Sources on the North Indian Shiʿi Hierocracy IV: Āyīna-yi ḥaqq-numā

I first came across mention of this text in the classic published dissertation of Juan Cole on the hierocracy in Awadh (you can view that book for free here). It is an anonymous 'biography' of Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī 'Ghufrān-maʾāb' (d. 1235/1820), the prominent mujtahid of Awadh and a work that in its promotion of him and his thought often denigrated his opponents among Sufis, Akhbārīs and even some prominent Sunni theologians (such as the epigones of the Farangī-Maḥall). It was written by a group of his students in 1231 H just a few years before his death and probably at the height of his power. The text often refers to his as the jurist of the age (mujtahid al-ʿaṣr). The Muʾassasa-yi kitābshināsī-yi Shīʿa in Qum continues to give to those of us interested in Islamic intellectual history in India.

The edition comprises two volumes, once again edited by ʿAlī Fāżilī (who has again done a stellar job of annotating the text) and includes in detail the text that provides a biography of Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī but also of his opponents and in critique of those who also wrote about the hierocracy such as Āqā Aḥmad Bihbahānī (d. 1834/1819), a scion of the Majlisī-Khātūnābādī family who spent time in Awadh and Benaras mainly lamenting the fact that India was not Iran, in his Mirʾāt al-aḥvāl-i jahān-numā. The one feature shared by the two texts is the promotion of the authority of the hierocracy and a clear sense of mission to defend true knowledge and the authority of the jurist. 

[There are two editions, an Iranian one edited by the late ʿAlī Davānī, Tehran, 1370 Sh/1991, and a facsimile one by Shayesta Khan published by the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna in 1992 - pictures from which are above.
There are two two useful articles on this text by Juan Cole:
'Mirror of the world: Iranian "Orientalism" and early 19th century India', Critique 1996, 41-60, and 'Invisible Occidentalism: eighteenth-century Indo-Persian constructions of the West', Iranian Studies 25 (1992), 3-16]

The edition is based on 6 manuscripts - I suspect that the photocopy noted as manuscript 1 is probably identical to the Nāṣirīya manuscript used by Cole (but which seems now to be 'missing'); the others are in the Mumtāz al-ʿulamāʾ library in Lucknow, in Raza Library in Rampur, the former Āṣafīya Library in Hyderabad, and the Subḥānullāh Collection at the Azad Library in Aligarh.

[It has now come to my attention that there is indeed a manuscript of this in the British Library - Delhi Persian 259, fol. 148v-279v - see the descriptor here in the digitised but unpublished volume 3 of the India Office Persian catalogue]

The text itself is divided into three sections (abwāb), and is followed by nine appendices on the lineage, ideas, will and testament and waqf of Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī, as well as responses to critiques of him levelled by others. The first appendix deals with a refutation of Āyīna-yi ḥaqq-numā by Sayyid ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm b. ʿAlī Riḍā Ḥusaynī Linjānī (it is possible that he was an associate of Bihbahānī and a copy of his refutation is in the British Library). The appendix is a refutation of Linjānī by Sayyid Muḥammad Fayżābādī entitled al-Rumḥ al-maṣqūl fī aʿdāʾ Āl al-rasūl or al-Sayf al-lisānī li-qatl al-Linjānī (these fun titles retain the military symbolism of polemics!). Linjānī had studied with the same teachers as Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī in Iraq and was known for his skill in philosophy; he dedicated his gloss on the Metaphysics of Avicenna's al-Shifāʾ to Ghāzīuddīn Ḥaydar, ruler of Awadh. This would also make him a potential rival of the mujtahid of Lucknow. Fayżābādī also claimed a certain prowess in philosophy. The editor quotes sections of the text from a Nāṣirīya manuscript. 

1. The first section, which is by far the briefest, is in praise of ʿulema who are good and practice what they preach and in condemnation of 'bad' ʿulema. In a nutshell, it is a defence of the uṣūlī method and of ijtihād, laying down the conditions necessary for acquiring the status. The message is clear - it is the mujtahids who are the representatives of the Imam in occultation. 

2. The second section is on Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī and comprises two chapters. The first of these is on the teachers of Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī: Sayyid Mahdī Ṭabāṭabāʾī known as Baḥr al-ʿulūm (d. 1212/1799) a major jurist in Najaf with a saintly reputation, Āqā Muḥammad Bāqir Bihbahānī known as Vaḥīd (d. 1207/1791) the arch-uṣūlī who attacked Akhbārīs and Sufis in the shrine cities, Sayyid ʿAlī Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1231/1816) author of Riyāḍ al-uṣūl, and Mirzā Mahdī Shahristānī (d. 1216/1803). The second chapter (called a detailed exposition of the ʿulema of India) is divided into nine sections (tabṣira):

i) on Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī - this includes details on his teachers in India: Sayyid Ghulām Ḥusaynī Dakanī Ilāhābādī, a known philosopher, student of Muḥammad Aʿlam Sindēlvī, who taught in Allāhābād and whose work on the nature of instauration (jaʿl) is extant; Maulvī Ḥaydar ʿAlī Sindēlvī (d. 1225/1810) with whom he read the Sharḥ Sullam al-ʿulūm of his father Ḥamdullāh Sindēlvī in logic - the author notes that he was a Sunni Ḥanafī but praises his father and grandfather who were Shiʿi especially the father Ḥamdullāh who wrote a famous gloss on al-Shams al-bāzigha of Maḥmūd Jawnpūrī; and Bābullāh Jawnpūrī a prominent student of Ḥamdullāh. It also mentions his disputation in Shāhjahānpūr with Mullā Ḥasan Farangī-Maḥallī on issues in Mullā Ṣadrā's Sharḥ al-hidāya. What is clear is that his training in India was in the intellectual disciplines and he gained a particular expertise in this text of Ṣadrā (who is mentioned as the author of the Asfār and Sharḥ uṣūl al-Kāfī which gives us some evidence for the fame of these texts in early 19th century India; the question of the status and fame of the Asfār has not been analysed and determined thus far, not even in Akbar Subūt's book on Mullā Ṣadrā in India entitled Fīlsūf-i Shīrāz dar Hind). Accounts are given of his sons and his ijāza to his son Muḥammad Sulṭān al-ʿulamāʾ, and encounters with his patron Ḥasan Riżā Khān, and his rival 'the leader of the deviant Sufis' Shāh ʿAlī Akbar Mawdūdī, a tafżīlī Sunni who led his own Friday prayer congregation at court.

