Dara Shikoh as Religious Scholar: A Re-assesment
Motia Bibi
In today’s rapidly globalizing world, relations between states and between different communities need a firmly moral basis. Clearly, as long as such relations are premised, as they are today, simply on unequal power and economic structures, sustained peace and justice will remain elusive, and ongoing conflicts can only linger on or even further exacerbate. While generally-accepted secular contemporary human rights norms are an obvious ingredient in developing this moral basis for international and inter-community relations, they are, in themselves, insufficient. Given the salience of religion globally (and also of conflicts that are sought to be justified by appeals to religion), the moral basis for such relations needs also to draw on existing religious/spiritual resources. A key task in this regard is to recover, articulate and promote religious traditions or interpretations that reflect or champion justice, peace and solidarity transcending communitarian bounds, being grounded in a firm faith in ethical monotheism. These traditions can make a valuable contribution in developing the moral basis that we seek today to govern inter-community and international relations, providing them with a vital transcendental dimension that contemporary secular human rights discourses lack. This paper seeks to develop this argument by building on the insights of a key medieval Indian religious figure Dara Shikoh, focusing particularly on his quest for developing a consensus between conflicting religious communities and their conflicting truth claims.
Dara Shikoh quest for a universal
Sufi ethic
Dara Shikoh, eldest son of the Mughal Emperor of India, Shah Jahan, and heir
apparent to his throne, was born near Ajmer in 1615 C.E.1 It is said that
before Dara’s birth, Shah Jahan had paid a visit to the tomb of the
great Chishti Sufi mystic, Hazrat Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer and there had
prayed for a son to be born to him, since all his earlier children had been
daughters. Thus, when Dara was born great festivities were held in Delhi, the
imperial capital, for the Emperor now had an heir to succeed him to the throne.
Like any other Mughal prince,
Dara’s early education was entrusted to maulvis attached to the royal
court, who taught him the Qur’an, Persian poetry, and history. His
chief instructor was one Mullah ‘Abdul Latif Saharanpuri, who
developed in the young Dara an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and the
speculative sciences, including Sufism. In his youth, Dara came into contact
with numerous Muslim and Hindu mystics, some of whom exercised a profound
influence on him. The most noted among these was Hazrat Miyan Mir (d.1635
C.E.), a Qadri Sufi of Lahore whose disciple he later became. Hazrat Miyan Mir
is best remembered for having laid the foundation-stone of the Harmandir Sahib
or Golden Temple at Amritsar at the request of his close friend, Guru Arjan
Dev, the fifth Guru of the Sikhs. The strand of Qadri Sufism that Miyan Mir
represented, which he must have bequeathed to his disciples, including Dara,
thus appears to have been extremely catholic and accepting of spiritual truths
in other traditions and communities. This must be seen as in marked contrast to
the ‘orthodox’ ‘ulema associated with the royal
courts, the vast majority of who appeared to champion a misplaced Islamic or,
more exactly, Muslim supremacism, not just denying the possibility of spiritual
worth in other faith traditions and communities but also going so far as to
advocate their suppression and extirpation.
After Dara was initiated into the Qadri Sufi order, which he describes in his
Risala-i Haq Numa as ‘the best path of reaching Divinity’,
he came into contact with several other accomplished mystics of his day,
Muslims as well as non-Muslims, including Shah Muhibullah, Shah Dilruba, Shah
Muhammad Lisanullah Rostaki, Baba Lal Das Bairagi, and Jagannath Mishra.
Dara’s willingness to freely interact with, among other, non-Muslim
seekers of the truth marked an understanding of Islam that was in contrast to
the court ‘ulema. It was perhaps more in line in keeping with the
original Quranic vision, which regards all communities as having been the
recipients of divine revelation through prophets, all of who taught a common,
universal din, the same primal religion of surrender to the One that was
preached by the last of them, the Prophet Muhammad.
