Exercises in peace: Āz̲ar Kayvānı̄ universalism and comparison in the School of Doctrines
Daniel
J. Sheffield
Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America/ Email: djs5@princeton.edu
Modern Asian Studies (2022), 56, 959–992
doi:10.1017/S0026749X21000494
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Abstract
In 1650, an encyclopedia of comparative religion known as Dabistān-i Maẕāhib (the School of Doctrines) was completed near the city of Hyderabad. Asserting that the religions of the world are reflections of a single inner truth, its author Mīrzā Ẕu’l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī, known by the poetic penname ‘Mūbad’, travelled widely across India to record encoun ters with diverse religious figures. This article re-examines the composition and legacy of the Dabistān in light of new manuscript evidence relating to its author and the world he inhabited. It argues that the Dabistān’s universalist project reflects a widely held the ory of the interrelatedness of the macrocosm, in which sociality with diverse popula tions was understood to be a spiritual exercise leading to saintly perfection in the same way that venerating the cosmos and ascetic bodily practices were. The article pro vides a close reading of the Dabistān’s shortest chapter on the religion of the Tibetans, the earliest such description in Persian. Situating the Dabistān within the diverse expres sions of ‘Universal Peace’ (ṣulḥ-i kull) during the Safavid and Mughal periods, it argues that the Dabistān’s project of recovering a universal theology that was attributed to ancient Iran and India led to expressions of dual religious belonging—to particular religions of revela tion as well as to the universal religion of the philosophers—parallel to and connected with what Jan Assmann has termed the ‘religio duplex phenomenon’ in early modern Europe. Finally, the article briefly traces the legacy of the Dabistān into the modern period.
The
free do not think of religion, doctrine, and spiritual guidance— Those shackled
by seeking liberation are not truly free.
For how long must we wander the alleyways of religion and nation?— There is no highway through the land of verification (taḥqīq) besides heresy (ilḥād). Mūbad’ Mīrzā Ẕu’l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī (fl. 1060s AH/1650s CE)1
Keywords:
Comparative religion; Safavid Iran; Mughal India; Zoroastrianism; Tibet
Introduction
Completed
in its first recension near the city of Hyderabad in the year 1060 AH/ 1650 CE,
Dabistān-i Maẕāhib (the School of Doctrines) is a work that describes the
religions (adyān) of the world in commensurable, rather than polemical, terms.
Rejecting the binary between notions of true religion (dīn al-ḥaqq) and false
religion that characterize many earlier Islamic works of heresiography, the
Dabistān instead seeks to investigate the ‘true nature of religion’ (ḥaqīqat-i
dīn) as it is found within diverse forms of outward religious expression.2
Written in a style that is at times erudite and philosophical, at times bawdy
and humorous, and filled with the illustrative Persian verse characteristic of
tasteful prose composition, the Dabistān was read widely across the eastern
Islamic world into the colonial period. Yet, in spite of more than 200 years of
modern scholarship on the text, confusion about even its most basic char acteristics
remains. Recently identified manuscripts allow us to speak with greater
certainty about the circumstances in which the Dabistān was composed, the life
of its author, and his connections to contemporary developments in religious
thought in the Islamic world. By placing the Dabistān in its historical
context, I seek to understand the method and aim of its author’s comparative
research, the regime of comparatism3he refers to as taḥqīq (‘independent veri
fication’)4through which seemingly distinct religious ideas are translated into
a single universalist framework.
The author of the Dabistān, Mīrzā Ẕu’l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī, known by the poetic penname ‘Mūbad’ (Magus), was born in Patna in 1618, during the reign of the Mughal emperor Jahangir.5At an early age, he was connected to a secretive group of mystics, followers of an Iranian gnostic known as Āẕar Kayvān (942–1027 AH/1533–1618 CE), who claimed to derive their practices from the ancient Persians. According to Mūbad’s own account, several groups attribut ing their beliefs to pre-Islamic Iran ‘exist throughout Iran and Turan going about dressed as Muslims (ba libās-i musalmān), but secretly walking the path of their own religion (nihān rah-sipar-i kīsh-i khẉīsh-and)’.6The Āẕar Kayvānīs pro mulgated a work of scripture known as Dasātīr-i Āsmānī (The Celestial Laws), which presented occult, devotional, and philosophical texts as revelations transmitted from ancient Iranian prophet-kings, rather than as texts grounded more immediately in the contemporary Islamic tradition. Drawing upon a widely held theory of macrocosm, in which the heavens, society, and the human body were understood to be closely linked, Āẕar Kayvān enjoined his followers to cultivate harmony at each of these three scales, through venerat ing the celestial bodies, mingling with diverse communities, and adopting strict regimens of dietary and bodily practice. These practices were understood to be steps towards saintly perfection, whereby the perfect saint, in imitating Āẕar Kayvān himself, could hope to ascend through the heavens to reach a state of union with God and the cosmos (taʾalluh). This liberation of the soul through the acquisition of divine knowledge and union with God was under stood by Āẕar Kayvān’s followers to be the universal goal of human life, a belief they saw everywhere, from ancient Greece to contemporary Tibet.
Organizing his book according to the metaphor of a schoolhouse (dabistān), Mūbad laid out his table of contents as a syllabus in which each of the religious traditions he knew is presented as a lesson leading readers to the goal of apprehending the true nature of religion (ḥaqīqat-i dīn). Though the Dabistān draws extensively on older writings on religion, Mūbad insists that his project was not merely an imitative update, but instead was something unprece dented.7In the years leading up to the completion of the Dabistān, Mūbad trav elled widely. In combining older accounts with the oral testimony of contemporary practitioners and excerpts from diverse religious texts, Mūbad invented an ethnographic genre of writing about religion in Persian.8In certain respects, Mūbad’s approach to the religions of India paralleled the work of Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī some 600 years before him, but while Bīrūnī’s work on the religions of India began from a position asserting the fundamental differ ence between the religious systems of India and Islam,9 Mūbad instead comes to the conclusion that, although religions differ in outward manifestation, they reach the same goal.
Throughout
the text of the Dabistān, Mūbad insists upon what he views as the essential
translatability of religion and its subcategories. At the conclusion of the
text, Mūbad likens his work to that of a translator. Summarizing his method, he
writes:
In
this Land of Conduct and Abode of Doctrine (kirdāristān-i ʻaqīdat-ābād), what
has been written about the doctrines of the various sects comes from the
tongues of the followers of those doctrines and their books. As for the
accounts of the notable persons of each religion, they have been accorded
respect in the same way that their followers and sincere friends describe them,
so that not even a whiff of zealotry and partisan ship should arise. The author
deserves no rank in this account other than that of translator (manṣab-i tarjumānī).10
Indeed,
Mūbad’s regime of comparatism is premised on a notion of interreli gious
translatability which is deeply embedded in Āẕar Kayvānī thought more
broadly.11 The Dabistān thus can be seen as a counterpoint from the Islamic
world to the early modern works on the religion of the ancient Egyptians
highlighted by the German intellectual historian, Jan Assmann. Extending his
earlier work on the break between ancient cosmotheism and monotheism,12 Assmann
argues that in Renaissance Europe, the renewal of interest in a perennial
ancient theology ( prisca theologia) was sparked by the circulation of writings
attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster. This led to an understanding
of Egyptian religion as twofold (religio duplex), charac terized by an outer
official religion, the ‘religion of revelation’, as well as an inner universal
religion, ‘the religion of nature.’ Assmann argues that these interests led
early modern thinkers to begin to connect their constructions of the ancient
theology of Egypt and Persia with Western Christianity, rechan nelling this
synthesis into articulations of a universal natural theology parallel to
Christian revelation.13
In
what follows, after briefly reviewing the history of the study of the Dabistān,
I outline the rhetorical contestations of religious toleration during the
period immediately preceding Mūbad’s life. These contestations hinge around the
term ṣulḥ-i kull (‘Universal Peace’). This term, which originated during the
reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar, connects ideas about the well-being of the
body politic with macro- and microcosmic harmony—ideas attributed to ancient
Iran.
I
then contextualize Mūbad’s project in relation to broader ideas about uni
versal peace as an extension of the spiritual exercises14 of the followers of Āẕar
Kayvān. With roots stretching back to Late Antique Neoplatonism,15 the philo
sophers’ goal of perfecting the soul and attaining theosis (taʾalluh) required
the adoption of a way of life dedicated to the cultivation of wisdom. Kayvān
encouraged his followers to spend their time living among diverse religious
communities, along with adopting a regime of specific bodily practices and
celestial venerations. These exercises were connected to a widely accepted the
ory of macrocosm, in which the cosmos, society, and the body were understood to
be connected realms in which to cultivate harmony. What was perhaps unique
about Āẕar Kayvān’s movement, however, was its emphasis on living among diverse
religious groups and even adopting their prayers for private devotion, a
practice which Kayvānī texts refer to as āmīza-yi farhang (‘the mix ture of
cultures’).
Mūbad
was one of the last documented disciples of Kayvān’s order, who speaks of his
predecessors but mentions no followers or successors. Considerable confusion
has arisen within Western scholarship about how to char acterize Mūbad. In the
second half of this article, I attempt to trace the contours of his career from
extant sources, which, in addition to the Dabistān, include a Dīvān of poetry
compiled sometime during the early reign of Aurangzeb and numerous letters and
short compositions originating in the late Quṭbshāhī court of Hyderabad. I then
present an analysis of the Dabistān’s shortest chapter on the religion of the
Tibetans, to illustrate some aspects of Mūbad’s method and aims. In the final
section of the article, I consider again the question of the ‘iden tity’ of Āẕar
Kayvān and his followers. I argue that they represent a parallel and connected
development in the Islamic world to the early modern European con struction of
what Jan Assmann terms religio duplex (‘dual religion’), the practice of
maintaining and reflecting upon commitments both to the exoteric native reli
gions of revelation and to an esoteric universal religion of the philosophers
which can traced back to pre-monotheist Antiquity. The article concludes with a
few examples of the survival of this notion into the colonial period.
Studying
at the School of Doctrines
The
Dabistān has long been recognized as an important, if idiosyncratic, record of
a pivotal moment in Indian history, memorialized in popular memory as an age of
interreligious harmony cultivated by the Mughal state under the banner of
‘Universal Peace’ (ṣulḥ-i kull).16 The Dabistān records, for instance, the
earli est outsider description of the Sikh (nānak-panthī) community,17 and it
pro vides a lengthy account of the religious debates that took place at the
court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, which, though fictionalized, nevertheless
reflects a contemporary understanding of what might have been at stake for the
various parties who participated in such activities.18 Mūbad was evidently
well-connected to the philosophical circles which joined together Safavid Iran
and the various Muslim states of India, and he provides first-hand accounts of
meetings with a cast of characters ranging from monarchs and theologians to
revolutionaries and tribesmen on the frontiers of the Mughal state.
Beyond
the interest in the Dabistān for the historical moment it records, the text
exerted considerable influence in the centuries following its compos ition.19
It seems to have become popular immediately after the completion of its first
draft, going through two recensions during the author’s lifetime—the first
completed in 1650, and a second by 1658.20 The Dabistān was praised for its
‘ancient style’ (ṭarz-i bāstānī) by contemporary readers at the Quṭbshāhī court
in Hyderabad—one contemporary reader wrote that ‘the elegant pen of its
composition had drunk the milk of divine secrets from the breast of spiritual
and worldly mysteries’ (qalam-i bāligh-i raqm-ash az pistān-i rumūz-i anfusī va
āfāqī shīr-i asrār nūshīda).21 The Dabistān was widely copied across India and
Iran during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and found its way
into the libraries of Europe soon thereafter.22 In 1787, the Calcutta
Orientalist Sir William Jones described it as containing ‘more recondite learn
ing, more entertaining history, more beautiful specimens of poetry, more
ingenuity and wit, more indecency and blasphemy, than I ever saw collected in a
single volume . . . On the whole, it is the most amusing and instructive book I
ever read in Persian.’23 For Jones, the work seemed to confirm Isaac Newton’s
notion of a primordial monotheism, the pure religion of Noah from which all
postdiluvial religions were descended.24 A partial English trans lation of the
first chapter of the Dabistān appeared in 1789, followed by a full English
translation in 1843.25 The text then became an important source for Orientalist
scholarship on Indian religion—late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
European scholars adopted its framework to varying degrees.26 The Dabistān was
frequently printed in Persian throughout the nineteenth century, first in a
lead-type edition printed in Calcutta (1809) and subsequently in lithographed
editions printed in Bombay (1846), Tehran (1850), and Lucknow (1877), each
undergoing several reprints. A Gujarati trans lation of the Dabistān became the
first book printed by a native-owned press in Bombay (1815);27 an Urdu
translation was completed by the Sanātanī Hindu revivalist Pandit Shraddha Ram
Phillauri in 1881 and published posthumously in Lahore in 1896.28
In
spite of the Dabistān’s great popularity, basic questions remain about the
context of its composition. The leading twentieth-century German-American
scholar of Indian Islam, Annemarie Schimmel, described the Dabistān as ‘a
strange work on comparative religion’ and ‘utterly confused’.29 Polemics aside,
scholars do not agree what motivated Mūbad to adopt a seemingly non partisan,
even-handed approach to religion, one which he contrasted with the genre of
Islamic heresiography even while repurposing it for his own agenda. Basic
questions regarding the authorship and the intent of the work continue to
occupy considerable scholarly attention. Just who was the author of the
Dabistān? Was he Muslim or Zoroastrian, Sunni or Shiʿi, part of a Sufi network
or an eccentric outsider, a forerunner of liberal toleration or a reviver of ancient
wisdom? To answer these questions, we must first step back to the per iod of
Mūbad’s forebears, Āẕar Kayvān and his followers, and the Safavid and Mughal
worlds that they traversed.
