Emerging Approaches To The Sufi Traditio

South Asia Research
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Emerging Approaches to the Sufi Traditions of South Asia: Between

Texts, Territories and the Transcendent
Nile Green
South Asia Research 2004; 24; 123
DOI: 10.1177/0262728004047908
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SOUTH ASIA
RESEARCH
www.sagepublications.com
DOI: 10.1177/0262728004047908
VOL 24 NO2 NOVEMBER 2004
Vol. 24(2): 123–148; 047908
Copyright © 2004
SAGE Publications
New Delhi,
Thousand Oaks,
London
EMERGING APPROACHES TO THE SUFI

TRADITIONS OF SOUTH ASIA:
BETWEEN TEXTS, TERRITORIES AND
THE TRANSCENDENT
Nile Green
LADY MARGARET HALL, OXFORD, UK
ABSTRACT This article examines Sufism as a textual world

composed of several overlapping genres of writing, arguing that
the crucial interface between different kinds of writing, the
world and the individual Muslim presents a major challenge for
the study of Sufism. The co-existence of the embodied realities
of powerful Sufi practitioners of South Asia’s past and present
with the alternative textual reality of the literary world of Sufi
writings from the region is explored in depth. The article
presents an overview of the Sufi traditions of South Asia,
emphasizing some emerging research angles on the problematic
convergences between texts, territories and the transcendent
elements in Sufism in four major sections.
KEYWORDS: hagiography, history, Islam, mysticism, region, Sufism,

territory, textual analysis, transcendence
Introduction
Descriptions or definitions of Sufism have traditionally skirted around the basic
fact that from a certain set of perspectives (historical, ethnographic, architectural),
Sufism is a form of Islam that is embodied in the persons of representatives of the
chains of spiritual power and piety that believers ultimately trace back to the
Prophet Muhammad.1 Of course, Sufism is also the shorthand term we use for the
nexus of spiritual theories and practices through which countless Muslims have
sought a closer personal relationship with God. In this sense, Sufism is also a set
of pious disciplines aiming at the transcendence of the affairs of this world. At the
same time, the term Sufi can also be usefully applied as a designation for the
traditions of writing that have articulated the models through which these living
practitioners have been understood by modern scholars and, more problematically,
in some way saw themselves. Sufism, then, is also a textual world composed of

124 South Asia Research Vol. 24 (2)
several overlapping genres of writing. It is at this crucial interface between writing,

the world and the individual that the greatest difficulties in the study of Sufism
emerge.
This article aims to present an overview of the Sufi traditions of South Asia
that emphasizes emerging research angles on these problematic convergences. It
also seeks to examine ways of viewing together the two dimensions of Sufi history
that are the embodied realities of the world of the powerful Sufi practitioners of
South Asia’s past and the alternative textual reality of the literary world of Sufi
writings from the region. The second section of the article focuses on texts,
outlining some of the major characteristics of Sufi writing in South Asia. This is
the written world of Sufi ideals and theory, as well as the medium through which
the Sufi past was represented and passed on to successive generations of believers
through different kinds of commemorative works. A third section, focused on
territories, discusses how the ideals of Sufi literature were translated into or
refracted as patterns of real life. It addresses in more detail some of the insights
available from both non-textual sources and the placing of texts into specific
geographical or ethnographic contexts. This is the world in which the embodied
sanctity of Sufi holy men played a central part through their living interaction
with both state representatives and the lesser orders of everyday clients. No less
significant were their roles in the creation of politically as well as spiritually potent
sacred geographies of Sufi shrines, and of the family dynasties of professional Sufis
that would inherit these shrines and maintain the material and symbolic capital
that came with them.
It is far from the intention of this article to grant de jure primacy to written
sources on the Sufi past. Important work is now emerging on non-textual aspects
of Sufi history and practice, and new insights into the living world of the Sufis of
South Asia’s past are becoming available to us through the examination of the
material culture and architectural legacy of Sufism (Frembgen, 1998; Landell-
Mills, 1998). It is also self-evident that an emphasis on texts has obscured that
large part of Sufi piety which has for a variety of reasons failed to find textual
expression. Yet scholarly emphases on historicism as a means to understanding the
phenomena of Sufism have accentuated certain approaches to Sufi written
materials, prioritizing modern reading strategies that often conceal the writing
strategies of the authors (or the texts) themselves. In order to draw attention to
some of the inherent difficulties faced by a study of Sufi history based on the
written word, a different perspective on Sufi textual material, focusing on the
transcendent, is presented in the fourth section. By arguing for what is termed the
transcendent qualities of writing itself, this section aims to suggest ways in which
Sufi writings can be seen to address key problems of human corporate and private
identities through an alternative hermeneutics of the writing strategies of Sufi
texts. Having started with the representation of Sufism within its own written
tradition and then, by way of contrast, looking at the embodied, terrestrial
qualities of the Sufis, we may see what room is left for an understanding of Sufism
through a revised understanding of the traditional scholarly paradigms of
mysticism and the search for transcendence.

Green: Emerging Approaches to the Sufi 125
Texts: South Asian Sufism in the Written Word

The earliest literature of Sufism was composed in Arabic by Sufis writing in
regions as widespread as Baghdad and Tirmiz on the banks of the Oxus. However,
by the time of the spread of Sufism in South Asia itself and the great flourishing
of Sufi writings in the region, Persian had already begun to be adopted as the
suitable medium for Muslim religious literature by Sufis writing in Central Asia as
well as Iran (see e.g. Baldick, 1981). Although important contributions to the
Arabic literature of Sufism were certainly made in South Asia through the
centuries (particularly in Sindh and the Deccan), it was overwhelmingly in Persian
that the greatest contribution of the region was to be made.2
The scale of this contribution is perhaps seen most clearly in the fact that the
first extant Sufi prose work written in Persian was composed in the mid-11th
century in Lahore. This was the famous Kashf al-mahjub of ‘Ali ibn ‘Uthman al-
Hujwiri (d.c.1072). At the same time, Kashf al-mahjub (al-Hujwı̄rı̄, 1967), one of
the Sufi works best known to Western scholarship, is nonetheless capable of
revealing new insights into the process of the formation of the Sufi traditions of
South Asia. Its author, al-Hujwiri, was an immigrant to Lahore from the environs
of Ghazna, one of the earliest of many Khurasani Sufis to migrate to South Asia.
However, his text reveals that he had also travelled in a much wider region, not
least on pilgrimage to the tombs of such earlier Sufis as Abu Yazid at Bistam and
Abu Sa‘id at Mihna in Khurasan (al-Hujwı̄rı̄, 1967: 68, 235). These references to
a pre-existing Sufi practice of shrine pilgrimage outside of South Asia are
important. They remind us that what is often seen as being in some way a
typically South Asian characteristic of Islam – the emphasis on a cult of Sufi
shrines – was in fact one of the key practices and institutions of a wider Islamic
cultural system to be introduced to South Asia at an early period. al-Hujwiri’s
reference to the shrines he visited in Iran also reminds us at the outset of the close
interaction that always existed between the literature of Sufism and the institu-
tions (mausolea, Sufi lodges, land-holdings, etc.) that upheld the cult of the saints
in Islam.
Despite its many interesting facets, it is the moralizing and ethical qualities of
Kashf al-mahjub that connect it to the greater vehicle of Muslim piety, reminding
us of the danger that often lies in talking about Sufism in a different breath from
Islamic law or the study of the Hadith. For al-Hujwiri, as for many of his
successors, Sufism was a path to perfecting one’s adherence to normative Islam
rather than an alternative to it. Although, arguably less fascinating than the poetry
or heady speculative philosophy of some Sufis, this emphasis on the morality and
etiquette (akhlaq and adab) of the Sufi was something that would continue to be
perhaps the major theme of Sufi literature in all of its forms (Böwering, 1984;
Matringe, 2001).
This kind of moralizing Sufi literature had its origins outside of South Asia.
Other early Sufi works on the subject that were written outside the region were at
times imported and popularized there. This was most famously the case with the
Awarif al-ma‘arif of ‘Umar Suhrawardi (d.1234), a text originally introduced to
South Asia by its author’s Suhrawardi successors in Multan, but which was later