ii) on his students - a very full account including Sayyid Muḥammad Qulī, the father of Sayyid Muḥammad ʿAbbās Shūshtarī, and others. The author particularly defends the students against the critique of Aḥmad Bihbahānī. 

iii) on his opponents - the author identifies three groups: Sufis especially those who espoused monism (waḥdat al-wujūd), Sunni Ḥanafīs, and Akhbārīs.

iv) on his works  - prominence is given to his polemics beginning with Asās al-uṣūl, followed by Shihāb-i sāqib, then ʿImād al-islām (a full Persian translation is given of the khuṭba), and his refutations of Shāh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. Mention is made of his gloss on the Sharḥ al-hidāya that included 'critique of some of the claims of the bigot Maulvī ʿAbd al-ʿAlī' (this being the famous Farangī-Maḥallī philosopher Baḥr al-ʿulūm d. 1225/1810) and cites approvingly the views of Tafażżul Ḥusayn Khān (d. 1216/1800).

v) on the reasons why the people of India often ignore their true scholars - primarily about the conflict with Sufis including Bihbahānī against the Niʿmatullāhīs (this and other elements of the text that refer extensively to events in Iran suggest to me that the author was either someone trained and lived in Iran or someone who at least had a good familiarity with intellectual developments there)

vi) on the correspondence addressed to Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī - two letters, one from Sayyid ʿAlī Ṭabāṭabāʾī and the other from Sayyid Mahdī Baḥr al-ʿulūm

vii) on the opposition to Friday prayer's establishment in Lucknow (which was a key initiative of Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī) - there are three parts: the first is the letter of Mullā ʿAlī Pādshāh Kashmīrī to the court on the need to establish Friday prayer and to appoint Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī as the prayer leaders; the second is his ijāza to his son Muḥammad to lead the prayer; and the third is the author's debate with Aḥmad Bihbahānī on the issue.

viii) on the reasons for the publication of his sermons and for penning his uṣūlī manifesto Asās al-uṣūl, 

ix) and on his ijāzāt received in Iraq - text of Sayyid Mahdī authorising the teaching of fiqh works and ḥadīth including the chain of transmission, followed by a Persian translation, and then the texts of Sayyid ʿAlī Ṭabāṭabāʾī, Mīrzā Mahdī Shahristānī and Mīrzā Mahdī Iṣfahānī, each followed by a Persian translation 

3. The final section is divided further into ten sections called tadhkiras. These range from the account of the visit of the nephew of Vaḥīd Bihbahānī to Lucknow to a critique of Mīrzā Muḥammad Akhbārī and also a long set of critiques of Āqā Aḥmad Bihbahānī and others who visited or tried to settle in India. This section in particular in rich in the forms of mullah gossip essential to 'memorials' of ʿulema and a great source for the intellectual and cultural historian. There are scholarly analyses and debates. The various sections contain correspondence, vaqfnāmas and other sorts of documents which are invaluable. Lots of details are given of scholars coming for Iran seeking the patronage of the Awadh courts (with letters of recommendation from major ʿulema of Iran and Iraq). 

Large parts of the text read like refutations of Bihbahānī which was written around seven years before. The author responds in three ways: first, in response to Bihbahānī's dismissal of the quality of the ʿulema in India, he proposes that true ʿulema do indeed exist in India who are active and represent the Imam; second, he deals in detail with Akhbārīs and there is a sense that the Iran of Bihbahānī and his own family background is tainted with Akhbārīs - a corollary to this is displaying his knowledge of philosophy and Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī's skill in that discipline; third, he plays up his knowledge of the scholarly scene in Iraq and Iran to show how integrated the Awadh networks were. In all, this is a presentation of the Indian hierocracy as equal if not superior to their counterparts in Iran. A refutation of Mirʾat al-aḥvāl-i jahān-numā.

I look forward to the Muʾassasa producing critical editions of these two texts: Tadhkirat al-ʿulamāʾ al-muḥaqqiqīn fī āthār al-fuqahāʾ wa-l-muḥaddithīn of Sayyid Mahdī Riżavī ʿAẓīmābādī written in 1263/1847 about his circle of the students of Ghufrān-maʾāb and his sons (a section was published as an appendix to Warathat al-anbiyāʾ which I discussed here), and Shudhūr al-ʿiqyān fī tarājim al-aʿyān of Sayyid Iʿjāz Ḥusayn Mūsavī Kintūrī (d. 1286/1869), the famous bibliographer and scholar, who discusses the famous figures of the family. The set will then be complete for a full account of the Shiʿi hierocracy in North India on the cusp of colonialism. 

The value of this source, the Āyina-yi ḥaqq-numā, is clear. Alongside the other works on the Shiʿi hierocracy that I have discussed in previous blog posts, they demonstrate the connected nature of the intellectual history of the Shiʿi hierocracy across Iraq, Iran and India in the 18th and 19th century, a feature that is now lost in increasingly monolingual semiospheres and in a world of (failing) nation-states. They force us to think beyond the confines of nationalist historiography as well as recognising the multilingual semiosphere of the Persianate world. It is also refreshing to see in Iran that scholarship is trying to do just that, to engage in the study of 'Indian' texts as part of their own common heritage in the scriptural, religious, literary and philosophical disciplines. 

