The Chishti Shaikhs, the Afghans and the Mughals

In the mid-1520s, when Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur entered northern India with a plan to establish Mughal power in the subcontinent, Shaikh ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi, a member of the Sabiri branch of Chishti order, was probably the most noted Sufi shaikh there, with his deputies (khalifas), disciples (murids) and ordinary associates (mutawassils) spread over almost the entire upper northern Indian plain. They belonged to diverse groups, ranging from lowly weavers and peasants to the very high members of the political class, including the reigning monarch and many of his courtiers, nobles and commanders.Footnote ³ Gangohi's early career was in Rudauli, in Awadh, where he was initiated into the Sabiri line of the Chishti order by Shaikh Muhammad, a grandson of the eminent Chishti Sabiri saint, Shaikh Ahmad ‘Abd al-Haqq of Rudauli (d. 1434). He moved to the Punjab in the wake of Rajput uprisings in Awadh following the death of Bahlol Lodi (r. 1451–88) and settled in the Afghan-dominated town of Shahabad, near Karnal, north of the Yamuna river. In Shahabad, Gangohi spent the most important period of his life, living there for over 38 years, building intimate affinity with the ruling Afghan king of the Lodi dynasty and his nobility. He had close relations with, and a special appreciation for, Sultan Sikandar Lodi (r. 1488–1517), for he, according to Sufi accounts at least, was generous to the ‘ulama and the pious, so that in his reign ‘in fear of his dreadful and dazzling sword, and because of the grandeur of his exalted kingly power, sinners and mischief mongers were totally annihilated (literally: disappeared into the darkness of night and inexistence)’.Footnote ⁴ We may however also note here that Sikandar Lodi, as the later chronicler Muhammad Qasim Firishta reports, was the first Muslim king to create facilities for Hindus to learn Persian, and thus be trained to take charge of several offices under the Persianate Muslim government.Footnote ⁵

Gangohi, like many Afghan nobles of the time, was however unhappy with Ibrahim Lodi (r. 1517–26), though unlike them he did not welcome the Mughals, whom he saw as a divine scourge, set loose as a divine retribution in the world of the sinful Afghans. Indeed, the flourishing Afghan town where he lived with his family turned desolate with the news of the feared Mughal invasion of the region. He left Shahabad, moved farther to settle in Gangoh, on the eastern bank of the Yamuna river, away from the route of the invaders. But as he was nearly the sole royal pir of the Afghans, he was persuaded by his disciples to join with them in the Afghan camp, in order to bless them and pray for them in their imminent fight against the Mughals under Babur. Gangohi anticipated the Afghan defeat, thought of fleeing, but eventually managed only to send his family away to Gangoh. He was constrained to stay back with Ibrahim Lodi's army together with his eldest son, Shaikh Hamid and his servitor (khadim), Sayyid Raja. With the Lodi Sultan's defeat and death, the Sufi fell into the hands of the Mughals, who first forced him to undo his turban, which they then threw around the necks of his son and khadim. The elderly pir of the Afghans was then forced to walk on foot from Panipat to Delhi, a distance of some forty miles, while his son and khadim were tied to the saddle of a horse by the long turban of the Shaikh.Footnote ⁶ Soon after, he was released, and he then spent the last 11 years of his life in Gangoh, where he died in 1537.

In 1530, when Babur died, the Afghan struggle to regain their lost power was still unabated. According to the Lata'if-i Quddusi, the most detailed and reliable tazkira of the Shaikh, throughout the years of the Afghans' fight against Babur's son and successor, Humayun, Gangohi remained opposed to the Mughals. He even allegedly had support and admiration for Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat, the arch-enemy of Humayun on the western frontiers of his domain. It is interesting to note here the details of two visions of one Dattu Sarwani, a noted Afghan disciple of Gangohi. One of these visions pertains to Humayun's campaigns in Gujarat. According to the Lata'if-i Quddusi, one night, when Sultan Bahadur Shah was in the port of Diu and Humayun had gone to Gujarat, threatening to capture that kingdom, the Shaikh appeared in Dattu's dream, commanding him to go to Gujarat, convey his greetings to the pirs there and give them the following message:

Accordingly, Dattu reached Gujarat, and delivered the Shaikh's message first to Hazrat Shah Manjhan and then to Shaikh Ahmad Khattu, the two major sufi divines of the region. They both welcomed and endorsed the Shaikh's mission, promised their support, and requested him to come to them ‘so that we may together drive away Humayun from both the country of Mandu and the country of Gujarat, in order that Islam may grow strong and there may be stability in the land’.Footnote ⁷

The other vision concerns Sher Shah's battle against Humayun, in which the Afghans defeated the Mughals and made them finally flee from India in 1540. The text of the Lata'if reports (through the voice of Dattu):

These visions reflect a kind of consciousness of the opportunities to try and upset the Mughals' position in Gujarat, Malwa or eastern India—opportunities which the most persistent of their Afghan opponents, including the dreamer Dattu, must have been observing with interest.Footnote ⁹ However, the fact that they were incorporated into Gangohi's tazkira and continued to be an integral part of it, shows the image of the Shaikh that Gangohi's descendants and disciples preferred to keep, even when, as we will see later, they vied with their rivals, the Naqshbandis, to have some influence in Mughal official circles.

Gangohi, however, also seems to have periodically tried to develop good relations with Mughal conquerors. We possess letters written by him to Babur, Humayun and also to a Mughal noble, Tardi Beg. Besides the routine contents that such letters transmit, namely exhortations for pious acts and generous care for the learned and the saintly, in his letter to Babur, Gangohi particularly projects himself as an orthodox Sunni advocate of a rather narrow and bigoted juristic version of the shari'a.Footnote ¹⁰ To some extent he contradicts here, an earlier position elaborated in his Rushd Nama. Footnote ¹¹ Not much however can really be made of his apparently changed position, especially if we take into context the fluid and ambiguous political conditions in which these letters were written. Features of indigenous devotional religion in fact continued to be part of his tasawwuf. He also never gave up teaching the Rushd Nama to his disciples.Footnote ¹²

As someone recovering from the trauma and humiliation of Mughal captivity, Gangohi's uncompromisingly bigoted position in his letter to Babur could also have been intended to reinstate himself as a pious pir, with an unstated assertion that his close affinity with the erstwhile rulers had been for a purely religious objective, unconcerned with anything profane and this-worldly. Whether he succeeded in his effort or not is a moot point. There is not much evidence in the existing contemporary sources—either from courtly circles or Sufi fraternities—to show his, and for that matter of any other Chishti shaikh's, regular and sustained connections with the early Mughals. The position of pir to Babur and Humayun was still a preserve of the Naqshbandis of Mawarannahr (Transoxiana).Footnote ¹³ Humayun showed interest in some Indian saints, but they, as will see below, were not Chishtis. Much later in Akbar's reign the emperor's ideologue and historian, Abu al-Fazl, however, mentions that Humayun with some of his companions used at times to visit the shaikh, and spend some time in his divinely inspired and animated assembly to experience truth and gnosis.Footnote ¹⁴ This mention was then copied with obvious additions and hyperbolic effects in almost all the later Chishti tazkiras and also in some Mughal chronicles. Among the principal Sufi tazkira writers who did so was the noted seventeenth-century scholar, ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti, the author of the Mir'at al-Asrar. Footnote ¹⁵ ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti, like Gangohi, was also a Sabiri and came from Rudauli. Interestingly the authority that ‘Abd al-Rahman cites for this report is Abu al-Fazl's Tazkirat al-Auliya, which obviously means the chapter entitled Auliya-i Hind (saints of India) in the A'in-i Akbari. How and why were these images of Mughal–Chishti connections formulated in the course of the consolidation of Mughal imperial power under Akbar? For an understanding of the Mughals' rather late appreciation of the need to build close contacts with India-specific Sufis, it will be useful if we first considered the trajectory of their relations with their erstwhile Mawarannahri pirs, in Transoxiana and also in India.

