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).Footnote ¹⁶ The Dabistān records, for instance, the earliest outsider description of the Sikh (nānak-panthī) community,Footnote ¹⁷ and it provides 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.Footnote 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 composition.Footnote 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.Footnote 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).Footnote 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.Footnote ²² In 1787, the Calcutta Orientalist Sir William Jones described it as containing ‘more recondite learning, 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.’Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁴ A partial English translation of the first chapter of the Dabistān appeared in 1789, followed by a full English translation in 1843.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 translation of the Dabistān became the first book printed by a native-owned press in Bombay (1815);Footnote ²⁷ an Urdu translation was completed by the Sanātanī Hindu revivalist Pandit Shraddha Ram Phillauri in 1881 and published posthumously in Lahore in 1896.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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 period 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 seventeenth 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,Footnote ³⁰ while ʿAbbas's intolerance is linked with his attempts to impose Twelver Shiʿi orthodoxy onto a religiously diverse population.Footnote ³¹ In order to gain perspective 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ³³ In his letter to ʿAbbas, Akbar writes,

In this carefully crafted letter which draws upon the tradition of ethical philosophy (akhlāq), Akbar chides ʿAbbas for neglecting his duty as king to maintain 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:

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 distinctively Shiʿi interpretation. Rather than drawing on Shiʿi texts to support this claim, though, ʿAbbas instead cites the widely known aphorism that kingship 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.Footnote ³⁶

Taken together, these two carefully crafted works of diplomatic correspondence 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 religiously 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).’Footnote 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 knowledge 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.’Footnote ³⁸ Though the topoi to which the term ṣulḥ-i kull was eventually applied had existed in Persian poetry for centuries 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.’Footnote 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.’Footnote 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 influence of auspicious and inauspicious stars, o Ṣāʿib—/ they have made Universal Peace with the fixed stars and planets of the firmament.’Footnote 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, maintaining 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 discussions 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.’Footnote 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 cacrocosm of the Magi

Āẕar Kayvān is said to have been born in the city of Istakhr, near the ruins of Persepolis, in 1533.Footnote 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 traditionally 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 doctrines in the preceding paragraph were expressed by other Zoroastrians of this time, and the salient features of Zoroastrianism as they are expressed throughout the Zoroastrian textual corpus are altogether absent from Āẕar Kayvān's system.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴⁷ For this reason, it is helpful to consider Āẕar Kayvān alongside other historical figures from the Muslim world who presented their ideas as emanating from ancient Iran. To borrow a term of ancient Iranian origin from Western Neoplatonism to refer to this phenomenon, I suggest that ‘magus’, rather than ‘Zoroastrian’, might better describe the nuance of Āẕar Kayvān's invocations of ancient Persia.Footnote ⁴⁸

One forebear to whom there is a clear link is the twelfth-century philosopher Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī. Much of the Āẕar Kayvānī scripture Dasātīr-i āsmānī (The Celestial Laws) consists of word-for-word Persian translations 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.Footnote 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 spreadFootnote ⁵⁰ 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.Footnote 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).Footnote 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:

Here we see how the microcosmic level of the body, the mesocosmic level of society, and ultimately the macrocosmic level of the cosmos relate to one another at the level of the spiritual exercise of the saint. The passage describes Kayvān preparing his body according to the physicians’ creed (kīsh-i pizishkī). Perhaps what is meant here is the widely held belief in Galenic humoral theory, an aspect of natural philosophy.Footnote ⁵⁴ Further, Kayvān adjusts his diet and practises wakefulness. He abandons any form of religious partisanship and, indeed, speech itself. Bodily and social ascetic practices thus prepare him for his vision of the celestial spheres, ultimately ascending to the divine presence.