The
poetics of peace
The
decades before Mūbad’s birth are today regarded as high points of both the
Safavid and Mughal states. In popular accounts, a contrast is frequently drawn
between the putatively tolerant rule of the Mughal emperor Akbar and the
‘ruthless’ reign of the Safavid Shah ʿAbbas, the two monarchs who reigned over
northern India and Iran in the late sixteenth and early seven teenth centuries,
the peak of Āẕar Kayvān’s career. In such narratives, Akbar’s tolerant attitude
is frequently attributed to an ethos of ṣulḥ-i kull,30 while ʿAbbas’s
intolerance is linked with his attempts to impose Twelver Shiʿi orthodoxy onto
a religiously diverse population.31 In order to gain per spective on this
discourse of toleration, let us turn to a revealing exemplar of imperial
correspondence between the two courts.
During
the latter part of the sixteenth century, Safavid Iran was in the midst of a
civil war, as contending factions among the religiously heterodox Qizilbāsh
tribes, who had previously provided the military support of the Safavid state,
vied for influence at the fragile court of Muḥammad Khudābanda. With the
accession of Khudābanda’s young son ʻAbbās to the throne in 1588, the new king
began to systematically stamp out the bases of Qizilbāsh support while
promoting the consolidation of Twelver Shiʿi orthodoxy under the aegis of the
Safavid state. Famously, in 1592–93, ʿAbbas campaigned against groups
identified as Nuqṭavī heretics associated with the Qizilbāsh elite, gruesomely
putting many of their leaders to death.32
A
year later, the Mughal emperor Akbar wrote a letter to ʿAbbas to chasten him
for his severe response. Akbar had well-known sympathies for individuals
derided as Nuqṭavīs and was himself accused of adhering to the doctrine.33 In
his letter to ʿAbbas, Akbar writes,
Today,
when the land of Iran is quite depleted of sages who look to the future, it
behooves the man who is the quintessence of his noble ancestors to strive
greatly to manage the kingdom and to cure the affairs of all man kind […] In
putting men to death and in destroying this divine structure, he must exercise
complete caution […] The sections of humanity, which are the wonders of the
deposits of the divine treasury, must be regarded with the eye of compassion,
and you must strive to unite their hearts. Realizing that the all-encompassing
divine mercy comprises all nations and sects (milal va niḥal), you must strive
as completely as possible to bring yourself into the eternal spring garden of
Universal Peace (ṣulḥ-i kull).34
In
this carefully crafted letter which draws upon the tradition of ethical phil
osophy (akhlāq), Akbar chides ʿAbbas for neglecting his duty as king to main
tain social harmony. The passage begins by likening the role of the king to
that of a physician in providing a cure (iltiʾām) for the affairs of mankind. Just
as divine love and compassion are universal, extending to members of all races
and religions, the king’s duty extends to all sections of society. Thus, Akbar
enjoins ʿAbbas to lay aside religious persecution and apply an ethic of
universal kingship.
While
Akbar’s letter to Shah ʿAbbas has been well known to historians since the
nineteenth century, Shah ʿAbbas’s responses to it are less familiar. In 1598,
emboldened by military and administrative successes, ʿAbbas sent a delegation
to the court of Akbar. In preparation, he commissioned a draft of a letter in
which he would respond to Akbar’s chastisement. In the draft, ʿAbbas boasts
that his campaign against the Uzbeks would continue until the names of the 12
imams were minted on the coins of Bukhara and the ritual cursing of the first
three caliphs was uttered in every sermon in the Uzbek realm. ʿAbbas then
alludes to his rooting out of heresy, stating that:
Some
queries (kāvishī chand) were made regarding religion and sect of a group of
little conviction and turbid morality. Although it does not much conform with
pleasantry (maẕāq) and Universal Peace (ṣulḥ-i kull), nevertheless, as has been
confirmed in heavenly scriptures and well attested reports, every single one of
the prophets and possessors of divine resolve have commanded in endless
injunctions from the pinnacle of div ine magnificence that one should wage war
against evildoers (ashqiyāʾ). […] (Arabic:) Kingship and religion are twins
(al-mulk wa-l-dīn tuʾāmān). If not for them, security (al-amān) would not
arise. (Persian:) The conduct of the king lies in strengthening the religion
(taʿqīd-i dīn), as both the ancients and the moderns say: Be the protector of
religion and of wisdom, / if you do not want your days to go badly for you.
Religion is in its place on the royal throne. / Without religion, rule is
unsound. They are each other’s sentinels, / as though they lie beneath a single
sheet.35
For
Shah ʿAbbas, fulfilling the commandment to wage war against evil-doers
(ashqiyāʾ), though it is incompatible with the ethic of toleration suggested by
Akbar, is one of the foundations of kingship. The term ashqiyāʾ indeed evokes
the enemies of the Imam Ḥusayn at the Battle of Karbala, thus adding a dis
tinctively Shiʿi interpretation. Rather than drawing on Shiʿi texts to support
this claim, though, ʿAbbas instead cites the widely known aphorism that king
ship and religion are twins, attributed to the ancient Iranian king Ardashīr
(the so-called Testament of Ardashīr) in both its Arabic rendition and in its
Persian verse transmission from the Book of Kings.36
Taken together, these two carefully crafted works of diplomatic correspond ence capture two distinct political theologies, each of which is ultimately attributed to an ancient Iranian origin. That of ʿAbbas is enshrined in the Testament of Ardashīr, in which kingship and revealed religion exist on a level playing field, each of which serves the other. That of Akbar is enshrined in the notion of ṣulḥ-i kull, the universal peace transcending religious boundaries, in which the person of the king ennobled by divine splendour is placed above revealed religion as the physician of the body politic. While ʿAbbas seeks to enforce the distinction between true and false religion, Akbar seeks to abolish it, reinforcing his own role both as sacred king and as the sovereign of an reli giously and ethnically diverse empire.
As
we see in this correspondence, the term ṣulḥ-i kull implies nonsectarian
tolerance and is poetically likened to an ideal state of things—an ‘eternal
spring garden’. Contemporary poetry allows us further to understand the
semantic contours of the term. In a famous verse, the fourteenth-century
Persian poet Ḥāfiẓ speaks from a position outside the boundaries of sectarian
belonging, commanding his audience to forgive all those engaged in religious
struggle. Referring to the tradition (ḥadīth) attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad
that his followers will be divided into 73 sects, only one of which will attain
salvation, Ḥāfiẓ imagines the struggle of the 72 condemned sects as a war (
jang), saying: ‘Forgive them all in the war of the seventy-two sects— / since
they did not see Truth (ḥaqīqat), they plundered superstition (afsāna).’37
Already here, sectarianism is contrasted with truth and likened to myth.
As
poets of the early modern period sought fresh imagery to build on the
inheritance of the past, they expanded upon the topos of the war of the 72
sects to infer that peace (ṣulḥ) with the 72 sects was a prerequisite for knowl
edge of the divine. In an anonymous verse, sometimes attributed to Ḥāfiẓ, the
poet says, ‘Do not enter the circle of the wanderers of the tavern / until you
make peace with the seventy-two sects.’38 Though the topoi to which the term ṣulḥ-i
kull was eventually applied had existed in Persian poetry for centur ies before
the Mughal period, poets do not seem to have used the phrase until the reign of
Akbar, after which it spread very rapidly across the Persian-speaking world.
While not exhaustive, my attempts to scour the corpus of Classical Persian
poetry suggest that some of the earliest literary uses of the phrase ṣulḥ-i
kull originate with Akbar’s poet-laureate Fayżī, who uses the term in a ghazal
only once, but in prose on several occasions.39 Likewise, Fayżī’s brother, the
chief minister and chronicler Abu’l-Fażl uses language similar to the letter
quoted above when introducing the purpose for describing the diverse
populations of the realm in his encyclopedic account Āʾīn-i Akbarī.40
Soon
after, the topos of the gnostic who had made peace with the 72 sects became
widespread in poetry. By this point, this peace was referred to as ‘Universal
Peace’ (ṣulḥ-i kull). Thus, the Safavid cleric-philosopher Shaykh-i Bahāʾī (d.
1621) writes: ‘Be my enemy, or look at me with kindness! / I have made
Universal Peace with all humanity.’41 Abū Ṭālib Kalīm (d. 1651), the poet
laureate of Shāhjahān, could say of his poetic beloved, ‘He is always on the
verge of war with us, o Kalim, / even though we have made Universal Peace with
the seventy-two sects.’42
A
further extension of the topos of ‘Universal Peace’ extends the notion to the
cosmos and to the ascent of the soul. The poet Ṣāʿib Tabrīzī (d. 1676), court
poet to the Safavid king ʿAbbas II, writes: ‘The gnostics are free from the influ
ence of auspicious and inauspicious stars, o Ṣāʿib—/ they have made Universal
Peace with the fixed stars and planets of the firmament.’43
From the foregoing examples, we can see that Akbar’s ethic of ṣulḥ-i kull had a wide currency by the seventeenth century. First used in political contexts, the term positioned the king, as the perfect man, as God’s intermediary, main taining the diverse sections of the body politic as God maintains the cosmos and man maintains his body. The term was also applied more broadly in dis cussions of sainthood. The Kashmiri poet Mīrzā Bayg Akmal, known as Kāmil (d. 1719), provides a narrative account of the perfection of the saintly soul in his ode entitled Mukhbir al-asrār (The Announcer of Secrets). Upon reaching the highest realm of existence ( jabarūt), the poet declares ‘Infidelity and faith both vanished in that state of isolation— / I taught Universal Peace to the seventy two sects.’44 Here the term is used in a narrative text, rather than, as in the other examples, lyric poetry. For Kāmil, ṣulḥ-i kull is a stage reached during the process of the soul’s perfection. Indeed, as we will see, the term occurs in a similar context in commentaries on Āẕar Kayvān’s own narrative of his spiritual ascent and in Mūbad’s descriptions of spiritual exercises of his followers.
The Pacrocosm of the Magi
Āẕar
Kayvān is said to have been born in the city of Istakhr, near the ruins of
Persepolis, in 1533.45 By the middle of the sixteenth century, he had attracted
a school of followers in nearby Shīrāz. After refusing a series of invitations
from the Mughal emperor Akbar to take up employment at the Mughal court, Āẕar
Kayvān eventually left Iran, travelling from Shīrāz via Zābulistān and Bukhara,
capital of the Shaybanid Uzbeks, to Lahore. He died in Patna at the age of 85
in 1618. According to the hagiography circulated by his followers, Āẕar Kayvān
followed a regime of spiritual exercises his whole life, from childhood to old
age, premised on a theory of macrocosm that linked the celestial spheres with
realms of human society and the human body.
One can briefly summarize the salient features of Āẕar Kayvān’s doctrine according to the Dabistān as follows: everything in the cosmos originates from a series of divine emanations from a single source; existence is eternal and souls transmigrate after death; all that exists bears the same relationship to God as rays of sunlight do to the sun; God is to be worshipped by venerating intermediary emanations, especially the planets; the earth was populated for millions of years by human beings who lived before the time of the tradition ally acknowledged First Man; vegetarianism is virtuous; God’s revelation to the prophets, comprising the Dasātīr-i āsmānī (The Celestial Laws), was universal and the celestial language within it contains all languages; and human beings should strive for perfection through exercising the spirit which will allow them to obtain divine knowledge and their souls to find liberation and join the angelic beings of the heavenly spheres.
Beyond this, little is known about the background of Āẕar Kayvān. Though he is often described as a Zoroastrian priest in modern secondary literature, there is no evidence that he had any of the ritual or textual knowledge that a Zoroastrian priest of the sixteenth century would have had. None of the doc trines in the preceding paragraph were expressed by other Zoroastrians of this time, and the salient features of Zoroastrianism as they are expressed through out the Zoroastrian textual corpus are altogether absent from Āẕar Kayvān’s system.46 Indeed, other than a few Āẕar Kayvānī appropriations of Zoroastrian nomenclature, and a familiarity with the traditional narrative of the life of Zarathustra, hardly any aspect of Āẕar Kayvānī religious life overlaps with the Zoroastrian tradition.47 For this reason, it is helpful to consider Āẕar Kayvān alongside other historical figures from the Muslim world who pre sented their ideas as emanating from ancient Iran. To borrow a term of ancient Iranian origin from Western Neoplatonism to refer to this phenomenon, I sug gest that ‘magus’, rather than ‘Zoroastrian’, might better describe the nuance of Āẕar Kayvān’s invocations of ancient Persia.48
One
forebear to whom there is a clear link is the twelfth-century philoso pher
Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī. Much of the Āẕar Kayvānī scripture Dasātīr-i
āsmānī (The Celestial Laws) consists of word-for-word Persian transla tions of
the Arabic-language devotional works composed by Suhrawardī. He too had claimed
to be reviving an ancient Persian philosophy in putting forth his system,
encapsulated in Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (The Wisdom of Illumination). Already by
Suhrawardī’s time, the memory of ancient Iranian religion had filtered through
many lenses of the Hellenistic, Late Antique, and Islamic periods. Little is
known about the reasons that lay behind Suhrawardī’s Iranism—his distinctive
presentation of his philosophical system as a revival of ancient Iranian
philosophy—but in his time, it seems to have been perceived as encapsulating a
compelling and potentially dangerous political doctrine.49 In the Mongol and
post-Mongol period, the idea of Iran as the ancient and eternal locus of sacral
kingship only increased, as the legacy of Suhrawardī’s formulation of the
emanation of kingly splendour (kiyān khẉarra) from the light of lights spread50
to such an extent that it was incorporated directly into the introduction of
Abu’l Fażl’s Āʾīn-i Akbarī, the definitive account of Akbar’s empire.51
Āẕar
Kayvān’s spiritual preparation for divine union was recorded in a verse
narrative emulating Suhrawardī’s allegorical accounts of the soul’s ascent,
entitled the Mukāshafāt-i Kayvānī (The Revelations of Kayvān).52 In the text
that must have been composed during the 1560s or early 1570s, Kayvān narrates
his visions of the celestial spheres and ultimately his apprehension of
existential unity. The text begins by narrating Āẕar Kayvān’s preparations:
First
I prepared my body and adorned it according to the physicians’ creed.