Naqshbandi Shaikhs and Timurids in Mawarannahr

In the late-fourteenth century, the Mughals' great ancestor Amir Timur himself is reported to have maintained close relations with Amir Kulal, the pir and preceptor of Shaikh Baha al-Din Naqshband, after whom the Sufi silsila came to be known subsequently.Footnote ¹⁶ This was principally a routine spiritual relationship of a murid (seeker, disciple) with a murshid (guide, preceptor). In the fifteenth century, however, things changed with the emergence of Khwaja Ubaid-Allah Ahrar (d. 1490), the second great figure in the silsila after Baha al-Din, with whom the Naqshbandis expanded the frontiers of their influence far beyond Mawarannahr into Iran and Ottoman territory. Now, the relationship between a Naqshbandi master and his disciples, in particular the ones associated with power, also acquired a special social and political significance. Khwaja Ahrar was not only the spiritual preceptor (pir), but also a kind of paramount political patron of his disciples, amongst whom were a large number of the Timurid rulers and their nobles in Central Asia. He and several of his descendants and disciples claimed that they were not simply their spiritual masters, but also a source of strength and help in politics and power struggles.

Mulla Fakhr al-Din ibn Husain Wa'iz al-Kashifi, the author of Rashhat ‘Ain al-Hayat, the renowned tazkira of the Khwaja and his associates, devotes a full chapter to describe the Khwaja's interventions in politics with an objective of setting the record straight, as he thought it ought to be. The chapter entitled ‘an account of the miracles of Hazrat-i Ishan that pertain to his bestowal of conquering power to the kings, rulers and the others of his time’ (zikr-i tasarrufat-i ki hazrat-i Ishan betaslit-i quwwat-i qahira nisbat besalatin wa hukkam waghair-i ishan az ahl-i zaman pish burda and) contains numerous anecdotes of his support or opposition to one or the other ruler of his time.Footnote ¹⁷ It is useful to quote here one anecdote that also shows in some detail the Khwaja's avowed mission and method.

Ahrar thus saw himself as having been divinely ordained to protect the Muslims from the evil of oppressors (Musalmanan ra az sharr-i zalama nigah darim) and to help them achieve their purpose (maqsud-i Muslimin bar-awurdan).Footnote ¹⁹ This he thought he could achieve by ‘trafficking with kings and conquering their souls’ (ba padshahan bayast ikhtilat kardan wa nufus-i ishan ra musakhkhar kardan). There was thus a clear awareness of a political role that he believed he has been assigned to play. As a matter of fact, in the prevailing conditions, he believed that it was not correct for him to just sit on a street-corner, devoting his time to routine prayer and the spiritual training of disciples that a regular shaikh would normally do.Footnote ²⁰ The chronicler Khwandamir thus reports that Sultan Abu Sa'id and his son, Sultan Ahamd sought his advice in important state matters.Footnote ²¹ Whether this meant the elevation of political activity to the level of a kind of principle of the Naqshbandi silsila is not so important as the fact that all this was with a view to ensuring the implementation of the cause of the shari'a. This was something new and different from a mere loyalty to the shari'a which earlier Shaikh Baha al-Din had insisted upon.Footnote ²²

Ahrar's power and triumph is to be explained perhaps more in terms of his enormous wealth and organizing skill than his spiritual and sufi qualities, howsoever unusual and unprecedented such wealth and skill might have been. He was probably the biggest single landowner of Central Asia of his time. He possessed thousands of acres of the best irrigated lands in Tashkent, Samarqand, Bukhara, Kashkadaria and other places. Besides, he also owned 64 villages surrounded with irrigating canals, 30 out-of-town orchards, 11 town estates and scores of commercial establishments and artisanal workshops, numerous arcades of shops and commercial stalls, town baths and water mills.Footnote ²³ These properties were critical for the system of protection and patronage that Ahrar developed, and which included an economic network made up of these holdings and also his trading activities, both regional and international. There were a large number of people and officials involved in this network, working with Ahrar himself at the central khanqah, and also spread out in various places all over Turkestan, Mawarannahr and Khurasan, to maintain and administer these properties. Many of them were not even his formal spiritual disciples. With this organized wealth, Ahrar was able to help both commoners and rulers in time of their financial difficulties.Footnote ²⁴ It was in this way that he rearranged the forces of the Naqshbandi silsila to an unprecedented degree, building and consolidating his overriding position and uncontested power in the region.

The nature of Ahrar's unusual relations with the rulers of the region is illustrated from the behaviour of Sultan Ahmad Mirza who along with some of his nobles was initiated by him into the Naqshbandi order. The Sultan was not simply extraordinarily respectful and overawed in the presence of Khwaja Ahrar. He never placed one knee over the other before the Khwaja, and on occasion would start trembling and sweating out of fear in his presence (az haibat wa dahshat-i majlis-i Hazrat-i Ishan gosht-i shana-i wai mi larzid wa qatrat-i arq az jabin-i wai mi chakid).Footnote ²⁵ In return, he received the Khwaja's full support and, according to Babur's own testimony, even if he was a man of ordinary intelligence he was successful only because ‘his, highness, the Khwaja, was there accompanying him step by step’.Footnote ²⁶

Babur's own father ‘Umar Shaikh Mirza was also a disciple of the Khwaja, who often visited the Mirza and treated him as his son.Footnote ²⁷ According to Abu al-Fazl, ‘the king (Umar Shaikh) was always of a dervish mind and inclined to the society of religious persons and asked for wisdom at the doors of the hearts of the God knowing, especially the holy Nasir al-Din Khwaja Ubaid-Allah, known by the name Khwaja Ahrar’.Footnote ²⁸ The Khwaja is also reported to have given substantial amounts of money to the Mirza, once 250,000 dinars and on another occasion 70,000 dinars, to relieve the tax burden of the Muslims of Tashkent.Footnote ²⁹ A measure of the Khwaja's intimacy with the Mirza was the fact that at Babur's birth, he, his father-in-law, Yunus Khan, the ruler of Moghulistan, and Maulana Munir Marghinani, one of the major theologians of the time, who had composed the chronogram of the birth of the prince, ‘begged his Holiness’ (writes Mirza Haidar Dughlat), ‘to choose a name for the child and he blessed him with the name of Zahir al-Din Muhammad. [But]t that time the Chaghatai were very rude and uncultured . . ., and not refined . . . as they are now; thus they found Zahir al-Din Muhammad difficult to pronounce, and for this reason gave him the name of Babur’.Footnote ³⁰ In the words of Abu al-Fazl the ‘weighty appellation with its majesty and sublimity, was not readily pronounceable or current on the tongues of the Turks, the name Babur was [thus] also given to him’.Footnote ³¹ In Farghana, the Khwaja also had a close association with the important families of the nobles and high officials. One such was the family of ‘Abd-Allah who made use of the joint name of Khwaja-Maulana-Qazi because he combined in his house the positions of muqtada (religious guide), shaikh al-Islam and qazi.Footnote ³²

