Smashing the Idols of the Ignorance of Literalism

When did we become literalists? When did we forget that language as a human phenomenon of communication within certain rules of play, argumentation and performance is inextricably polysemous and polyvalent? How can we forget the myriad ways in which we make the world that we inhabit? I think one of the challenges posed is that of literature, the inability to appreciate the different ways in which we narrate ourselves, situate ourselves, locate and make us belong in the different communities with which we associate. Logic is one mode but has its limitations because its strength lies in its precision. Poetry takes us beyond and allows us the imagination necessary not only to see ourselves in others but also see that there is more to reality that meets the eye.

Logic can point towards the metaphysical and the divine but it cannot convince necessarily or grasp the ineffable. Poetry can unveil the deus absconditus, the very hiddenness of the divine and find how that reality is manifest, in the person of her friends, most notably the Imams. They are the deus revelatus understand the different modes in which human language works - reason and logic with the philosopher and theologian, poetry with the lover and the devotee. Here by literalism I do not mean the lexical meaning; as it is, meaning is very much a function of contexts, of illocutionary speech acts as well as what is uttered. I am using literalism as opposed to the ways in which languages figures and configures meanings. Sometimes uses of ambiguity can be far more eloquent.

So here are presented four exhibits countering literalism which are so pertinent and timely for contemporary Muslim thought.

The first is this classic qawwali by the late, lamented Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan:

The second is this wonderful poem by the equally lamented, Syed Ali Mohammad Rizvi, known as Sachey, may God embrace him in her mercy and unite him with his ancestors:

The third is the beautiful laṭmīya by Bāsim Karbalāʾī:

And lastly, and here I could have picked many examples, but I will go with the story of Joseph in the Qurʾan:

PS: I'd like to add this. Many a Qajar era philosopher attributed to the poem to Rūmī. Here in the inimitable voice of Abida Parveen:

Sources on the North Indian Shiʿi Hierocracy V: Tadhkirat al-ʿulamāʾ

In a blog post that I wrote on Warathat al-anbiyāʾ, the first in this series on sources on Shiʿi ʿulema in North India, I noted that the edition included appended to it an edition of Tadhkirat al-ʿulamāʾ of Sayyid Mahdī b. Najaf ʿAlī Riżavī ʿAẓīmābādī (d. c. 1270/1853), a student of ʿUmdat al-ʿulamāʾ Sayyid Muḥammad Hādī, grandson of Ghufrān-maʾāb. As his name suggests, Sayyid Mahdī was originally from Patna and was one of the elites of that city who were closely linked into the networks of Avadh under the nawabs. Important writers on the North Indian Shiʿi hierocracy such as Āqā Buzurg Ṭihrānī, Sayyid Iʿjāz Kintūrī and Sayyid ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī draw upon the Tadhkira. The text that is published was redacted on 7 Rabīʿ II 1263/March 1847 (the edition mistakenly gives the number 1293 in parentheses) in Rasūlpūr in Jaʿfarnagar in Etawah district. The important notices include Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī and his students (heavily reliant on Āyīna-yi ḥaqqnumā - in fact in a number of places he confirms the date of the completion of that text as 1231 H), Sulṭān al-ʿulamāʾ Sayyid Muḥammad his son, his other sons Sayyid al-ʿulamāʾ Sayyid Ḥusayn and Sayyid ʿAlī, Sayyid Muḥammad Hādī (the teacher of the author), and Mufti Sayyid Muḥammad ʿAbbās Shūshtarī (the author of Awrāq al-dhahab discussed here). Among these family portraits is a short notice on a prominent student of Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī, namely Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlī (d. 1295/1878) of whom he says:

he was the confluence of being a sayyid and a perfect scholar, the manifestation of godly character traits and praiseworthy virtues, a perfect scholar and a virtuous sage, insightful jurist, a leader in the teaching of the religious sciences and the leading instructor of the sciences of the seminary, the scholars' resource in matters of theology, the source of compliance for scholars in matters of law, a perfect matter of both poetry and prose in both Arabic and Persian, pious and manly in a peerless manner such that he attracted the pleasure of the divine.