From the Ḥadīqat al-shīʿa to the question of philosophy in Najaf

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Mahdī Tadayyun and Andrew Newman both questioned the attribution of the Ḥadīqat al-shīʿa to Aḥmad b. Muḥammad known as al-Muqaddas al-Ardabīlī (d. 993/1585). Adabīlī was a major jurist of his time who had studied the intellectual disciplines with luminaries of the 'school of Shiraz' and along with his co-student ʿAbdallāh Yazdī (d. c. 995/1587) taught these subjects in Najaf. As Khwānsārī (d. 1895) says in Rawḍāt al-jannāt,

On the basis of an analysis of the anti-Sufi section, Newman concluded that he thought the text (at the very least the anti-Sufi part) was actually written by the famous anti-Sufi theologian and polemicist Muḥammad Ṭāhir Qummī (d. 1098/1687) who has earlier trained in Najaf and may well have used the prestige of Ardabīlī to authority to the text. In recent years there has been much interest in Qummī and his influential refutation of mystically inclined philosophy is about to be published by Brill.

["Sufism and anti-Sufism in Safavid Iran: the Authorship of the Ḥadīqat al-shīʿa revisited", Iran 37 (1999), pp. 95-108; Mahdī Tadayyun, "Ḥadīqat al-shīʿa yā Kāshif al-ḥaqq?" Maʿārif 2 (1364 Sh/1985), pp. 105-21]

[Newman places the motivation of Qummī's attacks and the Sufi and anti-Sufi groups to the differences between the Shaykhāvand and Rustam Bēg cabals in the middle of the 17th century - and on this he draws heavily on Kathryn Babayan's work. Of course, one other possibility might be Qummī's resentment at the ascendency of Sufi-minded philosophers and theologians at court and maybe also in Najaf where he studied and where students of Ardabīlī may well have continued the tradition of teaching philosophy and kalām. The role of these intellectual disciplines in the early modern milieu of Najaf, apart from some brief pages in the recent work of ʿAbd al-Jabbār Rifāʿī, remains terra incognita).

Earlier Safavid biographers did not raise any questions - both al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī in his Amal al-āmil, and ʿAbdullāh Afandī in Riyāḍ al-ʿulamāʾ have the same entry on Ardabīlī. Here is the Amal passage followed by Riyāḍ (which tells us something about the influence of the former on the latter):

Similarly, Sayyid Ḥasan al-Ṣadr in his Takmilat Amal al-āmil insists on the soundness of the attribution to Ardabīlī:

However, Afandī does not mention the Ḥadīqa as a work of Ardabīlī in his Taʿlīqat ʿalā Amal al-āmil. And Majlisī is known to have questioned the attribution. Sayyid Muḥammad Shafīʿ Ḥusaynī-yi ʿĀmilī in his continuation of Sayyid Nūrullāh Shūshtarī (d. 1610)'s Majālis al-muʾminīn, penned in the middle of the 18th century, is clear that he was informed that the attribution is incorrect:

[Maḥāfil al-muʾminīn fī dhayl Majālis al-muʾminīn, eds. Ibrāhīm ʿArabpūr and Manṣūr Chughtāʾī, Mashhad: Astān-i quds, 1383 Sh/2004, p. 213]
Sayyid Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Qazwīnī was a major scholar who died in around 1151/1738. Ḥazīn mentions having briefly studied with him. [See Sayyid Ḥasan al-Ṣadr, Takmilat Amal al-āmil, II, p. 11] He was almost definitely a relative of ʿĀmilī.

Some other studies have suggested that the Ḥadīqa cannot be the work of Ardabīlī since he adhered to the doctrine of monism (waḥdat al-wujūd) which is explicitly attacked in the Ḥadīqa or again at least the anti-Sufi section - an article in Persian on this point is here. In his Gloss on the New Commentary on the Tajrīd of Ṭūsī (Ḥāshiya ʿalā ilāhīyāt al-Tajrīd) in the section on affirming the singularity of the Necessary Being, he argues that this and the very reality of being can only be One; everything else is ascribed conceptual existence. It amounts to a position of the school of Ibn ʿArabī who considered only God to be wujūd muṭlaq (the influence could come through the Jurjānī tradition on this question via his teacher Jamāl al-Dīn Shīrāzī's teacher Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī):

Certainly many of the biographical dictionaries point to his saintly character and hint at mysticism - such as Khwānsārī (who refers to the Ḥadīqa as Zubdat al-shīʿa):

While a very small detail, what this might indicate is how biographical dictionaries develop and draw upon each other and especially on the kinship and other networks that informed the scholarly work of the ʿulema. The focus on Ardabīlī brings us to the fascinating question of the study of the intellectual disciplines in the Iraqi shrine cities and considering the intellectual history of the commentary culture on the Tajrīd between the polemics of Davānī and Dashtakī in the later 15th century and the establishment of this cycle as a key teaching text for the Avicennan tradition with Lāhījī and Khwānsārī in the later 17th century. In my current research project one of the questions I am considering is precisely the Tajrīd cycle and its later manifestations from the Safavid period onwards.

Decolonising Islamic history through Shiʿi Texts

For over two decades now, Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi has produced a number of short studies that have challenged us with a radically different picture of Twelver Shiʿi Islam as an oppositional, alternative spiritual movement rooted in an esoteric vision of reality and comprehension of the scripture in which the everlasting countenance of God, the Imam, is present. Religion therefore is about the relationship that believers have with the Imam, and the ethical imperatives of what they do to him and to one other (who are the ahl al-walāya, the people cleaving to the sanctified nature of this ultimate Friend of God). However, this does not mean that like Corbin, he places history to one side all the while criticizing the historicism of much intellectual history; rather, his analyses of the texts are designed to rethink how we conceive of the history that is often immanent in those recensions. In so doing, he has forced us to reconsider how we analyse the contestations of Islam, identity and revelation in the classical period. His latest book is the second collection of his articles, originally published in French in 2011, and in this case rendered into English by the renowned poet – and emeritus professor of McGill University, Eric Ormsby. 