The Mawarannahri Shaikhs and the Early Mughals

Although associated with the moment of his birth, Khwaja Ahrar had died by the time Babur rose to power. But the prince nevertheless attributes several of his achievements to the Khwaja's blessings. Shortly before he took Samarqand in 1501, he had seen the Khwaja in a dream. He writes:

As a matter of fact, in that town the followers of the Khwaja held a considerable position at the turn of the century. They did not pay any levies to the government under the Khawja's principle of himayat and they sometimes even dictated who should have the supreme power in the town. For only a brief while, in 1494, they had some difficulty when Sultan Mahmud Mirza was for a few months in possession of the town, made new regulations, and treated them with harshness and oppression.Footnote ³⁴ Khwaja Ahrar's son Khwaja ‘Abd-Allah (better known as Khwajagi Khwaja) and Khwaja Muhammad Yahya were their leaders. Earlier, in 1499, when Babur intended to capture the town, he was told by the begs to approach Khwaja Yahya with whose consent, they thought ‘the town may be had easily without fighting and disturbance’. In Babur's own understanding too, the matter was to be resolved when Khwaja Yahya would decide to ‘admit us to the town’.Footnote ³⁵ The issue thus was not simply one of spiritual power; Khwaja Yahya was clearly involved in the politics of the town. Earlier, in 901 AH, when the Tarkhanis of the town had revolted against Baisunghar Mirza and raised his half-brother Sultan ‘Ali Mirza to supreme power, Khwaja Yahya blessed the latter and became his pir. But interestingly enough, the rebels could not lay hands on Baisunghar as he had taken refuge in the house of Khwaja ‘Abd-Allah.Footnote ³⁶ Babur noted and actually appreciated this political involvement. He writes:

Later, when the Uzbek ruler Shaibani Khan conquered Samarqand, he had apprehensions about Khwaja Yahya and therefore dismissed him, with his two sons, Khwaja Muhammad Zakariya and Khwaja Baqi, towards Khurasan. Some Uzbeks followed them and near Khwaja Kardzan killed both the Khwaja and his two young sons. Babur strongly resented this incident.Footnote ³⁸ As a ruler of Mawarannahr, however, Shaibani Khan could not afford to be indifferent to the great Naqshbandi lineages as such. While he harshly treated the descendants of Khwaja Ahrar, he offered prayers at the shrines of Khwaja ‘Abd al-Khaliq Ghijduwani (d. 1220) and Shaikh Baha al-Din Naqshband (d. 1389), along with a large number of his nobles, the ‘ulama and Sufis, who included several noted Naqshbandis of the time.Footnote ³⁹ Later, Shaibani Khan's nephew Ubaid-Allah Khan, restored the major part of the Ahrar family lands. Still later, the descendants of Khwaja Yahya became the shaikh al-Islam of the city of Samarqand, combining with it the trusteeship of rich endowments settled on the tomb of Khwaja Ahrar.Footnote ⁴⁰

It is well known that between 1500 and his conquest of India, Babur came into contact with Shah Isma'il Safavi and with his help avenged himself upon the Uzbeks for the devastation they had wreaked on the Timurids and their associates in Central Asia. Because of his close relations with the Safavid Shah, who was not an orthodox Shi'a but a zealous propagator of heterodox Shi'ism, Babur is also alleged to have temporarily developed Shi'a leanings. It is also reported that a Naqshbandi shaikh of the time, Ahmad ibn Jalal al-Din Khwajagi admonished him for his seeking help from the Shah of Iran and asked him instead to accept Shaibani Khan as a khalifa.Footnote ⁴¹ Be that as it may, Babur nevertheless remained a lifelong devotee of Khwaja Ahrar. Of interest here is an anecdote pertaining to Babur's victory over Ibrahim Lodi in the battle of Panipat in 1526. The anecdote is reported by a seventeenth-century historian, Muhammad Sadiq. Sadiq writes that as Babur's army was too small in opposition to a huge and near-countless Afghan brigade, he felt overwhelmed and feared that he might lose the battle to the enemy. He then contemplated the image of Khwaja Ahrar as he had heard it described. All at once there appeared a horseman dressed in white, fighting against the Afghans, who were thereupon completely routed. Later, after the fight, he narrated the incident to one of his nobles. The noble told Babur that according to his description, the horseman in white was Maulana Ahmad Khwajagi. The same day, Babur sent one of his close courtiers to Khwajagi with several gifts together with a portrait drawn on a piece of paper. Babur, according to Sadiq, included the following verses too in the letter he wrote to the saint:

The saint seems to be the same Ahmad Khwajagi who had earlier resented Babur's seeking help from the Safavid Shah. The letter sounds like a statement of repentance for his earlier comportment and a reaffirmation of his devotion to Khwajagi Ahmad, in particular, and to the Naqshbandi saints in general.

Although Babur himself does not mention this incident, his continuing faith in and loyalty to the Naqshbandi order is pretty clear. On November 6, 1528, when he fell ill in India, he decided to render into poetry a treatise of Khwaja Ahrar entitled Risala-i Walidiya with a belief that this was how he would be able to cure himself of the disease. He writes:

From their usual residence in Samarqand, Babur also invited to Hindustan Khwaja Ahrar's grandsons Khwaja Khawand Mahmud (also known as Khwaja Nura) and Khwaja ‘Abd al-Shahid (the second son of Khwajagi Khwaja), and his great-grandson Khwaja Kalan (a grandson of Khwaja Yahya). The last two were guests of honour at a feast that Babur gave in Agra on December 18, 1528. On this occasion, they sat at his right and received rich presents.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, they did not choose to stay in India. On the other hand, Khwaja Khawand Mahmud set out for India only in the spring of 1530, but before his arrival, Mirza Haidar Dughlat writes, Babur had died. He was nevertheless received in Agra with great honour by the new ruler, Humayun.Footnote ⁴⁵ Soon however, ‘for some [unspecified] reasons’, he left for Kabul and died there.Footnote ⁴⁶ In Dughlat's account, there is a vague clue suggesting the reason why he did not stay at Humayun's court. Khwaja Khawand had apparently come with the intention of occupying the exclusive position of the royal spiritual master. But while Humayun welcomed and showed respect to him, he was also simultaneously devoted to a Shattari Sufi saint, Shaikh Phul. Dughlat writes:

The sorcery and magic that Dughlat mentions were the Sufi prayer and litanics known as da'wat-o-asma-i hasana, in vogue among the Shattaris in India. The practice involved the observation and study of stars and other heavenly bodies. Humayun's fascination with the Shattari saints, we may guess, could have been because of his own interest in astronomical sciences. Later in the century, the chronicler ‘Abd al-Qadir Bada'uni writes that he had great devotion to and trust in Shaikh Phul (or Bahlul) and his younger brother, Shaikh Ghaus of Gwalior and had learnt from them the method of asma’. In 1540, when during his campaigns in eastern India against Sher Khan, he heard the disturbing news of his brother Mirza Hindal's plan of rebellion, he sent Shaikh Bahlul to try to talk to him on his behalf to seek reconciliation. Hindal and the other nobles in his retinue, however, suspected the Shaikh to be acting in collusion with the Afghans. He was thus killed by one of Hindal's associates.Footnote ⁴⁸

As for Khwaja Khawand, he seems to have left for Lahore at the invitation of another of Humayun's brothers, Mirza Kamran. By this time, Mirza Dughlat also arrived in Lahore to have the honour of ‘kissing his feet’. While they were in Lahore, the Safavid ruler Shah Tahmasp invaded Qandahar and captured it. This obviously caused Kamran ‘immense grief’ and when Dughlat at his request told the Khwaja about his misfortune, the latter is reported to have said to him: ‘I have seen His Holiness [Khwaja Ahrar] in a vision. He asked me, ‘Why are you sad?’ I replied: ‘On account of Kamran Mirza, for the Turkomans have taken Kandahar. What will come of it?’ Then His Holiness advanced towards me and taking me by the hand said: ‘Do not grieve; he will soon recover it’. And thus, indeed, it came to pass, for Kamran Mirza marched against Kandahar, and the troops of Tahmasp Shah gave up the city to him in peace’.