taken up by the Chishti Sufi, Farid al-din Ganj-e-Shakar.3 ‘Awarif al-ma‘arif is one
of the key texts in Sufi history precisely for the fact that it formed a set of rules
for life in the Sufi lodge (ribat, khanaqah), once again reminding us of the
institutional connections of this literature (Suhrawardı̄, 1978). The text later
remained popular among both the Chishtiyya and virtually every other Sufi group
in South Asia, both in its original Arabic form and more particularly in the
Persian translation made by Mu’iz al-din Kashani (d.1334–5).
While demonstrating the connections between writing and a wider set of Sufi
institutions, such texts also remind us of the communal character of Sufi teaching
which emphasized the relationship of the Sufi to wider social life.4 One genre
containing instructions for Sufi practices that shows this well is that of the Sufi
prayer manual. A Suhrawardi example of this under-studied genre from Multan
has recently been a focus of scholarly investigation, revealing more of the
connection between Sufi practices and the performance of ordinary Muslim prayer
within the context of a highly literate Sufi tradition with close ties both to
Baghdad and the religious establishment of the Delhi Sultanate (Huda, 2003:
137–72). Since class has been so routinely neglected as a tool of analysis in the
study of Sufism, we can at present only speculate on the connections between
social stratification, literary production and specific forms of Sufi piety and so on
the wider history of aristocracy and aloofness in Indo-Muslim societies.
However, didactic manuals were by no means always concerned with primary
questions of good behaviour and shared spiritual exercises. Other didactic works
promoted more esoteric practices, whether they be meditational techniques,
prayers for the summoning of visions or practices that were more clearly magical
in character, as in the Jawahir-e-khamsa of Muhammad Ghaws of Gwalior
(d.1562–3). While the latter text has still not received the careful study it
deserves, two related early 18th-century Chishti texts serve to demonstrate the
character of Sufi meditative practices conceived with more typically pious aims. In
his Kashkul-e-kalimi, for example, Shah Kalimullah of Delhi (d.1728) described a
graveside meditation (zikr-e-kashf-e-qubur) that was capable of revealing to its
practitioner the spiritual states of the dead saint beside whose tomb it was
performed, thus tying Sufi metaphysics into what is too easily dismissed as a
popular model of shrine visitation (Jahanabadi, 1910: 46–7). Kalimullah also
discussed the merits of yogic practices amid a wider description of the zikrs of
different groups of Sufis. The Nizam al-qulub of Kalimullah’s disciple, Nizam al-
din of Aurangabad (d.1729), took up these themes in greater detail and described
a whole series of meditative practices (zikrs) belonging to almost every known Sufi
order, as well as assessing the benefits of techniques explicitly adapted from yoga.5
However, Nizam al-din was careful to emphasize in the first chapter of the work
that these techniques should only be practised under the guidance and with the
explicit command of a living Sufi master.
Here we see one of the crucial characteristics of Sufi instructive literature. For
these were by no means self-help books in the modern sense. If a modern parallel
must be sought, they were perhaps more akin to teaching manuals than study
guides. This questions modern understandings of the epistemological character of
the book as opening up a field of learning to any literate person who happens to

pick it up. For in Nizam al-din’s warning we are reminded how the transmission
of written knowledge interacted with a wider institutional framework of Sufi
knowledge that was based on the master–disciple relationship. As other kinds of
texts (particularly malfuzat) sometimes show, these forms of Sufi pedagogy that
governed the use of texts at times also branched out into a wider institutionaliza-
tion of education within the Sufi lodges (khanaqahs).
We have noted that these two texts discussing quite the same themes to
similar effect were written by a master, Kalimullah, and his disciple, Nizam al-din.
This relationship between the two texts points to another key characteristic of the
institutional character of Sufi literature that merits greater scholarly exploration.
While it is easy to talk about the Sufi literature of South Asia in one short breath,
it is more difficult to comprehend how the many different works that in sum
comprised this literature actually related to one another. We require greater
understanding of these processes of intertextuality both from the perspective of
the composition of Sufi works and from the perspective of their reception. Which
Sufis read which books, and which books influenced the composition of others?
And what were the deliberate or accidental control structures (syllabuses, language
barriers, schools of thought, destroyed libraries) that shaped patterns of reading
among Sufis? Although it is a daunting prospect, it is essential that scholars take
steps towards comprehending this textual ecumene of South Asian Sufism. Studies
of specific collections of books and the relationships between books are necessary
to begin to understand this Sufi world of books as a whole that was constructed of
various disjointed and fragmented parts.6
The two meditational handbooks of Kalimullah and Nizam al-din Awranga-
badi point to what is probably the most obvious factor in this ecumene. This is
the influence of the Sufi networks themselves, of the tariqa system, on the
creation and transmission of knowledge. Now this can be easily overstated. The
influence might simply be one of master and disciple, the straightforward matter
of a teacher shaping the tastes of his students. But there was often more to it than
this and it is no coincidence that these two manuals discussing in detail and with
considerable admiration the meditational techniques of non-Muslims should be
composed by two Chishti Sufis. Although it is certainly something of a
commonplace in the modern historiography of Sufism, through the work of such
Sufis as ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti (d.1683) who reformulated the Bhagavad Gita
into Persian, the Chishtiyya were the most open to non-Islamic traditions of all of
the literate traditions of Indian Sufism (Ernst, 1996; Vassie, 1999).
Yet when posing such questions of cultural exchange (whether addressed
through the language of syncretism or hybridity) one needs always to bear in
mind the differences between such exchanges in literate, non-literate and partially
literate contexts. For while the written world of texts offers the possibility of
distinctly separate religious models that may therefore be combined in genuine
acts of hybrid exchange, the living world of embodied religious knowledge and
cultural behaviour rarely if ever offers the same monolithic distinctions as writing.
The processes at work in the creation of hybrid texts may therefore be perfectly
distinct from those involved in the creation of cults too easily classified by the
same criteria as texts.7