Dara’s close and friendly interaction with non-Muslim mystics led him
to seek to establish bridges of understanding between Sufism and local or Indic
forms of mysticism. In pursuit of this aim, Dara set about seeking to learn
more about the religious systems of the Brahmins. He studied Sanskrit, and,
with the help of the Pandits of Benaras, prepared a Persian translation of the
Upanishads, which was later followed by his Persian renderings of the Gita and
the Yoga Vasishta. Throughout this endeavour, his fundamental concern was the
quest for the discovery of the Unity of God, seeking to draw out commonalities
in the scriptures of the Hindus and the Muslims. One can see this quest as a
search for the recovery of the original vision of both the Quran and of the
Indic scriptures, the former having been clouded by excessive ritualism in the
name of the shari‘ah and Muslim communalism, the latter by widespread
corruption, ritualism and caste prejudice. If, as Dara possibly believed, the
core of Islam, understood here in the sense of the primal din taught by all the
prophets, including the Prophet Muhammad and the prophets sent by God to India,
was monotheism (Arabic/Farsi/Urdu: tauhid, Hindi: ekishvarvad), his quest in
drawing parallels between the Quran and the Upanishads can be seen as an effort
to recover, highlight and stress this monotheism—the basic common
core of divine revelation that could bring about a grand reconciliation between
Muslims and Hindus. This project of unity was to be based on the principle of
tauhid, regarding the differences of language, custom and ritual that
distinguished Muslims and Hindus from each other as secondary, and, indeed,
ultimately speaking, immaterial in the eyes of God.
Dara expresses this concern in his Persian translation of the Upanishads, the
Sirr ul-Akbar (‘The Great Secret’
“And whereas I was
impressed with a longing to behold the Gnostic doctrines of every sect and to
hear their lofty expressions of monotheism and had cast my eyes upon many
theological books and had been a follower thereof for many years, my passion
for beholding the Unity [of God], which is a boundless ocean, increased every
moment. […] Thereafter, I began to ponder as to why the discussion of
monotheism is so conspicuous in India and why the Indian [Hindu] mystics and
theologians of ancient India do not disavow the Unity of God, nor do they find
any fault with the Unitarians.”
Dara’s works are numerous,
all in the Persian language, only some of which are readily available today.
His writings fall into two broad categories. The first consists of books on
Sufism and Muslim saints, the most prominent of these being the Safinat
ul-Auliya, the Sakinat ul-Auliya, the Risala-i Haq Numa, the Tariqat
ul-Haqiqat, the Hasanat ul-‘Arifin and the Iksir-i ‘Azam.
The second consists of writings on parallels between Muslim and Hindu mysticism,
such as the Majma’ ul-Bahrain, the Mukalama-i Baba Lal Das wa Dara
Shikoh, the Sirr-i Akbar, and his Persian translations of the Yoga Vashishta
and the Gita.
Dara on Tauhid as the basis of human unity
Dara’s Muslim critics, particularly among the Sunni ‘ulema
(in his own time, down to our own) berated him for allegedly renouncing Islam
or for allegedly mixing Islam with ‘infidelity’. Nothing
could be further from the truth. In actual fact, Dara’s commitment to
Islam was unquestionable, although, obviously, his understanding of Islam was
in marked contrast to that of his ‘orthodox’ Sunni critics,
particularly on the question of recognising, accepting, respecting and even
celebrating religious truths in other communities, particularly the Hindus,
whom the ‘ulema regarded as infidels and polytheists who deserved to
be exterminated, or, at least, to be crushed and subdued. Dara’s
understanding was hardly an aberration even within the larger Muslim Sufi fold,
for numerous other Indian Sufis made much the same arguments. Dara located
himself firmly within the broader Sufi Muslim tradition, as is evident from the
numerous works on Sufism that he penned, including the Safinat ul-Auliya, a
biography of several leading Sufi saints, his first work, composed in 1640
C.E., and the Sirr ul-Auliya, his second biography of various Sufi saints.
Unlike the Sakinat ul-Auliya, which deals with Sufis of various orders, this
book discusses only the Qadri Sufis of India. Here Dara explicitly declares his
Qadri credentials, confessing, ‘Nothing attracts me more than this
Qadri order, which has fulfilled my spiritual aspirations’.
Dara’s third book on Sufism, the Hasanat ul-‘Arifin or
‘The Aphorisms of the Gnostics’, consists of the sayings of
107 Sufis of various spiritual orders. In his introduction, Dara explains why
he wrote the book: “I was enamoured of studying books on the ways of
the men of the Path and had in my mind nothing save the understanding of the
Unity of God.” This thirst to comprehend the principle and meaning of
tauhid—the core of not just the Quran, but all other forms of divine
revelation as well prior to the advent of the Prophet Muhammad, and indeed the
uniting principle of all of them, placed Dara firmly within the Islamic
tradition, as broadly understood.
In line with numerous other mystics, Dara, as is evident in his writings on
Sufism, was bitterly critical of ritualism in the name of religion, which
tended to substitute for genuine devotion and which also served to build walls
of division between various communities. In the Hasanat ul-‘Arifin,
Dara bitterly criticises self-styled ‘ulama who, ignoring the inner
dimension of the faith, focus simply on external rituals. His critique is
directed against mindless ritualism emptied of inner spiritual content, and he
challenges the claims of religious professionals who would readily trade their
faith for worldly gain. Thus, he says:
May the world be free from the noise of the mulla
And none should pay any heed to their fatwas.