Dughlat's account shows not simply his anguish over Humayun's treatment of the Khwaja. It reiterates the Timurids' continuing faith in and their devotion to the family of Khwaja Ahrar. Humayun, therefore, was also perturbed over the Khwaja's decision to depart from his court, and begged him to stay, but the latter would not listen to his entreaties. He then sent Maulana Muhammad Parghari to Lahore to persuade the Khwaja to return, and on his continued refusal, the Maulana begged his sins to be forgiven and beseeched him to write a reply to the letter from Humayun. The Khwaja in response reportedly wrote only the following verse:

Dughlat further writes that in this response, there was a curious pun, for Humayun Padishah eventually did not come to throw his shadow in the country (India) where the parrot was rarer than the kite. Dughlat also notes that in those days, he often heard the Khwaja say: ‘I have seen in a vision, a great sea which overwhelmed all who remained behind us in Agra and Hindustan; while we only escaped after a hundred risks’; and Humayun's defeat at the hands of Sher Shah eventually came about 3 years later, just as the Khwaja had predicted.Footnote ⁴⁹

The unfortunate Humayun thus missed the blessings of both the Naqshbandi Khwaja of his ancestral homeland, Mawarannahr, and the great Chishti Shaikh of Hindustan. Later his relations with Khwaja Khawand appear to have been restored somewhat. In 1546, during an illness of the Emperor in Kabul, the Khwaja and his son Khwaja Mu'in were the only ones besides his personal attendant allowed to visit him.Footnote ⁵⁰ Humayun also had some contacts in Kabul with Maulana Zain al-Din, an eminent Naqshbandi of his time, and with Khwaja ‘Abd al-Bari, a great-great-grandson of Khwaja Ahrar.

It is also worth noting here that the Mughals were connected with some of the great Naqshbandi lineages matrimonially. A daughter of Babur was married to Nur al-Din Muhammad, a descendant of Khwaja ‘Ala al-Din ‘Attar, who was the first khalifa (or disciple) of Khwaja Baha al-Din Naqshband. Their daughter, Salima Begam, as we will see below, was later married to the powerful Mughal noble Bairam Khan. Humayun's younger son, Mirza Muhammad Hakim, the ruler of Kabul, gave his sister, Fakhr al-Nisa in marriage to Khwaja Hasan Naqshbandi, a descendant of Baha al-Din Naqshband, after the death of her first husband, Abu al-Ma'ali. Khwaja Hasan thus became very powerful in Kabul for a time in the later sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵¹

In the early phase of Mughal settlement in Hindustan, the presence of certain Naqshbandi saints as pirs (but not necessarily as the royal pir) and as important members of the Mughal elite, is unmistakable. The second phase of Timurid contact with the subcontinent begins with Humayun's return from his exile in Iran. Humayun, as we know, died soon after his return and resumption of power in Delhi. The process of recovery of the lost territory, its consolidation and further expansion only took place in Akba's time. We may now turn to how the Naqshbandi Khwajas figured at this critical juncture of the shaping of Mughal power.

Akbar Encounters the Naqshbandis

At the beginning of Akbar's reign (1556–1605) Khwaja ‘Abd al-Shahid, who had earlier visited Babur's court, arrived anew from Samarqand. Akbar received him ‘with respect and kindness’ and granted him the pargana of Chamari in Punjab. There the Khwaja lived for about two decades, ‘with piety and severe austerities, striving much in the path of holiness as a compendium of all such perfection as man can attain to’. He was widely respected and people from all walks of life visited him acquiring grace from his ‘precious utterances’, ‘being directed thereby in the path of righteousness and godly living’. The Khwaja, according to the chronicler Bada'uni, was a symbol based on the earlier model of Khwaja Ahrar. In 1561, when the Mughal commander Husain Quli Khan chasing the rebel Mirzas (who had risen up against Akbar) arrived at Chamari, he received from the Khwaja an assurance of his own victory, and the holy man's dress as a present. Bada'uni concludes: ‘The result of this prayer was that having arrived by forced marches in Tulambah he (Husain Quli) gained a glorious victory’.Footnote ⁵² In 1574, however, the Khwaja left India, also according to Bada'uni, following a premonition of his fast approaching death. ‘The time of my departure is drawn nigh’, the Khwaja is reported to have said, ‘and I have been commanded to convey this handful of bones, of which I am composed, to the burying place of my ancestors in Samarqand’. He died shortly after his arrival in Samarqand.Footnote ⁵³ However, the real reason and occasion for the Khwaja's departure seems to have been the rapid decline of the Naqshbandis from the favour of the Emperor. To gain a clearer sense of this decline, we may examine the career of another noted Naqshbandi, Sharaf al-Din Husain, who also visited Akbar's court early in his reign.

Sharaf al-Din Husain was the son of Khwaja Mu'in and a grandson of Khwaja Khawand Mahmud. He had lived with his father in Kashghar, where the latter had made a fortune as a merchant dealing in precious stones.Footnote ⁵⁴ He was sent by the ruler of Kashghar to offer condolences on the death of Humayun in 1556 and to congratulate Akbar on his accession.Footnote ⁵⁵ Sharaf al-Din came with this mission accompanied by Khwaja ‘Abd al-Bari, who had earlier been sent by Humayun to Kashghar at the time of his expedition to reconquer India. Khwaja ‘Abd al-Bari also belonged to ‘the noble line of the Naqshbandi Khwajas’, and we learn that he was ‘son of Khwaja ‘Abd al-Khafi, son of Khwaja ‘Abd al-Hadi, son of Khwajagan Khwaja, son of Khwaja Ahrar—may his grave be holy’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Now, Sharaf al-Din soon rose in eminence in the Mughal court through the influence of Maham Ananga and Adham Khan, important figures of the early years of Akbar's reign. He received the high rank of amir, and was given jagirs in Ajmer and Nagor. During the 5th year of his reign, the Emperor gave him his half-sister Bakhshi Banu Begam in marriage. In the 7th year he was deputed to capture the fort of Mertha. Abu al-Fazl notes that he was assigned a high mansab of 5000.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the 8th year, his father Khwaja Mu'in ‘hearing of his son's exaltation and grandeur’, also arrived from Kashghar. The Emperor received him with respect, gave him ‘honourable quarters and treated him with favours such as kings show to dervishes’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Naqshbandis at this stage were hence held ‘in great esteem’, to the extent that Mulla Mubarak, whom Bada'uni portrays as a man opportunistically inclined doing what was most rewarding at a given moment, ‘adapted himself to their rule’.Footnote ⁵⁹ It has been noted that Bairam Khan's wife, Salima Sultan Begam also came from a Naqshbandi family. She was a ‘daughter of Nur a1-Din Muhammad, Nur al-Din was son of ‘Ala al-Din Muhammad, who was son of Khwaja Hasan, commonly known as Khwajazada Chaghaniyan. This Khwajazada was grandson of Khwaja Hasan ‘Attar, who again was a direct descendant of Khwaja ‘Ala al-Din, the first khalifa of Khwaja Baha al-Din Naqshband. We should also keep in mind that Khwajazada Chaghanian was son-in-law of Sultan Mahmud, son of Sultan Abu Sa'id Mirza”.Footnote ⁶⁰