It is important in this context not to underestimate the windows that written

language opens onto other worlds and the windows that it closes. Clearly, the fact
of the literacy of many South Asian Sufis in Persian – less often in Arabic – tied
them into an intellectual world stretching as far west as Anatolia or the Maghreb
(Robinson, 1997). Suhrawardi’s ‘Awarif al-ma‘arif was far from the only Sufi work
that was imported into South Asia, and William Chittick (1992) has carefully
traced the journeys of Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings to India and the subsequent spread of
his ideas through commentaries written on them in the region by his later
promoters. But these ties also possessed their complications and discontinuities.
Until the Mughal conquests, the Deccan, for example, was more closely tied in
with the world of Arabic learning just across the sea to the west than was northern
India (Hindustan proper) with its closer historic ties to Khurasan and Central
Asia. Arabic Sufi writing had long flourished in the Deccan, while the ties forged
between the independent Deccan sultanates and Safavid Iran also resulted in a
very particular kind of intellectual input into the Deccan.8 The spread of Shii
learning, by way of the immigration of the Arabophone sayyids of Shustar and the
Persophone Sufis of Kerman, was one cultural consequence of the specific
maritime connections of the Deccan to the ports of eastern Arabia and southern
Persia.9 The Sufi orders that flourished in the Deccan during this period – the
Qadiriyya at Bijapur, the Ni‘matullahiyya at Bidar – were orders tied by writing as
well as genealogy and geography to Iraq and Iran.10 Yet with the conquests of the
Deccan by the Mughals, these particular inter-Islamic ties were broken and
replaced by others. Paramount were the cultural and linguistic ties fostered
through the wider political and cultural geography of the Mughal-Timurid world
that incorporated northern India and Transoxiana. The Mughals thus re-
introduced the Chishtiyya to the Deccan (in the hands of the aforementioned
Nizam al-din of Awrangabad), as well as introducing the Central Asian Naqshban-
diyya to the region for the first time (Digby, 1990). In the Persian texts written by
Chishti and Naqshbandi masters in the Deccan during the period of the Mughal
conquests, we learn that the books being read in their circles were chiefly those
describing the pious deeds and miraculous accomplishments of the earlier Chishti
Sufis of Delhi and the earlier Naqshbandi masters of Bukhara. The Rashahat of
Kashifi, Nafahat al-uns of Jami or the Manaqib-e-Chishtiyya, books that these
writers described as being read in the Sufi lodges of the Deccan’s new capital at
Aurangabad, and which the writers themselves adapted as their own prose models,
were thus texts composed in Delhi, Herat and Bukhara, cities that were the
cultural centres of the Timurid world beloved of the Deccan’s new Mughal rulers.
So language connections opened up specific wider worlds, but we have earlier
noted that they also closed them. It seems no coincidence that the greatest hybrid
literature of South Asian Islam was composed neither in Arabic nor Persian, but
by writers working in Bengali (Cashin, 1985; Roy, 1983; Tarafdar, 1992). It is
important not to overlook the occasional programme of translating Sanskrit
religious works into Persian or Arabic (such as that sponsored by Akbar) or the
claims that some Sufis (such as Gesu Daraz) were familiar with Sanskrit learning.
But the simple fact of the limited literacy of Sufis whose education was entirely in
Persian and sometimes Arabic was of more consequence than the exchanges

afforded by translations. In Bengal, where Perso-Arabic learning never established

the same foothold as in Hindustan and the Deccan, Sufis educated and literate in
Bengali were thus able to partake in a wider Gedankenwelt that included the
contributions of non-Muslim thinkers. Poetic epics with Sufi themes patronized at
such courts as those of Islam Shah Sur and Husain Shah Sharqi, like Manjan’s
Madhumalati (1545) and Qutban’s Mirigavati (1503) were written in other
regional languages like eastern Hindavi and show similar hybrid characteristics (de
Bruijn, 1999; 2002; Manjhan, 2000). Like the patronage in ‘Adil Shahi Bijapur of
similar works written in Dakhni, such religio-cultural mélanges may not primarily
be a reflection of either the tolerant religious sentiments of poet or patron or the
free interaction of ideas in non-literate contexts, as may well be the case in non-
literate syncretic movements.11 Rather such works may be the products of specific
local ecumenes of written learning in given regional languages, worlds of books
that are now only scarcely discernable to us amid the shadows cast by the trans-
regional traditions of Perso-Arabic and Sanskrit scholarship (Alam, 1998; Pollock,
1998a, 1998b). Indeed, such an approach may suggest that for certain purposes
language forms a better mode of classification than religion (we might speak of
Perso-Arabic rather than Muslim learning, etc.). Such as it is, textual hybridity
may reveal itself to be not so much a matter of liberality (or perhaps not only a
matter of liberality), but rather as a process dependent on access to specific
channels of written communication.
Our understanding of the Persianate Sufi world of books is clearly helped by
the fact that Sufi writers (like their premodern counterparts in Europe) were in
the habit of mentioning the titles of other books within their own writings. On
the one hand, poetic classics like the Masnavi of Rumi and the ghazals of Hafiz
seem to have been read by Persophone Sufis of virtually every order or lineage. At
times these works were the subjects of Sufi commentaries in South Asia, though
such works have yet to be examined. Certain other writers (or at least their
commentators and epitomisers) also had a very widespread influence, such as the
ubiquitous Ibn ‘Arabi, even though the scale of the actual readership of such
technical metaphysical works may have been overestimated in the past.
The same cannot be said in the case of hagiographical or commemorative
writings (tazkirat), the Persianate genre which reached its greatest popularity and
voluminousness in South Asia rather than elsewhere (Hermansen and Lawrence,
2000; Mojadeddi, 2001). This most prevalent of all Sufi genres seems also to have
been the one whose readership was most shaped according to the order to which a
given Sufi belonged. Certainly there were major exceptions to this, not least in the
case of the earliest classic hagiographies (such as ‘Attar’s Tazkirat al-awliya) which
were read by all kinds of Sufis, nor in the case of later hagiographies from the
colonial period (such as Ghulam Sarwar Lahawri’s Khazinat al-asfiya) which often
included Sufis by merit of their regional associations rather than their tariqa
affiliation. Nonetheless, as evidenced by mention of examples in other Sufi
writings, the common sub-genre of the hagiography devoted to the shaykhs of a
given order does seem to have been read by similarly proscribed readerships, with
their contents thus mirroring their reception. Such issues of the reception of Sufi
texts, however, remain largely unexplored.