I
abandoned my former religion, all my desires for rites and doctrines. Then I
ceased to speak; neither good nor ill did I speak to anyone. In a dark, narrow
place, I sat and abided.
I
lessened my food, ceased to sleep—
I
proceeded exhausted.
Never
did I rest from God’s memory.
Besides
Him, my misfortune seemed all the same.
I
saw so many lights, and yet
only
a little—just a thousandth—shall I recount.53
A
commentary on the Mukāshafāt quoted in the Dabistān explains the pas sage as
follows:
the
traveller of the path must know the art of medicine so that he can bring
whatever humours are dominant into harmony (iṣlāḥ). Afterward, he must banish
from himself all beliefs of religion, custom, sects, and paths (hama-yi
ʿaqāʾid-i dīn va āʾīn va kīshhā va rāhhā). He must partake of peace with all
(bā hama ṣulḥ gīrad), sit in a narrow and dark place, and eat less by
degrees.55
Here,
the equilibration of the four bodily humours (iṣlāḥ-i akhlāt̤) is directly
linked to the practice of peace with all (ṣulḥ bā hama) and, ultimately, to the
harmony of the celestial spheres.
Perfecting
the self through cultivating bodily, societal, and celestial har mony was not a
new idea in Āẕar Kayvān’s time. Throughout the medieval Islamic world,
philosophers widely subscribed to a theory of macrocosm, wherein the interior
of the human body, the world, and the cosmos were inter connected and directly
correspond to one another. This idea, attributed to the ancients (in particular
to Hermes Trismegistus and Plato), had particular importance for the
development of a universalist Islamic ethics during the post-Mongol period.
Indeed, the theory that a perfect human being (insān-i kāmil, imagined as a
prophet, saint, and/or king) was necessary to regulate societal harmony (iʿtidāl)
in parallel with macrocosmic harmony was a crucial element of Islamic political
theology during the early modern age.56
The
influential Persian-language treatise on ethics, the Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, com posed
by Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (1201–1274 CE) on the eve of the Mongol sacking of
Baghdad, had already compared the social ills of the world to the ailments of
the human body. The role of the ideal king, as the regulator of the world
(mudabbir-i ʿālam), is thus akin to that of a physician. In the years surrounding
the rise of the Safavid dynasty, a great deal of ethical literature derived
from Ṭūsī was composed in Iran. One of the most influential scholars of the
early modern period, Jalāl al-Dīn Davvānī, who died in Shiraz in 1502, expanded
upon Ṭūsī’s notion of the just ruler as physician in his Akhlāq-i Jalālī:
The
king is the physician of the world. Just as there is no choice for the
physician but to know about sickness, the causes of pain, and the methods of
cure, likewise, it is necessary for the sultan to know the sickness of the
kingdom and the means of its cure. Since the term ‘civilization’ (tamad dun) is
given to a general assembly of different peoples, then as long as every one of
these peoples sticks to its own position and remains in the task assigned to
it, and receives the share of riches and honours, i.e., of station and
property, which is appropriate to them, then the tem perament of the
civilization is in a state of equilibrium (iʻtidāl) and its affairs are at the
pinnacle of organization. […] For it is established that the source of every
state is the consensus of a population who in their cooperation resemble the
organs of a single body. In this manner, it is as though they are a single
person whose collective power is greater than that of the population.57
Just
as Muslim physicians, as heirs to the tradition of Galen, understood illness to
be caused by the disproportion of bodily humours and temperaments, like wise,
for ethical thinkers like Davvānī, social illnesses are caused by imbalance. It
is the duty of the king to promote an ideal state. Despite the fact that
society is comprised of diverse populations, it is the king’s job to promote
equilibrium and to harmoniously adjust for these differences so that different
classes of people might serve one another, just as the organs of a body do. For
Davvānī, then, the ideal state functions as a united whole, single body, whose
combined power is greater than the sum of its parts.
Philosophers
of the early modern period understood ethics to be a universal science. The
ideal lawgiver (ṣāhib-i nāmūs) regulates the world through the application of
universal regulations (qavānīn-i kullī). Such regulations made no distinction
between Muslim and non-Muslim. Indeed, as the prolific early Safavid philosopher
Ghiyās̱ al-Dīn Manṣūr Dashtakī (1462–1541) writes, the principles of ethics
unfold from the universal idea of the First Source (mabdaʾ), not from a
particular scriptural source. For Dashtakī, sages of every religion and in
every age are united in the philosophical quest deriving from an investigation
of the First Source:
There
have been different peoples and opposing nations in every age and every era of
every single religion, yet no sage has ever registered oppos ition to the
existence of the First Source (mabdaʾ). On the contrary, the impossibility of
its contradiction is precisely what defines it. […] Love per vades universally,
and its rule extends over all (ʿishq dar kull sārī va ḥukm-ash bar hama
jārī-st). The beginning proceeds from Him and the end is with Him, since
everything is Him.58
Just
as divine love is universal, since the entirety of existence is equated with
God by thinkers in the tradition of Ibn ʿArabī, the ethical principles which
Dashtakī outlines are similarly universal. Writings on ethics of the early mod
ern period offered a theory of direct correspondence between the human body,
society, and the universe. The ideal state for each of these was a state of
equi librium or harmony—in the case of the body, a harmony of humours and tem
peraments; in the case of society, a harmony of the interests of different
societal groups; and in the case of the universe, the harmony of proportions
which characterizes the orbital motions of the spheres. Moreover, the philoso
phers of the early modern period argued that such principles were universal,
shared by ancients and moderns, by non-Muslims and by Muslims. In the fol
lowing section, we will explore how these ideas in turn shaped the idea of an
ancient universal religion of humanity that runs throughout the Āẕar Kayvānī
scripture and the compositions of later generations.
The
Celestial Laws as the Persian Prisca Theologia
The
Celestial Laws (Dasātīr-i Āsmānī), the scripture of Āẕar Kayvān and his fol
lowers, consists of several liturgical hymns dedicated to the luminaries and
planets, along with other texts drawn from the corpus of Muslim philosophy. The
Dasātīr is composed in an artificial language—the language of heaven (zabān-i
āsmānī)—which is accompanied by a commentary in pure Persian, writ ten without
the use of any Arabic words.59 As I have shown elsewhere, these hymns are
word-for-word translations of the Arabic hymns associated with the philosopher
al-Suhrawardī.60 In form, these hymns (taqdīsāt, literally ‘sanc tifications’)
belong to a genre that has its roots in Neoplatonic theurgical lit urgies from
Late Antiquity,61 though the chain of transmission of these texts to Suhrawardī
is difficult to trace. Each hymn begins with salutations and praise of the
planetary body, then describes its relation to the chain of eman ation, before
concluding with a request for divine apprehension, the removal of evil, and a
gift of blessings upon the reciter. Just as Suhrawardī described his own
philosophy as a revival of the ancient theology of Persia,62 the Dasātīr too
describes its religion as originating with the pre-Adamite king Mahābād and
ascribes each of its hymns to a succession of ancient Iranian kings continuing
down to the Muslim conquest of Iran.
Little is known at present about the transmission of the devotional mate rials of Suhrawardī into early modernity, which might shed light on the background of Āẕar Kayvān. As Giancarlo Casale discusses in this special issue, there was considerable interest in this material at the Ottoman court under Mehmed the Conqueror, to whom three manuscripts of Suhrawardī’s devo tional works are dedicated.63 Mehmed similarly had commissioned a copy and an Arabic translation of extracts of the Nomoi (Laws) of the fifteenth century late Byzantine Neoplatonic revivalist George Gemistos Pletho, along with the Chaldaean Oracles which he had compiled himself and attributed to Zoroaster. There has been considerable discussion as to whether Pletho might have directly known of the writings of Suhrawardī.64 As Maria Mavroudi concludes, while the question of the direct influence of Suhrawardī on Pletho is difficult to prove, the convergence of the Byzantine and Islamic reception of Late Antique theurgy in elite Ottoman circles is note worthy in showing that an early modern Muslim audience might have under stood the projects to be commensurable.65 It is worthwhile noting here that Pletho’s principal detractor, George Gennadios Scholarios, described Pletho’s putative teacher Elissaios as ‘ostensibly a Jew but in fact a Hellenist’, as having been ‘an adherent of Averroes and other Persian and Arabic interpreters of Aristotle’s works’, and as having ‘expounded to Gemistos the doctrines of Zoroaster and others’.66 The reception of Pletho’s writings in Renaissance Florence set off an interest in uncovering the Prisca Theologia (The Ancient Theology), attributed to Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, which in turn shaped the early modern European ideas about religio duplex.67
It
is certainly tempting to see a connection between Pletho’s Nomoi and Āẕar
Kayvān’s Dasātīr-i Āsmānī. The parallels between the two texts and their
receptions are striking—both project a Neoplatonic cosmology onto ancient
Iranian figures; both texts comprise theurgical litanies dedicated to the celes
tial bodies to be recited on the corresponding days of the week; and both texts
emerged in contexts connected to Suhrawardī and resulted in an esoteric
interest in ancient theology.
The
interest in the recovery of an ancient perennial theology during the early
modern period extended across the Islamic world, from the Ottoman domain to
Mughal India. There is at least some evidence to draw a connection between the
theurgy of the Dasātīr and the Dīn-i ilāhī (Divine Religion) of the Mughal
emperor Akbar. Āẕar Kayvān’s student Bahrām ibn-i Farhād writes:
We
know the account of Shaykh Abu’l Fażl, because he requested a refer ence manual
(dastūr al-ʻamal) from [Āẕar Kayvān] the Lord of Sciences about the worship of
the stars and the like. […] When the Friend of the Divine Religion (dūstkām-i
yazdānī kīsh) [Āẕar Kayvān] came to India, Shaykh Fayżī and Abu’l Fażl learned
from him the rites of worshipping the sun and the other planets. […]
Afterwards, they obtained favor (navāzish) from the Emperor.68
It
is possible that the reference manual (dastūr al-ʿamal) referred to in this pas
sage as being sent to Akbar’s closest advisers is none other than the Dasātīr
itself, as suggested by the etymological connection between the singular dastūr
and the plural dasātīr. At any rate, it seems likely that the steady stream of
migrants from Iran to India played an important role in Akbar’s 1583 decree
instituting the dīn-i ilāhī and the adoption of ṣulḥ-i kull ‘Universal
Peace’.69
The Dasātīr laid the foundation for a universalist project claiming both a common source and a common end for the exoteric religious traditions of the world. Manuscripts of the Dasātīr reveal further evidence of this perenni alist project. One manuscript of the Dasātīr, which is unique among the many extant manuscripts of the text, contains an appendix after the conclusion of the text70 which contains a supplement of invocations in a variety of languages, including Avestan and Pazand (both are referred to as zand), ‘Samrānī’, Sanskrit, ‘Hindavī’, Turkī’, and Arabic. Each of these texts is tran scribed phonetically in Arabic script and accompanied by a Persian transla tion.71 Technical details aside, the inclusion in a single text of liturgical material drawn from Zoroastrian, Bhakti, Turkic Shamanic, and Muslim philo sophical traditions sheds light on the eclecticism of the followers of Āẕar Kayvān. The Dasātīr is itself a kind of perennialist anthology, a convenient tool whereby a devotee could incorporate the results of a comparative enter prise into their regime of spiritual exercises—indeed, the result of independent verification (taḥqīq). And in fact, such multilingual practices by the followers of Āẕar Kayvān are also described by the Dabistān. In 1638/9 CE, Mūbad mentions meeting a sage in Lahore by the name of Hīrbad (‘Archmagus’) who prayed in several languages. He describes him as someone who busied himself with ascetic practice (riyāżat), and he lived alone and chaste. He spent his time reciting prayers (adʿiya) in Persian, Hindi, and Arabic about the greatness of the Light of Lights (nūr al-anvār), the Archetypal Lights (anvār-i qāhira), and the Planets (kavākib). He under stood the qibla to be the luminous bodies (ajsām-i furūgh-bakhsh), and he knew the compositions of Shaykh-i Maqtūl (Suhrawardī) well.72
Āẕar
Kayvānī texts frequently refer to the notion that all languages, and by
extension all religions, were derived from a common source and were thus
ultimately translatable, at least in their inward meaning if not their exoteric
practice. This idea is again ascribed to ancient Persian doctrine, negating
exclusive, non-universal claims to truth. In or around 1618, Bahrām ibn Farhād,
who had studied in Shiraz before he came to follow Āẕar Kayvān, com pleted a
lengthy work entitled the Shāristān-i Dānish va Gulistān-i Bīnish (The Region
of Knowledge and the Garden of Vision), better known as the Shāristān-i Chahār
Chaman, a text which provides extensive contemporary descriptions of Āẕar
Kayvān, his followers, and their interactions with the intellectual cir cles of
Iran and India, interspersed throughout a history of ancient Iran. As a major
source cited throughout the Dabistān, the Shāristān is a crucial link between
the writings of Āẕar Kayvān himself and those of Mūbad. Among other things, the
Shāristān cites extensively from texts associated with Āẕar Kayvān that are no
longer extant. In one such text, Āẕar Kayvān identifies philosophical schools
as a universal aspect of religion
Āẕar
Kayvān, in the Mirror of Alexander, which is one of the writings of that
Master, has related that the difference of the aforementioned sects is in name
only. Thus, [one says] Pandit Smāranik [Sanskrit paṇḍita smāraṇika, a teacher
of smṛti] in Hindi, Mūbad [a Zoroastrian ritual priest] in Persian, and
Mutakallim [theologian] in Arabic; Sanyāsī [renunciant] in Hindi, Hīrbad [a
Zoroastrian priest of higher rank than a Mūbad] in Persian, and Ṣūfī in Arabic;
Gyānī [ jñānī, sage] in Hindi, Farzāna jūyā gūyā va **kalnā [the seeking,
speaking, ? sage] in Persian, and Mashshāʾī [peripatetic] in Arabic, Jogī [
yogī] in Hindi, Farzāna bīnā va gashaspī [the perceptive and illuminated sage]
in Persian and Ishrāqī [Illuminationist] in Arabic. The difference occurs in
the signifier and not in the signified, just like [the following words for
water]: [Persian] āb, [Arabic] mā, [Turkish], sū, and [Hindi] pānī.73
Subscribing
to a view of language that languages differ only in their signs, not in their
signification, Kayvān implies that religions too differ only in their outward
signs, not in their inward signification. As such, all were reflections of a
single entity, much as water remains water no matter what it is called.