Unlike the first collection, which was more thematic constituting a series of studies in the Twelver doctrine of the Imam (imamology), this one introduces us to his readings of five classical Shiʿi texts that exemplify the nature of this esoteric tradition. While one or two of these may well be the great works of the early period, I have reservations about the others which begs the question of some analysis of the selection.  Crucially, as before, the author is making an argument about the very method by which we ought to study the history of Islam between the history of the early conflicts – what earlier was partly ascribed to the ‘sectarian milieu’ – and the redaction and canonization of Muslim scriptures, both the Qurʾan and the hadith. To put it more bluntly, the emergent ‘orthodox’ picture of early Islam that became the Sunni tradition is rather partial and too ‘neat’ a description of how the revelation was received, not least with its myth of the ʿUthmānic recension of the Qurʾan and its position on the probity and respectability of the companions of the prophet, both of which are key positions, that Amir-Moezzi argues, ought to be rejected if we take the early Shiʿi texts seriously since they categorically affirm the falsification of the revelation by the ‘orthodox’ caliphs and point out the shortcomings of such a romantic vision of a concordant early generation. The theme thus of this volume is how were the scriptures of the Qurʾan and hadith received, glossed, commented upon by the early Shiʿi scholarly community and what sort of hermeneutics did they need to apply to make sense of the violence and mess of the early history of Islam. 

The first text is Kitāb Sulaym ibn Qays (also known as Kitāb al-Saqīfa), arguably at its core the earliest work of Shiʿi literature – and indeed of any Muslim literature – extant, and the subject of recent studies by Robert Gleave, Tamima Bayhom-Daou, and the late Patricia Crone (as well as Maria Dakake before). This work demonstrates for the author the violence of what became the normative Muslim (read: Sunni, caliphal) history and the early articulation of a Shiʿi counter-history of the usurpation, injustice and evil of history. Amir-Moezzi emphasizes the popularity of this counter-narrative, briefly examines the debate on the reliability of its ascription to such a person (and whether Sulaym even existed), translates some key passages and provides the full table of contents of the 98 traditions given in the text produced in a critical edition in the late 1990s by Khūʾīnī. But this is just an introduction. I would have liked to see some further analysis of what this text – with its various layers which in themselves require some discussion – tells us about the very notion of Shiʿi history, of the nature of transmission of texts especially written transmission of which this is a prominent example, and what the reception history of this text tells us about issues such as the importance given to taqiyya in different periods of history including today (since often in seminary contexts, clerics will tend to usher people away from the text, a perhaps judicial thing given our sectarian, anti-Shiʿi times).

The second text is the Kitāb al-qirāʾāt or Kitāb al-tanzīl wa-l-taḥrīf of al-Sayyārī from the 3^rd/9^th century; this chapter is a version of the introduction to the edition of the text produced by Amir-Moezzi and Etan Kohlberg. As they say in the opening, the history of prophecy is also one of the falsification of the prophetic message The author uses this text to show how an exegesis can in fact be a history of this process of falsification that further academic studies that have raised questions about the redaction of the ʿUthmānic recension of the Qurʾan. However, the arguments of revisionist approaches to the codification of the text that point towards the role of al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf and the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (as presented in the work of Alfred de Premare among others) is not quite that of the early Shiʿi accusations of falsification; the revisionists are not talking about an Ur-text that is changed but a late text that emerges from the sectarian milieu and conflicts of understanding, while the Shiʿi accusers insisted that there was a pristine revelation collected in a book and that scripture was with ʿAlī (who in effect defined it by his redaction as well he could given his closeness to the recipient of the revelation).  I have some criticisms of the way in which the edition itself is done with the assumption of the normativity of the reading of Ḥafṣ (which is not present in the manuscript) but that does not arise in this book but in the Brill publication of the edition itself. Some comment would also be pertinent on the relative obscurity of the text in Shiʿi scholarly circles (by comparison to the others discussed in this book).

The third text is the (probably Zaydī) exegesis of al-Ḥibarī again from the 3^rd/9^th century. The problem of the absence of the names of the Imams and their enemies from the Qurʾan, a clear revelation of the reality of things as they are, meant that a hermeneutics was required that would decode and uncover meaning within the ʿUthmānic recension that demonstrates that the silences and absences of the Qurʾan needed to be articulated and made to speak by the Imam. To recall one early polemical exchange, the Qurʾan as text was itself not enough for the community of Muḥammad. One can see this process of reading in a number of the classical Shiʿi exegeses but once again one wonders about the actual importance of al-Ḥibarī for the scholarly tradition.

The fourth text, Baṣāʾir al-darajāt of the 3^rd/9^th century Qummī tradent, al-Ṣaffār raises the key thematic of imamology: the gnosis of the Imam and the need for believers to recognize this as central to their status. Amir-Moezzi includes a table of contents of the work. For him, like other early works from the Ismaili and what became the ʿAlawī-Nusayrī tradition, al-Ṣaffār’s collection shows how the early Shiʿi community was a gnostic one with a strong initatic tradition; in fact the ‘anomalies’, as he puts, in the text, may in fact provide further evidence for this since only the initiated would be able to distinguish what is correctly transmitted from what is intended to deceive. But this does not seem so convincing – and a comparison with al-Kāfī of Kulaynī (discussed in the final chapter) shows the extent of the overlap of material. The author similarly does not discuss directly some of the recent scholarly and seminarian debates on the authenticity of the ascription of the text (raised, for example, by Hassan Ansari and Sayyid Kamāl al-Ḥaydarī).