Soon after, however, the Naqshbandis' position seems to have declined, even though some of them held a couple of offices until about the end of the 1570s. One ‘Abd al-'Azim, better known as Sultan Khwaja, the son of a disciple of Khwaja ‘Abd al-Shahid, was selected to be the amir-i hajj in 1576. He returned from Mecca in 1578 and then held the office of the sadr until his death in 1584.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1578, another Naqshbandi, Khwaja Muhammad Yahya, a direct descendant of Khwaja Ahrar was appointed amir-i hajj.Footnote ⁶² After the 1570s, however, we have only Sultan Khwaja with a position of some eminence at Akbar's court, as his daughter was even married to Prince Daniyal in 1588.Footnote ⁶³ But Sultan Khwaja's seems to be an altogether peculiar case. His position, according to a report, owed to his ‘conversion’ in support of Akbar's religious innovations of the time, which meant unquestioned obeisance to the Emperor and a nearly total deviation from the Naqshbandi Ahrari tradition.Footnote ⁶⁴

A major factor behind the turn in the Emperor's attitude could have been the revolt of Sharaf al-Din Husain himself in 1560s. Akbar decided to tackle this with uncompromising firmness. He refused to listen even to Khwaja ‘Abd al-Shahid's recommendation on the matter,Footnote ⁶⁵ which must have disappointed the Khwaja and forced him to leave for Samarqand. This appears to be a major reason for what happened—and not simply a wish to die in Samarqand as Bada'uni would have us believe of his departure in 1574. In fact, Bada'uni gives this hagiographical explanation while writing the biographical notices of the saint in the third volume of his history. In the context of his description of the incident in the second volume, however, he himself provides a clue to the real reason for the saint's departure. He writes that the saint ‘felt much grief at the refusal [to accept his advice] and left much saddened, even though the Emperor did not neglect any marks of due honour and respect, and publicly even read the fatiha’.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of Akbari Dispensation

The seemingly disproportionate grief of the Khwaja reported by Badau'uni, might have been a consequence of the new developments at Akbar's court, where, he realized, there would be little place left for the Mawarannahri Naqshbandis to live in their erstwhile style. In several modern writings on Mughal India, we have excellent accounts of the details of these developments.Footnote ⁶⁷ We need not repeat them all here, even if it may not be pointless to briefly mention some of them. The most momentous of these was the emperor's marriage with a Rajput princess early in his reign, and together with it a number of administrative measures such as the abolition of pilgrimage taxes and the hated jizya, and giving up of the practice of forcibly converting prisoners-of-war to Islam. By the mid-1560s there had also evolved a new pattern of emperor–noble relationship, which suited the needs of a new Mughal state, to be defended now by a nobility of diverse ethnic and religious groups, amongst whom the Hindus and the Shi'as came to occupy a significant position. The Mughals were originally Hanafi Sunnis and Akbar too, until the 1570s at least remained faithful to this tradition. On the other hand, the new non-Muslim and non-Sunni recruits into Mughal state service were not asked to abandon their old customs and beliefs. On the contrary, several non-Muslim rituals began to be integrated into an evolving Akbari political culture of governance. All this was evidently not compatible with the Naqshbandi Khwajas' perception of a Muslim state. A major task of the ruler with whom they had contact, as is illustrated from Khwaja Ahrar's relations with the rulers of his time, was not simply to ensure the comfort (asa'ish) and welfare (rifahiyat, khair) of the Muslims, but also to discourage and abolish the customs of strangers (rusum-i biganagan). In their view, Muslim society was to be totally free from the evil (sharr) of non-Muslim social practices.Footnote ⁶⁸ Earlier Shaikh Baha al-Din Naqshband (d. 1389) had proclaimed that the distinctive feature of his silsila was a total conformity and obedience to the traditions of the Prophet and his venerable companions (chang dar zail-i mutaba'at-i sunnat-i Mustafa zada im wa iqtida ba asar-i sahaba-i kiram-i u namuda), and that his followers formed a community of the perfect (kamilan-i mukammal), having attained high status because of their adherence to the path of the Prophet, and that best and the fastest way to the Truth was to provide relief to the heart of the Muslim.Footnote ⁶⁹

Although it is difficult to accept the understanding of some recent historians regarding the so-called ‘highly centralized absolutism’ or ‘highly systematized administration’ under Akbar, there is no denying the fact that the years between 1560 and 1575 saw a rapid change in the position of the Chaghatai nobles and this in the main was intended by the emperor to buttress the power around his person. The revolts by the old guard—the Mirzas, the Qaqshals and the Atka Khail, for instance—which followed and also precipitated measures aimed at weakening their strength, showed the intensity of their disapproval and resistance to this change. Their jagirs that they had hitherto held concentrated in a region were dispersed, while nearly all the civil and financial offices were now being staffed by the non-Chaghatai groups.Footnote ⁷⁰ The fortunes of the Naqshbandis, who had an established affinity with the Chaghatais, according to one report, were ensured because of the high and unmatched strength of the latter in the early years of Akbar's reign.Footnote ⁷¹ Their preeminence then would very likely suffer a serious setback in the wake of the increasing corrosion in the power of the Chaghatai nobles.

From the mid-1570s, we see the unmistakable signs of Akbar moving away from the pattern of Islamic rulership of the erstwhile Timurids, shared on occasion and in a measure with members of the nobility and the Naqshbandi Sufi lineage. Instead, Akbar favoured a kind of universal kingship, emphasizing an undisputed and all-encompassing power for the ruler. He now had a new capital of his empire, Fathpur Sikri, built in large measure in deference to the place's association with a saint, but it was he, the emperor, not the place or the saint, who was to be lauded as the centre of authority in the new Timurid polity in India.Footnote ⁷² Critical as it was, this feature of the evolving Akbari dispensation of power clashed with Naqshbandi ideas regarding authority and kingship.

