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Transporting Knowledge in the Durrani Empire Two Manuals of Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi Practice

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Transporting Knowledge in the Durrani Empire Two Manuals of Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi Practice 5 Transporting Knowledge in the Durrani Empire Two Manuals of Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi Practice Waleed Ziad The Durrani period, between 1747 and 1823, is often discounted as an ephemeral Afghan imperial interregnum. Yet it had a decisive impact on shaping the intel- lectual and sacred landscape of South and Central Asia. As cities such as Kabul and Peshawar were revitalized by Durrani rule in the mid-eighteenth century, Hin- dustan’s centers of commercial and intellectual gravity gradually shifted westward.1 These burgeoning Afghan imperial capitals attracted Sufis and ‘ulama from Hindu- stan, eventually becoming fulcrums of reoriented intellectual-exchange circuits. The khanaqahs, shrines, and madrasas that made up these circuits provided instruction in an ensemble of esoteric and exoteric Islamic sciences.2 These institutions pen- etrated rural and pastoral communities from Swat to Badakhshan and Yarkand, as well as to such rising regional capitals as Khoqand in Central Asia and Hyderabad in Sindh. Among these networks, the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi order, which origi- nated in seventeenth-century Hindustan, was arguably the most prominent. The reemergence of Kabul and Peshawar as sacred-intellectual entrepôts in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century has been largely erased from histori- cal memory. It seems that these developments have been eclipsed by Great Game narratives that relegate these regions to the status of frontiers or isolated buffer states saddled between British and Russian imperial spheres of influence. Yet two questions regarding the intellectual and religious developments of this period re- main unresolved. First, what types of knowledge systems were transmitted from Hindustan into the Afghan heartlands and onward into Turkestan? Second, what were the mechanisms through which intellectual and devotional capital flowed westward and northward, in the process adapting to disparate regions of a politi- cally decentralized Persianate ecumene? 105 106 The Infrastructure of Religious Ideas This chapter attempts to address these questions through the lens of two manu- als of Sufi practice composed in Persian at the turn of the nineteenth century. The tracts were compiled among two prominent branches of the Naqshbandi-Mujad- didi Sufi order based in Kabul and Peshawar, respectively. The texts in question are the most widely reproduced writings of each suborder and right up to the present day are deployed by disciples within these Sufi networks. Remarkably, the most re- cent reproductions and adaptations of the texts were published within the last few decades in Waziristan and Malakand, the turbulent borderlands between modern- day Pakistan and Afghanistan. As we will see, the two texts provide us with the means to interpret broader questions regarding the transmission and transforma- tion of religious-knowledge systems in the early modern world. The first section of this chapter provides a historical overview of the establish- ment of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi institutions in Hindustan and, eventu- ally, in the Kabul and Peshawar valleys. It then introduces the two manuals by situating them into the broader exoteric and esoteric curricula imparted in the madrasas and khanaqahs of Kabul and Peshawar. The next sections of the chapter are situated in the field of the history of the book, specifically readership studies, which as yet remains an untapped mode of inquiry in Afghan religious contexts. In this respect, the chapter considers how the two texts were produced, consumed, taught, and compiled by synthesizing sciences, including cosmology, meditation methods, and systems of divine-energy transfer. Finally, the chapter turns to the dissemination of the texts by asking how they were reproduced and how they in- terfaced with other literary productions to form a distinctive yet integrated tran- sregional knowledge system. The following pages argue that these two Naqshbandi Sufi texts represent the development of a new, concise, manual genre that merged mystical theology and praxis. Before the advent of a regional print culture, these manuals served as easily replicable tools to facilitate the efficient transfer of complex knowledge systems in the form of a regularized curriculum. Such a curriculum could then be carried via appointed teachers, or deputies (khalifa; plural khulafa), in diverse cultural environments and locales well beyond the Afghan Durrani Empire. The chapter further argues that this genre emerged as a response to the sociopolitical reali- ties of the late eighteenth century. The manual genre was specifically adapted to new urban