The final (and longest) chapter – co-authored with Hassan Ansari – is on Kulaynī and is the first major contribution in a European language (there is already an extensive highly useful academic literature on him in Arabic and Persian; see also Ansari, L'imamat et l'occultation salon l'imamisme, Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp. 27-36). One sees the hand of Ansari in the historically sophisticated contextualization of the work in this chapter. The main point that they wish to present is that this first of the classical four books (I still await a proper study of whence this notion of the Shiʿi canon of four books) represents the sufficient source to establish Shiʿi Islam as an independent religious tradition. This is taken up in the epilogue – given that those who had most vehemently opposed Muḥammad became the guardians of Islam, the propaganda, censorship and falsification of that imperial Islam would have to be opposed by articulating an alternative vision, indeed religion which placed at its centre the Imam as the countenance and revelation of the divine.

Amir-Moezzi’s work fits within the broad approaches of rethinking both the sources for the early period and the pivotal points of conflict to show how the master narrative of Sunni historiography (taken up by Orientalist scholarship) must be questioned and ‘de-colonised’. Far too much of the study of Islam is taken up with Sunni normatively, and any serious study that opens up the question  of what we understand by Islam in the many situations and contexts in which we encounter it, and concurrently what it means to be 'Islamic' ought to look far and wide at sources that address these questions, taking us, if necessary, out of our comfort zone. While many might criticize whether the author is sufficiently source critical of the texts which he is examining (one thinks back to his recanting back and forth with Karim Crow on method and today's sectarian milieu in which the excavation of the more esoteric aspects of the Shiʿi tradition arguably leads to the targeting of innocents), there is little doubt that those studying early Islam will profit from reading this work. The historian studying early Islam needs to cast his net for sources far and wide: Arabic traditions from the different trajectories that became Sunni, Sunni traditionalists, various types of Shiʿa, Ibāḍī and so forth, as well as the many other sources in Syriac and other languages and traditions which we know through the work of Robert Hoyland, David Thomas, Kevin van Bladel, Sidney Shoemaker, Philip Wood, Mathieu Tillier, David Wasserstrom, Michael Philip Penn, Antoine Borrut and many others. The next obvious step - already initiated - is to read the Arabic Shiʿi sources alongside the others to uncover other narratives of what constitutes the sacred tradition of Islam. 

Ḥurūfīs: Esoteric Shīʿa or what exactly?

I guess the Shiʿi Heritage Series of the Institute of Ismaili Studies takes a rather broad understanding of 'Shiʿi heritage' since they have published works which do not, on the surface, look like they contribute anything to the study of any of the major branches of Shiʿi Islam. Most recently they have published a volume on the ghulāt which raises interesting questions about the relationship of those texts and circles in Kufa and elsewhere in Iraq and Syria with the nascent communities of Ismailis and ʿAlawī-Nuṣayrīs, but still one wonders whether one can look at elements of the ghulāt of the early period as experiments in spirituality that did not survive. Orkhan Mir-Kasimov's work raises a more intriguing question about a group, a short-lived but highly influential community of esotericists committed to the sacred roots of the Persian language as well as elements of devotion and attachment to the ahl al-bayt that was characteristic of esotericism in the middle period. 

The study of Islamic intellectual history, while existing in pockets of scholarship before, has increasingly become a dominant aspect of the study of Islam. We have moved from some piecemeal approaches to the classical period to a more carefully nuanced and thick understanding of the middle period, that critical time from the wane of the ʿAbbasids to the rise of the Gunpowder Empires. In particular, the ‘Chicago school’ has expended much effort in making sense of the critical messianic moment from around the time of Timur, the ‘lord of the junction’ through to the ‘messianic sovereigns’ of the Timurid and later Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires. Mir-Kasimov's book concerns one of the key intellectual developments of that period, namely esoteric political theology and lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), which later informed similar developments in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and gives us one, albeit marginal and rather antinomian, glimpse into the important of the esoteric and the occult learning that was a critical element of the scholarly underground even among elites through the middle and early modern periods in the world of Islam. Although at times one wonders whether we have, in the current esotericist and occultist turn in intellectual history, overdone the significance of the esoteric as the master science. Mir-Kasimov’s magisterial and highly textual study of Fażlallāh Astarābādī (d. 1394) and his movement of the Ḥurūfīya, neither mainstream Shiʿi nor ʿAlid-loyalist Sufis nor even complete esotericists outside the pale of Islam, makes a contribution to the processes by which elite discourses on hermeneutics of reading the word and the world filtered into more subaltern and vernacular understandings of the cosmos and the human within and the divine both within and without. It is therefore no accident that the careful lettrist calculations that places letters as a primordial signifiers and producers of the cosmos, their manipulation to make sense of the cosmos and wield power, and their role in the folding up of the cosmos focused upon the Persian alphabet and vernacular. After all lettrism need not be confined to learned disquisitions on the letters of a particular language such as Arabic – but unlike other forms of lettrism found in the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ or al-Būnī or others, there is something peculiarly transgressive about the insistence of Astarābādī on the primordial nature of the Persian language. In recent years, Shahzad Bashir and others have contributed to our understanding of this movement, not least motivated by the desire to make sense of the varying manifestations of Sufism in the messianic moment and its relationship with forms of Shiʿism or ʿAlid loyalism. For those who are interested in these processes and the way in which this impinges upon vernacular learning, Mir-Kasimov’s study will be essential. Most importantly by insisting that he is studying the ‘original’ teaching, while holding one hostage to a certain hubris, he is differentiating the later reception and understanding of Astarābādī from his doctrine, and critically separating his particular movement from the wider trend of lettrism from the middle period in the Persianate world. And it is always important to remember that interest in lettrism need not make a thinker a ḥurufī. 

