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122 Arthur F. Buehler

Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update

A r t h u r F. B u e h l e r
Victoria University, Wellington

Abstract
This article revises current understandings of the Indian Naqshbandi Shaykh,
Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624). It moves analytically beyond the pioneering and bal-
anced scholarly accounts of Yohanan Friedmann and J.G.J. ter Haar, directly
addressing the issues that Sirhindi’s modern scholarly detractors have considered
his most alarming statements and alleged exaggerated claims. Looking sociologi-
cally at Sirhindi’s ashrafi social context and his role as a sufi teacher the article
demonstrates the logic of many of his shocking statements, some of which involve
personal issues that have yet to be discussed in western scholarly literature. Finally,
the so-called “controversy” generated between two perspectives of unity (wahdat-i
wujud and wahdat-i shuhud) has been vastly overstated in the scholarly literature.
The overall sufi consensus is that there is no real controversy. Indeed, both Ibn al-

Arabi and Sirhindi agree that these two valid modes of unity are simply two ways of
perceiving the One.

Introduction1

Twenty-first century scholarly commentary still continues to judge

Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624 Sirhind) in a simplistic manner. This situ-
ation is partially a result of prior scholarship not considering the social
and praxic context in which Sirhindi lived and taught. This article seeks to

1) The issues briefly discussed in this article are only a small sample of those
covered in more detail throughout the numerous introductory essays to selected
translated letters in Sirhindi, a monograph to be published by Paulist Press in
2012. Each letter has a separate detailed introduction and is translated completely.
These translated letters comprise 13 % of the 1263 pages in the Maktubat. See
Ahmad Sirhindi, Maktubat-i Imam-i Rabbani, ed., Nur Ahmad, 3 vols. (Karachi:
Educational Press, 1972).

Der Islam Bd. 86, S. 122–141 DOI 10.1515/ISLAM.2011.017

© Walter de Gruyter 2011
ISSN 0021-1818

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Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update 123

enlarge the context of inquiry to include Sirhindi’s ashrafi social milieu

and to include Sirhindi’s contemplative practices in the larger context
of his sufi training. By examining these two distinct spheres of Sirhindi’s
life, this article revises current understandings of Sirhindi by moving ana-
lytically beyond the pioneering and balanced scholarly accounts of Yoha-
nan Friedmann and J.G.J. ter Haar.2 Part of this enterprise involves di-
rectly addressing the issues that Sirhindi’s modern scholarly detractors
have considered his most alarming statements, for example, his comparing
the common people to cattle, suggesting that one treat Hindus like dogs,
or his allegedly “self-inflating” and “smugly self-righteous” claims. The
most balanced scholarship has sidestepped these issues, glossing them over
because Sirhindi was basically a sufi, or because these kinds of utterances
occurred very infrequently in letters written to influential Mughal offi-
cials. I invite the reader to bracket any prior assumptions about Sirhindi
and consider looking at him in a fresh manner.
For those unacquainted with Ahmad Sirhindi, his best-known writings
are his collected letters, Maktubat, the vast majority of which discuss con-
templative practice and related sufi concerns. Using the contemplative ex-
ercises outlined in these letters, Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi teaching spread
quickly throughout the eastern Islamic world. The historical record shows
that these contemplative methods supplanted almost all prior Naqshbandi
practices worldwide within two generations. The lineage Sirhindi founded,
the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya, is still vibrantly active today. At the
same time, this dynamic, seventeenth-century Naqshbandi sufi made his
mark as a controversial figure when Jahangir imprisoned Sirhindi for what
he considered to be religiously arrogant claims. In the scholarly literature,
Sirhindi continues to draw a disproportional share of off-the-cuff criticism
than any other sufi. This article explores to what extent he deserves this
kind of attention.
There is sufficient historical evidence to go beyond many of the modern
perfunctory judgments of Sirhindi. The first part of the article focuses on
what modern scholars consider to be Sirhindi’s most controversial state-
ments by providing socio-cultural and contemplative contexts that hereto-
fore have not been considered in the scholarly literature. The second sec-
tion of the article revises the general scholarly understanding that Ahmad
Sirhindi’s experience of the unity of contemplative witnessing (wahdat-i

2) Yohanan Friedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi: An Outline of His Thought

and a Study of His Image in the Eyes of Posterity (Montreal: McGill Queen’s Univer-
sity Press, 1971). See J.G.J. ter Haar, Follower and Heir of the Prophet: Shaykh
Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) as Mystic (Leiden: Het Oosters Instituut, 1992).