We have already summarized some key features regarding the position of Khwaja Ahrar. After him too, there were some other saints of the lineage who combined wealth with spiritual accomplishments to strengthen their intervention in the political domain. Khwaja Ju'ibari and Khwaja Mushtari, two members of the same family of Naqshbandi shaikhs in Uzbek-ruled Mawarannahr, were celebrated for their legendary wealth; and according to one report, from Turkestan to Khurasan, there was not a single city, desert or place where these Khwajas had not built a canal. One of them enjoyed a yearly income equal to the entire revenue collected by the Uzbeks from Samarqand, the other held over 2000 pieces of property, administered by his expert personal employees. They dominated the grain market, owned over 100 shops in Bukhara alone, and their joint property is said to have surpassed even that of Khwaja Ahrar.Footnote ⁷³ In another case, Makhdum-i A'zam (d. 1543), a disciple of Maulana Muhammad Qazi (d. 1516), a noted khalifa of Khwaja Ahrar established an ascendancy over the ruler of Kashghar in the same way as had Khwaja Ahrar over Sultan Abu Sa'id, and the power in his family remained for decades, until in 1678 one of his descendants, Khwaja Afaq managed to dislodge the ruler in Yarkand and became the ruler himself.Footnote ⁷⁴ The power to terminate and appropriate the authority of a king was thus within the realm of a Naqshbandi shaikh's political activity. We have already noticed how disobedience to Khwaja Ahrar led to the elimination of Mirza ‘Abd-Allah, the ruler of Samarqand. We may also note the following statement attributed to him by the author of Rashhat ‘Ain al-Hayat:

Later Naqshbandi Ahrari shaikhs, who had a strong memory of a share in power, would then have found it difficult to adjust to a political environment where the king did far more than simply assert his sole authority. Akbar, for example, had the audacity to throw overboard the shaikh's recommendation, and that too when it came from a scion of the great Naqshbandi lineage. Quite noticeably, therefore, Akbar moved away from the Naqshbandis. The emperor had lately begun to see the seeds of a formidable challenge to his plan for power and political preeminence in the activities of several supporters of the Naqshabandi lineage at the court of his half-brother Mirza Hakim, in Kabul. A glimmering of these sentiments is evident from events in the 1580s. While his nobles and deputies were assigned the task of suppressing serious rebellions. In Gujarat and the east, Akbar, himself, commanded the expedition to deal with Mirza Hakim in the Punjab.Footnote ⁷⁶ We will see below that Kabul served as the centre for relaunching the Naqshbandi order in India, even after the termination of Mirza Hakim's regime.

In the late 1570s Akbar had favoured the Chishti order. This is not to suggest that the Chishti saints' concerns were purely spiritual, with no taste whatsoever for power and politics. Their past too had seen cases of their conflict with rulers.Footnote ⁷⁷ A significant feature of their politics had, however, been their support to rulers in their endeavour to adjust the nature of Muslim power to the Indian environment.Footnote ⁷⁸ Again, no Chishti shaikh ever amassed wealth comparable to that of Khwaja Ahrar, with a mission to reform a political regime, reward those who would listen to his exhortations and become submissive, and punish the ones who dared act independently. On the contrary, the Chishtis had generally pleaded for a kind of asceticism, and preferred to advise and bless the political authorities from a distance. Indeed, their tasawwuf has been based on a doctrine, i.e. wahdat al-wujud, which had hitherto facilitated the process of religious synthesis and cultural amalgam. In some Chishti treatises of Akbar's time, the doctrine was expressed and elaborated in a much more forceful tone, even with a plea for the illegitimacy of considering Islam as superior to any other religion. ‘The whole world is a manifestation of love (‘ishq)’, to quote from one such treatise, ‘and we see everything as perfect (. . .). As you begin iradat (become a murid and join the order) you stop quarrelling over kufr and iman. There is no precedence of one religion over the other (. . .). After you experience the limitlessness of unbounded Beauty you can see His Grace present both in a kafir and a Muslim’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Nothing could have provided a stronger support to ‘Akbar's dream’.

Akbar's visits to the shrine of Khwaja Mu'in al-Din, the founder of the Chishti silsila in India best illustrates his fascination with the order. Here it is also interesting to note the circumstances in which the emperor, according to Abu al-Fazl, was drawn towards the Khwaja. One night, while on a hunting expedition, Abu al-Fazl writes, he heard people singing Hindi verses in praise of the Khwaja, in a village near Agra. The emperor was impressed by the saint's popularity, would often discuss his ‘perfections and miracles’, and developed a ‘strong inclination’ to visit the shrine.Footnote ⁸⁰ As we know, the emperor undertook several journeys to Ajmer, one of which was also on foot, all the way from Fathpur to the holy city of the saint. He also constructed several buildings around the shrine, arranged for its management and provided grants for the care and comfort of the visitors. Furthermore, in 1564 in Delhi, he visited the tomb of Nizam al-Din Auliya, while in 1569 he began the construction of palaces in Fathpur Sikri. This was selected as the site of his new capital, a token of respect for a living Chishti saint, Shaikh Salim Chishti, through whose prayers he believed he was blessed with a son who was named after the Shaikh.Footnote ⁸¹

By the 1570s, Akbar thus appeared as an exclusive devotee of the Chishti saints, both dead and alive. In 1581, on his way to the Punjab he visited the khanqah of another major Chishti saint of the period, Shaikh Jalal al-Din, in Thanesar. This visit is of special importance for us, since the grand old shaikh was a noted khalifa of Shaikh ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi. Akbar was accompanied by the brothers Abu al-Fazl and Faizi. They had a long conversation with the shaikh, discussed with him the secrets of Divine Realities and mystical sensibilities (haqa'iq wa ma'arif). The emperor, as the recorded memory in later Chishti tazkiras remember, was so impressed with the shaikh's response that he even expressed a desire to give up kingship. The shaikh, however, dissuaded him from doing so. He is reported to have said:

Did Akbar recognize the Chishtis then as royal pirs? There is nothing in our sources to suggest an answer to this in the positive. What did Akbar expect a Sufi to be? Which Sufis did he like to be close to? We are provided an answer to these questions in the following remark by Abu al-Fazl on Mirza Sharaf al-Din's revolt (which we have noticed above). This remark also supports and in a measure reiterates the reasons that were given above for the decline of the fortunes of Naqshbandis. He writes:

It is time now for us to return to the question that was posed at the end of the first section of this essay. We know that Abu al-Fazl wrote his history, in which he included a brief, three-line, description of ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi, in the 1590s, a time when the Akbari dispensation had in a sense been fully formed. While he does not neglect regards for the truth, the basic duty of a historian, his portrayal of the developments of the earlier years in several cases is influenced by the particular ideology and concerns of this late phase of Akbar's rule. We also know that he was not a mere chronicler. He had his own philosophy of life and social order, and propounded, promoted and defended the ideology of this dispensation. He wrote history with a mission. Now, in order to appreciate the significance of this particular case we may also note the following points. Firstly, the description of the shaikh as noted above is very brief indeed. Secondly, one line of this brief notice, which comprises the information about Humayun's visit and his meeting with the shaikh, begins with the word guyand, i.e. they say or it is said,Footnote ⁸⁴ which in a measure implies it is based on a kind of hearsay or on something remembered and constructed by the associates of the shaikh himself. This also means that while Abu al-Fazl wants his audience and posterity to take note of what is recounted, he is not particularly concerned with its truth. Again, we know that Gangohi was the royal pir of the enemies of the Mughals, supported them and on that count suffered humiliation at the hands of the Mughals. The memory of these details, already recorded, and incorporated in the tazkira of the shaikh written by his son, repeatedly read in the circle of the shaikh's associates and followers, threatened to affect adversely the good relations that Akbar had developed with the Chishtis and which Abu al-Fazl applauded. There was however also the memory of the shaikh's efforts to restore his own relations with the Mughals, as we can guess from the letters he wrote to Babur, Humayun and Tardi Beg. The shaikh also seems to have visited Agra in 1537 for a brief stay just before his death.Footnote ⁸⁵ And, it is not unlikely that the efforts in this direction continued in the changed political atmosphere to create conditions of friendship with the new rulers, and that in the process there also emerged stories of the emperor's meeting with the shaikh. Since the Mughal court's contact with the Chishtis was in practice an endorsement of Abu al-Fazl's own ideology, he promotes the memory of this anecdote bearing on an intimate contact between the two. He does not even allude to anything from the shaikh's life pertaining to the time of the Afghan rule, for he wants his readers to forget everything that invoked the memory of the Mughals’ distance from him. His aim is to emphasize the necessity and significance of the Mughal court's good relations with the Chishtis. If at all a king needed—which in Abu al-Fazl's view, he did indeed—to ‘attach to himself the hearts of dervishes’, such dervishes in India should be the Chishtis, and certainly not the Mawarannahri Naqshbandis.