As for those religious scholars and priests who claim to be religious
authorities but have actually little or no understanding at all of the true
spirit of religion, Dara writes, ‘As a matter of fact, these are
ignoramuses to themselves and learned to the ignorant’, and adds the
following couplet:
Every prophet and saint suffered afflictions and torments,
Due to the vicious and ignominious conduct of the mullah.
The term ‘mullah’ here is thus not a class just limited to
Muslims alone. It comes to stand for exploitative religious professionals
associated with every community whose tradition is associated with one or the
other prophet or saint. Its parallel in the Hindu tradition would be the
pandit, whom numerous Indian mystics roundly berated for precisely the same
reasons. These men, who thrive on opposing true religiosity, have, Dara would
probably argue, a vested interest in stressing and magnifying differences,
based largely on language, customs and rituals, between different communities,
turning a blind eye to the basis of all true
religion—tauhid—consciousness of which alone can unite
people beyond narrow, ascriptive communal boundaries. In another of his works
on Sufism, Tariqat ul-Haqiqat, Dara articulates tauhid as the basis of an ethic
that can unite all human beings irrespective of communitarian labels in the
following verse:
You dwell in the Ka‘aba and in Somnath [a famous Shaivite temple]
And in the hearts of the enamoured lovers.
In his Risala-i Haq Numa, Dara discusses the various stages on the Sufi path,
where the seeker (salik) is shown as starting from the ‘alam-i nasut
or ‘the physical plane’, and, passing through various
stages, finally reaching the ‘alam-i lahut or ‘the plane of
Absolute Truth’. Some of the physical exercises employed by the Sufis
that are described in the Risala-i Haq Numa are shown by Dara to be similar to
those used by the Hindu Tantriks and Yogis. These include astral healing and
concentration on the centres of meditation in the heart and brain. Further, he
suggests that the four planes through which the Sufi seeker’s journey
takes him—nasut , jabrut, malakut and lahut—correspond to
the Hindu concept of the avasthanam or the four ‘states’ of
jagrat, swapna, shushpati and turiya. By stressing the similarities, or
identicalness, of the concept of the planes in both Hindu and Muslim mystical
systems, Dara seems to argue that, at root, both stem from a common tauhidic
tradition, the differences between them, as suggested by their different
terminology, being apparent—only linguistic—and not real.
Dara on the religious systems of Hindus
Medieval Muslim ‘ulema in India, as has been suggested earlier,
generally (with notable exceptions) regarded the Hindus as polytheists, and
some of them even went so far as to refuse to accept them even as
‘People of the Book’ (ahl-i kitab), who could be granted
protection in return for the payment of the jizya. This attitude of theirs was
a principal cause for a deep-rooted and long-standing tradition of hostility
between Hindus and Muslims. It was premised on a notion of Muslim communal
supremacism, which some noted Sufis actively protested against as un-Islamic,
and not warranted by their understanding of Islam and tauhid. Dara can be
classed in this category of Sufis, who not only denounced Muslim communalism
but also actively sought to explore a common spiritual basis for unity between
Hindus and Muslims, rooted in tauhid.
In pursuance of this aim, Dara wrote extensively on the religious systems of
the Hindus, following in the tradition of several Muslim mystics and scholars
before him. Like several Muslim Sufis, he saw the possibility of some religious
figures of the Hindus having been actually been prophets of God, and certain
Hindu scriptures as having been of divine origin. Thus, for instance, he writes
in the Sirr-i Akbar that a strong strain of monotheism may be discerned in the
Vedas and opines that the monotheistic philosophy of the Upanishads may be
‘in conformity with the Holy Qur’an and a commentary
thereon’.
In his quest for an empathetic understanding of the Hindu religious systems,
Dara spent many years in the study of Sanskrit, and for this purpose employed a
large number of Pandits from Benaras. Several contemporary Sanskrit scholars
praised him for his liberal patronage of the language. Prominent among these
was Jagannath Mishra, who, it is said, was once weighed against silver coins at
Shah Jahan’s command and the money given to him. He was the author of
the Jagatsimha, a work in praise of Dara, and of the Asif Vilasa, a treatise
written in praise of Asif Khan, brother of Nur Jahan, wife of Shah Jahan. Other
Sanskrit scholars who were patronised by Dara included Pandit Kavindracharya,
who was granted a royal pension of two thousand rupees, and Banwali Das, author
of a historical work on the kings of Delhi from Yudhishtra, a key figure of the
epic Mahabharata, to Shah Jahan, for which he was honored by Shah Jahan with
the title of Sarvavidyanidhana.