He was born in 1206/1791 in Muḥammadābād in Jaunpur. In 1224/1809 he moved to Lucknow and became a student of Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī. He wrote a number of works mainly in Persian such as a refutation of Akhbārīs, a paraphrase of the Risālat al-dhahab attributed to Imām Riḍā, a translation of the Ithnāʿasharīya on prayer by al-Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī (d. 1621), and various treatises on controversies both internal to Shiʿi circles (on the permissibility of establishing the Friday prayer and allowing a sinful prayer leader to convene it) and external such as the proper mode of performing ablutions for prayer (contra the Sunni Ḥanafīs) as well as a refutation of one of the chapter of the Tuḥfa-yi ithnāʿasharīya of Shāh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. 

Memorialising and Narrating the Community

We often loosely describe works on the lives of Shiʿi ʿulema over time in different places and specialisations as 'biographical dictionaries' but when one considers the modern notion of a biographical dictionary, apart from the obvious point that Hayden White makes about how 'no one actually lives a life' and it is those who come later who ascribe a narrative to the events of a person's biography, most works do not really tell us about the person on their own terms or even provide useful 'biographical details'. Rather the function of these works is the memory and memorialisation of the 'heroes' of the community and narrating a continuous history of the scholarship of that community which links the present to the time of the Prophet whence all authority in an Islamic context issues. 

The recent publication of al-Darajāt al-rafīʿa fī ṭabaqāt al-imāmīya min al-shīʿa of the renowned poet and scholar of the seventeenth century Sayyid ʿAlī Khān Madanī Shīrāzī (d. 1120/1709), a scion of the Dashtakī family of scholars is a welcome addition to the literature of this kind of memorialisation. It has been published a few times before but this is the first scholarly edition based on manuscripts (although not a fully 'critical' edition) and does an excellent job of tracing sources and finding references for text cited. Once again the Muʾassasa-yi shīʿa-shināsī Qum has produced a fitting contribution with this two volume work edited by Shaykh Muḥammad Jawād al-Maḥmūdī and annotated by Sayyid ʿAbd al-Sattār al-Ḥasanī.

Sayyid ʿAlī Khān, also known as Ibn Maṣʿūm, was born in Medina in 1052/1642, and studied there and in Mecca, attesting to the vibrant Imāmī scholarship in the Ḥijāz which nowadays is unthinkable - Marco Salati has published extensively on Shiʿi scholarship in Ḥijāz in the early modern period including on Sayyid ʿAlī Khān. Then like others he migrated to India in 1068/1658, to the Deccan which had links with Shiraz going back at least to the late fourteenth century and he lived there most of his life, and then later having failing to find patronage in Isfahan under Shah Sulṭān Ḥusayn, he spent the last years of his life in the city of his ancestors, Shiraz, where he taught at the Madrasa-yi Manṣūrīya founded in 1479 by his ancestor Sayyid Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad Dashtakī (d. 1497). The best account of the family is the Fārsnāma-yi Nāṣirī written by Mīrzā Ḥasan Fasāyī (d. 1898). He died in 1120/1709 and was buried in the complex of Shāh Chirāgh, Sayyid Aḥmad the brother of the eighth Imām ʿAlī al-Riḍā. 

He wrote two works memorialising the community, one Sulāfat al-ʿaṣr was on poets with his 'poet' hat on, and the other is this work al-Darajāt al-rafīʿa on ʿulema. 

The text, as he states in the introduction, is divided into twelve classes of people:

I - companions of the Imām (first those of the family of the Prophet - in each section, perhaps because he was himself a sayyid he begins with the scholars of the family)

II - the succeeding generations (these first two sections take up the bulk of what he completed)

III - those who narrated hadith from the Imams

IV - on the traditionalists, jurists and exegetes (51 notices)

V - the theologians and philosophers

VI - on specialists of the Arabic language 

VII - on the Safavids

VIII - on rulers and princes

IX - on notables

X - on viziers

XI - on poets (57 notices) 

XII - women 

Of these only I-IV and XI are extant and published. 

He later wrote a second recension which was based on successive generations (twenty classes arranged by companions of Imams and then centuries up to the twelfth) beginning with the Imams, and of which only a section on 49 figures arranged alphabetically are extant (he doesn't get beyond alif/Ibrāhīm). The extant section contains notices on people from different classes - Ibrāhīm al-Ṭabāṭabā as well as Ibrāhīm b. Sulaymān al-Qaṭīfī (d. 945/1539), Ibrāhīm Mīrzā (d. 1577) grandson of Shāh Ismāʿīl and patron of the arts, Ibrāhīm Quṭb Shāh (d. 1580, ruler of Golconda), and Ibrāhīm b. Salām Allāh, his own ancestor. 