The book itself is divided into an introduction (on the sources and a literature review), three parts on the cosmology and cosmogony of language, prophetology as the descent of the logos and process of reversion to God, and soteriology and eschatology, and a final conclusion that attempts to contextualize the Ḥurūfīya in Islamic intellectual history. I would have liked to see far more discussion of the sources and the problems one migh face in their analysis and distinction. Quite often one feels that the individual sections and even their internal chapters stand alone – the book reads somewhat like a series of broadly congruous but distinct articles on specific aspects of his thought, and the introduction and conclusion could do far more to provide sufficient background, connectors and contexts for those unfamiliar. Nevertheless, the detail, the careful philology (given that the language of the texts is usually a Khurasani/Astarabadi vernacular of Persian), the manuscript work and the coverage will make this the major reference for anyone interested in the Ḥurūfīya as a movement and their intellectual and political intersections. The introductions presents them within the messianic turn, provides a literature review of their study, and deals with the difficulties of their texts not least the Jāvīdān-nāma. On a small side note, I know that transliteration is not necessarily an exact science, but the practice of the Institute of Ismaili Studies that insists on rendering Persian as if it were Arabic is rather tedious – hence I prefer Jāvīdān-nāma to Jāwīdān-nāma and Fażlallāh to Faḍl Allāh. Mir-Kasimov provides some useful appendices on key terms, an inventory of texts found in the works that help the readers contextualize the sources as well as preliminary transcriptions of the Persian texts used. There is little doubt that this will become the main resource for our understanding of Ḥurūfism, even if some of the more recent studies in Persian are more ‘historical’. Most of the chapters are careful and close readings of the text (with copious translated passages that could be fruitfully used in class) and it is only in the conclusion that he returns to the wider picture of how Astarābādī relates to tendencies in esotericism, especially of Shiʿi varieties.

The text follows the drama of the Jāwīdān-nāma as the descent of the word from the One, its manifestation in prophecy, and its soteriological return. Surprisingly given Astarābādī’s own messianic role, there is little discussed on walāya, which is such a central concept in different esotericisms, even if the other key notion of such approaches to text, namely taʾwīl is much analysed. Part one on the cosmogony and cosmology begins with the problem of creation: how does multiplicity arise from unity and how does the immaterial produce a material cosmos? It then moves onto key aspects of the cosmos – the engendering of the human with the narrative of Adam and Eve, as well as space and time and the ways in which in its very diversity the multiple universe is united by the word. In the scheme of the school of Ibn ʿArabī and his later Shiʿi interpreters, existence is a singular reality in which diversity is not mere phenomenal illusion but constitutes the very stuff of a modulated and hierarchically arranged pyramid of being; they called this doctrine tashkīk al-wujūd or the modulated but singular reality of existence. For Astarābādī, there seems to be a similar ontological description but with the word taking the place of existence; it is the word that is one and many. This phenomenon has been noted for the esotericist  Ibn Turka (d. 1432) by Matthew Melvin-Koushki. The footnotes make some brief comparisons with Hellenic neoplatonisms, but more interesting are some of the parallels and clear references to Christian apocrypha especially of a Gnostic type. I would like to know if there are any references to hermetica that would be appropriate but there is nothing mentioned. The centrality of the notion of the correspondences and the balance in the cosmos recalls both the Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ and Jābir ibn Ḥayyān but the parallels are not analysed. The ultimate homology is between God and his form in Adam – though it is the first human couple who fully manifest the divine since for Astarābādī Eve is the form of Adam. There is no strict precedence of the male. Adam is the divine throne and Eve the footstool that together ensure the perpetuation of the balance. Similarly Adam is the soul of the word manifest while Eve is its very existence. Their bodies are the preserved tablet and the ‘mother of the book’, the essence of revelation. Astarābādī constantly refers to esoteric sayings of ʿAlī as the primordial Adam. Insofar as Adam/ʿAlī is the perfect word of God and all things he takes the place of the ‘perfect man’ of the Sufi tradition.

Part two on prophetology includes a number of esoteric contemplations of particular prophets as exemplifying the descent and the course of the word in this world and its indication towards the reversion to God. As the short excursus in part one suggested, knowledge and love are the two motivations for the descent of the word as well as the process for its reversion. Prophets take the word and fragment them into the expressions of human language; but they also provide the tools for the re-integration of the word through taʾwīl. A short chapter 9 discusses the three famous examples of this later: Joseph, Moses, and Solomon. Jesus and Muḥammad reflect a more direct revelation of the word and its reversion – the taking up into heaven of the former, and the ascension (miʿrāj) of the latter.

Part three on soteriology is remarkably short with a discussion of gnostic salvation (the salvific efficacy of knowledge overcoming ignorance), and the end of times and the relative role of those initiated and the uninitiated. Perhaps it is not paradoxical that a messianic movement shows little interest in the world to come precisely because it seems in its theological and politically radical moment to be invested in the ever present. The fall from the edenic state was related in part one to the oblivion of the complete word of God and the meaning inscribed on the bodies of Adam and Eve. The return or the reversal of the fall therefore requires through taʾwīl an enlightenment of that word and the realization of the self that comes at the end of the religious dispensation brought by Muḥammad culminating in Astarābādī. Those who fail to achieve this enlightenment join Satan in his ignorance and fiery nature and become the hellfire in which they dwell. In this section there is further consideration of the role of ʿAlī at the end of the religious dispensation. The fall of Adam reflects the reduction of the 32 primordial words into 28; it is ʿAlī who returns the four key words for the integration and reversion of the word at the end of time. There is little that is explicitly Imami or Twelver Shiʿi in the text although Mir-Kasimov suggests that might be due to the changing context under Shahrukh and the reception of the text.

Given the very detailed nature of the chapters, the conclusion plays a critical role in allowing us to see the woods from the trees. A question that remains is how did Astarābādī see himself? Can one see the Jāwīdān-nāma as an act of taʾwīl on the Qurʾan or itself a work of revelation? To what extent does he draw upon existing lettrism and esoteric interpretation and how is his legacy received? Locating him within the traditions of esoteric interpretation - on which one may consult a recent book which I had something to do with - might help one to understand some of the wider currents of interest and intersection. Mir-Kasimov discusses the links with the school of Ibn ʿArabī even if there is little explicitly from the master himself; there is a discussion of the superiority of walāya over prophecy and some ambiguity over the nature of the seal 0f saints – more explicitly Shiʿi contemporaries such as Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī followed Ḥamūya and Kāshānī on identifying the figure with the Twelver Mahdī but Astarābādī was more circumspect. The problem of contextualization is raised because the milieu of Astarābādī included the school of Ibn ʿArabī, Ismailism and other trends of esoteric Shiʿi Islam such as Rajab Bursī. Mir-Kasimov suggests that instead to tying him to a particular Shiʿi trend, one can see in his work the same revival of early esoteric Shiʿism found in both Twelver and Ismaili works – certainly matters are complicated by some later Ḥurūfīs who took a more markedly Twelver approach. We know that others attracted to esotericism and lettrism immediately after such as Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Ibn Turka rejected Astarābadī while using some of the same techniques. Rightly, the author suggests that there is much more to research on the legacy and reception of Astarābādī – perhaps a follow up volume?