Developing this idea further in a later passage, Bahram ibn-i Farhād likens the
religions of the world to a tree:
‘[Arabic:]
Mankind was a single community. Then God sent prophets bear ing good tidings
and warnings to them (Qurʾān 2:213). Then they formed differences. As your Lord
willed, he created mankind as a single commu nity.’ [Persian:] On account of
this, it is established that one can find the Lord in all religions (ba jamīʿ-i
adyān) and reach him by every path (ba har rāh). There is no path which does
not end there. After all, a tree has one root even if its branches are many.
There exists one inner meaning (ʿibārat), which is the fruit of this tree: in
all religions, which are like the branches of a tree, this fruit does not
differ in taste.74
The
passage begins with an exegesis in Arabic of a well-known Quranic passage
understood to describe humanity sometime in the period between Adam and Noah.
While it is normally interpreted to explain man’s fall into error from the
Religion of Truth and the necessity of prophets to restore humanity to God’s
law, here the passage is instead taken as a statement approving of religious
diversity. Bahrām uses the metaphor of a tree as a model of divergence to
explain seeming difference. Yet although the branches of the tree appear sep
arate from the root, Bahrām states that the fruit of each branch, here under
stood to be the inner meaning (ʿibārat) of religion, is the same no matter
which branch it is picked from.
The
Shāristān speaks approvingly of the practice of befriending members of diverse
religious communities as a way to avoid partisanship. Bahrām relates an
anecdote in which a Sufi came to Āẕar Kayvān, who contrasted the behav iour of
a saint with that of the jurists. In a statement redolent of the religious
persecutions of the Safavid state, Bahrām claims they are complicit in murder:
A
knowledgeable and truth-seeking Sufi came to the master of the sciences [Āẕar
Kayvān]. He used to say, ‘The Sufi believes that one must not be partisan
(mutaʿaṣṣib), and that one should act in the same manner with fellow travellers
of all different kinds. Just as one spends time with Muslims, one should also
befriend Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians (gabr), and Christians. Therefore, one
cannot act according the decrees of the jurists of the age ( fuqahāʾ-i ʿaṣr),
for they are complicit in jihād and murder (bar jihād va qatl murtakib) and
thereby deny the obligatory (az vujūb inkār-and).’75
Bahrām
ibn-i Farhād was an important early influence on Mūbad, whom he met in Lahore
in 1638 CE, when Mūbad was 20 years old. His Shāristān became a major source
for Mūbad’s description of the life of Āẕar Kayvān. But while Bahrām’s composition focused almost
exclusively on the circles of Āẕar Kayvān and his followers, Mūbad’s project
would take him across the Indian subcontin ent and beyond in search of
religious knowledge.
The
peripatetic Magus
Now
that we have shed light on some of the ideas that contributed to the com
position of the Dabistān, we can return to Mūbad himself. Assembling informa
tion on the life of Mūbad from various sources into a coherent narrative is no
easy task. Though the Dabistān often provides dates for Mūbad’s encounters, the
text is by no means arranged chronologically. Surveying the dates given
throughout the text in aggregate, however, does seem to reveal consistent pat
terns in Mūbad’s movements throughout India.
Briefly
summarized, during the early part of Mūbad’s life (1028 AH/1618 CE– 1047/1637),
he moved from Patna in Bihar to the area around Agra and Kashmir.76 During this
early period, he seems primarily to have met other members of the Sipāsī order,
many of whom had followed Āẕar Kayvān during his lifetime, and who were
evidently quite old when Mūbad met them.
Mūbad’s
own description of the followers of Āẕar Kayvān highlights the group’s
tolerance of religious difference:
Now,
a bit about the mingling (āmīzish) of the Ābādī dervishes with the diverse
peoples shall be written with the pen of inquiry. This group calls this
practice ‘The Mixing of Cultures’ (āmīza-yi farhang). When some one foreign to
their sect (kīsh) is introduced to the assembly of this group, they do not
speak coarsely of him; they praise his path and religion (rāh va maẕhab), and
they accept what he says, and do not overlook even a morsel of politeness and
generosity, according to the principle of their sect (aṣl-i maẕhab-i khẉīsh),
namely that in their belief (iʻtiqād), one can reach God (khudā) through every
religion.77
The
theme of openness to outward religious difference runs throughout Mūbad’s
accounts of meetings with members of diverse religious groups. So too does the
theme of concealing one’s inner beliefs from the non-initiated— at one point,
Mūbad even tells us that Āẕar Kayvān once said, ‘If you want to keep your
religion a secret everywhere you go, hide it even from your coreligio nists,
for they might expose you to make their path look strong.’78
During
the middle part of his career (1047/1637–1055/1645), Mūbad was active primarily
in Punjab and Afghanistan.79 At this time, he was evidently associated with
several figures at the court of the Mughal emperor Shāhjahān and began to
report meeting Hindu and Muslim figures more fre quently. Especially noteworthy
during this period are Mūbad’s accounts of his meetings with the Sikh gurus
Hargobind (1595–1644) and Har Rai (1630– 1661), the latter described as a ‘good
friend’ (bisyār āshnā) to the author.80
In
the last documented portion of his life (1055/1645–1069/1659) he trav elled
south via Gujarat to the area around Hyderabad, the domain of the Quṭbshāh
sultans.81 The first recension of the Dabistān was copied for Mūbad’s disciple
Muḥammad Amīn in Potlacheru (modern Patancheru) near Golkonda in 1060, who
checked the copy with Mūbad himself. In 1061 and 1063, Mūbad was in Srikakulam
on the Andhra coast. By 1062, elite readers in Hyderabad were mentioning the
Dabistān in their letters. A second recension of the Dabistān was completed
between 1063–1068 AH/1653–1658 CE.82 According to contemporary (though undated)
letters, at some point he seems to have served as a chancery officer in the
employment of the long-reigned ʿAbdullāh Quṭbshāh (r. 1035/1626–1083/1672).
ʿAbdullah was a man of notably eclectic taste, who brought together at his
court a wide range of natural philosophers, physicians, astronomers, and occult
practitioners. Mūbad seems to have thrived in this context—one letter records
that his honesty was so unimpeachable that his testimony in court counted for
that of two Muslims.83 Following the period of the Hyderabad letters, when he
would have been around the age of 40, we lose track of Mūbad, though we know
from his poetic Dīvān that he was still active after 1069/1659 when he composed
poetry mourning the loss of the Mughal prince Dārā Shukōh at the hands of his
brother, the newly crowned emperor Aurangzeb.
The
picture that emerges of Mūbad, then, is not one of a man aloof from politics,
as some authors have tried to depict him, but rather of a figure who was never
far from a royal court in spite of his many travels. Much of his early career
must have been spent close to the Mughal court, and it is pos sible that he was
in some way connected to the Mughal state apparatus, though at present there
are no known documents that allow us to connect him to the court with
certainty. When he completed the Dabistān, it appears that he was in the
imperial service of the Quṭbshāh court.
Unlike
the earlier Āʾīn-i Akbarī of Abu’l-Fażl, which provided accounts of Indian
learning from the perspective of the imperial court,84 the Dabistān was not
explicitly linked to an imperial project—no patron is ever mentioned in the
text and Mūbad presents the project as his own initiative. Nevertheless, the
ideals of sainthood presented in the text were closely tied to ideals of sacral
kingship. Similar activities exploring the metaphysical richness of religious
diversity, while asserting absolute political authority, legitimized through
the notion of maintaining the harmony of the body politic, such as those of the
con temporary Mughal prince Dara Shukoh, were acts of royal self-fashioning and
instruments of political authority.85 What I think the Dabistān allows us to
state with certainty is that the ethics of toleration enshrined in the idea of ṣulḥ-i
kull and the universality of the pursuit of religious truth were not merely
instruments of the royal court but were understood more broadly in early mod
ern society to be virtues leading to self-perfection and spiritual liberation.
‘Those
who have been silenced by love have another language’
The
Dabistān is filled with descriptions of encounters between its author and
members of diverse religious groups. The descriptions, often difficult to evalu
ate, are of religious figures and groups who are not mentioned elsewhere in the
early modern Persian textual corpus. A modern reader might wonder what actually
transpired in Mūbad’s encounters with a follower of the seventh century Arab
rebel prophet Musaylima in seventeenth-century Mashhad or a group of Mazdakites
claiming to possess an otherwise unknown scripture of a sixth-century Persian
heretic. Such seemingly implausible narratives are mixed freely with first-hand
accounts of much better-known figures. Throughout the text, first-person
accounts are embedded in broader philo sophical and hagiographical narratives,
leaving the reader little context to understand what brought Mūbad into contact
with the figures he describes.
Certain
accounts, like the short chapter on the Tibetans (tabatiyān),86 which is
presented below, contain enough linguistic specificity to leave little room for
doubt that Mūbad indeed spoke with Tibetans about their religion and took great
care in transcribing their language. Mūbad does not record when or where he
encountered Tibetans but one might well assume that the encounter took place
while he was based in Kashmir, where he spent a considerable amount of time in
the early phases of his life.87 One might even guess that the encounter took
place during the period of the Kashmīr governor Zafar Khan’s raids on Baltistan
(‘little Tibet’) in 1637. During his discussion of the Tantric Shaivite Gosain
Tirlochan, Mūbad mentions in passing that when Zafar Khan’s wife had become a
devotee of Tirlochan, Zafar himself requested assistance from the saint in
obtaining victory over the Tibetans, promising him alcohol and women in return
for his blessing.88 At any rate, Mūbad’s chapter on the Tibetans does not seem
to draw on any earlier source in Persian, and as such provides an opportunity
to investigate briefly the programme of compari son and translatability which
underlies the Dabistān.
Like
most chapters in the 1650 manuscript of the Dabistān, the description of the
beliefs of the Tibetans begins with an invocation written in naskh script at
the top centre of the folio—an equivalent to the Arabic bismillāh specific to
the religious tradition being described.89 In this case, the Tibetan word for
God (könchok) is transcribed in large letters in Arabic script (kujaq). The
chapter then commences with a distinctly Islamic-Neoplatonic description of the
Tibetan Buddhist view of God. This immediately serves to establish Tibetan
religion within the universal framework of the Dabistān:
They
call God kujaq [Tibetan dkon mchog], and they consider him to be incor poreal
(mujarrad), uncompounded (basīṭ), and omnipotent (tavānā). They assert that he
manifests himself in three forms, just like the Hindus do. They say that if
someone should apprehend God and can speak with him without mouth or tongue,
this is the station of prophethood ( pāya-yi nubuvvat).90
After
introducing the Tibetan view of God in familiar terms, Mūbad proceeds to
compare the doctrine of the Tibetans to that of the Hindus, apparently likening
the Buddhist doctrine of the ‘three jewels’ (dkon mchog gsum)—the Buddha, the
dharma, and the sangha—to the Hindu belief in the ‘three divine forms’ (trimūrti)—Brahma,
Viṣṇu, and Śiva—which he had previously described in the chapter on Vedanta.