Interestingly, Abu al-Fazl is the sole authority cited for this anecdote in the later Chishti tazkiras, as if his was a piece of contemporary evidence, by an eyewitness to the event. Obviously, in these tazkiras were added words and phrases, implying that Humayun had regular meetings with the shaikh, the same way as the earlier Afghan rulers had had.Footnote ⁸⁶ A seventeenth-century non-Chishti account, however, mentions the anecdote without referring to Abu al-Fazl.Footnote ⁸⁷ It is relevant here also to note that in the oft-cited Mughal–Sufi tazkira, written by Shaikh ‘Abd al-Haqq Dehlavi (d. 1642) about the same time as Abu al-Fazl wrote his history, this anecdote finds no place, even though Dehlavi's account of Gangohi is pretty detailed, comprising over 1400 words.Footnote ⁸⁸ This may be because Dehlavi did not share Abu al-Fazl's concern, and also his primary connection was with the Qadiri silsila.

Akbar for his part retained his faith in Khwaja Mu'in al-Din, and thereby remained in contact with the Chishtis, even after what Bada'uni and some Naqshbandis projected as the emperor's rejection of Islam.Footnote ⁸⁹ In return the emperor too received noticeable appreciation from Chishti circles. If Abu al-Fazl is to be believed, on the occasion of one of his visits to Ajmer, the people connected with the shrine told the emperor that they saw the Khwaja in a dream saying: ‘If he (Akbar) knew the amount of his own spirituality, he would not bestow a glance on me, the sitter-in-the dust of the path of studentship’.Footnote ⁹⁰ At the time of his visit to Shaikh Jalal al-Din in Thanesar, the old shaikh, who because of his advanced age would generally keep lying in bed, in a half conscious state, asked his attendants to give him support to stand up and welcome the emperor, ‘the Caliph of the age’. In the seventeenth-century Chishti tazkiras, Akbar is remembered and mentioned as a just and pious king, devoted to Khwaja Mu'in al-Din, and also on occasion with the Arabic phrases such as rahima-hu Allah (may God bless him) and anar Allahu burhana-hu (may God illumine his proof),Footnote ⁹¹ which are generally used for saints.

The Return of the Naqshbandi Shaikhs

We have seen that the Naqshbandis came to India along with the Mughals. But far from being the royal pirs as they had been in Central Asia, they could not manage to maintain good relations with the Mughal rulers. In the society outside the charmed circle of the ruling class too, they made little mark as notable Sufi shaikhs. In the Indian conditions, they noticed that the other shaikhs, the Chishtis most prominently, had greater appeal and that the Naqshbandis' heritage of explicitly combining power (or wilayat) with rulership had, in a measure, stood in the way of their achieving the high position they wanted and aspired to. They thus had to reckon with the existing popular Sufi orders, assert and establish the supremacy of their own order and emphasize how it was the best, and that how even in matters relating to the principle and practice of poverty and asceticism (faqr, tark-i dunya) they were really far ahead of the Chishtis. They always remained within the limits of the traditions of the Prophet, and stated that their primary task was to achieve ‘the purpose of the Muslims’, even as they engaged with worldly politics and trafficked with kings.

Two further major Naqshbandi saints, Khwaja Khawand Mahmud ‘Alavi Husaini (d. 1652) and Khwaja Baqi-Billah (d. 1603), came to India and established their khanqahs during Akbar's reign. Khawand Mahmud was perhaps the first to be directed by his pir, Shaikh Muhammad Ishaq Dehbidi (d. 1599) to come to India to propagate the Naqshbandi mission. Thereupon he joined a caravan and set out for Lahore. When he arrived in the town of Gujarat in the Punjab where the road bifurcated, one path leading to Kashmir, the other to Lahore, he fell into a mystic trance and his horse took the route of Kashmir. After he regained consciousness, he decided to continue his journey in the direction of Kashmir, thinking that this was what God and his master would have wanted. He settled in Kashmir, and though initially he had some difficulty, succeeded in establishing the order on a firm footing in the Valley. His son and successor, Khwaja Mu'in al-Din (d. 1674) also was a prominent saint in the Valley. Khawand Mahmud's influence, despite his efforts to come close to some nobles in Delhi and Agra, did not really extend beyond the Valley.Footnote ⁹²

It was hence Khwaja Muhammad Baqi-Billah—a member of the family of Khwaja Ahrar from his mother's side—who took up the challenge of reinstating the Naqshbandi order in the heartland of Mughal Hindustan. He came to settle in Delhi from Kabul in 1599, inspired and perfected in the order by Khwaja Muhammad Muqtada Amkinagi (d. 1600). He had earlier been to India, lived and wandered in Sambhal, Lahore and Kashmir. He lived very briefly in Delhi, for slightly over 4 years, but before his premature death in 1603 he had virtually reinstated the Naqshbandi order.Footnote ⁹³ He left behind four major khalifas, Shaikh Ilahdad (d. 1640), Shaikh Husam al-Din (d. 1633), Shaikh Taj al-Din Sambhali (d .1642) and Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624). Of these, the last two occupied prominent positions in strengthening and propagating the teachings of the order in India and abroad in the Islamic lands in the seventeenth century. Sirhindi, we know, also founded a new branch, the Mujaddidi, of the order.Footnote ⁹⁴

There is plenty of information about the nature of Baqi-Billah's tasawwuf and karamat in the contemporary and near-contemporary writings of his disciples and khalifas, and also in the tazkiras compiled during the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. For the following discussion, however, I have drawn in the main on his own writings, i.e. malfuzat (table-talk) and maktubat (letters) and poetry, edited and published together with his poems in one volume, by two leading twentieth-century Naqshbandi–Mujaddidi scholars.Footnote ⁹⁵ I will select a few issues here, which in his view were the distinctive features of the order and are in a measure also illustrative of a rather combative overtone. He compares the features of his order with those of the other orders, the Chishti in particular, pointing succinctly to the flaws of the latter. He emphasizes and stresses on the dimensions of mystical sensitivity (wajd, zauq), without losing contact with mundane power. Regarding the pir, for instance, he observes that according to the Naqshbandi order there could be more than one pir. For the pir as the Chishti and the Suhrawardi shaikhs understood it was not simply the one from whom the seeker received khirqa (robe). There were other two categories of pir as well, which he characterized as the pir-i talim who gives training in litanics, and the pir-i suhbat whose company resulted in general benefit and in enabling the seeker to appreciate the diverse avenues of spiritual progress.Footnote ⁹⁶ Baqi-Billah thus was keen to initiate into his silsila, even those who already had their pirs, of the Chishti, Suhrawardi or any other lineage, in India. This amounted to making a bid to extend the domain of his own order, even if it meant violation of generally accepted Sufi practice. In this connection it is interesting to note the following passage, which explains why he did as above:

But while for him, and for that matter for any other shaikh of his order, it was legitimate to allure the followers of other silsilas, he did not allow the murid of a Naqshbandi to seek guidance from any other pir in India. Elaborating on the relationship between the seeker and the preceptor, he wrote to his khalifa, Shaikh Taj al-Din:

With reference to the discourse on tauhid and wujud, we are aware that the Chishtis in India followed Ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240) and maintained that the position of ‘Ala al-Daula Simnani (d. 1336), who contested Ibn al-'Arabi's stand and propounded a contrary view, was not correct. Baqi-Billah for his part took a different stand. He proposed that both Ibn al-'Arabi and Simnani were right. Still, while he tried to reconcile the two views and suggested that the difference between them was only in words rather than in deeper substance, he argued that Simnani was closer to the truth:

Further, Baqi-Billah firmly rejected the Chishtis' understanding of tauhid. He openly challenged Shaikh Nizam al-Din Thanesari—nephew and son-in-law of Jalal al-Din Thanesri, who after the latter's death was virtually the sole spokesman of the Sabiri branch of the Chishti order—to debate him about the matter and prove his position if he was right, in an assembly of ‘ulama and Sufis. In the circle of his associates, the belief was that Thanesari, even if he was considered to be the most perfect Indian dervish, did not possess adequate knowledge and mystical sensitivity to appreciate Simnani's observations on Reality, and that his understanding was based on wrong and misleading translations and interpretations. Baqi-Billah was aware of the intensity of such offensive opinion (gustakhi). But he asserted that he was constrained to express himself thus with the sole objective of disseminating and protecting the position of the true sect and bringing forth the correct meanings of the utterances of the great shaikhs. He wanted, or so he claimed, to save the people from being misled and thus sinking into the whirlpool of mistaken belief. He wrote further that often the illumination experienced by a Sufi in an early stage of his mystical journey was taken as the real epiphany (tajalli). This was an error and was just a reflection of, and not the real light of, tajalli.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This assumes special import considering that the Mawarannahri Naqshbandis, including the great Ahrar and Shaikh ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami, were mostly wujudis.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Baqi-Billah's competitive attitude towards his contemporary Chishti shaikhs is further illustrated from his observations on sama' or Sufi music. Sama' had come to be an integral part of Chishti Sufi life, and was regarded as a means to experience and achieve the spiritually sublime; in this, the order drew support from the life and teachings of the early great saints, whose Sufi accomplishments the Naqshbandis also recognized. Baqi-Bi1lah however contested their reading and interpretation of their predecessors. He took up the case of Shaikh Nizam al-Din Auliya, since his practice was the most oft-cited evidence in support of musical practices, and remarked that in his malfuzat where Nizam al-Din discussed the legality of sama', he appended the condition that the listener should be a true lover of God. This evidently meant, Baqi-Billah added, that he disapproved of its practice. True love of God, Baqi-Billah added, required total and unqualified submission to the path (sunna) of the Prophet. A true follower of his path would never indulge in an act for which there was no precedent in the life of the Prophet. The Prophet never listened to music nor did he ever permit its performance.Footnote ¹⁰² The Indian Sufis failed in getting at the correct meaning of the discourses in the texts composed in India too, as they misunderstood and misinterpreted Ibn al-'Arabi and Simnani. Islam in India was to be as Baqi-Billah saw it, whatever its practice in the past.

In all this obviously lay the critique of basis of the prevailing understanding of tasawwuf. ‘Our tariqa’, Baqi-Billah noted, ‘is based on three things: an unswerving faith (rusukh) in the truth of the beliefs of the Sunni community (ahl-i sunnat wa jama'at), knowledge, gnosis (agahi) and prayer (‘ibadat). Laxity in any one of these throws one out of our tariqa’.Footnote ¹⁰³ The principal duty of a seeker, according to him, was to follow the shari'a. ‘Correct beliefs’, he reiterated, ‘regard for shari'a and sincere attention to God are the greatest wealth. No mysticism (zauq, wijdan) is comparable with this’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Indeed, the ultimate aim for him was to achieve what the earlier shaikhs of his lineage characterized as musalmani. When a seeker asked him about its implications, he said: ‘Musalmani is the murad [the desired goal, but it] is difficult’. It is achieved only with divine grace, and is beyond the circle of human effort. To become a musalman is the very reality (haqiqa) of mysticism (ma'rifa).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In one of his letters, he elaborates on the question saying that beauty (jamal) and perfection (kamal) in a seeker follows from his submission (bandagi), which meant prayer, fasting, alms-giving, hajj, war with the infidels, regard for the rights of the parents and others, and justice.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Furthermore, Baqi-Billah pleaded for the need to insist on maintaining the distinction between infidelity (kufr) and faith (iman). He dismissed as heretic (zandaqa) and extremely stupid (ablahi, safahat) the idea that encouraged words implying abandoning of the shari'a, admiration of unbelief and emphasis on the basic unity between a believer and an infidel.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A measure of the intensity in his attitude on the matter was reflected in his resistance to the idea of treatment by a Hindu physician during his illness. He relented as he was told that this was only arranged at his mother's wish. Still, he did not like the presence of the physician and turned his face away from him when he visited.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

It is however significant that together with these statements—addressed to the Indian shaikhs in the main in a rather uncompromising and aggressive tone—he also disapproved a Sufi's direct involvement in power and money making. He thus discouraged a feature of Ahrari wilayat, which had hitherto legitimated the drive of a Naqshbandi shaikh to aspire for a position alongside the ruler, at least, if not above him. As we have already noticed, this was one of the factors that alienated the Mughal emperor Akbar. To Baqi-Billah, musalmani or the highest stage in tasawwuf was to be accomplished with poverty (faqr) and negation of self (nisti),Footnote ¹⁰⁹ and not with power and wealth. He showed no direct concern for power politics; but he was in close contact with people at the helm of affairs, and spared no chance in recommending the cases of his associates and disciples.

Among others, he recommended the case of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi for an adequate cash grant.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Of the 86 of his letters available to us, no less than 13 were addressed to people engaged in state service and trade. His addressees included Shaikh Farid Bukhari, who according to a report bore all the expenses of his khanqah,Footnote ¹¹¹ Mirza ‘Aziz Koka and the sadr al-sudur, Miran Sadr-i Jahan Pihani. Some of these recipients have been mentioned by the compiler as his sincere devotees (az ‘umara-i mukhlis), but it is not clear if they really became his murids.

Baqi-Billah used all his strength and accomplishments to reinstall the Naqshbandi silsila as a great, if not the greatest, mystic order in Mughal India. He joined issue with the contemporary saints of the other orders, and tried to demonstrate the supremacy of his order. He disapproved of several features of prevailing Sufi culture that lent strength to some important features of the Akbari dispensation. He also hinted that it was purification of things Indian and their redefinition that the mission of his coming to Hindustan was. Nowhere, however, did he actually comment upon their legality or illegality, let alone pronouncing a verdict on the very faith of the emperor. On this question, his approach seems to be different from the one we generally associate with his noted disciple, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi. Can we assume that this was because he died prematurely, leaving his mission incomplete while still mobilizing his strength? We are discouraged from following this line of speculation by the fact that Sirhindi, howsoever powerful he may have been, was not the sole spokesman of the Naqshbandi order after his death. But this is a major question which still demands careful examination, and which should be dealt with elsewhere.