Dara Shikoh

Dzieła

• 1655Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn (Zbieg dwóch mórz)

  Krótki traktat perski, który zestawia pojęcia sufickie i hinduskie – żywioły, zmysły, imiona Boże, duszę, etapy stworzenia i wyzwolenia – i dowodzi, że poszukiwacze prawdy obu tradycji różnią się raczej słowami niż treścią.

• 1657Sirr-i akbar (Największa tajemnica – perski przekład upaniszad)

  Perski przekład pięćdziesięciu upaniszad, wykonany w 1657 roku z pomocą panditów i przedstawiony przez Darę Shikoha jako „ukryta księga” Koranu; A.-H. Anquetil-Duperron przełożył go na łacinę jako Oupnek’hat (1801–1802) – w tej wersji upaniszady czytał Schopenhauer.

Stanowisko

Dara Shikoh is on the map for his attempt to show that Sufi metaphysics and Hindu philosophy speak of the same truth. In The Confluence of the Two Seas (Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn, 1655) he set side by side the terms of the Sufis and of the Indian “monotheists” – for the elements, the senses, the divine names and attributes, the soul, the stages of creation and liberation – and concluded that he found no difference between them except in words. His framework is the unity of being (waḥdat al-wujūd) in the tradition of Ibn Arabi, which he combined with Vedantic ideas; at the same time he described himself as a Hanafi Muslim and a Qadiri Sufi committed to God’s unity. In 1657 he had fifty Upanishads translated into Persian with the help of pandits as The Greatest Secret (Sirr-i akbar); in his preface he argued that the “hidden book” mentioned in the Qur’an (56:78) is none other than the Upanishads. This translation had a long afterlife in Europe: Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron put it into Latin as Oupnek’hat (1801–02), and it was in this version that Arthur Schopenhauer read the Upanishads from 1814 onward and praised them in the preface to The World as Will and Representation. In India he has been remembered, much later, as a symbol of a tolerant alternative to Aurangzeb; Supriya Gandhi’s biography (2020) reads him in the context of the courtly and Sufi culture of his own time.

Życie i kontekst

Muhammad Dara Shikoh was born on 20 March 1615 in Ajmer, the eldest son of Prince Khurram, the later emperor Shah Jahan, and Mumtaz Mahal. He was his father’s favourite and designated successor and held high military and administrative offices. As a young man he turned to the Qadiri Sufi order: he became a follower of Mian Mir in Lahore and a disciple of Mian Mir’s successor Mulla Shah Badakhshi. He wrote lives of the Sufi saints, treatises on the Sufi path, poems, and records of conversations with the Hindu ascetic Baba Lal Das, and he was a patron of painting, music and architecture. When Shah Jahan fell ill in 1657, a war of succession broke out among his sons; Dara was defeated by his younger brother Aurangzeb, captured and brought to Delhi, and executed on 30 August 1659 on a charge of heresy.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Confluence of the Two Seas (Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn, 1655)
• The Greatest Secret (Sirr-i akbar, 1657), Persian translation of fifty Upanishads
• The Ship of the Saints (Safīnat al-awliyāʾ), lives of Sufi saints
• The Tranquillity of the Saints (Sakīnat al-awliyāʾ)
• The Compass of Truth (Risāla-yi Ḥaqq-numā)