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124 Arthur F. Buehler

shuhud) opposes the experiences involved with the unity of being (wahdat-i
wujud), often associated with Ibn al-
Arabi (d. 1240 Damascus). Although
these two spheres of Sirhindi’s life are distinct, these are the two most mis-
understood aspects of the scholarly understanding of Ahmad Sirhindi.

The sociological context: ashrāf/ajlāf

Sirhindi emphasized religious affiliation. Not only was he a very self-

conscious Muslim, he was a Hanafi-Maturidi Muslim. In the eyes of others,
particularly his seventeenth-century South Asian contemporaries, it is of
the utmost importance that Sirhindi came from a family with ancestry
outside of India. Thus, they appended Kabuli and/or Faruqi to the names
of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi and his father. The first appellation shows that
Sirhindi’s ancestors came from outside of India, specifically Kabul. The
second indicates that he is a descendent of
Umar b. Khattab al-Faruq, the
second Sunni caliph. In the social milieu of Mughal India (and many cen-
turies before), this kind of information was critical, even though modern
accounts typically ignore this sociological dimension in analyses of Indo-
Muslim life.3 These nisbas signal the social distinction between foreign-
born Muslims who are “the noble” (ashraf), and indigenous Indian Muslim
converts who are “the commoners” (ajlaf). It is this very distinction that
provides a lens to understand some of Sirhindi’s statements, particularly
those that have been interpreted negatively by modern readers.
Muslim ashraf, as early as the fourteenth century (at least from the texts
we have available), coalesced into roughly four social substrata: Sayyids,
putative descendants of the Prophet; Shaykhs, putative descendants of the
Companions; Mughals, putative descendants of Turkic origin; and Pathans,
putative descendants of Afghans.4 Shaykh includes those of pure Arab de-
scent. There are names ending in Siddiqi from Abu Bakr as-Siddiq the first

3) David Damrel aptly notes that Sirhindi’s antagonism toward non-Muslim

participation in government and overall antagonism toward Indian non-Muslims

“more likely comes from his background in Indian Islam rather than from his mem-
bership in the imported Central Asian Naqshbandi order.” However, there is no
further elaboration in his article, “The
Naqshbandî Reaction’ Reconsidered,” in
Gilmartin, Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate
South Asia (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), 188 [216–245].
4) See Ja
far Sharif, Islam in India: The Customs of the Muslamans of India,

translated by G. A. Herklots, edited by William Crooke (Delhi: Oriental Books

Reprint Corporation, 1972), 10–11.

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Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update 125