A commentary on the Mukāshafāt quoted in the Dabistān explains the passage as follows:

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 harmony 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 interconnected 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.Footnote ⁵⁶

The influential Persian-language treatise on ethics, the Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, composed 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:

Just as Muslim physicians, as heirs to the tradition of Galen, understood illness to be caused by the disproportion of bodily humours and temperaments, likewise, 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:

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 modern 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 equilibrium or harmony—in the case of the body, a harmony of humours and temperaments; 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 philosophers of the early modern period argued that such principles were universal, shared by ancients and moderns, by non-Muslims and by Muslims. In the following 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 followers, 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, written without the use of any Arabic words.Footnote ⁵⁹ As I have shown elsewhere, these hymns are word-for-word translations of the Arabic hymns associated with the philosopher al-Suhrawardī.Footnote ⁶⁰ In form, these hymns (taqdīsāt, literally ‘sanctifications’) belong to a genre that has its roots in Neoplatonic theurgical liturgies from Late Antiquity,Footnote 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 emanation, 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,Footnote 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 materials 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 devotional works are dedicated.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 noteworthy in showing that an early modern Muslim audience might have understood the projects to be commensurable.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 celestial 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:

It is possible that the reference manual (dastūr al-ʿamal) referred to in this passage 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’.Footnote 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 perennialist 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 textFootnote ⁷⁰ 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 transcribed phonetically in Arabic script and accompanied by a Persian translation.Footnote ⁷¹ Technical details aside, the inclusion in a single text of liturgical material drawn from Zoroastrian, Bhakti, Turkic Shamanic, and Muslim philosophical 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 enterprise 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

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, completed 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 circles 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

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:

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 separate from the root, Bahrām states that the fruit of each branch, here understood 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 behaviour 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:

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 subcontinent 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 composition of the Dabistān, we can return to Mūbad himself. Assembling information 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 patterns 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.Footnote 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:

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 coreligionists, for they might expose you to make their path look strong.’Footnote ⁷⁸

During the middle part of his career (1047/1637–1055/1645), Mūbad was active primarily in Punjab and Afghanistan.Footnote 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 frequently. 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.Footnote ⁸⁰

In the last documented portion of his life (1055/1645–1069/1659) he travelled south via Gujarat to the area around Hyderabad, the domain of the Quṭbshāh sultans.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 possible 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,Footnote 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 contemporary Mughal prince Dara Shukoh, were acts of royal self-fashioning and instruments of political authority.Footnote 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 modern 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 evaluate, 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 philosophical 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),Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 comparison 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.Footnote 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:

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 revelation directly in their hearts rather than through conventional means.Footnote ⁹¹

After establishing Tibetan doctrine about the nature of divinity as something familiar, indeed uncontroversial, Mūbad proceeds to describe the specifics of Tibetan belief about the human soul and its rebirth reported from a religious expert:

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 chapters of the Dabistān. Several followers of Suhrawardī attributed to him a positive view of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls.Footnote 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 transmigration. 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:

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 interlocutors, 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:

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:

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 society 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 converse 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.

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 jarring, 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 commonality of their pursuit of liberation.

Ṣulḥ-i kull and the global memory of Āẕar 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 descent from the pre-Islamic Sasanian dynasty in the second.

The difficulty in characterizing Mūbad as belonging to one or another religious 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 constant 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 anyone to be evil and have practiced peace with every existent being (ṣulḥ bā kull kāʾināt karda-and)’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 universal 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 tantalized 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 generations of Iranian nationalists, the Dasātīr and the Dabistān helped to shape an idea of an eternal Iran that still persists to this day.Footnote 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 philosophy which he called Ishrāq. Through the auspices of Henry Steel Olcott, president 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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. Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Scholarship of recent decades has done much to bring to light the roots of the discipline of comparative religion within early modern European intellectual historyFootnote ¹⁰⁷ 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 knowledge, the Dabistān provides an important counterpoint to Eurocentric accounts of the history of the study of religion, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam has already noted.Footnote 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 revelation 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 promoter of a universal Persian national identity; Ruswā was a ‘Musalman Platonist’.

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 exercises, 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 appearance 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.