In many ways Mir-Kasimov has provided us with a critical sourcebook on a major figure of esotericism in middle period Persianate Islam. It is then for those reading the work to follow up on the contexts and connections with other trends of the period especially in the great messianic turn of the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Bashir’s work is a much better integrated introduction but in this work we have a far more deeply textual work that can complement Bashir. But the work still leaves me somewhat baffled by the problem of esotericism and particularly esoteric Shiʿism in the period.

A couple of recent publications of the Muʾassasa-yi kitāb-shināsī-yi Shīʿa

Biographical dictionaries are essential tools of research that help us to flesh out the context of a thinker's composition and production. Of course, like most forms of narrative, they carry within them a certain rhetorical style and effect and a self-referentiality to the genre itself - these works draw upon previous works of the genre, sometimes through explicit citation and at other times through influence and unacknowledged citation. The job of a good editor at times is precisely to reveal the sources used, especially if those latter works are not extant or are difficult to obtain.

The first text I want to mention is ʿUlamā-yi ʿahd-i Nāsir al-Dīn Shāh Qājār, which is an edition of the biographical section of al-Maʾāsir wa-l-āsār of Muḥammad Ḥasan Khān Iʿtimād al-salṭana (d. 1313/1896).

Iʿtimād al-salṭana as a major courtier and one of the earliest 'European' trained officials (having studied in the Dār al-funūn in Tehran) headed up the publications bureau of the state and was responsible for editing and having published a number of important histories, gazetteers and geographical surveys. Al-Maʾāsir was written and published in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the reign of Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh in 1301-3/1884-6, and is a work cited extensively in 20th century sources such as the continuation of Nujūm al-samāʾ by Mīrzā Muḥammad ʿAlī Kashmīrī, the Takmilat Amal al-āmil of Sayyid Ḥasan al-Ṣadr (d. 1354/1935) and the massive undertaking of Āqā Buzurg Ṭihrānī, Ṭabaqāt aʿlām al-shīʿa arranged by century. It was divided into 16 chapters and the chapter on the ʿulama is chapter 10, much of which was actually written by Shams al-ʿulamāʾ Muḥammad Mahdī ʿAbd al-Rabbābādī although it bears the strong editorial imprint of Iʿtimād al-salṭana. The modern edition of al-Maʾāsir by the late Īraj Afshār was published in the 1980s in three volumes.

The text itself says that it is a listing of the 'names of ʿulama and scholars, imams of religion, eminent mujtahids, illustrious theologians, theosist philosophers, contented mystics, accomplished litterateurs, Arabists, curing physicians, great poets, unique preachers and lamenters, writers and calligraphers from the land of Iran in the last forty years'. What follows are 698 notices, some as short as a simple name (such as entry number 206 Mullā Riżā, 'a notable scholar of this land') and others fuller biographies (such as entry number 46 on the eminent philosopher of the school of Mullā Ṣadrā, Ḥājj Mullā Hādī Sabzavārī [d. 1289/1873]). The editor Nāsir al-Dīn Anṣārī Qummī has done a good job of annotating the entries so that one can cross refer with other sources especially the 20th century ones that draw upon it. The text tells us useful things about the Nāsirī period, commenting on Bābī and Bāhāʾī and Shaykhī challenges to the hierocracy, bolstering the authority of the jurists, and praising the eminent philosophers and poets who carried the tradition of Mullā Ṣadrā and of mysticism.

The second text is from the late Safavid period, al-Darajāt al-rafīʿa fī ṭabaqāt al-imāmīya of the well known poet, literary scholar and scion of the Dashtakī family of Shiraz, Sayyid ʿAlī Khān b. Muḥammad Maʿṣūm Madanī (d. 1118/1707), who also wrote an important taẕkira of Arabic poets entitle Sulāfat al-ʿaṣr fī maḥāsin al-shuʿarāʾ bi-kulli miṣr.

The text was previously published in Najaf in the early 1960s (and there is an even earlier lithograph); the Najaf edition has been offset printed a number of times. As the text has come down to us in a somewhat incomplete form, this edition is somewhat preliminary, produced by Shaykh Muḥammad Jawād Maḥmūdī and ʿAbd al-Sattār al-Ḥasanī. The text is divided into 20 sections starting with the companions of the prophets and the next generations down to his contemporaries. The sections on the companions, those who narrated from the Imams, and the early Shiʿi women are not extant as far as the editors have attempted to trace. The latter in particular is rather unfortunate given the great interest in uncovering voices and personalities from the early Islamic period. Notices tend to be rather brief and should be read alongside other contemporaneous Safavid period compilations such as Riyāḍ al-ʿulamāʾ of Mīrzā ʿAbdullāh Afandī and Amal al-āmil of al-Ḥurr al-ʿĀmilī. Once again the published text is well annotated. His particular interest in poets and the poetic output of scholars and philosophers was what prompted me first many years ago to look at poetic taẕkire as an important source for intellectual history.