In both introductions, Sayyid ʿAlī Khān says that he modelled his work as a memorial to the Shīʿa on Majālis al-muʾminīn of Sayyid Nūrullāh Shūshtarī (d. 1610). The need for memorialisation is due to the fact that he saw the Shīʿa everywhere and in all places and times but because of circumstances they often had to hide their identities. So in a sense like Shūshtarī he has a project of uncovering the Shīʿa of the past.

Despite the fact that it is incomplete (unlike Shūshtarī), Sayyid ʿAlī Khān's work still testifies to the ways in which Safavid thinkers conceived of their history and narrated the memory of the community. It is an important testimony to the refashioning of Shiʿi Islam by the Safavid hierocracy that remains of critical significance for us today. Given the centrality of his scholarly family to this Safavid establishment, one should read his work alongside other scholarly testimonies such as the works of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-ʿĀmilī (d. 1691), a great-grandson of Shahīd II, al-Durr al-manthūr, as well as the anthologies of Sayyid Niʿmatullāh al-Jazāʾirī (d. 1701) and 'historians' such as Mīrzā ʿAbdullāh Afandī (d. 1717) and traditionalists such as al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī (d. 1693). Despite the sterling work of scholars such as Manṣūr Ṣifatgul, Andrew Newman, Rob Gleave, Rule Abisaab, Kathryn Babayan, Said Amir Arjomand and others, there is still much that we need to understand about the Shiʿi hierocracy in the Safavid period. 

The Gnostic Avicenna?

The twenty-second and latest instalment from the Institute of Ismaili Studies’ Series on Ismaili Texts and Translations presents us with a relatively short text complemented with an extensive introduction in English on the Ṭayyibī Ismaili reception ofAvicenna’s psychology and his approach to the salvific nature of philosophy. 

This is not the first collaboration between Wilferd Madelung and Toby Mayer; their previous work on Shahrastānī in particular was quite excellent. 

The text and translation are together shorter than the introduction – perhaps not surprising since the poem of Avicenna on which the commentary is based is a mere 20 lines. Much of the Fatimid heritage has survived and been nurtured by the Ṭayyibī traditions first in Yemen and then in India and their continuing adherence in their philosophical works to the modes of Arabic Neoplatonism first articulated in the classical pre-Fatimid and Fatimid periods is remarkable. The Arabic edition – as ever separately placed at the end of the volume – is based on three quite late manuscripts of Bohra provenance; the annoying thing is that instead of giving us the codicological details of these, the editor merely gives us the references to where we can find these details in the catalogues of the collections of the Institute of Ismaili Studies. However, one striking improvement is in the font and typeface. The shift to Decotype away from Arabic Typesetting is to be welcomed. The Arabic typeface is a much better – one only wishes that they had used a slightly larger font.

The introduction is a major contribution to our understanding of the reception of Avicennan psychology and the role of allegory in the work of Avicenna, taking up a path in Avicenna studies which has been much neglected recently – at least since the late Peter Heath’s monograph of the early 1990s on the (apocryphal) Miʿrājnāma. Given that a number of recent specialists on Avicenna have doubted the authenticity of the Qaṣīda al-nafs or the Qaṣīda ʿaynīya (it is surprising that Mayer does not mention Gutas’ doubt since that will be well known), the translator opts to accept the ascription to Avicenna on the basis of its widely attested appearance in codices, particularly of anthologies. Throughout the work he engages with those who studied the text before including Kholeif, Corbin, and De Smet – and Madelung’s earlier discussion of the text is cited. Mayer’s introduction is broadly divided into three parts, beginning with Avicennan allegory and a consideration of his ‘visionary recitals’ as Corbin famously put it, as a context for the discussion of the Qaṣīda, and then finally an introduction to the author Ibn al-Walīd (d. 1215) and an analysis of the contents of the commentary. He tries to strike an even path between the interpretation of the two major ideological camps of Avicenna studies, between Gutas’ denial of the importance of allegory and poesis and his decided relegation of it to a lower level than the demonstrative, occasioned with his rejection of the spurious nature of some of these textual ascriptions to Avicenna, and Corbin’s whole-hearted embrace of allegory and the symbol (in quite Jungian) ways in which philosophy is articulated. At stake is the very question of what constitutes philosophy for Avicenna and the role of the symbols. Mayer’s discussion provides us with a succinct and highly interesting take on what constitutes philosophical discourse for Avicenna.

