants, rich patrons, sub-imperial actors, and local religious figures such as Sufis and

Sayyids. As material traces of the Prophet, these objects were viewed by devotees to be blessed with the same healing and salvific powers as the Prophet’s own body. At the same time, the same networks of Indian Ocean travel that permitted the arrival of relics also were responsible for the transmission of Islamic knowledge in South Asia. While there is a vibrant field of scholarship looking into the translation of Islamic teachings into vernacular languages,3 the

Mughal period also saw the transmission of Arabic knowledge systems, in this case hadith- based scholarship, into Persian. Works like those of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq examined in the previous chapter suggest that the hadith-based tradition, as mediated through Persian, emphasized devotion to the Prophet and at numerous junctures articulated the claim for the auspicious nature of the Prophet’s body. This scholarship was mobilized in local religious debates amongst Sufis, particularly on topics dealing with prophecy. While this dissertation sketched in brief form the broader strokes of this transmission of knowledge, further research on the topic awaits.

In terms of Mughal historiography, this dissertation offers a new way of understanding the court’s religious policies, the way in which imperial power and influence was mediated in different localities, and the role of financial capital in cultivating and maintaining agents of empire. To start, the case studies examined explain the logic of the Mughal court with respect to its receptiveness to adopting an ecumenical approach in matters of religious. In looking at

3 See for instance the works of Asani, Narayanan, Irani, and Stewart cited in the introduction.

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the Risālah-i qadamīyah, which served as the official record of the court’s response to the arrival of the footprint relic, it is clear how the emperor charted a path of caution in dealing with matters of religious uncertainty. The court sought recourse to various authorities but also ultimately the decision was the Mughal emperor’s to make.

The case studies also demonstrate the contingent nature of imperial power, which relied on local actors and social networks to enact its will. The construction of the qadamgāh in

Gujarat was funded by the emperor but the task was carried out and overseen by a local sayyid and nobleman Abū Turāb who had his own interests in establishing the reliquary shrine. Its functioning was therefore reliant on both imperial largess, as well as the involvement of Abū

Turāb’s family. These two forms of investment complemented one another and allowed the shrine to thrive during the Mughal period. The history of the site was closely associated with royal fortunes. As Mughal rule receded from Ahmedabad in the eighteenth century, connections between the imperial court and locality unravelled and the site was abandoned.

Similarly, when it came to the management of the Dargāh-i Qadam Sharīf, while the royal court patronized the site and appointed its trustee in the early Mughal period, there were limits to how effectively it could interfere in the shrine’s affairs. When administrators from the Mughal court wished to remove a local Sufi figure who had set up camp at the site, it saw its efforts stymied. Later the reliquary shrine in Delhi received more donative attention, partially a function of its proximity to the new imperial capital of Shahjahanabad, but also the outcome of the particular form of piety that came to be associated with Awrangzīb’s household.

Finally, the relics also allow us to see the importance of capital in drawing together imperial connections. As Patrick Geary noted, relics are invested with value in the societies in

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which they circulate.4 As we think about the circulation of the qadam that Abū Turāb brought, we begin to see a broader economy of relations, piety, and charitable giving in which it operated and which bound various actors of Mughal imperium together. Afterall, the relic was said to have been sent to India in return for the money given by Akbar to Abū Turāb in order to distribute it amongst the Sharīfs and the residents of the holy sites. Upon the relic’s arrival, the Mughal court invested more capital in the establishment of a reliquary shrine, which when established served to bolster the cultural capital of our sayyid—a transference very much in line with Bourdieu’s ideas of how different forms of capital can convert into one another.5

At this point I would like to reflect on three avenues of further research. The first deals with the emergence and circulation of the narrative that the relic in Delhi was brought by the fourteenth century Suhravardī shaykh Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān as discussed in chapter one.

Amina Steinfels has noted that early hagiographies of Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān make no mention of his bringing the relic and the earliest account in hagiographic tradition of him doing so dates from the seventeenth century.6 As the dissertation demonstrates, the connection dates to the sixteenth century when Abū Turāb made the claim that the qadam in Delhi was brought by Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān. The question that arises is what was happening in the sixteenth century for this narrative to emerge and what was at stake for different compilers of

Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān’s memory to perpetuate this association? It is worth noting that the qadam in Delhi was not the only one associated with Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān. There is one in

4 On the question of the value of relics in circulation see Geary, “Sacred Commodities,” 169–191.

5 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–58.