The most well-known of Dara’s several works on the religious sciences
of the Hindus is his Majma ul-Bahrain (‘The Mingling of the Two
Oceans’
The Majma-ul Bahrain is divided into twenty-two sections, in each of which Dara
seeks to draw out the similarities between Hindu and Sufi concepts and
teachings. Thus, for instance, the Hindu notion of mutki, he says, is identical
with the Sufi concept of salvation, denoting the annihilation (fana) of the
self in God. Or, for example, the Sufi concept of ‘ishq (love) is
said to be identical with the maya of the Hindu monotheists. From Love, says
Dara, was born the ‘great soul’, alternately known as the
soul of Muhammad to the Sufis, and mahatman or hiranyagarba to the Hindus.
Dara’s translation of certain Hindu scriptures into Persian represents
a landmark in the process of developing bridges of understanding between people
of different faith communities in medieval India, in which certain Sufis played
the leading role. One of Dara’s earliest attempts at translation was
his rendering of the Gita into Persian. Keenly interested as he was in the
philosophy of Yoga, Dara also had the Yoga Vasishta, one of the earliest
Sanskrit texts on Yoga, translated into Persian. The translator of the text
opens his treatise with praises of God and the Prophet Muhammad thus:
“Gratitude, adoration and
submission are offered to the One, the Sun of whose glory shines in every atom
of the cosmos and where grandeur is manifested in the entire Universe, although
He is hidden from all eyes and is behind the veil; boundless benedictions in
all sincerity and faith free from error, omission or sanctimoniousness to that
choicest product of His creation, to that personification of all that is best,
the Holy Prophet Muhammad, may peace and Allah’s blessings be upon
him, and the same to the Imam ‘Ali, the object of his
love.”
The translator then quotes Dara as
saying:
“My chief reason for this
noble command [to have the Yoga Vasishta translated] is that although I had
profited by pursuing a translation of the Yoga Vasishta ascribed to Shaikh
Sufi, yet once two saintly persons appeared in my dreams; one of whom was tall,
whose hair was grey, the other short and without any hair. The former was
Vasishta and the latter Ram Chandra, and as I had read the translation already
alluded to, I was naturally attracted to them and paid them my respects.
Vasishta was very kind to me and patted me on the back, and, addressing Ram
Chandra, told him that I was brother to him because both he and I were seekers after
truth. He asked Ram Chandra to embrace me, which he did in exuberance of love.
Thereupon, Vasishta gave some sweets to Ram Chandra, which I also took and ate.
After this vision, a desire to cause the translation of the book intensified in
me.”
Dara established close and cordial
relations with mystics from various backgrounds. Among these were several Yogis
and sadhus, about some of whom Dara also wrote. One such sadhu was Baba Lal,
follower of the renowned Sufi-Bhakti saint Kabir and founder of a small
monotheistic order named after him as the Baba Lalis. Many of the teachings of
this sect can be traced to a distinct Sufi influence. A summary of these
teachings is to be found in Dara’s Makalama Baba Lal wa Dara Shikoh,
which consists of seven long conversations between the Baba and Dara held in
Lahore in 1653. These seven discourses were composed originally in Hindawi, and
were later translated into Persian by Dara’s chief secretary, Rai
Chandar Bhan. As in the case of Dara’s translation of the Yoga
Vasishta, this text focuses particularly on certain similarities in the
teachings of Hindu and Muslim mystics.
The great interest that Dara had in exploring monotheistic strands in Hindu
philosophy led him, finally, to translate fifty-two Upanishads into Persian.
The text that he prepared, the Sirr ul-Akbar (‘The Great
Secret’
“Praised be the Being,
that among whose eternal secrets is the dot in the b of the bismillah in all
the Heavenly Books, and glorified be the Mother of Books. In the Holy
Qur’an is the token of His glorious name; and the angels and the
heavenly books and the prophets and the saints are all comprehended in this
name. And the blessings of the Almighty Allah be upon the best of His creatures,
the Holy Prophet Muhammad and upon all his family and upon all his
Companions!”