The poem itself seems to draw explicitly upon Neoplatonic psychology, of the descent or fall of the dove (soul) from the top of a mountain (intelligible higher realm) where it had dwelt for some time to become imprisoned in this plane (body) whence it seeks to transcend and return to its blissful origin. It originally forgets its happy existence on top of the mountain but gradually remembers and seeks to return. This seems to suggest the pre-existence of the body and is rather reminiscent of the account of the fall of the soul – using the same metaphor of the bird – found in Plotinus’ Enneads IV.8.1 paraphrased and adapted in Arabic in the first mīmar of the Uthūlujiyā (Theologia Aristoteles). The dual and connected doctrines of the pre-existence of the soul and of metempsychosis  - as well as the notion that the soul knows through recollection of what it knew in the higher intelligible world through anamnesis - are ones that sit uncomfortably with Avicenna – he was familiar with elements of them in his own Ismaili milieu but in his own De Anima, especially the first chapter on the definition of the soul, and in his glosses on the Uthūlujiyā, he emphatically rejects them both. The question of Avicenna’s relationship with Neoplatonism remains intriguing; the soul retains a dual aspect for him – but it is one which applies to the soul as embodied in this world and not independent of it.

The final section of the introduction presents Ibn al-Walīd, a Ṭayyibī leader of their kerygma in Yemen; this section begins with a detailed history of his context, before discussing briefly his important refutation entitled al-Dāmigh al-bāṭil (and studied by Farouk Mitha among others) of Ghazālī’s condemnation of the Ismailis. The Ismaili exegete sees the poem as the work of a fellow traveller who deliberately used the tropic approach to hide his true intentions for the text. Elements of Ṭayyibī cosmology can be discerned not only in the utter transcendence of God as hidden but also in the almost gnostic approach to the cosmos as a fallen being that emerged from the demiurge (and not from God directly). Ibn al-Walīd cosmology in which the world and nature arise out of the confusion of the third intellect emanated recalls the schema found in the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ - and this is probably the same time when their encyclopaedia was being enthusiastically appropriated by the Ṭayyibī tradition – and Ḥamīd al-Dīn Kirmānī, especially from Rāḥat al-ʿaql. Other themes that come from the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ include the homologies between the cosmos and the human – the former as the macro-anthropos and the later as the microcosm. Mayer divides the commentary into six parts – the initial genesis of the soul, the ambivalence of its embodiment, a therapeutics for that embodiment inspired by Plato and the recollection of the original state through anamnesis, the happiness of the soul released from the confines of the body, the providential nature of the whole order and why the soul needed to fall, and finally the relationship of the soul and body at different levels of transit. One question that might arise is what is Shiʿi or Ismaili in this whole structure. Apart from the opening adherence, it is clear that the slow self-realisation of the soul can only occur through the guiding hand of the mission (headed by the Imam and his representatives) that acts as a ‘ladder of salvation’ (Sullam al-najāt – which is the title of a work of the earlier Khurasani Ismaili missionary Sijistānī). What the analysis shows is one of the modalities in which Avicenna was received and a key lesson: just because an author comments on a text does not mean he espouses the doctrines presented therein. 

While the commentary is an exegetical one and not an aporetic one, it shifts the Neoplatonising Aristotelianism of the original towards a more determinedly Gnostic reading. The translation itself is fluent and precise and well annotated tracing the sources that are cited – one interesting one is the attestation of the Nahj al-balāgha (the compilation from the early eleventh century of the sermons and sayings of ʿAli b. Abī Ṭālib) which fits with its early reception in Yemen and in Zaydī circles whence it probably went to Ismaili ones. Overall, this Ismaili commentary on Avicenna’s short poem on the soul provides us with further evidence for the dossier of the reception of Avicenna in the later period, often critical and usually taking the reading in a direction removed from the wording of the original. It does not mean that one necessarily rethinks Avicenna as a gnostic or an Ismaili; but it does show the different directions in which later Islamic intellectual traditions took his work. 

More Decolonising Islamic History: Construction of Extremism and the Shiʿi Tradition

Research into the formative period of Shiʿi Islam has come leaps and bounds in the laste couple of decades, inspired in particular by the work of Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, whose main insight has been to posit that ‘ancient’ Shiʿism is marked precisely by those doctrines and positions that the later rationalising tradition (in Baghdad and al-Ḥilla) rejected as ‘extreme’ (ghulūw). This was a particular form of heretication and othering that made sense once the communities were established and sought recognition in the ʿAbbasid and other courts and developed the institutions of learning and structures and hierarchies visible in other Muslim confessions. Or at least that is an element of the Makdisi theory applied to Shiʿi Islam: a confession crystallised once it became a legal school, adopted the hermeneutic of 'scholarly consensus' (ijmāʿ) and reconciled itself to power - in this sense the scholarly traditions of Shiʿi Islam can only be seen in terms of the normatively of the development of Sunni traditions and schools. An example of such an application is Devin Stewart's published doctoral dissertation.