Mūbad then states that individuals who have attained divine gnosis communicate
directly with God and in this respect are like the prophets of Islam, described
by Muslim authors as receiving reve lation directly in their hearts rather than
through conventional means.91
After
establishing Tibetan doctrine about the nature of divinity as some thing
familiar, indeed uncontroversial, Mūbad proceeds to describe the speci fics of
Tibetan belief about the human soul and its rebirth reported from a religious
expert:
They
say that the soul (rūḥ) is pre-eternal (qadīm), and that souls are sent down
(to this world). If the soul recognizes itself and God, it enters the upper world;
if not, it remains in the world of dust. The author of this text has heard from
one of their Perfect Masters (kāmilān) that when the rational soul (nafs-i nāṭiqa)
is separated from the body, it goes to the upper realm and passes through the
heavens. [β recension: In the upper world,] there is a sea, and in that sea,
there is a mountain upon which God Exalted sits. If that spirit were a doer of
good deeds, God Exalted appears to him in a beautiful form, such that by
witnessing it he obtains profound pleasure, which no one can express by means
of the tongue, and for all eternity, he is blessed and fortunate to witness it.
If he were a doer of bad deeds, God presents himself in a strange and terrible
form, nothing uglier and more hideous than which exists. With dread, he casts
himself down from the heavens, and he becomes imprisoned by the dust.92
Mūbad
devotes considerable space to describing Tibetan beliefs about the
transmigration of souls. Indeed, the question of transmigration, which was a
point of contention among early modern thinkers is discussed in most chap ters
of the Dabistān. Several followers of Suhrawardī attributed to him a posi tive
view of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls.93 The Dasātīr likewise
presented the doctrine of transmigration as part of ancient Iranian belief.
However, the influential philosopher Mullā Ṣadrā (1571–1636) came to criticize
both the doctrine of the pre-existence of the individual soul and that of trans
migration. Here, the account of the intermediate state of the soul between life
and death echoes Tibetan teachings about the state of bardo as found in texts
like the so-called Book of the Dead.
After
outlining the basic doctrinal orientation of the Tibetans, Mūbad moves on to
describe Tibetan hagiography. He writes:
There
is a man among them called pūn lupa [slob-dpon ‘teacher’], a man of
extraordinary piety. Among his miracles (khavāriq-i ʻādāt), it is said that he
once leapt from one stone to another, and the imprint of his foot was impressed
upon it. Nowadays they perform pilgrimage (ziyārat) to that place. There is
another perfect individual (kāmil), about whom they say that when he reaches
(the end of ) his natural lifespan, he assembles peo ple and selects someone.
In their presence, he entrusts that person with his books and personal
belongings and says, ‘I shall come to your house.’ Then, he breaks away from
his body, and they bury him according to their custom. Afterwards, the wife of
his executor will give birth to a son. After one year or even less, he will
begin to speak, and seek out wit ness, and in their presence, he will take the
things which were accounted to him and then entrust them to him again. [β
recension: Then he will not speak again until the (customary) age of speech
(hangām-i nuṭq). When he reaches adolescence, he will take up the path of
poverty (darvīshī).] They say that this Perfect Man comes to perfect the
deficient (takmīl-i nāqiṣān).94
Here
and above, the specific details of Tibetan belief regarding miracles and
monastic reincarnation are related as reported speech. The chapter on the
Tibetans in the Dabistān is noteworthy for not naming any individual interlo
cutors, nor even saints. As such, it is unclear who Mūbad is referring to in
these two examples. Nevertheless, the accounts consist of recognizable tropes
associated with the reborn incarnations (tulku) of high-ranking Tibetan lamas.
Next,
the text proceeds to describe essential details of Tibetan worship and society:
They
have idol-temples (butkhāna) which they call chahtarīn [mchod rten], and they
venerate these places. Their statement of faith (kalma) is umānī beme hum [oṃ
mani padme hūṃ]. The custom is for anyone who has two sons to commit one of
them to mendicancy (darvīsh kunad) on the path of God. Even if the king himself
has two sons, he commits one to mendi cancy. They believe that there are two
abodes (ʿimārat)—the otherworldly (ākhirat) and the worldly (dunyā). The
mendicant son is responsible for the otherworldly abode and the son who is
attached to worldly concerns (ahl-i taʻalluq) earns a worldly income. [β
recension: When their mother and father’s bodies become infirm and crippled
from old age, the worldly son serves them, but when the souls of their parents
are separated from their bodies, they receive help from the mendicant son.]
When many of these young mendicants assemble, then the son of the king or the
son of another leader becomes the leader of this group, and they set out to
Lhasa (usāng [dbus-gtsang]), which is their great shrine (maʻbad). When they
return from pilgrimage, they become lāmas, i.e., pilgrims (ḥājī).95
This
passage briefly describes basic aspects of Tibetan ritual practice before
giving a more detailed account of Tibetan monasticism. Emphasized here is the
bifurcation of society into worldly and religious spheres—the people of
attachment (ahl-i taʿalluq) and mendicants (darvīsh)—echoing descriptions of
the religious elite found in other chapters. The terminology employed here
brings Sufi mendicancy immediately to mind. The passage continues to discuss
the behaviour of the lamas:
The
lāmas abstain from animal (flesh) and women, and they do not set about doing
any worldly activity. They wear their hair dishevelled, and they eat from human
skulls. They carry joints of human hands strung together instead of rosaries
(subḥa), and they keep human femurs as trumpets (shākh-i nafīr). They say, ‘We
are dead, and the dead have no use for the things of the living.’ [β recension:
Couplet: We have departed and taken up in the corner of a shrine / so our bones
should not be a bur den to anyone [couplet by Ṭālib Āmulī.] This group (ṭāʾifa)
are without peer in magic (siḥr), sleight of hand (shuʻbada), spells (afsūn),
and even bot any (najāt), medicine (ṭibb), and surgery ( jarrāḥī).] If their
king’s mother is not of royal descent, they call him arghūn [argon] and they do
not recog nize him as worthy of (true) kingship. The worldly members (α:
dunyādārān β: ahl-i taʿalluq) of this nation are not wary of killing and eating
animals and flesh foreign (bīgāna) to their religion. [β recension: They eat in
the company of any man.]96
Here
Mūbad describes in some detail the bodily practices of the lamas. Like the
followers of Kayvān, they practise vegetarianism. The description of Tibetan
kapala—the ritual implements made of human skulls and bones, perhaps shocking
to the urbane audiences of the Dabistān—is rendered more palatable by the
inclusion of a witty verse composed by the court poet of Jahāngīr Ṭālib Āmūlī.
The passage then briefly describes the various strengths of Tibetan knowledge
of the sciences, and other aspects of the bifurcation of Tibetan soci ety into
the religious elite and lay classes.
Throughout
the Dabistān, Mūbad appears to have been able to speak to most of his
informants directly, presumably in Persian or in Hindavī. However, at the
conclusion of the chapter, Mūbad confesses to having been unable to con verse
in great detail with his Tibetan informants since he had to work through a
translator. This perhaps explains the lack of named individuals or books given
in the chapter, though Mūbad’s careful transcriptions of the spoken Tibetan
language into the Arabic alphabet reveal an attempt to accurately record what
he heard.
Since
the author held conversation with their learned men through the mediation of a
translator, whenever subtle details came up, the translator was unable to offer
a translation. [β recension: Verse: Those silenced by love have another
language.]97
It
is ironic that Mūbad, who describes his role in the Dabistān as like that of a
translator, was unable to inquire further into details regarding Tibetan
beliefs, owing to the failure of translation. Perhaps to make this conclusion
less jar ring, Mūbad adds an elegant verse to the end of the chapter, to
highlight the Tibetans’ inclusion in the universal framework of the
Dabistān—though unable to freely communicate with them, still Mūbad recognizes
the common ality of their pursuit of liberation.
Ṣulḥ-i
kull and the global memory of Āz̲ar Kayvān
Throughout
all of his compositions, in spite of the detailed attention he gives to minute
matters of religious doctrine and practice, Mūbad carefully conceals his own
identity in ambiguity. His very name, Mīrzā Ẕu’l-Fiqār Āẕarsāsānī, references
the sword of ʿAlī, the first Shiʿi imam in the first element, and des cent from
the pre-Islamic Sasanian dynasty in the second.
The
difficulty in characterizing Mūbad as belonging to one or another reli gious
group is perhaps the aim of the universalist framework of comparison of the
Dabistān, based in the social practices of the followers of Āẕar Kayvān. Even
as Mūbad defines seemingly distinct religious communities in his work, he
consciously and consistently blurs the boundaries between them through con
stant comparison of one to another, all positioned towards what he viewed as
universal philosophical concerns. While the many saintly figures described in the
Dabistān are identified as belonging to one or another group, it is clear that
Mūbad saw in them an affinity, a shared human pursuit of liberation through
truth. It is this phenomenon, a balancing of the exoteric religion of
revelation with the esoteric religion of humanity, mediated through the act of
translation, that distinguishes Mūbad’s programme of comparison.
The
religio duplex phenomenon associated with the ṣulḥ-i kull moment of the
mid-seventeenth century continued after the composition of the Dabistān. In
Iran, ṣulḥ-i kull was sometimes associated with Sufism and imbued with the
negative connotations that Shah ʿAbbas had already described in his response to
Akbar. The polemicist Mullā Muḥammad Ṭāhir Qummī wrote in a treatise against
the Sufis composed in 1659 that ‘the Sufis have not acknowledged any one to be
evil and have practiced peace with every existent being (ṣulḥ bā kull kāʾināt
karda-and)’.98 But in poetry, the topos of Universal Peace grew more and more
common with each generation. During this period, though we know little by way
of specific details, manuscripts related to the Āẕar Kayvānī must have
circulated widely—today, a relatively large number of manuscripts of these
texts survive across South Asia and Iran.
The
Dasātīr became newly popular when a manuscript purchased from a Muslim
bookseller in Iran was brought back to Bombay by the Parsi Zoroastrian priest
Mullā Fīrūz ibn Kāʾūs.99 Though Mullā Fīrūz was, unlike Mūbad or Āẕar Kayvān, a
recognized authority figure for orthodox Zoroastrians as the High Priest of the
Dadyseth Atash Behram in Bombay, he nevertheless identified strongly in his
philosophical leanings with the univer sal religion of the Dasātīr and the
Dabistān. In 1810, an English observer noted that Fīrūz claimed not to believe
in the basic tenets of Zoroastrianism and instead to be a philosopher, in spite
of his status as the highest religious authority of the Zoroastrians of
Bombay.100 Working together with Governor Jonathan Duncan, Mullā Fīrūz
published the Dasātīr in Bombay together with an English translation in 1818.
A
few decades later, the Delhi-based poet Ghālib declared his history of the
Indian uprising of 1857 to constitute a new section of the Dasātīr, and that he
himself was like the Sixth Sāsān, the successor to the ancient transmitter of
the Dasātīr.101 Ghālib claimed to have studied in his youth with a
‘Zoroastrian’ tutor bearing the Muslim name ʿAbd al-Ṣamad along with the secret
Persian name Hurmuzd. As noted in Moin’s framework article in this special issue,
Ghālib’s biographer Ḥālī declared his religion to be that of ṣulḥ-i kull.
As
increasing numbers of Āẕar Kayvānī texts were printed in India to be sold
across the Persian-speaking world, the influential Parsi representative at the
court of Nasir al-Din Shah, Māṇekji Limji Hāṭariā, who styled himself darvīsh-i
fānī (‘The Dervish of the Transient World’) shared his enthusiasm for Āẕar
Kayvān with a broad network of thinkers within the elite classes of Qajar
society. As modern European ideas of nationalism, language, and race took hold
in Iranian society, a secularized reading of Āẕar Kayvānī texts tanta lized a
young generation of nationalists with a vision of a perennial Iranian
philosophy seemingly distinct from Islam. Hataria himself, though charged with
representing the interests of Iranian Zoroastrians at court, found himself
supporting the Bahāʾī cause, encouraging Bahāʾullāh to write in pure Persian
and introducing him to the prophetology of the Dasātīr. Ultimately, many of the
intellectuals who helped to shape the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906
were familiar with the narrative and the strange, pure Persian language of the
Dasātīr. Though it became a cause of embarrassment for later genera tions of
Iranian nationalists, the Dasātīr and the Dabistān helped to shape an idea of
an eternal Iran that still persists to this day.102
As
a final example of the global legacy of the Āẕar Kayvānīs, in 1886, a young
Shiʿi poet by the name of Mirza Muhammad Hadi ‘Ruswā’, who would go on to write
the first well-known Urdu novel Umrāʾo Jān Ādā, wrote a letter from his home in
Lucknow to the town of Osceola, Missouri in the United States. As a young man,
Ruswā published a monthly magazine about philoso phy which he called Ishrāq.