successor to Muhammad, Rizwi from
Ali ibn Musa al-Rida, the eighth Shi
i
Imam buried in Mashhad, or
Abbasi from
Abbas, Muhammad’s paternal
uncle. Mughals usually have Persian or Chaghatai descent, adding Mirza or
Amirzada to their names. The commoners were tradesmen and farmers, the
lowest of whom were butchers, weavers, barbers, and leather workers. The
ashraf were to have the prestigious jobs in government service.
Al-Barani, a fourteenth-century chronicler, noted that Iltutmish
(r. 1211–1236) dismissed thirty-three persons from government service
on account of their low birth.5 In the same way, Balban (r. 1266–1287)
removed low-born persons (ajlaf) from all important offices and sharply
reprimanded the courtiers who had given Kamal Mohiyar, an Indian Mus-
lim, a post as a tax collector (mutasarrif) of Amroha. Muhammad Tughluq
(r. 1325–1351) consciously initiated the policy of giving preference to
foreign-born Muslims in administration and government, and systemati-
cally ignored the claims of Indian Muslims.6 Being among the ashraf was
an important consideration for sufi authority also, at least if one wanted to
attract ashrafi disciples. In addition, ashrafi sufis had greater status be-
cause they were perceived to be more shari
a-minded and more pious in
their formal Islamic practices, which were presumed to have taken the
place of indigenous customs.
By definition, all of those who Sirhindi corresponded with were among
the ashraf because they could read Persian (except the one letter written to
a Hindu). In Indo-Muslim Mughal culture, ancestry was of the utmost sig-
nificance. South Asian sufis almost always avoided any identification with
the trades or attaching professional attributions (nisbas) to their names
because tradesmen were considered to be at the lower rungs of Muslim so-
cial strata. In ashrafi terms, the translation for ajlaf is “course rabble.” In
his perusal of prominent hagiographical compendia of South Asia, Riazul
Islam notes that almost all of the major hagiographic works make a point
of mentioning the high pedigree of the leading shaykhs.7 From the textual

5) See also Dia’uddin Barani’s Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, trans. H.M. Eliot, The

History of India vol. 14, 2nd Edition (Calcutta: Susil Gupta Ltd., 1953), 178, for his
contempt toward “low-born men.”
6) See Imtiaz Ahmad, “The Ashraf-Ajlaf Dichotomy in Muslim Social Struc-

ture in India,” Indian Economic & Social History Review 3 (1966), 270. Indian in
this context means people from families who did not trace their lineage to non-In-
dian Muslim regions.
7) See Riazul Islam, “Stories of Saintly Wrath,” in Riazul Islam, Sufism in

South Asia: Impact on Fourteenth Century Muslim Society (Karachi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2002), 204.

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126 Arthur F. Buehler

evidence, there seems to be no doubt that this ashraf/ajlaf social stratifi-

cation permeated Indo-Muslim life, politically, socially, and even spiri-
tually.
Shaykh Sirhindi was born into a scholarly, respected ashrafi family.
He grew up expecting that it was the normal course of things for the ashraf
to be the privileged upper crust of Muslim society, with the ajlaf below,
and non-Muslims somewhere beyond the pale. In a letter addressed to
Shaykh Farid Bukhari, Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and Jahangir’s (r. 1605–1627)
paymaster general, he says that anyone who honors infidels (ahl-i kufr) dis-
graces Muslims. This is not only Hindus being employed in the ranks of the
Mughal elite, but also means keeping company with non-Muslims and talk-
ing with them, which implies a larger context than government service.
They should be kept away like dogs.8 He says that the least harm from as-
sociating with these non-Muslim enemies is the weakening of the shari
a in-
junctions and a strengthening of non-Muslim customs. “The object of col-
lecting a special tax (jizya) from them is to humiliate them to the point
that they will be afraid to wear nice clothing.”9
In this letter to one of the Mughal elite, Sirhindi invoked the primary
principle of social order. Muslims (and those of many other non-Muslim
cultures) have sacrificed individual freedoms and rights for what they have
considered the greater good of social order. Like
Abdulhaqq Muhaddith
Dihlawi’s (d. 1642) plea to Jahangir via Shaykh Farid,10 Sirhindi expected
the government to maintain the existing social order. In other words, every-
one was supposed to be in his “proper place” according to prior precedent.
These two learned sufis were conservatives in that they preferred to pre-
serve what they thought had worked in the past. Akbar’s fiscal reforms and
laws did not discriminate between Hindu, native Indian Muslim (the ajlaf),
and the privileged foreign-born Muslim nobility (the ashraf). The ashraf
did not appreciate Akbar’s policies because they lost their monopoly on
lucrative landownership entitlements and government posts. Precedent
dictated taxing young non-Muslim men who did not join the military and