Nevertheless, there remained the question of what made Shiʿi Islam distinct and how could one differentiate between the different tendencies that defined themselves as Shiʿi and what sort of construction was ‘extremism’? Is extremism an adequate rendition of ghulūw? By definition, an extreme is a relative position. It depends on where one places the centre - and even if that is located in the circle of the Imams, it begs the question of which circles and which particular Imams? Amir-Moezzi’s contribution is further complicated by Hossein Modarressi’s groundbreaking study of the formative period in the early 1990s, which posited ghulūw as exterior to the circle of the Imams and as a constant contrast and threat to the moderation of the scholarly community that remains to this day. However, this is predicated upon an assumption of the actual position of the Imams and those close to them, which perhaps we can never fully know. One finds that the rival tendencies of either ‘extremism’ or ‘shortcoming’ (taqṣīr) in the classical period are reproduced in more recent debates and even among the academics studying these issues. Much of those discussions were based on the use of heresiographical literature (both Shiʿi and non-Shiʿi) and re-reading the classical Imāmī sources in the light of ghulūw, including ones that ought to be carefully re-read or perhaps their attribution questioned - this applies as much to al-Barqī's Rijāl, al-Najāshī's Rijāl, and the Kitāb al-ḍuʿafāʾ of Ibn al-Ghaḍāʾirī (which barely seems to betray any sign of being a Shiʿi text). Nevertheless, for some time we have had a number of texts available that testify to the beliefs of the ghulāt, works surviving in Imāmī recensions, Ismaili ones and also among the descendants of many of those ghulāt groups in Kufa and Syria, namely the Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawī communities of the Levant. Asatryan – who has himself contributed by editing one such text – takes advantage of re-reading these sources, in particular those associated with the heresiarch al-Mufaḍḍal b. ʿUmar al-Juʿfī to rethink the formation of Shiʿi Islam and the construction of ghulūw in his work Controversies in Formative Shiʿi Islam. The recent (polemical Christian) publication of the works of the ʿAlawī tradition (Silsilat al-turāth al-ʿalawī) in Lebanon has provided researchers with texts that purport to come from within the tradition that has been compared to the manuscripts available in London, Paris and elsewhere that allow us to study the construction of that tradition. In all, thirty-six texts are now available to us, the best known of which has been the Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla ever since it was published by ʿĀrif Tāmir.

Asatryan's book comprises six chapters that consider four central texts associated with al-Mufaḍḍal such as Kitāb al-haft, al-aẓilla (usually conflated as one text), Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ (recently edited by Capezzone), and Kitāb al-ashbāḥ (edited by Asatryan), their textual milieu and their reception, not least the somewhat blurring of identities and textual affiliations in Syria in the 10^th century. In one recent study on the Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawis, Yaron Freidman has already shown how the nascent Nuṣayrī thinkers of Syria in the 10^th and 11 centuries often wrote recensions of texts for their own community and a ‘taqiyya’ version for the wider Imāmī community that led to the adoption of ghulāt texts into the mainstream of the Imāmī tradition; the most obvious example of this is the Kitāb al-hidāya al-kubrā of Ḥusayn al-Khaṣībī popular among the hierocracy in Najaf (and widely available on Shiʿi online libraries such as here). A brief appendix follows that traces fragments of ghulāt texts extant. Asatryan’s thesis is that the mature Imāmī tradition, especially from the period of the occultation of the Twelfth Imam, made a sharp distinction between the moderates and the extremists and excised much of the material of the latter from their tradition albeit with some elements remaining. Once defined, the ghulāt corpus was othered and put into sharp contrast with the emergence of an Imāmī ‘orthodoxy’, not least as the latter made its peace with the wider ʿAbbasid society. The Ghulāt, on the other hand, remained oppositional, socially disruptive and rebellious. 