centers and autonomous tribal polities that required a transregion- ally accredited intellectual and sacred infrastructure. Through such manuals, the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufis helped foster a uniform yet flexible cosmological and methodological system that facilitated the exchange of human capital and texts across a vast territory and absorbed a host of localized practices and institu- tions. This can be likened to the ritual flexibility adopted by the pre-Mujaddidi Naqshbandi Khwajagan of fifteenth-century Timurid Herat, which Jürgen Paul argues in his chapter in this volume was critical to the growth of the Khwajagan Transporting Knowledge of Sufi Practice 107 at that time. However, for the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidis, it was the works of the progenitor of the order—the mujaddid (renewer) Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi himself (d. 1624)—that became the canonical texts of this later network. REEVALUATING THE DURRANI RELIGIO-INTELLECTUAL SPHERE The implications of these claims are far-reaching. As we will see, a critical look at the two texts and the networks that produced them opens new vistas in the nascent field of the religious and intellectual history of Afghanistan and its neighbors. For there remains a dearth of research on the religio-intellectual dynamics of the Kabul and Peshawar valleys between the early Mughal period and the twentieth century, leaving us with a hazily understood period of four hundred years. Even studies that do exist on the Afghan Naqshbandis (arguably the most widespread Sufi tradi- tion in Afghanistan) are concerned with the order’s political involvements, at the expense of their day-to-day intellectual and social functions and pedagogies. To make matters worse, there remains an inadequate understanding of the institution- al and curricular links between madrasas and khanaqahs during this long period. In exploring these yet-uncharted domains, this chapter threatens to displace certain entrenched, binary categorizations among scholars regarding religious au- thority in the region. For example, let us consider Montstuart Elphinstone’s semi- nal account of Kabul during the first decade of the nineteenth century, which two centuries later still continues to inform our understanding of the Afghan religious sphere.3 In reference to Peshawar and Kabul, Elphinstone divided religious func- tionaries into three discrete categories. The first comprised “Moolahs,” a diverse array of religious officials responsible for educating youth, the practice of law, and the administration of justice. The second category comprised “holy men,” which included sayyids, dervishes, faqirs, and qalandars.4 Their domain was that of mir- acles, occult sciences, prophesizing, astrology, and geomancy. Finally, the third category comprised the “Soofees,” a minority “sect,” according to Elphinstone, who considered the world to be an illusion.5 In more recent literature, urban and tribal or folk Islam, along with Sufis and ‘ulama, are also generally treated as separate categories. Although there are merits to these categorizations, a study of Naqsh- bandi-Mujaddidi Sufis and ‘ulama reveals that these categories largely overlapped. Both Sufis and ‘ulama were intimately engaged in social and political functions; taught Hadith and jurisprudence (fiqh); partook in ascetic and mystical practices; and were revered as miracle-working holy men. Their literary productions, as we will see below, reflect a knowledge system in which mystical theology and praxis coexisted and complemented jurisprudence and scriptural study. This system ap- pears to have been widespread in the Durrani period, which in this regard was not unlike the Timurid period as discussed by Jürgen Paul in chapter 3 of this volume. 108 The Infrastructure of Religious Ideas Like Paul’s geographically wide-reaching account of the earlier Khwajagani Su- fis, the case study in this chapter has broader implications for the historiography of transregional connectivity across South and Central Asia, albeit here for the eighteenth and early nineteenth rather than the fifteenth century. Primarily, this study situates Peshawar and Kabul into a broader zone of trans-Asian literary and intellectual exchange that stretched from Sirhind—the source of the Naqshbandi- Mujaddidi tradition in present-day India—as far as Kazan and Istanbul. Moreover, as we will discuss below, religio-intellectual developments in Kabul and Peshawar can be interpreted as part of greater processes of categorization, formulization, in- stitutionalization, and dissemination that were also under way in the fragmenting Mughal domains as well as Turkestan. FROM SIRHIND TO THE KABUL AND PESHAWAR VALLEYS For the last millennium, Sufism has formed an integral part of the religious and cultural landscape of the Kabul and Peshawar valleys. Indeed, the broader region that today comprises Afghanistan has been a fountainhead for the development of Sufi traditions that
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