8) There is an implication here of non-Muslims being impure since dogs’ saliva is

considered to be impure and requires washing of garments before prayer according

to Hanafi jurisprudence.
9) See Ahmad Sirhindi, Maktubat, 1.163.43–44 (volume.letter.pages). Hereafter

Maktubat. Where there are no quotation marks, I have summarized parts of the
letter using Sirhindi’s language faithfully.
10) See Abu’l-Majd
Abdulhaqq Muhaddith Dihlawi, Kitab al-makatib wa-

rasa’il ila arbab al-kamal wa’l-fada’il (Delhi, Matba
-i Mujtaba’i, 1867), 84–91
(letter 17).

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Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update 127

generally humiliating non-Muslims. The ashrafi Sirhindi talking about

how he feels toward Hindus was almost identical to Brahmin attitudes to-
ward untouchable, outcaste mleccha Muslims. All of this, with its deroga-
tory and discriminatory black-and-white pageant of blatant inequality,
was intended to preserve a stable social order. Much of this, if not all, is un-
palatable to modern sensibilities.
It is very rare for Sirhindi to talk like this in Maktubat. There are echos
of al-Barani’s rhetoric almost four centuries earlier, whose “principles of
governance revolves [sic] around shari
a, kufr, jihad, and jizya; all that is
good originates from Islam and a non-Muslim is nothing but evil embo-
died.”11
Abdalquddus Gangohi, the paramount Chishti-Sabiri Shaykh who
Sirhindi’s father met as a youth, declared that only Muslims “of pure and
zealous faith” should have posts in the government and non-Muslims (kuf-
far) should not be employed in government positions. Forced to pay jizya,
they should not be allowed to dress like Muslims nor should they be allowed
to practice their faith openly and publically. There is a clear four-century
consensus of the Indo-Muslim religious elite on how to treat and govern the
Hindu majority. Sirhindi’s attitudes often fit the ashrafi profile, as one
would expect.
Not all harsh language can be attributed to ashrafi attitudes. Fried-
mann says that Sirhindi “frequently speaks of the common people with un-
disguised contempt … [using] expressions such as
common people who are
like cattle’.12 Most of the references to common people in Maktubat refer
to common Muslims who follow the shari
a to distinguish them from the
contemplative elite (khawass). In the few instances Sirhindi compares
common people to cattle, it is a description of common people’s unaware-
ness (maqam-i
awamm ka’l-an
am) or of common people being ruled by
their stomachs.13 This does not appear to be a typical ashrafi attitude or
“undisguised contempt.” An ashrafi attitude towards native-born Indian
Muslims would be more like saying that they are “unworthy, disgusting
and importunate, most of them being showy, superficial, and disagree-

11) See Muzaffar Alam, “Shari
a and Governance in the Indo-Islamic Context,”

in David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethink-
ing Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainsville, FL: University Press
of Florida, 2000), 225 [216–245].
12) See Friedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, 50. Although Fiharis-i tahlili-yi

hashtgana-yi maktubat-i Ahmad Sirhindi (Lahore: Iqbal Academy, 2000) is not a set
of concordances, of the ten entries for “common people” only two refer to them as
cattle. Ajlaf is not a term used to refer to them.
13) See Maktubat 1.313.168 and 3.49.114.