Chapter one on the Kitāb al-haft wa-l-aẓilla, earlier studied by Heinz Halm, is a philological and structural examination of the 67 chapters of the text, comparing at times with known doctrines rejected in the Imāmī mainstream tradition as extreme and with other doctrines that were acknowledged. The real problem is one of dating and recension. In that sense, one faces a similar problem to the study of the work often regarded as the earliest Shiʿi compilation, the so-called Kitāb al-saqīfa or Kitāb Sulaym b. Qays, which probably underwent various redactions as well from Imāmī to twelver. The Kitāb al-haft may also have undergone such transformation from a broadly Shiʿi text to a ghulāt (precisely: Nuṣayrī) one, even though the most widely available edition came from Ismaili manuscript collections. 

The other work to which it can be compared is the Ismaili Kitāb al-kashf attributed to Jaʿfar b. Manṣūr al-Yaman. The general source critical problem that we have with texts from the classical Islamic period is precisely being about to pinpoint completion dates, dissemination and the form that the circulated text took since it does seem variations were common in narrative, hadith and doctrinal works (a later example from philosophy are the variants of the elements of Ibn Sīnā's Kitāb al-inṣāf known as al-Taʿlīqāt or al-Lawāḥiq and the other work al-Mubāḥathāt). The themes of the text are clear enough: there is a cosmic drama in which the forces of God and his friends are arraigned in a conflict with the forces of evil. The true friends of God are never extinguished - Ḥusayn and Jesus in this docetist account did not actually die. The material world, and the unfolding of history, is somewhat illusory. The Shiʿi problem of the light of the truth being swamped and set aside by evil in the course of history is overcome by a denial of the reality of history, which in many ways is just a more exaggerated manner of resolution that one finds in the counter-history of the Imāmī tradition. The chapter that follows then examines how al-Mufaḍḍal and some of his associates were othered by the heresiographical literature, especially by al-Najāshī, and contains a section on the aẓilla group of texts (which perhaps should have been a separate chapter). One of the points that Asatryan makes is that ghulūw is a construction whereby the Imams attempted to retain control of far away developments in Kufa. The themes in the textual cycle can be seen in existing Imāmī texts: the cosmogony of the archetypal friends of God and their enemies, the manifestation of the light of God and the shadows, the seven Adams and a nod to cyclical history, spiritual entities and the lights of the throne. There is clearly a common Shiʿi patrimony that then splintered and took on stricter doctrinal meaning and differentiation. One should perhaps see texts such as Kitāb al-haft alongside al-Ihlījīyā, kitāb al-tawḥīd, the Umm al-kitāb, various more theological of the uṣūl, Kitāb Sulaym, and even Kitāb al-mahāsin and Baṣāʾir al-darajāt as constituting a common pool or drawing on a common pool of texts. One could argue that this was the mature Safavid position as exemplified in the collection that is Majlisī's Biḥār al-anwār; a recent series of publications of the sources of this compilation include the Kitāb al-tawḥīd and al-Ihlījīyā attributed to al-Mufaḍḍal. Following Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Jalālī of Chicago, we should maybe call this pool the 'turāth ahl al-bayt'.

Chapter three examines the intra-Shiʿi polemics around this patrimony and focuses on certain key themes: the notion of privileged door-keepers or gates to the doctrine of the Imams, the debate over tafwīḍ and whether it constituted a delegation of divine authority or an arrogation through the divinisation of the Imams, antinomianism and the status of the law, and the nature of written transmission which was significant in Imāmī circles. Chapters four and five shift to the reception of ghulāt ideas among the Nuṣayrīs. The former looks at the role of Khaṣībī, Ḥasan al-Ḥarrānī and Muḥammad al-Jillī in the formation of a Nuṣayrī tradition, as well as their marginal role in Imāmī literature - Ḥarrānī’s Tuḥaf al-ʿuqūl in particular remained a popular hadith collection in Imāmī circles in the middle period as attested by the many manuscripts. The second of these chapters is on the Kitāb al-ṣirāṭ and ghulāt cosmogony. The main point is to show that crystallised divergence of what became characterised as ghulāt material from cosmogonic material in the Imāmī tradition. The primary distinction in the final chapters between the true rejectors and the true believers and between the light that is unappreciated and the darkness remained a binarism that did not disappear from Imāmī texts. Asatyran does a good job of showing how the divergence came about and how the problem of dating makes it well nigh impossible to carefully determine what was always considered ‘extreme’. What I would have liked to see is how the themes and ideas that remained in what was in the 10^th century recognised as ghulūw could also be found in the texts of the Imāmī tradition that retained authority into the middle period and beyond.