Earlier Sufi masters were regarded in a true sense as saints in a technical

ontological and cosmological manner and the writing of their lives was one of the
most widespread of all literary acts of Muslim piety. With regard to what was
remarked earlier about the dangers of talking about Sufi as opposed to plain
Muslim religiosity, it should be noted that such hagiographical works were often
written by believers who might not necessarily regard themselves as ‘Sufis’. As the
most voluminous corpus of all Sufi literature (that is, then, literature about Sufis if
not always by them), the hagiography is along with the poetic ghazal the genre
which most connects the Sufis in a variety of directions to different persons,
institutions and practices in wider Muslim history. While the teaching manuals
and the treatises of Sufi metaphysical theory always had a relatively (and
sometimes extremely) circumscribed readership, the stories of the saints by
contrast fed out into wider society through the participation of a much broader
audience. And it is audience rather than readership that is the key here, since it is
the Sufi hagiography that has generally been the written genre with the closest
links to the oral ecumene. While stories of the saints have long spread from the
written into the oral tradition, we also know that certain Sufis composed
hagiographies through visiting shrines to collect stories that were being told of the
saints interred there. Muhammad Murad’s 18th-century Naqshbandi hagiography
Hasanat al-abrar is one case in point (Akimushkin, 2001). Tales of the saints,
then, were one of the crucial points of interface between the possessors of written
knowledge and the non-literate members of society.
However, hagiography was also an important ‘way in’ to Sufi discourse for
another social group. This group was the royalty and aristocracy. Of course,
without the patronage of rulers and aristocrats, Sufi literature would arguably be
scarcely worth discussing (consider the patronage of Rumi, Ibn ‘Arabi and Amir
Khusraw). However, when it came to putting pen to paper themselves, in terms of
prose literature it was usually hagiographical works that were the product of
princely pens. Between them, members of the Mughal royal house managed to
write in praise of just about every Sufi order present within their dominions, a
collective decision which showed as much political acumen as hope for celestial
reward. The most famous of such works were the pair of hagiographies written by
Dara Shikuh, heir-apparent of Shah Jahan. In these works, Safinat al-awliya and
Sakinat al-awliya, Dara Shikuh expressed his devotion to the Qadiri tradition in
which he had been instructed and provided a detailed biography of his Sufi
teacher Miyan Mir and many other saints. Dara Shikuh’s sister, Jahanara, was later
to write a hagiography of the Chishti saints of Delhi (Begam, 1991). In the
Baburnama, we hear for his part how their ancestor Babur expressed his devotion
to the Sufis by versifying the Walidiyya of the great Naqshbandi master
‘Ubaydullah Ahrar, a penance which he successfully prescribed himself as a cure
for an inflammation of the bowels (Babur, 1996: 410). But the Mughal house was
far from unique in such practices. The founder of Hyderabad State, Nizam al-
Mulk Asaf Jah, is said to have written Rashk-e-Gulistan, a now lost hagiography of
his supposed namesake, the aforementioned Nizam al-din of Aurangabad. This
was a practice also apparently favoured by some of his successors, while Nizam al-
Mulk’s close relative ‘Imad al-Mulk Firuz Jung III showed a similar proclivity for

praise of the saints of the Chishtiyya in writing his Manaqib-e fakhriyya in

memory of Nizam al-din’s son, Mawlana Fakhr al-din (d.1785).
This brings us to the question of the Sufi genre perhaps most closely
connected with South Asia, that of the malfuzat or so-called ‘recorded conversa-
tion’ (Askari, 1976; Ernst, 1992). The supposed invention and high point of the
malfuzat in the circle of the Chishti Nizam al-din Awliya in early 14th-century
Delhi has been the focus of a great deal of attention. This has certainly obscured
connections between the malfuzat and other Arabo-Persian anti-literary genres
claiming to belong to the realm of the spoken rather than the written word (the
Quran included). The dichotomy of the ‘authentic’ versus the ‘fake’ or ‘manu-
factured’ malfuzat also belies the clear hagiographical intentions that were present
in the genre from the outset. While such early examples of the genre as Fawa’id al-
fu’ad do present us with more of the purported conversations of their subjects
than some later malfuzat, it is overly simplistic to see these written documents as
products of speech rather than writing. The focus on their qualities of ‘teaching’
the reader also draws an artificial boundary that excludes the didactic qualities of
Sufi hagiography more generally. Whether through the provision of miracle tales
or edifying speeches, they contain an admonishing and didactic ethos that is not
entirely subsumed into flattery of the saint. While there are certainly different
styles of malfuzat (and certainly some which we would do well to disregard as
historical source material on the life of their subjects), the genre of the malfuzat
should best be seen as a limb connected to a wider body of writings devoted to
recording the words and deeds of past Sufi masters, the saints.
In all their different forms, these hagiographies reveal what is one of the
central characteristics of Islamic spirituality as of Islamic civilization more
generally. This is a central focus on history, on past human experience, as a key to
unwrapping God’s (and man’s) purpose in the world. While they have brought
endless perplexity to researchers seeking to re-assemble the positive facts of Sufi
history, what hagiographies do show us is a Muslim view of history seen from the
inside that is not easily translated into an altogether different approach to and
valorization of the past. Yet it is also worth drawing attention to the fact that as
roads into the past hagiographies also have much in common with Muslim
historiography through the common recurrence of stories of Sufis in the works of
historians such as ‘Isami and Firishta (Hardy, 1960). A comparative study of the
presentation of sainthood in hagiographical and historical works in South Asia
would therefore be an extremely fruitful exercise in understanding more clearly the
different ways Muslims explored of putting Sufis into ink.
The question of whose history hagiographies were writing is a pertinent one.
Although written in South Asia Sufi hagiographies were rare that did not include
references to persons whose lives were spent in entirely different regions, whether
in Mecca, Bukhara or Baghdad. Such early non-Indian Sufis as Hallaj, Shibli,
Ibrahim bin Adham or ‘Abd al-Qadir Jilani have been constantly remembered in
hagiographical works written down to the present day in South Asia, while every
Sufi order in the region ultimately traced its routes through persons and
geographies lying beyond the limits of the mountains and deserts to the north-

west. Hagiography, then, was also one of the central ways in which South Asian
Muslims connected their own history with that of the wider Muslim world.
After a long period of neglect among Western scholars of Sufism, in the past
decade hagiographical writings have been the focus for a considerable blossoming
of scholarship. Perhaps the chief reasons for this new interest is the fact that
among all of the literary output of the Sufis, hagiographical writings act as the
closest point of contact with the cult of the saints that (as we have seen from its
mention in al-Hujwiri’s pioneering Kashf al-mahjub) has long sustained Sufism in
a wide variety of social contexts. Of all Sufi texts, hagiographies are those whose
contours most closely mirror the earthly trajectories and territories of Sufi life.
Territories: The Contexts of Sufi Writings

It is difficult to understand the history of Sufism in South Asia without reference
to the several lengthy and distinct patterns of immigration into South Asia of holy
men from different regions of the wider Muslim world, chiefly from Arabia, the
fertile crescent, Iran and Central Asia.12 The patterns of interaction that developed
between the religious and wider cultural institutions which these individuals
brought with them and the pre-existing religious and cultural forms in the
different regions into which they moved forms one of the central processes at
work in South Asian history. As a Khurasani immigrant who was the first to pen
descriptions of his own pilgrimages to the shrines of the saints before becoming
the centre of a shrine cult of his own, al-Hujwiri is once again an emblematic
figure (Huda, 2000).
One of the ways in which the connectedness of Muslim South Asia to the
wider dar al-islam was articulated and assured was through readings of the
geography of South Asia itself. In the 18th-century Deccan, Azad Bilgrami
composed a treatise in Arabic, Subhat al-marjan, in which he envisaged India as a
sacred Islamic land, beginning with its hosting of Adam’s fall to earth in the
Serendips after his expulsion from Eden.13 For in South Asia as throughout the
Muslim world, coterminous with the establishment of Muslim communities was
the evolution of a sacred geography that was associated with the deeds of
especially pious or supernaturally powerful individuals, associated with Muslim
prophets, saints and at times also with devout kings.14 This anthropocentric focus
was typical of Islam at large, where sacred territories were widely formulated with
reference to the presence of special human beings, sometimes graded into explicit
hierarchies from the greater to the lesser prophets, and on through the
multifarious gradations of sainthood. But a sacred territory required visible
material signs of these associations with holy personages. This was essential both
in order to avoid the process of narrative drift (whereby the sacred associations of
one region become attached with other rival sites) as well as to provide a focus for
ritual or other forms of interaction with the sacred power accessible there. In some
instances, this role was played by topography (hills, springs), in others by specific
architectural forms (mausolea, mosques), in others by personal relics such as
footprints and cloaks.15 Although the primary category of sacred space attached to
the prophets could at times be stretched remarkable distances, as shown by