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128 Arthur F. Buehler

able.”14 Sirhindi’s statement, on the contrary, is an example of Sirhindi’s

very high standards for what it means to be a real human being. He says,
“The common people are outside this shared human reality since they are
ruled by their animal natures.”15 From this perspective, Sirhindi is just stat-
ing how few people tame their ego-selves. Here he is talking as a sufi shaykh.
There are also Central Asian Naqshbandi precedents. When we hear
Sirhindi and other ashrafi Muslims in India complain about the non-
Islamic nature of Akbar’s government, one of their frames of reference
is prior precedent in Transoxiana where Naqshbandis and jurists had more
influence in the political realm. The Naqshbandi Shaykh,
Ubaydullah
Ahrar (d. 1490), is often mentioned in Ahmad Sirhindi’s letters (33 times).
While Ahrar was alive, he was the largest landholder in Transoxiana and
the political patron of Timurid rulers and the Transoxiana elite. Ahrar had
a clear visionary message that he was “divinely ordained to protect the
Muslims from the evil of oppressors.”16 On a practical political level, he
strongly encouraged rulers to implement the shari
a. In India, the ashraf
expected their comfort and welfare as ashrafi Muslims to be the first and
foremost governmental priority. From this frame of reference, the govern-
ment’s job was to discourage and abolish customs of non-Muslims.
From the perspective of Mughal political reality, Khwaja Ahrar’s
Central Asia is another time and place, as are most other prior Islamic
principles of governance.
Abdulhaqq Muhaddith, like Sirhindi, com-
plained about Akbar mixing up the social order by putting ajlaf (the com-
mon Indian-origin Muslims) and even non-Muslims (the Rajput Hindus)
into elite positions in the government. This complaint is based upon

Abdalhaqq’s interpretation of Prophetic precedent, the sunna, which
Akbar had disregarded. From Akbar’s point of view, an expanding Mughal
empire required a leadership unfettered by a special ashrafi interest group
touting their interests in the name of Islamic legalism. It did not make
political, economic, or military sense just to think of the ashraf when ash-
rafi Muslims were at most three percent of the population.17 With very few

14) See Richard C. Foltz, Mughal India and Central Asia (Karachi: Oxford

University Press, 1998), 107.

15) See Maktubat letter 2.67.
16) See Muzaffar Alam, “The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs, and the Formation of

the Akbari Dispensation,” Modern Asian Studies 43/1 (2009), 144 [135–174].
17) Urban population was 15 % of the estimated 110 million population of the

Mughal Empire, that is, 16.5 million. Even if one inflates the population of ashrafi
Muslims by counting them as 20 % of the urban population, that is only 3.1 million
out of 110 million.

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Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update 129

exceptions, rulers of all times have put political expediency and maintain-
ing political power before anything else. The Mughal emperors were no ex-
ception.
Sirhindi’s concept of a stable social order was not a “Muslim only” af-
fair. His worldview recognized different religions with different ways of liv-
ing one’s life (shari
as).18 It was a “live and let live” perspective exemplified
by the Qur’anic verse he cites, “to you, your way of living (din) and for
me, my way of living (din) [Q. 109:6].19 There is no evidence that he ever
concerned himself with trying to “convert” non-Muslims to Islam or with
preventing non-Muslims from practicing their religions or living their way
of life. There was concern, however, that Muslims could not live freely as
Muslims. He says, “the infidels enforced the injunctions of their religion
while Muslims were prevented from implementing the injunctions (ahkam)
of Islam. If they did then they were killed.”20 The injunctions he is speak-
ing about here are not the individual worship aspect of shari
a injunctions
(
ibadat), since Muslims could obviously pray, fast, give alms, and perform
hajj. Instead Sirhindi is referring to injunctions in society (mu
amalat),
which includes the right to build mosques, slaughter cows, and have the
government appoint the requisite Muslim judges. In his hometown of Sir-
hind there had not been a judge for years.21 Some of Sirhindi’s concerns re-
flect the high degree of tension between Hindus and Muslims in the region.
Between 1616 and 1619, Sirhindi mentions Hindus destroying a mosque
and tomb in the pilgrimage spot of Kurukshetra reservoir (near Thanes-
war) and building a temple on the site. He reports that on the fasting day
the eleventh day of each month, Ekadashi, Muslims were not allowed to
bake bread or sell food, but during Ramadan Hindus were allowed to do
these activities.22 These types of issues created a lot of ashrafi opposition
to the Mughal government. More germane to our discussion, Akbar’s “up-
side-down social order” had mortally lasting effects on Sirhindi’s family.