Through the auspices of Henry Steel Olcott, presi dent of the Theosophical
Society, Ruswā was encouraged to write to Thomas Moore Johnson, editor of the
Missouri-based Neoplatonic revivalist journal The Platonist, which was engaged
in publishing the works of Plotinus, Proclus, and Iamblichus for an American
audience. In his first letter to Johnson, Ruswā describes himself as a
‘Musalman Platonist’ with a ‘great mind to come to America’ and offered to
translate works of Oriental Platonic philosophy for the journal.103 Johnson
seemed supportive, at least at first, to the idea of bringing Ruswā to America,
publishing an editorial in his journal calling on readers to seriously consider
a plan to found a ‘School of Philosophy’ ‘on American soil’ in which ‘the
wisdom of the Orient, and even Oriental teachers, may be brought here’.104 This
plan seems to have gone nowhere, but for the next year, Mirza Muhammad Hadi
would go on to publish a serialized English translation of the Dasātīr for the
readers of the Platonist.105 Though Ruswā seems to have given up on his plan to
relocate to America shortly thereafter, throughout his literary career he
continued to publish works on the legacy of Suhrawardī. His magisterial Urdu
translation and commentary of Suhrawardī’s magnum opus Ḥikmat al-ishrāq was
published in 1925, a few years before his death.106
Scholarship
of recent decades has done much to bring to light the roots of the discipline
of comparative religion within early modern European intellec tual history107
and has encouraged looking beyond the paradigms inherited from colonial-era
scholarship to other archives of comparison. As a work which weaves the notion
of the transability of religions together with an ethic of toleration, and
which intersects with nascent colonial forms of knowl edge, the Dabistān
provides an important counterpoint to Eurocentric accounts of the history of
the study of religion, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam has already noted.108 What I find
striking about these later examples of the reception of Āẕar Kayvānī thought is
the reflexive foregrounding of a twofold religious identity consisting of an
outward commitment to an exclusive religion of reve lation and an inner
commitment to a more universal pursuit. Mullā Fīrūz was simultaneously a
Zoroastrian high priest and a philosopher; the poet Ghālib presented his tutor
ʿAbd al-Samad as a Muslim and an authority on ancient Persian religion and
language; Hataria was an Indian Zoroastrian and a pro moter of a universal
Persian national identity; Ruswā was a ‘Musalman Platonist’.
Speaking
of his own religion, Mūbad writes at one point in his Dīvān:
The
Turanians think I am from Iran.
The
Iranians say I’m not one of them.
The
Sunnis think that I am Shiʿi.
The
Shiʿis think I must not be Muslim …
I
am outside of all religions.
I
am the ultimate sage of the Lord.
A
man who met his goal does not travel.
I
have obtained union with all souls.
I
am the most knowledgeable of the sages of the nature of Truth
I
am the archmagus of God.109
While
the poem is undated, it is tempting to view it as expressing Mūbad’s
achievement in the years he spent composing the Dabistān. After years of living
among and learning from diverse religious groups, Mūbad claims to have achieved
gnosis and spiritual liberation. In this article, I have argued that the
composition of the Dabistān was an extension of the spiritual exercises of Āẕar
Kayvān, which aimed at cultivating the perfection of the soul through actions
taken with respect to the cosmos, society, and the body. These exer cises,
reflecting the broader early modern ethic of ṣulḥ-i kull, were understood to
belong to the practice of the ancient Persians, leading saints to pursue what
they understood to be a universal human goal while maintaining the appear ance
of belonging to particular religious communities. For a man who spent much of
his life travelling to document religious diversity, it is noteworthy that in
the poem above Mūbad claims that those who have attained the goal of liberation
need no longer travel. By striving to put the notion of peace with all
religions into practice through the composition of his School of Doctrines,
Mūbad claims to have reached a higher truth.
Acknowledgements.
I would like to thank a number of colleagues whose assistance and insight ful
comments have contributed substantially to the ideas in this article. These
include Azfar Moin, Giancarlo Casale, Mana Kia, Ali Nadeem Rezavi, Alexander
Bevilacqua, Carlos Cañete, and the two anonymous reviewers of MAS for their
comments on various iterations of this article; and N. Wahid Azal, Yaser
Malekzadeh, Hunter Bandy, Patrick Bowen, and Ursula Sims-Williams for their
gener osity in sharing difficult-to-obtain manuscript sources.
Foot Notes
1rastagān-rā
fikr-i dīn u maẕhab u irshād nīst / ān-ki ū dar band-i āzādī-st ham āzād nīst.
chand dar paskūchahā-i maẕhab-u millat dawīm / shāhrāh-i kishvar-i taḥqīq juz
ilḥād nīst. From Dīvān-i Mūbad, Khudabakhsh Library, Patna, MS 3727, fol. 21r.
2The
term ḥaqīqat-i dīn appears to invert the Quranic identification of Islam as the
Religion of Truth (dīn al-ḥaqq). As discussed at length in Moin’s framework
article in this special issue, the term dīn al-ḥaqq appears in the Sūrat
al-Tawba of the Quran (9:33) to denote the priority of the dispen sation of Muḥammad
over all religion: ‘It is he who sent his messenger with guidance and the reli
gion of truth to make it prevail over all religion, although those who
associate others with God dislike it’ (huwa lladhī ʾarsala rasūlahu bi-l-hudā
wa-dīni l-ḥaqqi li-yuẓhirahu ʿalā d-dīni kullihi wa-law kariha l-mushrikūna).
3Drawing
attention to reflections upon and processes of comparison, rather than the act
of comparison itself, see the essays in Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill and
Geoffrey Lloyd (eds), Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in
History, Religion and Anthropology (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
4
Matthew Melvin-Koushki proposes that a new investigation of the tension between
taḥqīq and taqlīd (‘independent inquiry’ and ‘blind imitation’) should be the
foundation of a new early modern intellectual history. See Matthew
Melvin-Koushki, ‘Taḥqīq vs. Taqlīd in the Renaissances of Western Early Modernity’,
Philological Encounters 3, no. 1–2 (2018), pp. 1–45.
5On
past misunderstandings regarding the authorship of the Dabistān, and the
decision to ren der mūbad as ‘magus’ rather than as ‘Zoroastrian priest’ in
English, see below.
6Karīm
Najafī Barzgar (ed.), Dabistān-i maẕāhib: chāp-i ʿaksī-i nuskha-yi khaṭṭī-i sāl
1060 H./1650 M. (New Delhi: Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif-i Īrān va Hind, 2010), fol.
149r–v; Raḥīm Riżāzāda Malik (ed.), Dabistān-i maẕāhib (Tehran: Ṭahūrī, 1983),
p. 188.
7
Mūbad writes, ‘Some dear friends have said that the (books) Milal wa-Niḥal and
Tabṣirat al-ʿAvāmm, in which doctrines and beliefs have been explained, are not
devoid of partisanship ( jānib-rūʾī), and the truth of religion (ḥaqīqat-i
āʾīn) remains veiled. To rectify this, I set about writ ing this book’: Najafī
Barzgar (ed.), Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 301r. The β recension of
the Dabistān adds ‘Moreover, since the time (of those books), many (new) groups
have formed’: Riżāzāda Malik (ed.), Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 267.
On Mūbad’s repurposing of Shahrastānī’s schematization of religion to suit his
universal framework, see Carl Ernst, ‘Concepts of Religion in the Dabistan’, in
his It’s Not Just Academic! Essays on Sufism and Islamic Studies (New Delhi: Sage
Publishing, 2018), pp. 441–46. On his relocation of Shahrastānī’s descrip tions
of Presocratic philosophy to describe ancient sects and on the sources for the
interreligious polemic invoked in the religious debates at Akbar’s court, see
Gerald Grobbel, ‘Das Dabistān-i Maḏāhib und seine Darstellung der
Religionsgespräche an Akbars Hof’, in Islamische Grenzen und Grenzübergänge,
(eds) Benedikt Reinert and Johannes Thomann (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp.
100–01, 122–26.
8On
Mūbad’s method, see, in particular, Aditya Behl, ‘Pages from the Book of
Religions: Encountering Difference in Mughal India’, in Forms of Knowledge in
Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet,
1500–1800, (ed.) Sheldon Pollock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp.
210–39.
9
While avoiding theological polemics, Bīrūnī’s book on India famously begins
with the state ment that Indians ‘differ from us [Muslims] in everything which
other nations have in common’ ( yubāyinūnanā bi-jamīʿ mā yushtarak fīhi
l-ʾumam): Edward Sachau (ed.), Alberuni’s India: An Account of the Religion,
Philosophy, Literature, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of
India about A.D. 1030 (London: Trübner, 1887), p. 13. On Bīrūnī’s approach to
comparative religion, see, most recently, Mario Kozah, The Birth of Indology as
an Islamic Science: Al-Bīrūnī’s Treatise on Yoga Psychology (Leiden: Brill,
2015); Rushain Abbasi, ‘Islam and the Invention of Religion: A Study of
Medieval Muslim Discourses on Dīn’, Studia Islamica 116, no. 1 (2021), pp.
1–106.
10
darīn kirdāristān-i ʿaqīdat-ābād az iʿtiqādāt-i furuq-i mukhtalifa ānchi
nigāshta āmad az zabān-i ṣāḥibān-i ān ʿaqīda va kitab-i īshān ast va dar
guzārish-i ashkhāṣ va rijāl-i har firqa-rā chunānki mutbiʿān va mukhliṣān nām
barand ba-taʿẓīm s̱ abt nimūd tā bū-yi taʿaṣṣub va jānib-rūʾī nayāyad va
nāma-nigār-rā az īn guzārish juz manṣab-i tarjumānī nīst. Najafī Barzgar,
Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recen sion], fol. 301r: Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib
[β recension], p. 367.
11
Daniel Sheffield, ‘The Language of Heaven in Safavid Iran: Speech and Cosmology
in the Thought of Āẕar Kayvān and His Followers’, in No Tapping around
Philology: A Festschrift for Wheeler Thackston’s 70th Birthday, (eds) Alireza
Korangy and Daniel Sheffield (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), pp. 161–83.
12
In Moses the Egyptian, Assmann argued that the Abrahamic religions broke away
from the ancient notion that diverse ‘cosmotheist’ religions shared a common
ground and were thus trans latable. By contrast, what Assmann termed the
‘Mosaic distinction’ characterized a rupture at the emergence of monotheist
beliefs from a universal worship of the cosmos to a specific belief in a single
divinity wherein all other forms of religious belief were characterized as
false. It should be said that such a stark schematization no doubt
oversimplifies the Mosaic faiths’ historical encoun ters with religious Others
and makes no attempt to account for Islamic history.
13
Jan Assmann, Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian
Religion, (trans.) Robert Savage (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 8.
14
Throughout the article, the term ‘spiritual exercises’ is used in the sense
coined by the his torian of Neoplatonism, Pierre Hadot. Hadot writes of
Classical philosophical schools that each ‘practices exercises designed to
ensure spiritual progress toward the ideal state of wisdom, exer cises of
reason that will be, for the soul, analogous to the athlete’s training or to
the application of a medical cure. Generally, they consist, above all, of
self-control and meditation.’ Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life,
(trans.) Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 59. My under standing
of Hadot is informed by Sajjad Rizvi’s insightful application of Hadot to early
modern Islamic philosophy in S. Rizvi, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life in the
World of Islam: Applying Hadot to the Study of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635)’,
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 75, no. 1 (2012), pp.
1–13.
15
See, for instance, the classic study of Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The
Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995).
16
This simplistic understanding of ṣulḥ-i kull has been challenged, most recently
by Rajeev Kinra, ‘Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility: The Global
Historical Legacy of Mughal Ṣulḥ-i Kull’, The Medieval History Journal 16, no.
2 (2013), pp. 251–95 and by several of the contributions to this special issue.
17
See Irfan Habib, ‘Sikhism and the Sikhs, 1645–46: From “Mobad,” Dabistān-i
Mazāhib’, in Sikh History from Persian Sources: Translations of Major Texts,
(eds) J. S. Grewal and Irfan Habib (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2001), pp. 59–84.
18
An annotated German translation of the account of these debates is given in
Grobbel, ‘Das Dabistān-i Maḏāhib und seine Darstellung der Religionsgespräche
an Akbars Hof’.
19
See Carl W. Ernst, ‘The Dabistan and Orientalist Views of Sufism’, in Sufism
East and West, (eds) Jamal Malik and Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh (Leiden: Brill, 2019),
pp. 33–52.
20
The earlier recension is that published in facsimile by Najafī Barzgar in 2010,
which was antici pated by Irfan Habib, ‘A Fragmentary Exploration of an Indian
Text on Religion and Sects: Notes on the Earlier Version of the Dabistan-i
Mazahib’, Proceedings of the Indian History Conference 61 (2001), pp. 474–91.
The later recension was most recently published as Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i
maẕāhib [β recension]. See also Sudev Sheth, ‘Manuscript Variations of
Dabistān-i Mazāhib and Writing Histories of Religion in Mughal India’,
Manuscript Studies 4, no. 1 (2020), pp. 19–41.
21
Mūbad is mentioned in several contemporary letters from the Quṭbshāhī court of
Hyderabad. Regarding the favourable reception of his writing style quoted here,
see the letter by Naẓīr al-Mamālik Ḥājī ʿAbd al-ʿAlī Tabrīzī to Mīrzā Muʿīn
describing his attempts to obtain copies of Mūbad’s compositions, British
Library MS Add. 6600, 100v–101r. On the intellectual milieu of late Quṭbshāhī
Hyderabad, see Hundy Bandy, ‘Building a Mountain of Light: Niẓām al-Dīn Gīlānī
and Shīʿī Naturalism Between Safavid Iran and the Deccan’, PhD thesis, Duke
University, 2019.
22
A comprehensive survey of the dozens of surviving Dabistān manuscripts is much
desired. 23 John Shore Teignmouth, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and
Correspondence, of Sir William Jones (London: Printed for J. Hatchard, 1806),
Vol. 2, p. 293.