Bilgrami’s vision of a sacred Adamic geography in Sri Lanka, more often it was
around the figures of Sufi holy men that a more widespread sacralization of
Muslim territory was achieved. The importing of holy men thus played an
essential role in the creation of Muslim communities both in areas entirely new to
Islam (such as the forests of Bengal) and in new urban environments in regions
with earlier Muslim associations.16
This matter of the movability of holy persons helps explain why so many of
the shrines of South Asia are dedicated to figures who had moved into the place of
their eventual burial from elsewhere. Sometimes they came from outside of South
Asia altogether, sometimes just from the next town (Green, 2003). In this way,
Sufi saints also often played a role as the founder-figures of different urban
communities, becoming attached to narrative traditions of urban or community
genesis that required them to be seen as the earliest residents in an area, even
when in many cases they were not. Here we see one of the key points of interface
between the spheres of Sufi texts and territories, in that the hagiographical
literature of the Sufi saints may be alternatively read as a geographical literature of
shrines. This is particularly the case with regard to hagiographies discussing the
saints of specific towns or regions.17 By placing such texts back into the
geographical and architectural contexts from which they were produced, new
insights may well emerge into the ways in which the literature of sainthood was
also able to articulate ideas about political geography, local social hierarchies and
even the dynamics of urban and demographic growth. Recent studies of Central
Asian shrines as well as of the Indian town of Ballabgarh offer useful examples (de
Weese, 2000a; 2000b; Lahiri, 1996).
Sufis were by no means the only category of holy men in the process of
creating sacred geographies, for the presence of sayyids and ‘ulama in a town was
also a matter of pride and protection. But by the period of the effective
establishment of Islam in South Asia during the 11th century, the resorting to Sufi
tombs for aid or inspiration was already an established practice, as al-Hujwiri
described. A few centuries after al-Hujwiri’s death, tomb cults had risen to such a
degree of importance that local elites and royal dynasties began to patronize burial
sites with lavish mausolea. Reflecting the heritage of the wider Persianate world,
large mausolea in this way came to be built over the tombs of Sufis to define an
emerging sacred geography for South Asia’s expanding Muslim communities.
However, the most visible way in which the dialogue of kingship and
sainthood transformed the landscape of South Asia was through the overlapping
architecture of Sultans and Sufis. The architectural splendour of many of South
Asia’s countless Sufi shrines is testament to the fact that the power of the Sufis was
more than merely religious or symbolic. Styles of shrine architecture seem always
to have mirrored the fashions of the court. The tomb of Baha al-din Zakariya at
Multan is perhaps the earliest grand example of this. Later styles of shrine
architecture, encompassing the brooding basalt solemnity of the shrine of Gesu
Daraz at Gulbarga and the infinitely delicate marble tents comprising the resting
place of Muhammad Ghaws at Gwalior, continued this tradition in other regions
and among other dynasties.18 These were palaces for the dead that in many cases
also provided a good home for the living in the form of the extended families of

the saint’s descendants. While we need to be careful not to reify old dichotomies
of popular and elite forms of religion, it is important for us to begin to explore
the differences no less than the similarities between such grand urban mausolea
and the simple tombs that comprise village Sufi cults.
The maintenance of grand Sufi mausolea, like those of the kings, required
considerable material outlay and just as the markets and residences around the Taj
Mahal were endowed for the future upkeep of the tomb of Shah Jahan’s queen, so
were large landholdings often granted to Sufis or their descendents when a shrine
was constructed (Kozlowski, 1995; McChesney, 1991). Like their Central Asian
counterparts in particular, this meant that many shrines (most famously that of
Baba Farid in Punjab, but the same was true on a wider scale) were also involved
in agricultural production, trade and even in some cases cottage industries
(Gilmartin, 1984; Phillott, 1908). Similar to any social venture on such a scale, it
is therefore important to try to relate the history of Sufism to the modes of
production that were a central element in the prominent and continued role that
Sufism continued to play in South Asian history until the Land Reform Acts of
recent times. However, there is as yet little work on South Asian shrines to rival
Faroqhi’s (1986; 1988) studies of the agricultural and other economic activities of
Ottoman shrines.
Sufism was in these ways a discourse with a strong institutional backing and
in addition one with a powerful clout at court, one fostered partly through the
marriage of princes with the daughters of saintly lineages (Husain, 1972;
Lawrence, 1999; Schimmel, 2000). The emperor Humayun’s wife Hamida came
from the family of the great Khurasani saint Ahmad-e-Jam (d.1141), while
members of the Bahmanid royal house had made strategic marriages with the
Ni‘matullahiyya, for example. But in addition to this elite class of Sufis, there of
course always existed a greater number who wandered round in the ragged
garments that were the uniform of the faqir, the spiritually and materially
impoverished.
Yet wealth on the scale of the great Sufi families of sajjada nashins, especially
when tied to the state, meant that Sufism was a conservative and establishment
force in society as often as it was an antinomian and disruptive one (Bilgrāmı̄,
1978; Digby, 1986). This establishment character is perhaps best seen in the close
proximity in which royal palaces and saintly shrines were often found. Catherine
Asher (1992) has drawn attention to the fact that the shrine of Nizam al-din
Awliya is closely aligned to both the Din-Panah, the early residence of the Mughal
rulers, and the great mausoleum constructed for Humayun. Fatepur Sikri, the city
founded by the emperor Akbar, was in turn explicitly focussed around the tomb
of the Sufi Salim Chishti who, Jahangir was to claim, nominated him as his
spiritual successor (Petruccioli, 1987). Later, both Jahangir and Shah Jahan built a
lakeside palace near to the shrine of Mu‘in al-din Chishti at Ajmer. Such
architectural alignments continued to be important for the Mughals to the very
end. In the early 19th century, during the reign of Akbar Shah II, the royal
residence in Delhi shifted to the quarter surrounding the shrine of Qutb al-din
Bakhtiyar Kaki in Mehrauli (Asher, 1992: 292–6). The last emperor Bahadur
Shah built a palace there, known as Zafar Mahal, and his court diary (quoted in