Personal issues

When Mirza Hakim’s (Akbar’s half brother) army came through

Sirhind in 1580 to dethrone Akbar, there were many nobles in Sirhind who

18) See Maktubat letter 2.55.

19) See ibid., 1.47.18.
20) See ibid., 1.47.14.
21) See ibid., 1.195.85.
22) See ibid., 2.92.93–94.

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130 Arthur F. Buehler

openly welcomed him. The conventional rationales for this opposition have
been already discussed. Less evident are the personal factors in Sirhindi’s
life that heretofore have not been considered in the western academic lit-
erature. Specifically, these revolve around Akbar’s ordering the execution
of Sirhindi’s father-in-law, Shaykh Sultan, in the fifth month of 1007/
December, 1598. This event did nothing to endear Sirhindi to the Mughal
regime or to Hindus. It was one of the very few, if not the only, public kill-
ing in Akbar’s reign. Hajji Shaykh Sultan was one of the people assigned in
Akbar’s imperial service to translate the Mahabharata,23 and at some point
Hindus complained that he had slaughtered some cows in Thaneswar. This
was against the law in the Panjab, so he was banished to Bhakkar. Farid
Bukhari, the governor of Multan at the time, interceded for him, and
Shaykh Sultan ended up becoming the tax collector (karori) of Thanes-
war.24 Later, in the words of Abu’l-Fadl, “he [Shaykh Sultan] renewed his
old grudges and set himself to hurt the good.”25 No specifics are given other
than Shaykh Sultan was summarily executed. It does not seem that things
went well for at least one other member of Shaykh Sultan’s family. Sirhindi
writes two letters to Farid Bukhari concerning Shaykh Sultan’s brother,
Shaykh Zakariyya#, asking for assistance because Shaykh Zakariyya# is
having difficulties with his job as revenue officer. Then Sirhindi is pleading
with Khan-i Jahan, a high-ranking Mughal official, for Shaykh Zaka-
riyya#’s release from prison. The last letter is addressed to Shaykh Zaka-
riyya#’s son.26
Recently in the scholarly literature, this incident with Shaykh Sultan
has resulted in some misguided remarks. Sirhindi’s comments on the fric-
tions between Muslims and Mughal laws mentioned in the previous section

23) One suspects that Akbar knew of his intransigent attitude toward the Hin-
dus.
Abdulqadir Bada’uni, a Muslim theologian and translator in Akbar’s court
who disagreed with Akbar’s including Hindus in the court elite, was also assigned to
translate parts of the Mahabharata. There is a short biographical notice of Shaykh
Sultan Thaneswari in
Abdulhayy b. Fakhruddin Hasani, Nuzhat al-khawatir, 8 vols.
(Hyderabad, Deccan: Da’irat al-Ma
arif al-
Uthmaniyya, 1976), 5:161–162 which
confuses
Abdurrahman Khan-i Khanan for Shaykh Farid. There is no mention of
his demise at the hands of Akbar.
24) See
Abdulqadir Bada’uni, Muntakhab al-tawarikh, 3 vols., trans. by Wolse-

ley Haig (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1925), 3:173–174. Farid Bukhari went
on to become the future patron of Baqibillah’s sufi lodge in Delhi and a recipient of
twenty-four letters from Ahmad Sirhindi.
25) See Abu’l-Fadl
Allami, Akbar nama, 3 vols., trans. By H. Beveridge

(Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1993), 3:1118.

26) See Maktubat 1.43.9; 1.50.22; 1.72.54; 1.98.