24
See Bruce Lincoln, ‘Isaac Newton and Oriental Jones on Myth, Ancient History,
and the Relative Prestige of Peoples’, History of Religions 42, no. 1 (2002),
pp. 1–18; Urs App, William Jones’s Ancient Theology, Sino-Platonic Papers 191
(Philadelphia: Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University
of Pennsylvania, 2009).
25
Francis Gladwin (ed.), The New Asiatic Miscellany (Calcutta: Joseph Cooper,
1789), pp. 86–136; David Shea and Anthony Troyer (trans), The Dabistan, or,
School of Manners (London: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and
Ireland, 1843). This translation, which remains the only com plete study of the
text in any European language, is unfortunately seriously handicapped by its
translators’ lack of familiarity with Islam.
26
See Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and
Historiography (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Ernst, ‘The Dabistan
and Orientalist Views of Sufism’.
27
Fardunji Marzbānji (trans.), Dabestān ketābni tālim pehli: Irāni lokonā̃ mazhab
(Muṃbai: Mobed Fardunji Marzbānjinā̃Kārkhānā, 1815).
28
Pandit Shraddha Ram Phillauri (trans.), Uṣūl-i Maẕāhib: Dabistān-i maẕāhib kā
Urdū tarjuma (Lahore: Maṭbaʿ-i Mitravilās, 1896).
29
Annemarie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent (Köln: E. J. Brill, 1980),
p. 101. 30 For a critique of popular accounts of Akbar’s reign, see Kinra,
‘Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility’.
31
See Rula Abisaab, Converting Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).
32
The Dabistān’s account of these events may be found in the chapter on the
beliefs of the Vāḥidīs, the text’s term for the group conventionally called Nuqṭavīs.
33
See Abbas Amanat, ‘Persian Nuqtawis and the Shaping of the Doctrine of
“Universal Conciliation” (Sulh-i Kull) in Mughal India’, in Unity in Diversity:
Mysticism, Messianism and the Construction of Religious Authority in Islam,
(ed.) Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 367–91.
34
ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Navāʾī, Shāh ʿAbbās: Majmūʿa-yi Asnād va Mukātabāt-i Tārīkhī
(Tehran: Intishārāt-i Bunyād-i Farhang-i Īrān, 1973), Vol. 3, pp. 353–54. Cf.
the translation in Henry Beveridge (trans.), The Akbarnāma of Abu-l-Faẓl
(Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1899), Vol. 3, pp. 1008– 14. The text is preserved
in numerous sources, including the Akbarnāma, Mukātabāt-i ʿAllāmī, and several
other collections of inshāʾ. See Riazul Islam, A Calendar of Documents on
Indo-Persian Relations (Karachi: Institute of Central and West Asian Studies,
1979), Vol. 1, pp. 123–24.
35 This unpublished text may be found in Tehran University Library MS 4864, pp. 54–55; the text in the British Library India Office MS Islamic 379, fol. 52r introduces many mistakes. On this letter, and the possibility that it was never sent, see Riazul Islam, Indo-Persian Relations: A Study of the Political and Diplomatic Relations between the Mughul Empire and Iran (Tehran, 1970), pp. 63–65; Islam, A Calendar of Documents, Vol. 1, pp. 128–29. The verse at the end of the passage is taken from the Shāhnāma. See Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh (ed.), Shāhnāmah (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1987), Vol. 6, pp. 229–30.
36 On the Testament of Ardashīr, see Mario Grignaschi, ‘Quelques spécimens de la littérature sas sanide conservés dans les bibliothèques d’Istanbul’, Journal asiatique 254 (1966), pp. 1–142. For a translation of the Arabic text from which this quotation is drawn (itself reflecting a lost text of the Sasanian period), see Shaul Shaked, ‘Esoteric Trends in Zoroastrianism’, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 3, no. 7 (1969), pp. 214–19.
37
jang-i haftād u du millat hama-rā ʿuẕr bi-nih / chun nadīdand ḥaqīqat rah-i
afsāna zadand. See Ghazal 179:4 in Parvīz Nātil Khānlarī (ed.), Dīvān-i Shams
al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiż (Tehran: Farhangistān-i Adab va Hunar-i Īrān, 1980), pp.
374–75.
38
dar ḥalqa-yi rindān-i karābāt may-ā / tā ṣulḥ bā haftād u du millat nakunī. See
Aḥmad Kitābī, ‘Jilvahā-i madārā dar shiʿr-i Ḥāfiż’, Iṭṭilāʿāt, 27 November
2013, http://www.ettelaat.com/? p=30605, [accessed 20 August 2021]. The line
imitates a well-known poem of fourteenth-century poet Khwājū Kirmānī.
39
ṣulḥ-i kull dar raqm-i nāṣiya dārī fayżī / ki ṣalīb-i tu dar-īn butkada miḥrābī
būd. Ghazal 412:9 in E. Ṭ. Arshad (ed.), Kullīyāt-i Fayzī (Lāhaur: Intishārāt-i
Idāra-yi Taḥqīqāt-i Pākistān, 1967), p. 369. Also worth noting is Fayżī’s use
of the phrase mukammil al-ʿawālim wa-muṣallih al-kull (‘Perfectioner of the
Worlds and Universal Peacemaker’) to gloss the Quranic rabb al-ʿālamīn (‘Lord
of the Worlds’), in Fayżī, Sawāṭiʿ al-ilhām fī tafsīr kalām al-malik al-ʿallām,
(eds) Murtaẓā Āyatullāhzāda Shīrāzī and ʿAbdullāh ibn Muḥammad Riḍā Shubbar
(Qom: M. al-Shīrāzī, 1996), Vol. 1, p. 49. See also Carl W. Ernst, ‘Fayzi’s
Illuminationist Interpretation of Vedanta: The Shariq al-Ma’rifa’, Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, no. 3 (2010), pp. 356–64.
40
See H. Blochmann (ed.), The Ain-i-Akbarī (Calcutta, 1872), Vol. 1, p. 3.
41
ṣulḥ-i kull kardīm bā kull bashar / tu ba mā khaṣmī kun u nīkī nigar. Nān va Ḥalvā,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Acc. 1999.157, p. 22.
42
bar sar-i jang ast bā mā bī-sabab dāʾim kalīm / garchi ṣulḥ-i kull ba haftād u
du millat karda-īm. Ḥusayn Partaw Bayżāʾī (ed.), Dīvān-i Abū Ṭālib Kalīm
(Tehran: Khayyām, 1957), p. 280. 43 ʿārifān ṣāʿib zi saʿd u naḥs-i anjum
fārigh-and / ṣulḥ-i kull bā s̱ābit u sayyār-i girdūn karda-and. Ghazal 2486:8
in Muḥammad Qahramān (ed.), Dīvān-i Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī (Tehran: Shirkat-i
Intishārāt-i ʿIlmī va Farhangī, 1985), p. 1221.
44
kufr u dīn har du ʿadam mānad dar ān khalvat-zār /ṣulḥ-i kull yād ba haftād u
du millat dādam. Girdhari L. Tikku, Barguzīda-ī az Pārsī-sarāyān-i Kashmīr
(Tehran: Anjuman-i Īrān va Hind, 1963), p. 59; Girdhari L. Tikku, Persian
Poetry in Kashmir, 1339–1846: An Introduction (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1971), p. 130.
45
On the sources for establishing the contours of Āẕar Kayvān’s life, see Takeshi
Aoki, ‘The Role of Āzar Kayvān in Zoroastrian and Islamic Mysticism’, in K. R.
Cama Oriental Institute Third International Congress Proceedings (Bombay: K. R.
Cama Oriental Institute, 2000), pp. 259–77.
46
This point was exhaustively demonstrated by Sheriarji Dadabhai Bharucha, The
Dasâtîr (Bombay: Fort Printing Press, 1907).
47
Indeed, Āẕar Kayvān’s followers themselves carefully distinguish between
themselves (referred to as āẕarī, ābādī, or sipāsī) and Zoroastrians (referred
to as bihdīn, gabr, or zardushtī). Similarly, Āẕar Kayvān’s followers cite
dozens of texts written by Muslim authors but hardly any Zoroastrian texts.
48
See E. M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1948); Michael Stausberg, Faszination Zarathushtra: Zoroaster und die
Europäische Religionsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1998). For the more general memetic appropriation of aspects of Zoroastrianism,
Stausberg suggests the term ‘Parazoroastrianism’. See Michael Stausberg,
‘Para-Zoroastrianisms: Memetic Transmission and Appropriations’, in Parsis in
India and the Diaspora, (eds) John Hinnells and Alan Williams (London:
Routledge, 2007), pp. 236–54.
49
See Hossein Ziai, ‘The Source and Nature of Authority: A Study of
al-Suhrawardī’s Illuminationist Political Doctrine’, in The Political Aspects
of Islamic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi, (ed.) Charles
Butterworth (Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard
University, 1992), pp. 304–44; Henry Corbin, En islam iranien II: Sohrawardî et
les Platoniciens de Perse (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); John Walbridge, The Wisdom
of the Mystic East: Suhrawardī and Platonic Orientalism, SUNY Series in Islam
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
50
On the influence of Illuminationism in Mongol and post-Mongol formulations of
sacral king ship, see, in particular, Stefan Kamola, ‘Beyond History: Rashid
al-Din and Iranian Kingship’, in Iran After the Mongols, The Idea of Iran Book
8, (ed.) Sussan Babaie (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019), pp. 55–74; Sajjad Rizvi,
‘Practicing Philosophy, Imagining Iran in the Safavid Period’, in Safavid
Persia in the Age of Empires, The Idea of Iran Book 10, (ed.) Charles Melville
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2021), pp. 185–210.
51‘Kingship
is a light ( furūgh) emanating from the peerless creator and a ray emanating
from the world-illuminating sun, the index of the tomes of all virtues, the
receptacle of all aptitudes. In contemporary language it is called farr-i īzadī
and in the ancient tongue it is called kiyān khẉarra.’ H. Blochmann and H. S.
Jarrett (trans), The Ain i Akbari (Calcutta: printed for the Asiatic Society of
Bengal, 1873), Vol. 1, p. 2.
52
This text was first published in the nineteenth century and has subsequently
been reprinted. See Mīr Ashraf ʿAlī (ed.), Jām-i Kaykhusraw va sharḥ-i mukāshafāt-i
Āẕar Kayvān (Bombay: Fażl al-Dīn
Khamkar,
1848). A brief English summary of the text was published by Nowroji Dorabji
[Khandalavala], ‘A Parsi Ascetic’, The Theosophist 1 (1880), pp. 194–96.
Further, see Carl Ernst, ‘Poetry and Ishraqi Illuminationism among the Esoteric
Zoroastrians of Mughal India’, in Faces of the Infinite: Neoplatonism and
Poetics at the Confluence of Africa, Asia and Europe, Proceedings of the
British Academy, (eds) Stefan Sperl, Trevor Dadson and Yorgos Dedes (London: British
Academy, forthcoming).
53
Mīr Ashraf ʿAlī (ed.), Jām-i Kaykhusraw va sharḥ-i mukāshafāt-i Āẕar Kayvān, p.
4.
54
The phrase recalls the famous chapter of the Kalīla wa-Dimna attributed to the
late Sasanian physician Burzōy, who, being unable to cure human suffering by
medical means, set about inves tigating every religious group he could find in
order to discover secure knowledge of the hereafter, and yet, ‘In not one
[religion] did I find that degree of rectitude and honesty which would induce
rational persons (dhawu l-ʿaql) to accept their words and be satisfied with
them […] I will limit myself to those deeds which all men recognize as good and
which the religions agree on (tuwāfiq ʿalayhi l-adyān).’ See François de Blois,
Burzōy’s Voyage to India and the Origin of the Book of Kalīlah Wa Dimnah, Prize
Publication Fund (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1990), Vol. 23, p. 26. The
translation is from the important new article by Thomas Benfey, ‘A
Secular-Religious Distinction in Late Sasanian Iran’, forthcoming.
55
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fols 22v–23r; Riżāzāda Malik,
Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 27. Compare the lengthier commentary on
the passage from Mīr Ashraf ʿAlī (ed.), Jām-i Kaykhusraw va sharḥ-i
mukāshafāt-i Āẕar Kayvān, pp. 4–8.
56
For a broader discussion of the place of akhlāq in Mughal governance, see the
classic study by Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India,
1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
57
Muḥammad ibn Asʿad Davvānī, Akhlāq-i Jalālī, (ed.) ʿAbdullāh Masʿūdī Ārānī
(Tihrān: Intishārāt-i Iṭṭilāʿāt, 2012), p. 255. See also the discussion of this
passage in Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 467–71.
58
Ghiyās̱ al-Dīn Manṣūr Dashtakī Shīrāzī, Akhlāq-i Manṣūrī, (ed.) ʿAlī Muḥammad
Pushtdār (Tihrān: Muʾassasa-yi Intishārāt-i Amīr Kabīr, 2007), p. 225.
59
For an exploration of the idea of the language of heaven in light of Āẕar
Kayvānī ideas of lan guage, see Sheffield, ‘The Language of Heaven in Safavid
Iran’.