Spear, 1951: 78) records his keen attention to the rituals of the shrines of Delhi.
In the cities of the Deccan, palaces and shrines were often sited closely together, as
at Firuzabad and Aurangabad (Green, 2002; Michell and Eaton, 1992). Near
Mandvi in Gujarat, the shrine of Tamachi Pir is even to be found in the palace
gardens of the rulers of Kutch.19
Death is always a potent discursive force in the societies of the living and
relations with the dead have in one way or another shaped different aspects of
social life in almost all societies (Reynolds and Waugh, 1977; Smith and Haddad,
1981). One of the most important cultural functions of the process of burial and
enshrinement is the way in which it allows continued access to (and indeed
communication with) the dead.20 As pre-modern Muslims invariably described
them, tombs are the houses of the dead, places where they can be visited like the
living. Burial, then, provided one of the most important ways in which the
relationship of Sufis with the rest of society was charted.
Examples are legion of Muslim rulers in South Asia being buried within the
mausolea of the Sufi saints. Of course, there was frequently a good deal of
competition between saints and kings and there are ultimately no Sufi shrines that
ever rivalled the great imperial mausolea of the Mughals. But from Awrangzeb
onwards, we find many of the Mughal rulers being buried beside saints:
Awrangzeb himself beside Zayn al-din Shirazi in Khuldabad, Muhammad Shah
beside Nizam al-din Awliya in Delhi and several other late Mughal rulers beside
Qutb al-din at Mehrauli. However, this tendency by no means marked the
impecunious twilight of royal dynasties, as seen by the fact that at the apogee of
their power the sultans of Gujarat had been buried in the shrine of Ahmad Khattu
in Ahmedabad. This tendency was another of the features linking South Asian
Islam with Muslim practice elsewhere and directly mirrored such shared Sufi and
royal burial sites as Gazurgah outside Herat and Shah-eZinda on the outskirts of
Samarqand (Golombek, 1969; Marefat, 1991).
From their beginnings, as had been the case in Iran and Central Asia
beforehand, the funerary architecture of royal and Sufi dynasties had overlapped in
South Asia. So Sufi and royal buildings often shared the same architectural forms,
but they also shared many of the same rituals that brought the buildings to life.21
The ‘urs, the celebration of the death anniversary of the dead that is the most
widespread of all rituals associated with the Sufi shrines, was performed at royal
no less than Sufi tombs. Accounts survive of the ‘urs of the Bahmanid sultan
Ahmad Shah Wali, Mumtaz Mahal and Awrangzeb, for example.22 The etiquette
of pilgrims to the shrines of the Sufi saints (as described in pilgrimage manuals
such as Adab al-talibin of Muhammad Chishti Ahmadabadi or that in Mu-
hammad Najib Nagawri’s Makhzan-e a‘ras) often closely reflected that of the adab
expected of a visitor to the royal court (Ernst and Lawrence, 2002: 90–8).
Nonetheless, this did not deter royal visitors from making pilgrimages to major
shrines and the shrine of Mu‘in al-din Chishti alone was visited by Muhammad
bin Tughluq, Mahmud Khalji of Mandu, Sher Shah Suri, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah
Jahan, Awrangzeb and more recently Queen Mary and Indira Gandhi (Currie,
1989). Indeed, borrowing earlier Iranian usages, the shrine of the Sufi saint was
itself termed as a royal court (dargah), while the saint himself was titled as a king

(shah) and was surrounded by a retinue of servants (khudam) who served him at a
tomb that was decked out with all of the insignia of kingship, including the
crown (taj), the throne (gaddi) and the peacock feather fan (morchhal). But this
traffic of symbols was a two-way current, and court rituals for their part borrowed
from the imagery of the Sufis. From at least the reign of Akbar, the Mughal
emperors were themselves termed as Sufis masters (murshids), with their courtiers
in turn designated as the emperor’s disciples, murids (Hardy, 1985; 1986). Such
was the symbolic power of the Sufis that in some cases, as with the Bahmanid
rulers at Bidar in the Deccan, the royal investiture ceremony involved the
crowning of the sultan by a Sufi, in the earliest instance the Iranian Sufi, Shah
Khalilullah (Sherwani, 1985: 158).
But to return to an earlier theme, the presence of such immigrant Sufis as
Khalilullah played an important role in shaping the broader picture of the sacred
geography of South Asian Islam, a geography which as we have seen was created
largely through the presence of innumerable shrines built for the Sufis. Similar to
anyone else in pre-modern Muslim societies (or at least, anyone who was anyone),
Sufi saints carried with them a genealogy that was a central part of their identity,
of their and others’ sense of who they were. In the case of the Sufi, these
genealogies were often put on bold display at the shrines in the form of shajara
documents or in some cases were sung as a form of hymn (as in the Naqshbandi
khatm-ekhwajagan). Such Sufi genealogies were twofold, one part relating to his
family ancestry and another part to his initiatic ancestry. In a great many cases,
however, the two overlapped, since Sufi masters invariably initiated their own sons
and so allowed them to carry on what was often a family business, not unlike that
of families of clergy in Europe. Royal and Sufi genealogies also sometimes
overlapped and the founder of Hyderabad State, Nizam al-Mulk, was proud of a
genealogy that connected him with the great Shihab al-din Suhrawardi. But
through the group-name (nisba), geography was implicit in the names of Sufis,
showing their own or their family’s regional origins, while in some regions the
populations of whole villages could claim descent from their local saint, who was
himself related to the saint buried in a neighbouring village, and so on.23 Aspects
of the question of Sufi genealogies have recently been partly addressed by Ernst
and Lawrence (2002: 47–64) with respect to the Chishtiyya,24 though a fuller
investigation of the overlapping of ideas of inheritance through kinship and
initiation (bay ‘at) is still needed.
Through the names of individuals and orders and their respective family trees,
genealogy also invoked geography. Yet this was also the case with shrines, since
through a saint’s own initiatic and family links his shrine in turn became attached
to other shrines elsewhere. Reflecting the central place of kinship structures in
wider Indo-Muslim society, shrines did not exist in isolation but were parts of
wider networks of shrines. Some of these networks were simply local, for example
with the presence of the minor shrines of the deputies (khulafa) of a saint located
in different quarters of the same city. Other networks were more regional, with
related shrines spreading through the towns and villages of a given area. And the
largest networks, into which all of the lesser networks ultimately fed, were
transregional, connecting the Naqshbandi shrines of the Punjab and the Deccan

with the hinterland of Bukhara and the Chishti shrines of the Coromandel coast
with Delhi, Ajmer and in theory Chisht itself.
It is here that migrant Sufis re-enter the picture, since through the many Sufi
migrants into South Asia and within its different regions an interrelated and
overlapping sacred geography was able to develop between South Asia and the
wider Muslim world. The nature of the causes that at different periods led Sufis to
migrate meant that the creation of these sacred geographies was often inevitably
bound up with politics. For over the centuries, the immigration of Sufis and the
introduction of the great Sufi orders into South Asia and its different regions was
stimulated by such factors as the Mongol invasions of the central Islamic lands;
the mass persecution of Sufis under the Safavids in Iran; the close ties of the
Mughals to both Transoxania itself and the Naqshbandi Sufis who followed them
from there into India; and the trade links between Multan and Iraq and the
promotion there of an order transplanted from Baghdad.
When these factors are placed together with the fact of the royal and
aristocratic patronage that created the great shrines marking the sacred geography
of South Asian Islam, it becomes clear how closely political and sacred geographies
mirrored one another, as we have seen was also the case with regard to certain
hagiographical texts. For this reason it is perhaps best to see these different
processes, religious and political, together. In reflection of the dangers we have
already noted in the use of the term ‘Sufi’ as opposed to a more nuanced use of
‘Muslim’, this interdependence of the geographies mapped out by saints and kings
ultimately shows us what was after all a unified cultural geography of South Asian
Islam in which political and religious factors were endlessly intertwined. The
cumulative effect of these different processes is perhaps most neatly encapsulated
in that often-repeated description of Ajmer as ‘the Medina of Hind’.
The Transcendent: Reconfiguring the Mystical Qualities of Sufi