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Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update 131

have been mistranslated as “infidels openly practiced their rites, while the
Muslims were prevented from so doing [implying
ibadat instead of
mu
amalat injunctions]; and if they did so, they were killed.” This is fol-
lowed by the translator’s remark, “so says the divine with the usual smug
exaggeration of which the self-righteous are so capable.”27 Not linking
these two events, M. Athar, the translator, notes thirteen lines later that
the only case of an execution on record was of Hajji Sultan Thansewari
(whom he did not know as Shaykh Sultan, Sirhindi’s father in law), a rev-
enue collector. Regretfully, the author did not connect Sirhindi’s comment
with Shaykh Sultan.
As a Muslim living under Mughal rule, Sirhindi thought the govern-
ment could have been more just, indeed much more just. If Hindus had
been treated like dogs, there would have been social stability (Sirhindi’s
ashrafi version), and all this might never have happened. His father
Abdu-
lahad passed away in the sixth month of 1007 or January, 1599, within a
month of his father-in-law’s execution. Very soon after these events Ahmad
Sirhindi met a Naqshbandi shaykh, Baqibillah (d. 1603 Delhi), in Delhi
and experienced a spiritual transformation that changed his life.

Modern versus pre-modern notions of societal order

Sirhindi’s comments about commoners or Hindus, in their potential to

increase strife between people, contrast sharply with the larger perspective
advocating peace to all (sulh-i kull) that held Akbar and his Mughal
successors in good stead.28 From a modern perspective, one could accuse
Shaykh Sirhindi, in spite of his documented spiritual insights, of express-
ing perspectives that disrupt social harmony. To a large extent, the
contrast between hard boundaries between religious communities and
relatively fluid or non-existent boundaries between others on the basis of
religious identity exemplify the qualitative differences between pre-mo-
dern and modern worldviews. In the modern world there is a rational no-
tion of being a citizen among other equally legally, morally, and politically
free citizens regardless of ethnicity, color, religion, or gender. In Sirhindi’s
world one is a believer who, by embracing certain beliefs and practices, will

27) See Maktubat 1.47.14. See M. Athar Ali, Mughal India: Studies in Polity,
Ideas, Society, and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 167.
28) Nasir ad-Din al-Tusi
s books were read regularly to Akbar. Muzaffar Alam

explains the differences between “the sharia-model and the Nasirean model of gov-
ernance in his “Shari
a and Governance,” 216–245.

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132 Arthur F. Buehler

be saved in the Hereafter. For the former, not having these freedoms is
painfully inconceivable, and for the latter, to be an infidel is to be cast out
of one’s family and community and forever doomed to punishment in the
Hereafter. These are drastically different worldviews. In Sirhindi’s world-
view, there would be no strife if Hindus lived in their world and Muslims
lived in their world, with the ashrafi Muslims authoritatively presiding
over the Hindus politically. There was no place in his worldview for mutual
understanding, shared meanings, much less mutual resonance between
these two religio-cultural worlds.29
Sufi contemplative practice (or any other pre-modern contemplative
practice), focusing on subjective individual experience and development,
was structurally incapable of making an inter-religious space for this
to happen. Subjective contemplative development is independent of this
dimension of intersubjective inter-religious development. Just because
someone is contemplatively gifted and can facilitate others to have similar
experiences does not mean that culturally determined prejudices and
proclivities automatically disappear. It is only with the advent of modern-
ity that a critical mass of people could rationally view the cultural ignor-
ance that had perpetuated slavery, caste, ethnocentricity, and sexism.
With their collectively combined and increased intersubjective social
awareness, moderns have made irreversible changes to human societies
across the globe, which are still in process. This is a long-winded way of
saying that Sirhindi had a worldview quite different from most of us in the
modern world who read English.30 His way of ordering society to achieve
what he considered social harmony contrasts sharply with modern notions
of what multicultural harmony entails in functioning democracies.

Exaggerated claims

In the western academic world over the last decades, Sirhindi does not
get many compliments. This is nothing new. From
Abdalhaqq Muhaddith
Dihlawi and Jahangir to the present day, the most common critique of Sir-
hindi has been his apparently exaggerated claims. Sirhindi claimed that he
was the first to receive certain spiritual knowledge, that he was at a higher
station than Abu Bakr (who as Muhammad’s first successor Sirhindi had

29) See Maktubat letter 1.167.

30) There were those individuals who transcended aspects of the predominant
seventeenth-century Indo-Muslim culture like Dara Shikuh (d. 1659), and Miyan
Mir (d. 1635).