The Muʾassasa-yi kitāb-shināsī-yi Shīʿa continues to produce significant works of reference - alongside the others they have already produced including the two volumes collection of all the books lists (Fahāris) compiled by Shiʿi ʿulama of the past. It would help if the website were better updated especially in the section of their publications (manshūrāt) as often recentish books are found in the news (akhbār) section. The publications themselves might not always have the most analytical introductions, but the job of making sense of the narratives, the formation of the self, and constructions of scholarly genealogies and histories remain for us as historians to decipher and examine.

Sources on the North Indian Shiʿi Hierocracy III: Awrāq al-dhahab

The Shia Bibliographical Institute/Muʾassasa-yi kitābshināsī-yi Shīʿeh/Muʾassasat turāth al-Shīʿa based in Qum is doing some excellent work publishing biographical dictionaries, editions of key texts, and studies of particular Shiʿi scholars and intellectuals. In recent years, they have noticeably been contributing to the study of Shiʿi South Asia - which is, of course, highly commendable. 

As part of this effort, they produced a critical edition by ʿAlī Fāżilī in 2015 in three volumes of Muftī Sayyid Muḥammad ʿAbbās al-Jazāʾirī (b. 1224/1809, d. 1306/1889)'s biography of Sayyid al-ʿulamāʾ Sayyid Ḥusayn b. Dildār ʿAlī Naṣīrābādī (d. 1273/1856) entitled Awrāq al-dhahab aw al-Maʿādin al-dhahabīya al-lujjaynīya fī l-maḥāsin al-wahbīya al-ḥusaynīya along with some important correspondence of the author and relevant ijāzāt. There is an earlier edition of the text by the Kufa Academy based in Holland and run by Muḥammad Saʿīd al-Ṭurayḥī, which came out in 2007 printed in Beirut. However, in comparison it is a much weaker text since that editor is rather unfamiliar with South Asia and does not have the relevant grasp of Persian required (even if the actual text is in Arabic). 

The author of the text, Muftī Sayyid Muḥammad ʿAbbās, was fifth generation descendent of the Safavid theologian Sayyid Niʿmatullāh al-Jazāʾirī (d. 1701). His grandfather Sayyid Jaʿfar was the first to emigrate to India, settling in Lucknow in the early nawabi period. One of the earliest sources for Muftī was the account in Tadhkirat al-ʿulamāʾ al-muḥaqqiqīn written in 1263/1847 was his student Sayyid Mahdī Riżavī ʿAẓīmābādī. The standard account that most use is from Takmilat Nujūm al-samāʾ of Mīrzā Muḥammad Mahdī Kashmīrī. Muftī was known for his skills as a theologian and as a jurist (as Muftī of Lucknow) and as a poet and literary figure. Sayyid ʿAbd al-Ḥayy Lukhnavī (d. 1341/1923) the famous rector of Nadwat al-ʿulamāʾ in his major biographical dictionary Nuzhat al-khawāṭir wa-bahjat al-manāẓir wa-l-masāmiʿ gives a full account of him including his studies with the Farangī-Maḥallī Ḥanafī scholars ʿAbd al-Qawī and ʿAbd al-Quddūs in literature, and another Farangī Maḥallī Maulānā Qudrat ʿAlī in philosophy and logic; his main teacher was Sayyid Ḥusayn. Muftī was appointed to teach in the royal seminary (madrasa sulṭānīya) and as a judge.

The whole text is divided into an introduction on the author and his subject, then it is followed by Awrāq al-dhahab which has ten chapters (maʿdin) and a khātima, and then various appendices (mulḥaqāt): 
I: on the ijāzāt that Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī received from Sayyid Mahdī Baḥr al-ʿulūm, Sayyid ʿAlī Ṭabāṭabāʾī, Sayyid Mahdī Shahristānī and Sayyid Mahdī Iṣfahānī
II: on the ijāza that Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī gave his son Sayyid Muḥammad Sulṭān al-ʿulamāʾ
III: on the ijāzāt that Sayyid al-ʿulamāʾ gave including to Muftī Sayyid Muḥammad ʿAbbās and some more on his life and works
IV: on the ijāza that Shaykh Muḥammad Ḥusayn Najafī, author of Jawāhir al-kalām, gave to Sayyid Muḥammad Taqī Mumtāz al-ʿulamāʾ, the grandson of Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī
V: on the ijāzāt of Muftī Sayyid Muḥammad ʿAbbās
VI: on the correspondence of Sayyid Ḥusayn in Arabic and in Persian 
VII: on the correspondence of various ʿulamāʾ of the Iraqi shrine cities to Sayyid Ḥusayn
VIII-XII: various documents relating to the death and testament of Sayyid Ḥusayn
XIII: notes of condolences to Sayyid Muḥammad Taqī Mumtāz al-ʿulamāʾ on the passing of his father Sayyid Ḥusayn 
XIV: related obituaries
XV: the correspondence of Mumtāz al-ʿulamāʾ with Muftī Sayyid Muḥammad ʿAbbās
XVI: other correspondence of Muftī Sayyid Muḥammad ʿAbbās
XVII: other correspondence of Mumtāz al-ʿulamāʾincluding with Sayyid Muḥammad Qulī (d. 1844), father of Mīr Ḥāmid Ḥusayn Kintūrī [the father was a student of Sayyid Dildār ʿAlī and Sayyid Muḥammad, while the son was a student of Sayyid Ḥusayn]
XVIII: last testament of Mumtāz al-ʿulamāʾ

Taken together this is an invaluable source - hitherto only available in separate lithographs that are rare to find especially in European libraries and even Indian ones - for our understanding of the culture of the ʿulamāʾ in North India, especially in Awadh in the last days of the kingdom and in the early period of colonial rule, and their interactions with the Shiʿi hierocracy in Iraq (and Iran). What it demonstrates is just how integrated and significant the Indian ʿulamāʾ were considered in the 'centres' of learning. The ijāzāt tell us much about the curricula and how the texts were received and understood and what of them was actually studied. The correspondence tells us then more about the contexts of study. Any serious intellectual history of the Shiʿi hierocracy in North India especially in the early colonial period must engage with this valuable three volume work.