6 Steinfels, Knowledge before Action, 131–32.

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Uch, Sind that is said to been brought by Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān on one of his journeys.7 In addition, Abū Turāb’s qadamgāh is built in the vicinity of the shrine of one of Makhdūm-i

Jahāniyān’s descendants, Sayyid Muḥammad Maqbūl-i ʿĀlam, which also has a qadam installed.8

Thinking critically about the constellation of hagiographies that contain narratives of

Makhdūm-i Jahāniyān’s bringing back a qadam and the contexts in which these accounts emerged may reveal new insight about the role of relics in articulating Sayyid and Sufi identity, emerging early modern networks of Suhravardī piety, and Indian Ocean travel.

Another avenue that merits further investigation is the increasing phenomenon of

South Asian Muslims undertaking ziyārat to the grave of the Prophet in the early modern period. Based on discussions in chapter one it is clear that before the sixteenth century the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina was not a prominent feature of Muslim piety in North India.

Indeed, as Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence have noted, for many pre-modern Muslims the hajj to Mecca was replaced by pilgrimage to the shrines of important Sufi shaykhs.9 The emergence of pilgrimage narratives, particularly those to the grave of the Prophet, during the Mughal period thus deserves attention. The production and circulation of these narratives not only reflected the reality of increasing pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina but also a deeper desire to cultivate new forms of piety and stake claims to authority. For example, Marcia Hermansen has argued that the production of visionary narratives by Naqshbandī Sufi shaykhs who went on pilgrimage served to bolster particular claims to spiritual ascendancy as well as to put

7 Manan Ahmed, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 24.

8 Ali and Seddon, trans., Mirat-i-Ahmadi: Supplement, 24.

9 Carl W. Ernst, and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 67.

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forward particular ideological arguments concerning Islamic prophetology.10 While this dissertation has examined ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq’s pilgrimage narrative, a broader consideration of texts produced in the seventeenth century by pilgrims from North India would enrich our understanding of Prophetic piety, religious materiality, and the Indian Ocean world.

The final line of inquiry goes beyond the heuristic of Indian Ocean circulation and concerns how Muslim attitudes towards Prophetic relics changed over time. When this project began, an issue I wished to explore was how Muslims thought about the incorporation of material culture, particularly the footprint relic as a particularly material and visual object, in devotional activity.11 After all, given the commonplace understanding of Islam being aniconic when it comes to the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad,12 I was particularly interested in questions of how Muslims living in Mughal India might have viewed the qadam and its relationship to the material culture of other visually rich South Asian devotional traditions.

The footprint relic finds close analogues with the pādas or footprints of Buddha and the Hindu deity Viṣṇu. Footprint impressions deemed to be relics of holy figures have at times attracted devotees from different traditions who interpret the object through different frames of reference. For instance, in his study of pādas found at Bodhgayā and Gayā, in the northeastern state of Bihar in India, Jacob Kinnard has noted that the footprint is a polyvalent symbol of both the Buddha and Viṣṇu, arguing that “it is thus a kind of empty signifier, a most graphic marker of an absence, and the identity of the maker must be imaginatively determined by the

10 Marcia K. Hermansen, “Citing the Sights of the Holy Sites: Visionary Pilgrimage Narratives of Pre-modern South Asian Sufis,” in The Shaping of an American Islamic Discourse: A Memorial to Fazlur Rahman, ed. Earle H. Waugh and Frederick M. Denny (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1998), 189–213.

11 Indeed, the visually striking nature of the relic brought by Abū Turāb was noted by observers for the impression of the Prophet’s foot was white and contrasted against the black stone—see Ali and Seddon, trans., Mirat-i-Ahmadi: Supplement, 24.