Writing
In the second section of this article it was noted how Sufi texts make
unambiguous statements about the Sufi life, present edifying accounts of the lives
of the Sufi saints and promise visions or elevated mystical states if certain
techniques are performed. But when we move onto an examination of the
contexts or ‘territories’ in which these texts flourished matters become far more
complex. This is so much the case that at times it can be hard to make out who
the Sufis actually were. Scholarly argument during the past few decades over the
existence of warrior Sufis brings this out well (Nizami, 1979). In the texts a Sufi is
usually presented simply as a Sufi, while in real life Sufis had all kinds of other
social roles and identities that are often difficult, for us at least, to reconcile.
There is, after all, a great difference between the institutionalized living holy
man with his myriad social functions, ties and allegiances, or the Sufi with the day
job of a bureaucrat, soldier or horse-dealer, and the often free-standing and
socially two-dimensional figures of Sufi literature. One of the ways in which this is
beginning to change is by a shifting focus onto more personal types of Sufi
writing which are capable of revealing more of the lived life of the Sufis. The

genre of the collection of letters (maktubat) exchanged between master and

disciple, a further borrowing from the Sufi writers of Baghdad, offers such a
possibility, as do Sufi autobiographical writings.25 Future research may refine
emerging understandings of notions of selfhood in South Asian Islam and allow
insight into historically earlier constructions of personality than scholars have until
now attempted to understand (Robinson, 1997).
As the Sufis at times dissolve before our eyes into family dynasties of
landholders or their glory mutates into a reflection of the largesse of kings, we
might be forgiven for wondering if Sufism really ever existed outside of the pages
of its textbooks and hagiographies. After all, even al-Hujwiri, whose Kashf al-
mahjub we began by discussing, famously stated that in his day there were no true
Sufis left like those of old, those of old by necessity being Sufis whom he had read
about.
In an important sense it is both banal and simply untrue to claim that Sufism
only ever existed in books. Yet at the same time, there is also a certain amount of
truth in this notion. The more we learn of different Sufi groups over the centuries,
the more we come to terms with the vast diversity in their aims, methods,
clothing, customs, etiquette and lifestyle. These are differences that are easily
subsumed between similarities in ideals and purported doctrines, for which we
may read texts. Then there are those persons posthumously regarded as Sufis,
whether they were in fact collectors of hadith, plain sayyids or even just sailors or
soldiers. This is of course a matter that is bound up with the cult of the saints in
Islam, something which for the best part of a century Western scholars denied had
anything to do with Sufism. But what united this great diversity most firmly was a
common technical language, that is, a common set of terms deemed broadly
respectable in a Muslim framework, which were interpreted or put to use in a
whole variety of different ways and contexts. It is deeply significant that the Sufi
terminology of most of the major languages of the Muslim world is identical.
Language, then, in particular language consecrated and validated through the
prestige and legitimacy bestowed by the written word and reified through
reference to the Quran and Hadith, was the unifying factor between these many
movements designated as Sufi.26
It was this world of writing that persistently acted as the benchmark for living
Sufis in the real world. The uncertainties and ambiguities of life on earth could be
overcome through reference to books of instruction or hagiographies describing
the deeds of the earlier Sufi saints. The recitation of Sufi poetry could be used to
bring on states of ecstasy (hal) or else to simply console the Sufi broken-hearted.27
And for the very reflective believer, really deep existential issues might be
approached through a close study of the great writings of Sufi metaphysics. In
these ways in which Muslims related to the written heritage of Sufism, we see how
in an important sense Sufism was something which existed most fully in books.
And in our search for the transcendent qualities of Sufism, we can see how this
branch of Muslim spirituality regarded texts as both the path to and the
expression of the transcendent. The prose writers tell how to get there, the poets
recount the ecstasy of arrival. But writing remains the key (cf. Martin, 1988).

Writing flattens out the contradictions and discrepancies of real life. Like the
relationship of the soul to the body, the relationship of writing to the world is one
of transcendence. Sufi writings were able to rise above the differences between the
very different persons, places and practices that made up Sufism in its entirety.
Regional differences in place were overcome through the glossing of local
identities in Sufi biography. At the same time, local loyalties were defused through
the transportation of people and places to different regions through the medium
of writing, in such textual form bringing Herat to the Deccan or familiarizing
Baghdad to readers living in Multan. Corresponding differences in linguistic
identities were overcome through the shared fact of writing in Persian.28 Written
language could create common links between different regional and ethnic groups
even at the same time as different Persian speaking Sufis were attending to
different ethnic or social groups within South Asian society as a whole. In such
ways, a broadly shared tradition of Sufi writing was able to overcome the many
differences between the living practitioners of Sufism themselves. Texts, then, were
able to transcend territories.
The world contained in books is different to ours and yet deeply related to it.
As for readers of other kinds of books, for the readers of the texts of Sufism their
books provided the models that shaped their aspirations and the tools with which
they sought to fashion their lives. Sufi written works were typically instructive and
exemplary in nature, intended to affect change in the reader’s life, hence their
being read aloud in khanaqahs. Through historical memory as preserved and
handed down in writing, individuals were also able to enter into a relationship
with the grand figures of the past. The dead saints were vicariously able to speak
to and create new followers, even centuries after their deaths. Sufi texts therefore
provided a form of transcendence in the way in which they enabled the reader to
reach through history to achieve continuity with the lives and spirituality of the
past saints and ultimately with the Prophet himself. Time, as conceived in the
modern form as irrevocably dividing and differentiating human experience,
presented no barrier. In the creation of this sense of continuity, texts allowed the
reader to transcend time. They permitted the creation of a sacred community, a
brotherhood of Sufis connected through time, who were able to become aware of
one another, of their similarities and shared spiritual goals, precisely through the
act of reading. This community of readers was not only one which transcended
time, it was also one which was capable of transcending many of the private
differences in human existence.
This transcendent community was not one of embodied holy men disen-
chanted through the political allegiances and other unedifying details of their daily
lives. For, as we have seen, the act of writing allowed the differences of place,
ethnicity, language and politics to fade quietly into the background. Moreover,
from al-Hujwiri’s day to the period of the grand Persian and Urdu biographical
dictionaries of the saints in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the written world of
the past always outshone the living world of the present. The weight of historical
tradition was no doubt always humbling to the readers of such works and perhaps
this was deliberately so. Although connecting different times together, texts also
allowed them to enter into a critical dialogue that could define attitudes to the

present world of the reader. None of these processes were unique to the written
world of Sufi readers and their texts, yet a failure to address them impoverishes
our understanding of the place and roles of book learning within an Islamic
epistemological milieu.
Such insights into the circularity of the written world are by no means the
preserve of postmodernist critics. At times Sufis tried to circumnavigate the
existential and epistemological dilemma of this kind of literary entrapment by
bravely destroying their books. In the Nafahat al-uns of Jami (d.1492), for
example, we hear of how ‘Ayn al-Zaman Gili was commanded in a dream of his
master to throw all of his books into the river Bactrus and Jami also tells us about
a dervish called Ibrahim Majzub who took the decision to eat all of his books
instead of reading them (Jami, 1955[1375]: 432, 479). But of course their
biblioclastic deeds were only publicized and preserved (and paradoxically recom-
mended) by the fact of Jami’s writing about them. In a similar if more famous act,
the poet Rumi decided for his part to throw all of his books down a well. But as
with Jami, there remains the caveat that the act was later reported in written form
in his own prose discourses (Rumi, 1999: 109). Other Sufis sought to get around
the need for book learning by encountering the famous luminaries of the past
(such as Aristotle or Abu Yazid Bistami) in visions, in this way speaking to them
directly.29 But of course they only knew about the wisdom of these people in the
first place because they had either written books themselves or had had books
written about them. Yet in such ways some Sufis did seek to escape the
epistemological bondage of the world of writing, to seek to reach the reality
behind the book. In an Islamic context this was only appropriate, for the Quran is
itself regarded as a book that is the reflection of another book behind it, the
inscribed tablet (al-lawh al-mahfuz) that is stored in pre-eternity.
Looking at the history of Sufism, we have seen the inconsistencies between
the ideals presented in the Sufi written record and the realities of the entangle-
ment of Sufis in the different societies in which they lived in South Asia. While
many studies of South Asian Sufi movements have focused on either written ideals
or lived realities, the one need not cancel out the other. Event does not simply
negate writing. Perhaps it is this fact that ensured the persistent importance which
written works have always possessed in the Sufi traditions of South Asia as
elsewhere in the Muslim world. For engaging in texts through both reading and
writing was always a core spiritual activity in Sufism and we suggest that the
reasons for this lie in what might be termed as the transcendent qualities of
writing.
Conclusions
The transcendent qualities of writing that Sufi authors exploited remind the
researcher of the specific limits which textual analysis imposes on scholarship. As
we have seen through the ways in which the strategies of Sufi writings have
concealed the disparate regional, ethnic and linguistic identities of their writers
and subjects, writing is as often an act of concealing as it is of disclosure. A failure
to address this issue inevitably means that scholarship only reifies the de-