60
See Daniel J. Sheffield, ‘Zoroastrian Scripture or Illuminationist Theurgy? On
the Sources of the Dasātīr-i Āsmānī’, forthcoming. On Suhrawardī’s devotional
materials themselves, see the com prehensive work of Łukasz Piątak, ‘Between
Philosophy, Mysticism and Magic: A Critical Edition of Occult Writings of and
Attributed to Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (1156–1191)’, PhD thesis, Warsaw
University, 2018. See also his remarks on the similarity of the Dasātīr to the
prayers of Suhrawardī (p. 511). See also John Walbridge, ‘The Devotional and
Occult Works of Suhrawardī the Illuminationist’, Ishraq: Islamic Philosophy
Yearbook 2 (2011), pp. 80–97; Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā Suhrawardī, L’archange
empourpré: quinze traités et récits mystiques, (trans.) Henry Corbin (Paris:
Fayard, 1976).
61
See Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul; Yochanan Lewy, Chaldaean Oracles and Theurgy:
Mysticism, Magic and Platonism in the Later Roman Empire, (ed.) Michel Tardieu
(Paris: Institut d’Études augustiniennes, 2011; 3rd edn).
62‘There
was in Persia a people (ummatan) guided by truth and doing justice according to
it. They were virtuous philosophers not at all resembling the Magi (ghayr
mushabbah bi-l-majūs), to which bore witness Plato and the philosophers who
preceded him. We have breathed life into their noble enlightened philosophy in
the book entitled The Philosophy of Illumination.’ Translation adapted from
Walbridge, The Wisdom of the Mystic East, p. 60. See Ragıp Paşa MS 1480 f. 207v,
cf. Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī, Three Treatises, (ed.) Najafqulī Ḥabībī
(Lahore: Institute of Persian Studies, 1977), p. 117.
63
These are MSS Ahmed III 3377, 3183, and 3217. For full discussion, see Maria
Mavroudi, ‘Pletho as Subversive and His Reception in the Islamic World’, in
Power and Subversion in Byzantium, (eds) Dimeter Angelov and Michael Saxby
(Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), p. 188.
64
Most recently, see the debate between Siniossoglou and Hladký. Niketas
Siniossoglou, Radical Platonism in Byzantium: Illumination and Utopia in
Gemistos Plethon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Vojtěch Hladký,
The Philosophy of Gemistos Plethon: Platonism in Late Byzantium, between
Hellenism and Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 2014).
65
Mavroudi, ‘Pletho as Subversive and His Reception in the Islamic World’, p.
189.
66
C. M. Woodhouse, George Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 24.
67
Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, (trans.) Robert Savage (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 76–84; Stausberg, Faszination
Zarathushtra, Vol. 1, pp. 35–92.
68
Bahrām ibn Farhād, Shāristān-i Chahār Chaman, (eds) Bahrām Bīzhan et al.
(Bombay: Maṭbaʿ-i Muẓaffarī, 1862), pp. 244–45.
69
See Amanat, ‘Persian Nuqtawis and the Shaping of the Doctrine of “Universal
Conciliation” (Sulh-i Kull) in Mughal India’.
70
British Library MS Or. 11967. The manuscript must have been written before 1138
AH/1725– 1726 CE, as this is the date found on one of its ownership seals.
71
Of these, the identification of the ‘Zand’ and the Arabic source texts are
certain—the ‘Zand’ texts consist of the Zoroastrian liturgies Xwaršēd Nyāyišn
(f. 52r–54v) and the Āfrīn ī Zarduxšt (f. 55r–56r); the Arabic, of al-Suhrawardī’s
Wārid taqdīs al- aʿlā li-kull yawm (f. 58r–v). The other prayers are not
immediately identifiable. The Sanskrit and the Hindavi texts are generally
compre hensible as invoking a series of epithets common to the language of
bhakti, while the ‘Turki’ text, which invokes Tengri, the sky-god, is composed
in a bizarre language containing some genuine archaic Turkic forms alongside
what appears to be numerous invented forms. What language the ‘Samrānī’ text is
composed in is a mystery—from the Persian translation, it is clear that the
contents of the text correspond to the description of the ‘Great Man’ of the
macrocosm found in the Dasātīr in the Book of Jamshīd quoted above, though the
‘original’ language of the passage is apparently artificial, with discernible
word elements of Indic origin.
72
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 274v; Riżāzāda Malik,
Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], pp. 337–38.
73
Bahrām ibn Farhād, Shāristān-i Chahār Chaman, pp. 163–64.
74
Ibid., p. 327.
75
Ibid., p. 412.
76
The Dabistān indicates that he was born around 1028 AH (1618 CE) in Patna, the
year after the death of Āẕar Kayvān in the same city. At the age of five (1033
AH), he met another follower of Kayvān stationed at the royal court in Agra,
Mūbad Hūshyār. Three years later (1036 AH), he visited Kashmīr. He was still in
Kashmīr in 1040 AH. In 1046 AH, he reports briefly having been in Bangash in
present-day Afghanistan, but he was back in Kashmir in 1047 AH, where he met
several Sipāsī saints.
77
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 41r; Riżāzāda Malik,
Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], pp. 47–48.
78
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 28v; Riżāzāda Malik,
Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 33.
79
By 1048 AH, Mūbad had come to the imperial city of Lahore, where he met Farzāna
Bahrām ibn-i Farhād, the author of the Shāristān-i Chahār Chaman (The Region of
the Four Meadows). Later in 1048 he travelled with the physician Mihrān back to
Kashmir, where he stayed into 1049. By the end of that year, at the age of 21,
Mūbad more frequently began to report meetings with Hindu sages rather than
fellow devotees of Āẕar Kayvān. In 1050, he was in Wazirabad and later in
Gujrat in Punjab. By 1052, Mūbad stopped at Rawalpindi en route from Lahore to
Kabul. In 1053, he travelled to Mashhad in Iran for pilgrimage and returned via
Kabul to Kiratpur in Punjab, where he met the Sikh guru Hargovind. In 1054, he
was in Multan. By 1055, he reports that he was already writing the Dabistān,
during which time he moved between Gujrat and Peshawar.
80
For this section, see the excellent translation in Habib, ‘Sikhism and the
Sikhs, 1645–46: From “Mobad,” Dabistān-i Mazāhib’.
81
In 1056, he was in Dotara, near Jodhpur, in Rajasthan. In 1057, he came first
to the port of Surat and then to Hyderabad, where he met the poet Sarmad. A
composition of Mūbad’s from 1057 (Majlis Library, Tehran, MS 5138 f. 643r)
praises the Quṭbshāhī king ʿAbdullāh in pure Persian. In 1059, he briefly
returned to Gujrat in Punjab before returning to the Quṭbshāhī domain.
82
The latest date given in the text in 1063 AH, while the author reports being in
Srikakulam. Since the Dabistān speaks of Dārā Shikūh as still alive, the text
was most likely completed before 1659 CE.
83
Mentioned in a letter addressed to Sayyid Jaʿfar. British Library MS 6660, f.
103v–104r: mūbadā ki bā vujūd-i yagāna būdan manzala-yi du shāhid-i ʿadl
mītavānad būd: ‘Mūbad, who on account of his singular nature can stand in for
two witnesses.’
84
See Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, South
Asia across the Disciplines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp.
142–66.
85
See Supriya Gandhi, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 2020).
86
Strangely, the β recension of the Dabistān refers to the Tibetans as
qarā-tabatiyān or ‘black Tibetans’, a term which in later periods refers to
speakers of the Tangut rather than the Tibetan language, but perhaps here
indicates Baltistan.
87
For lucid accounts of the broader history of the events leading up to
Tibetan-Mughal war, see Johan Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 220–28; Luciano
Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh: C. 950–1842 A.D. (Roma: Istituto italiano per il
Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1977), pp. 57–80.
88
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fols 117v–118r; Riżāzāda
Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 169. See also the discussion in
Habib, ‘A Fragmentary Exploration of an Indian Text on Religion and Sects:
Notes on the Earlier Version of the Dabistan-i Mazahib’.
89
These invocations, found only in the α recension, include the Persian phrase ba
nām-i īzad-i bakhshāyanda-yi bakhshāyishgar to introduce the religions of the
Persians; the Sanskrit phrase śrī paramātmāya namaḥ to introduce the religions
of the Indians; the word kujaq to introduce the reli gion of the Tibetans; the
phrase dīʾūs [Latin deus]—bismil-ab wa-l-ibn wa-l-rūḥ al-quds allāh wāḥid to
introduce Christianity; bismillāh al-raḥmān al-raḥīm wa-bihi nastaʿīn to
introduce Islam; yā allāh maḥmūd fī kull fiʿālihi / asaʿīn bi-nafsiki alladhī
lā ilāha illā huwa to introduce the Wāḥidī/Nuqṭavīs; allāh nūr al-samāwāt
wa’l-arḍ to introduce the Rawshanīs; allāh akbar to introduce the Ilāhīs; and
ilāh yā nūr al-samāwāt wa-l-arḍ yā nūr al-anwār yā munawwir al-nūr yā wājib
al-wujūd to introduce the philosophers.
90
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 170v; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i
maẕāhib [β recension], p. 213.
91
See William A. Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam (The
Hague: Mouton, 1977); Sheffield, ‘The Language of Heaven in Safavid Iran’.
92
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 170v; Riżāzāda Malik,
Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 213.
93
Sabine Schmidtke, ‘The Doctrine of the Transmigration of the Soul According to
Shihāb Al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī and His Followers’, Studia Iranica 28 (1999), pp.
237–54.
94
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fols 170v–171r; Riżāzāda
Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 213.
95
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 171r.
96
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 171r; Riżāzāda Malik,
Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], pp. 213–14.
97
Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 171r–v; Riżāzāda Malik,
Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 214.
98
Mullā Muḥammad Ṭāhir Qummī, ‘Radd Bar Ṣūfiya’, in Mīrās̱-i Islāmī-i Īrān, (eds)
Rasūl Jaʿfariyān and Sayyid Ḥasan Islāmī (Tehran, 1996), Vol. 4, p. 147.
99
On Mullā Fīrūz, see Daniel Sheffield, ‘Iran, the Mark of Paradise or the Land
of Ruin? Approaches to Reading Two Parsi Travelogues’, in On the Wonders of
Land and Sea: Persianate Travel Writing, (eds) Roberta Micallef and Sunil
Sharma (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 14–43.
100‘In
a hall or large room in front, we were received by Mulna [sic] Perose, the
Parsee priest, who was educated fourteen years in Persia, and is not without
information and agreeable manners. He showed his usual anxiety not to be
suspected of believing any part of his Thirty-nine Articles [the tenets of the
Church of England, here applied to the beliefs of Zoroastrianism]. He repeated
what he said last year, that he was of the pheilosuf lok, or “philosophical
people”.’ Sir James Mackintosh, Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh (E.
Moxon, 1836), Vol. 2, p. 47.
101‘Thus
I am always in demand / I am the fountain of celestial secrets. My book forms a
portion of the Dasātīr / I am Sāsān the Sixth in experience’: z-īn sān ki
hamīsha dar ravāʾī māʾīm / sar chashma-yi rāz-i āsmānī māʾīm. lakhtī az dasātīr
buvad nāma-yi mā / sāsān-i shashum bi-kār-dānī māʾīm. Mirza Asadullah Khan
Ghalib, Dastanbū (Lahore: Maṭbūʿāt-i Majlis-i Yādgār-i Ghālib, 1969), p. 56. On
the context of Ghalib’s interest in the Dasātīr, see Mehr Afshan Farooqi,
Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India,
2021), pp. 206–26.
102
On Hataria, see Sheffield, ‘Iran, the Mark of Paradise or the Land of Ruin’.
For the relationship of the Dasātīr to the history of Iranian nationalism more
broadly, see Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran; Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, The
Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
103
Patrick D. Bowen and K. Paul Johnson (eds), Letters to the Sage: Collected
Correspondence of Thomas Moore Johnson. Volume One: The Esotericists (Scotts
Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2016), pp. 443–45. 104 Thomas Moore Johnson, ‘A School
of Philosophy’, The Platonist 3 (1887), pp. 278–79. 105 Mirza Mohamed Hadi,
‘The Celestial Desatir’, The Platonist 3 (1887), pp. 296–308, 660–70; 4 (1888),
pp. 48–56, 102–06, 136–44, 183–95.
106
Mīrzā Muḥammad Hādī Lakhnavī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq maʿ khulāṣa-i sharḥ (Hyderabad:
Osmania University, 1925).
107
See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European
Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005); Lynn Avery Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob and W. W. Mijnhardt,
The Book That Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of
the World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010); App, The Birth of Orientalism.
108
See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 103–43.
109
nazd-i tūrāniyān zi īrān-am / nazd-i īrāniyān na īshānam. sunniyān shīʿa-am
gumān dārand / shīʿiyān mahż nā- musalmān-am. … man az īn jumla-yi kīsh
bīrūn-am / ʿārif-i muṭlaq-i khudāvand-am. mard-i manzil-shinās rah na-ravad /
kāmyāb az viṣāl-i jānān-am. aʿraf-i ʿārifān-i ẕāt-i ḥaqq-am / mūbad-i mūbadān-i
yazdān-am. Dīvān-i Mūbad, Khudabakhsh Library, Patna, MS 3727, f. 64v.
Cite
this article: Sheffield, Daniel J. 2022. ‘Exercises in peace: Āẕar Kayvānī
universalism and com parison in the School of Doctrines’. Modern Asian Studies
56 (3), pp. 959–992. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0026749X21000494
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