12 On the issue see—Gruber, Praiseworthy One, 24–30.

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individual or collective ritual agents who continually respond to these pādas.”13 The footprint found in Sri Lanka at Adam’s Peak is similarly claimed by members of different traditions:

Buddhists claim that it belongs to the Buddha, Hindus regard it as Śiva’s, Muslims posit that the impression is of Adam’s foot, while Christians argue that it is of Saint Thomas the Apostle.14

However, the sources examined in this dissertation are entirely silent on this matter. The most tantalizing information is found in Fayżī’s Risālah, where he describes it as timsā̱ l-i mubārak, or a blessed facsimile. Beyond this however, the sources offer little information. This silence of course does not mean that Muslims were oblivious to the potentially polyvalent nature of the qadam, nor does it mean that others did not see in the qadam a symbol of their own religious tradition. Indeed, such objects could be polysemic, intelligible to members of different faith traditions in ways that could overlap. For instance, in her study of relics associated with the

Qutb Shahi dynasty in the Deccan, Karen Ruffle has suggested the mutual intelligibility of auspicious visual and material culture across confessional lines; for instance in the case of the panjah (the hand with its five fingers extended), which could at once index the hand of Imām

Ḥusayn, as well as the upturned hand of the god Viṣṇu, both auspicious for Shīʿah or Vaiṣṇava devotees respectively.15

One approach to thinking about the question of attitudes concerning relics is to think about the terms of debate as evident in our sources. Indeed, in two of the examples from this dissertation we see Muslims seeking out different sources of authority and epistemic truth when debating the nature of relics. In the case of the relic that arrived at the Mughal court, the

13 Jacob N. Kinnard, “The Polyvalent Pādas of Viṣṇu and the Buddha.” History of Religions 40, no. 1 (2000): 35–36.

14 Kinnard, “Polyvalent Pādas,” 56–57. For Muslim claims that it is Adam’s footprint see Carl Ernst, “India as a Sacred Islamic Land,” in Religions of India in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 559–60.

15 Ruffle, “Guises,” 60–61.

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question its veracity entailed a royal inquiry whose terms of debate were shaped by the particularity of the Mughal court. The inquiry was recorded in the high literary style of the poet laureate Fayżī, it demonstrated certain commitments to particular sources of authority such as the Sunni hadith tradition and the opinions of the scholars and Sufis of Mecca. The debate had a public performative element as did its resolution—the procession that marked

Akbar’s decision to exercise caution and venerate the relic. Compare that with the doubts about authenticity expressed about the relic in the possession of Shāh Valī Allāh’s father.

There the debate is recorded in the form of a Sufi malfūẓāt (anecdote) with the relic’s own miraculous powers, said to have been evident in a public venue, that confirmed its authenticity.16 In the case of Shāh Valī Allāh’s recounting of the challenge posed to his father’s relic, appeals to the Sunni hadith as a source of authority are absent altogether. While such an approach would be fruitful, it is worth noting that it privileges human responses over the power of the physical object itself.

The limitations of this anthropocentric bias in helping us understand the power of the

Prophet’s material traces and the footprint in particular became clear to me during a research trip to Pakistan in the summer of 2018. On a brutally hot summer day I visited the Badshahi

Masjid in Lahore, the city’s largest congregational mosque built by the Mughal emperor

Awrangzīb. The purpose of my visit was to see relics of the Prophet and other members of his household that were kept at the mosque.17 Housed in three small rooms on top of the main entrance to the mosque, the relics drew numerous visitors who reacted to the various objects with varying degrees of reverence, curiosity, and in the case of some, disinterest. The guards,

16 Shāh Valī Allāh, Anfās al-ʿārifīn (Delhi: Maṭbaʿ-i Aḥmadī, 1315/1897), 40–41. For a description of the anecdote chap. 3, n. 8.

17 On the relics see Sachiyo Komaki, “Islam and the Self-Representation of Punjabi Muslims in Pakistan: Case Study of the Exhibition of Holy Relics in the Badshahi Masjid,” Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 22 (2004): 105–20.

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dressed in uniforms but wearing prayer caps with rosaries in hand, loudly encouraged visitors to recite noble benedictions (durūd sharīf) for the Prophet. As I made my way through the rooms, I noticed a woman approach a qadam installed into the wall and as she did, she reverentially rubbed the palm of her hand on top of the glass barrier between her and the qadam. This simple act of desiring physical contact with the material trace of the Prophet at once recalled the supplicants of Mughal India who collected water that had touched the qadam.

Perhaps there was some deep memory or understanding of the efficacious nature of the

Prophet’s corporeal body that trained the modern visitor to perform this affective gesture; or perhaps, there are some powers within these stone-faced objects that a textually trained historian cannot know. Instead he or she can only map out the traces.

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