Dara then proceeds to detail the
purpose behind translating the Upanishads. He writes that in the year 1050 A.H.
he visited Kashmir, and there he met Hazrat Mullah Shah, whom he describes as
‘the flower of the Gnostics, the tutor of the tutors, the sage of the
sages, the guide of the guides, the Unitarians accomplished in the
Truth’. Thereafter, he says, he was filled with a longing to
‘behold the Gnostics of every sect and to hear the lofty expressions
of monotheism’. Hence, he says, he began his search for monotheism in
other scriptures as well, including the Torah of the Jews (Taurat), the Gospels
of Jesus (Injil) the Psalms of David (Zabur), and, in addition, the books of
the ancient Hindus. He notes with approval the fact that certain Hindu
‘theologians and mystics’ (‘ulama-i zahiri wa
batini) actually believe in One God, but laments that ‘the
ignoramuses of the present age’, who claim to be authorities in
matters of religion, have completely distorted this fundamental truth. His
search for traces of monotheism in the religious systems of the Hindus stems,
he says, from his faith in the Qur’an, which states that God has,
from time to time, sent prophets to all peoples to preach the worship of the
One. Thus, he goes on to add:
“And it can also be
ascertained from the Holy Qur’an that there is no nation without a
prophet and without a revealed scripture, for it has been said: ‘Nor
do We chastise until We raise an apostle’ [Qur’an: XVII,
15]. And in another verse: ‘And there is not a people but a warner
has gone among them’ [Qur’an: XXXV, 24]. And at another
place: ‘Certainly we sent our apostles with clear arguments, and sent
down with them the Book and the Measure’ [Qur’an: LVII,
25].”
Accordingly, says Dara, he travelled
to Benaras in 1067 A.H., where he assembled several leading Sanskrit Pandits to
translate the Upanishads, in an effort to draw out from the scriptures of the
Hindus the hidden teachings on monotheism which are, he says, ‘in
conformity with the Holy Qur’an’. Having explored the
teachings of the Upanishads, he writes that they are ‘a treasure of
monotheism’, although, he notes, ‘very few are conversant
with this, even among the Hindus’. Hence, he says, there is an urgent
need to bring to light this ‘Great Secret’ so that the
Hindus can learn the truth about monotheism as contained in their own
scriptures and, in addition, Muslims, too, can be made aware of the spiritual
treasures that the Upanishads contain. He goes so far as to claim for the
Upanishads, in their original forms, the status of divinely revealed
scriptures, claiming that the Qur’anic verse which speaks about a
‘protected book’, which ‘none shall touch but the
purified ones’ [Qur’an: LVI, 77-80] literally applies to
them, because some of the verses of the Qur’an are to be found in
their Sanskrit form therein. This conclusion can indeed be contested, although
the sincerity of Dara’s effort to draw parallels between the Hindu
and Muslim mystical systems and to stress their common core of tauhid as a
uniting principle and the basis of an ethic of universal human understanding
and solidarity cannot be so easily dismissed as his detractors did, causing him
to be killed at the command of his younger brother and rival to the Mugahl
throne, Aurangzeb Alamgir, in the year 1657.
Dara’s relevance in today’s age
Tauhid, or belief in and surrender to the One, formed the aim of
Dara’s spiritual quest. Tauhid was also the basis of his effort to
develop a rapprochement between people of different communities, most notably
Hindus and Muslims. The ethical monotheism that Dara stood for, and which
indeed all the prophets had preached, was the basis, and, indeed, real
intention of all divine revelation, Dara stressed. The differences in rituals,
language, manners and customs, which served to build barriers of division and hostility
between different peoples in the name of religion, he seems to have believed,
were, ultimately, meaningless, particularly if they were taken as ends in
themselves, as many conventional religionists did in Dara’s
time—and still do.
Commitment to tauhid is not, Dara suggests, simply a matter of personal belief.
Rather, it must necessarily translate into practical action on the social
plane. The fact of the unity of God must also be reflected in a deep and
abiding commitment to struggling for the unity and solidarity of humankind,
beyond all ascriptive differences, working together to fulfil the purposes of
God’s creation plan. That struggle for unity, harmony and peace, one
whose challenge we continue to be faced with, is demanded precisely by the
commitment to tauhid, the core the universal din preached by all prophets, Dara
would probably have insisted. This, however, might seem easier said than done.
Peace cannot be had without justice, and in the face of oppression—in
the name of religion, nation, community, gender and so on. In the absence of
justice, calls for peace are easily reduced into appeals for preserving an
iniquitous status quo and remaining silent in the face of oppression. Calls for
justice without peace can only mean endless chaos and ceaseless rounds of
revenge and retribution. Dara himself fell prey to a system of injustice
despite his life spent in quest for peace and human solidarity transcending
narrow boundaries, being accused of apostasy by orthodox clerics and sentenced
to death by his power-hungry brother.