We live at a point in time in which sectarianism and anti-Shiʿi bigotry is rampant, and in which the Nuṣayrīs and the Imāmīs are conflated for political reasons, especially because of the civil wars in Syria. What Asatryan’s study shows is that the process of heretication is fluid. That process and the means of heretication today need to be understood. How are issues of commonality the same as points of divergence? Just as the category of Muslim is a label of commonality and gens the question of distinction, such also is the case with Shiʿi. In the current context, no Shiʿi would want to be characterised as being among the ghulāt or associated with the Nuṣayrīs but nor do they necessarily want to be subsumed into an Islam, a Sunni supremacy that fails to recognise their distinction. This is not a new problem. The entire vocabulary of faith is at stake in such a rethinking of tradition. Islam needs to be rethought in Shiʿi terms – and then ghulūw rethought once again. By allowing ghulūw to be characterised historically and normatively in terms of criteria determined by Sunni normativity (such as divinisation of the Imams, rejecting the counter-narrative that is opposed ‘to what really happened’, the law and its discontents), we cannot account for what the Shiʿi tradition understood to be ghulūw and the limits of the ontological status of the Imāms, the cosmos and the nature of human history. Contexts also shift and transform meanings. In an age in which taqiyya remains a political reality in many places but need not hinder the pen, what is the meaning of ghulūw? 

Connected Imperial Histories, Persian and Sanskrit

The study of Islamicate South Asia suffers from being on the periphery of two fields of inquiry, Islamic studies and Indology, and as a periphery never fully participates in either. This is simply because the trend towards more connected histories may have forced historians to the mine the various European archives, supplementing the Dutch, Russian and Portuguese to the British and French, but has yet to compel researchers to be familiar with Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit as well as various other Indian languages – and I stress Indian since in their contexts, vernacular networks and usages these languages, albeit somewhat elite, were very much Indian within the multilingual semiosphere of South Asia. A more connected approach to South Asia in the Mughal period would require precisely the skills displayed by Truschke in her excellent recent book Culture of Encounters. 

And this is because the presentmindedness of much historiography in South Asia cannot break out of nationalist categories brought about by partition: as Truschke shows in her more recent little monograph on Aurangzeb, the Pakistani nationalist historian sees within the Mughals, hardy Muslim invaders forgoing a new community of faith on the South Asian frontier, a community that remained separate from those around and hence reached their fulfillment in the demand and creation of Pakistan, and the Hindutvadi historian for whom the Mughals remained outsiders who could not possibly have seen themselves as ‘Indian’. 

The very category of ‘Indian’ is essentialised in line with a retrojection of strict boundaries of communal affiliation and identification associated with ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’. This is not to argue for a syncreticism in which people in pre-modern South Asia did not know ‘where Hindu began and Muslim ended’ or for a fully fluid concept of identity or even to deny that there was ever any conflict based on religious identification; rather, the ways in which we articulate these two categories as identity and conflict markers today is rather different. Religion and power interact in rather contingent manners.

Apart for the rejection of such essentialising categories, Truschke’s book is a significant event in Mughal studies for a number of other reasons. First, it marks a new trend towards a future philological turn in which researchers for some time dazzled by statistics and more recently by fashionable European theory have returned to paying careful attention to the text and its possibilities; people have once again decided to take pride in their ability to parse and carefully construct editions of texts in Persian and Sanskrit. Sometimes one might argue that the neo-philologists go too far in their rejection of theory. But they do have a point: why shouldn't we consider theoretical formations and practices of textual production and reading that emerge from those cultures that produce the text instead of doing what has become far too common in the study of religion in North America, namely taking Foucault or Jonathan Smith or Charles Pierce or someone else and reading a South Asian thinker on their terms? New philology in that sense could constitute a call to arms towards a new theoretical attitude to the text.  Second, Mughal rulers placed themselves within various traditions of kingship, Chingissid-Timurid, Turco-Persian, Sanskritic and they did not just appropriate Sanskrit literary culture as a mode of legitimation. Other historians looking at the ʿAbbasids have also tended to see their ideological appropriation of Iranian, Indian and Hellenic traditions in terms of their imperial projection of authority. But the cultural and textual practices of the court need not always be sublimated to the question of legitimation as Truschke stresses in the introduction. The production of historical texts is a more complicated process; perhaps we have become bewitched by Foucault via Said into seeing all configurations of power, knowledge and culture as fundamentally constitutive of ideology in which legitimation is the only language game in circulation. Thus Akbar did not have the Mahābhārata translated merely as a means to legitimize his authority – in the same way as Mughal, Safavid and Timurid princes did not have the Shāhnāma of Ferdowsī copied and presented to their peers as a simple way to connect them to this pantheon of great Iranian world emperors of the past. Third, nevertheless, Truschke, like Moin more recently, does represent a shift towards an intellectual historian’s approach in which the aesthetic practices of power are taken quite seriously. Fourth, connected history is about supplementing the modes of inquiry and approach to questions – it is about destroying the canon and not necessarily producing another: it requires reading Persian and Sanskrit, and not replacing Persian with Sanskrit. Similarly, the adoption of Sanskritic and even Vedic idioms and projections of the self did not necessarily mean the Mughal rulers suddenly thought themselves truly Indian as opposed to Central Asian and Muslim nor did it entail pretense for the court elites who were predominantly not like them. They did not necessarily see themselves as ‘ceasing to be Muslim’ or suddenly becoming syncreticists. Even Moin’s theory of the millennial sovereign in which Akbar, Shah Jahan and Jahangir saw themselves as being above the theological affiliations of their subjects might not apply to all the rulers and their allies. 