personalizing and homogenizing rhetoric of so much premodern Sufi writing. The

best examples of recent work on South Asia’s Sufi traditions have been
characterized by a more careful selection of textual genres for study, more nuanced
reading of the texts themselves and greater attention to textual connections with
wider discursive and physical contexts in the real and written worlds that
surrounded them. Such sophistication is to be welcomed, for any comprehensive
history of Sufism needs to bring together the two distinct but interacting realities
of the written and the phenomenal worlds of the Sufis, as well as to pursue the
long shadows that they have cast onto one another.
Notes
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Islam in Asia Seminar, St Antony’s
College, Oxford. I am grateful to Ruth Barnes for the invitation to speak at the seminar.
The article was written with the financial support of the Gordon Milburn Junior Research
Fellowship, Oxford University.
1 Notable recent exceptions with regard to Sufism in South Asia include Frembgen
(2000) and Werbner and Basu (1998).
2 See Kokan (1974) and Marek (1968). For an overview of South Asian Sufi literature see
Schimmel (1973).
3 For a recent study of this text, see Huda (2003).
4 For an exhaustive study of the precise contours in which this relationship was charted
by Sufi writers, see Islam (2002).
5 Awrangābādı̄ (1891–2[1309]). By comparison, see Chittick (1999).
6 Some studies are useful towards this project, though despite the important book
collections of many shrines, data mostly refer to royal rather than Sufi libraries. See
Abdul Aziz (1967), Nadvi (1945–6) and Sprenger (1854).
7 For a recent attempt to formulate a new model of such processes, see Stewart (2001).
However, while being an extremely valuable contribution to the discussion, Stewart’s
theory is still based on translation models that have developed out of literary
scholarship, in some senses therefore reifying textual paradigms of communication.
8 On the cultural and political history of the pre-Mughal Deccan, see Sherwani and Joshi
(1973–4).
9 Bredi (1988) and Khalidi (1992). With its lavish patronage of Shi‘i institutions and
immigrants, the 18th/19th century North Indian Shi‘i state of Awadh saw this process
on the grandest scale (Cole, 1988).
10 On the history of these two orders in the Deccan, see Eaton (1978) and Pourjavady
and Lamborn Wilson (1978).
11 On this Dakhni literature, see Shah II (1956) and Suvorova (2000).
12 For continued connections between South Asia and the Middle East during the colonial
period, see Markovits et al. (2003).
13 The text is partially translated in Ernst (1995).
14 The most important early and recent studies of a Muslim sacred geography both relate
to greater Syria (Canaan, 1927; Meri, 2002).
15 For accounts of two such local religious geographies in South Asia, see Khan (1979)
and Sarangal (1995). For a more recent academic study of the creation of a Muslim
shrine, see Matringe (2000).
16 For a study of this process in Bengal, see Eaton (1993).

17 Premodern as well as modern examples of this genre are legion. For 18th- and 20th-
century examples relating to two important shrine towns in the Deccan, see Bilgrāmı̄
(1996) in Persian and Khān (1997) in Urdu.
18 On these two shrines, see Michell and Zebrowski (1999: 70) and Nath (1978).
19 I am grateful to Dr Edward Simpson for this information.
20 For studies of Muslim shrine cults, see especially Taylor (1999) and Troll (1989).
21 On South Asian shrine rituals, see Hussain-Moini (1989) and Qureshi (1993). On Sufi
shrine rituals elsewhere, see Reeves (1990) and Taylor (1999).
22 On Ahmad Shah Wali, see Sherwani (1985: 135–7). An account of the ‘urs of Mumtaz
Mahal is included in Begley and Desai (1989). For descriptions of Awrangzeb’s ‘urs at
his tomb in Khuldabad being attended by Sufis from nearby Aurangabad, see Digby
(2001: 128). The annual ‘urs celebrations of certain poets, such as that of Bidel, held
beside his tomb in his former house in Delhi, were also commemorated (Khan, 1989).
23 With respect to Punjab, see Eaton (1984). Similar connections between shrines and
kinship groups have been observed for Siddi and other communities in Gujarat (Basu,
1994), E. Simpson (private communication).
24 With regard to Central Asian lineages, see De Weese (1999).
25 For a study and translation of one such maktubat collection, see Maneri (1980). Recent
work on the autobiographical writings of Turkish Sufis offers an important example to
South Asianists (Terzioglu, 2002).
26 The standard study of the Quranic origins of Sufi terminology remains Massignon
(1922).
27 Amid the legacy of the 1960s boom in euphoric forms of mysticism, it is easy to
overlook the fact that many Sufis were professional and deliberate depressives. The
cultivation of existential sadness is one of the key themes of Sufi history, this mood
defining much of the timbre of its literature and lived experience. As yet, however, no
attempt has been made to understand the historical aspects of this cultivated
disposition, to write an emotional history of Sufism.
28 One of the few attempts to examine the limits of this common idiom remains
Schimmel (1999).
29 On one such famous visionary encounter with Aristotle, see Hairi (1981). On visions
and dreams in an Indo-Muslim context, see Digby (1965) and Ewing (1990).
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Nile Green held the Ouseley Memorial Scholarship at SOAS from 1999–2001
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Margaret Hall, Oxford University from 2002–5.
Address: Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, Oxford OX2 6QA, UK. [email:
nile.green@lmh.ox.ac.uk]


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EMERGING APPROACHES TO THE SUFI

ABSTRACT This article examines Sufism as a textual world

KEYWORDS: hagiography, history, Islam, mysticism, region, Sufism,

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several overlapping genres of writing. It is at this crucial interface between writing,

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Texts: South Asian Sufism in the Written Word

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It is important in this context not to underestimate the windows that written

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afforded by translations. In Bengal, where Perso-Arabic learning never established

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Earlier Sufi masters were regarded in a true sense as saints in a technical

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praise of the saints of the Chishtiyya in writing his Manaqib-e fakhriyya in

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Territories: The Contexts of Sufi Writings

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The Transcendent: Reconfiguring the Mystical Qualities of Sufi

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genre of the collection of letters (maktubat) exchanged between master and

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personalizing and homogenizing rhetoric of so much premodern Sufi writing. The

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Landell-Mills, S. (1998) ‘The Hardware of Sanctity: Anthropomorphic Objects in

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