Ahmad Sirhindi

Dzieła

• ok. 1617Maktūbāt-i Imām-i Rabbānī (Listy)

  Ponad pięćset listów po persku, zebranych w trzech tomach od 1617 roku: do uczniów, mistrzów sufickich i urzędników dworu mogolskiego Sirhindi wyjaśnia etapy drogi mistycznej, przeciwstawia „jedność świadectwa” „jedności bytu” i wzywa, by szariat kierował państwem.

Stanowisko

Sirhindi is on the map as the most influential critic of the doctrine of the “unity of being” (waḥdat al-wujūd), which later Sufis associated with Ibn Arabi, and as the founder of the Mujaddidi branch of the Naqshbandi order. In his letters he described the mystical path as a sequence of stages. The experience that only God truly exists and that the world is one with Him belongs to an intermediate stage; at the higher stage of the “unity of witnessing” (waḥdat al-shuhūd) the mystic recognises that the oneness he experienced lay in his own perception, and that God and creation remain distinct – creation is a shadow of God’s attributes, not one with His being. Mystical experience must therefore be measured against revelation and the sharia, which it cannot surpass. His followers called him the “renewer of the second millennium” (mujaddid-i alf-i thānī), since he wrote at the turn of the Islamic millennium. In letters to Mughal nobles he called for the restoration of the sharia in the state after Akbar’s religious policies; these letters also contain hostile remarks about Hindus and Shiʿis. How far he shaped later Mughal politics, as was long claimed, has been questioned by Yohanan Friedmann (1971), who traced how his image as a champion of orthodoxy grew after his death. In the eighteenth century Shah Waliullah sought to reconcile the two doctrines of unity as differing more in expression than in substance, and Muhammad Iqbal praised Sirhindi’s critical stance towards the Sufism of his time. The Mujaddidi order spread from India to Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

Życie i kontekst

Ahmad ibn ʿAbd al-Ahad Sirhindi was born on 26 June 1564 in Sirhind in the Punjab, into a family that traced its descent to the caliph ʿUmar. His father, a Sufi of the Chishti and Qadiri orders, taught him; he studied further in Sialkot and spent some years at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar in Agra, where he knew the court scholars Abu l-Fazl and Fayzi. In 1599 he was initiated in Delhi into the Naqshbandi order by the Central Asian master Khwaja Baqi Billah, after whose death in 1603 he led a growing circle of disciples. His letters to officials at the court of Jahangir drew suspicion, and in 1619 the emperor had him imprisoned in the fortress of Gwalior for about a year, after which he was released and received at court. He died in Sirhind on 10 December 1624; his tomb there is a place of pilgrimage.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Letters (Maktūbāt-i Imām-i Rabbānī), three volumes
• Proof of Prophecy (Ithbāt al-nubuwwa), in Arabic
• Origin and Return (al-Mabdaʾ wa-l-maʿād)
• Treatise against the Shiʿis (Radd-i rawāfiḍ)