Truschke explicitly located her own contribution alongside the work of Moin, Busch, and Faruqui. Fifth, Mughal practices of power were steeped in multilingualism and interactions. And this is not a new insight – the sources have been available; it is just that researchers have not availed themselves of them. It is not necessarily that new sources have emerged. Finally, Truschke’s work complements the ongoing Perso-Indica project looking at translations of Sanskrit into Persian. Islamicate societies were the loci for a number of such cultural translation movements, and if, following Shahab Ahmed’s recent plea for considering the ‘Balkans to Bengal complex’, we take South Asia seriously we cannot neglect the works and this process studied by Truschke.

The core of the book constitutes six chapters: on Brahman and Jain Sanskrit intellectuals – and it is striking how much of the material we have on encounters comes from the latter – at court, on textual production for the Mughals which mostly overlaps with the remit of the Perso-Indica project, of the particular interest in the Mahābhārata, of the means by which Abū-l-Fażl projected the sovereignty of Akbar (something often located in the rather simple ‘ishrāqī’ and Akbarian paradigms by Athar Abbas Rizvi and others), on the Sanskrit sources, and finally on how to incorporate Sanskrit into the Persianate world. The first of these is to establish the multicultural leanings of the Mughal elite and complicate the model of their kingship. The second establishes the multilingual nature of the Mughals. The third shows how aesthetics demonstrates the ways in which literary works were used for political effect as advice literature – in that sense the Mahābhārata is similar to Yūsuf u Zulaykhā of Jāmī in its Timurid context. The fourth is one must admit rather Foucauldian in which Abū-l-Fażl mastery of the Indian in his work promoting Akbar is very much about the politics of knowledge, even if aesthetics mattered to those in power and not merely for instrumentalist reasons. The fifth considers the encounter from the other perspective and gives us an insight into Sanskrit intellectual culture and its ties to the Mughals. The sixth shows how the Indo-Persian world (with all the caveats one may consider of the usefulness of the term) was fundamentally transformed by the encounter – and one thinks of various Sufi works whether by Dārā Shikoh or ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Chishtī who could not fail to incorporate the Sanskritic into their Indo-Persian imaginary. Along the way we enjoy the many examples of close and deep textual reading in Sanskrit and Persian that Truschke displays. 

In her conclusion, after noting that Mughal encounters with Sanskrit intellectual culture has been neglected for too long, she indicates precisely some of the reasons why such a study is important and timely. The nexus of aesthetics and power is critical and a central feature of a recent trend in Mughal studies. Of course, the question arises: why did the encounter come to an end? Truschke suggests two reasons – and in fact one would wish to see more argument on this – for this process: the first was vernacularisation and the shift from Sanskrit to Hindi (and Persian remained in literary and more vernacular usage alongside others), and the second was the fall in patronage under Aurangzeb and after. This might have less to do with his infamous bigotry and more to do with the priorities of the court. Then in the 18^th century the various rivals for the Mughal legacy in a declining empire provided multiple outlets of patronage for Sanskritic and vernacular elites (including those dealing with Arabic and Persian) to decentralise the process. 

For those seeking where Mughal studies lies today and its future, they would be well advised to read Truschke and heed her advice for the directions that the field may take. And at least for this intellectual historian it is refreshing to see someone take texts and ideas seriously.