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Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update 133

declared to be the most exalted non-prophet human being), and that he

was on par with the Prophet Muhammad.31 Sirhindi also declared himself
to be the unique one (fard), having absolute authority from the empyrean
to earth and implied that he was the renewer of the second millennium.32
What can scholars make of this and similar kinds of claims made by sufis
before Sirhindi? Ibn al-
Arabi (d. 1240 Damascus) had multiple visions
showing him to be the Seal of God’s Friends, the eternal source of being a
Friend of God (walaya).33 Ruzbihan Baqli (d. 1209 Shiraz) had an experi-
ence of God declaring him to be God’s vice-regent on earth and all other
worlds. These are some of the better-known examples.
Focusing on Sirhindi’s situation, there are three possibilities. The first
possibility is that these claims were made in an altered state of ecstatic
consciousness and deserve to be put in the category of what Carl Ernst
calls “ecstatic utterances.”34 Sirhindi understands that non-realized sufis
can have altered states of consciousness (ahwal) where they mistakenly
perceive themselves to be closer to God than they actually are. Sirhindi
apologizes for some of his own claims, explaining that he was mistaken.35
Here we have the rare case of the sufi himself recognizing some claims as
inappropriate and abrogating them. But that leaves the question open
because most of Sirhindi’s seemingly grandiose claims still remain.36 The
second and third possibilities are that these claims are either true or false
(or both). The vexing problem is that scholars qua scholars have no way of

31) See Friedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, 87–89.

32) See Ahmad Sirhindi, Mabda’ wa-ma
ad, ed. Zawwar Husayn with Urdu
translation (Karachi: Ahmad Brothers Printers, 1984), 9–11.
33) It is ironic when the doyen of Ibn al-
Arabi studies, William Chittick, finds

Sirhindi’s claims to be exaggerated but never questions Ibn al-
Arabi’s claims, for
example, saying how Sirhindi’s criticisms of Ibn al-
Arabi are “superficial and self-
inflating.” See William C. Chittick, “On Sufi Psychology: A Debate between the
Soul and the Spirit,” in Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani et. al., eds., Consciousness and Real-
ity: Studies in Memory of Toshihiko Izutsu (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 343.
34) See Carl Ernst, Words of Ecstasy (Albany, NY: State University of New

York Press, 1985), 3.

35) In Maktubat letter 1.220, which apologizes for claims made in Maktubat

letter 1.11.
36) Using primary textual translations, I demonstrate many of Sirhindi’s claims

in “Tales of Renewal: Establishing Ahmad Sirhindi as the Reformer of the Second

Millennium,” in Jack Renard, Tales of God’s Friends: Islamic Hagiography in
Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 234–248. These
claims are discussed analytically by Friedman, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, 28, 60–68,
87–91.

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134 Arthur F. Buehler

verifying these claims. If the intersubjective consensus of the sufi commu-

nity agrees or disagrees with a claim over time then that has some weight.
But that seldom turns up in the literature. In Sirhindi’s case, his implying
that he was the renewer of the second millennium was revised by the
Naqshbandi community over time. By the eighteenth century, Naqshban-
dis who came after him, including Shah Waliullah (d. 1762 Delhi) and
Ab-
dulghani Nabulusi (d. 1731 Damascus), recognized him as the renewer of
the first century of the second millennium.37
When evaluating “sufi utterances” one needs to have post-rational
criteria and data before one can evaluate post-rational claims as “boasts,”
“self-inflating,” or “true.” The realm of the mind can allude to the realm of
the post-mind (spirit if you will) but without the post-rational data, the
mind is not qualified to evaluate what happens in post-rational states
anymore than a person not trained in calculus is qualified to verify a dif-
ferential equation. The mind and post-mind realms are separate domains
of knowledge with distinct presuppositions and methodologies. There are
ecstatic utterances and there is ego-inflation, but scholars do not yet have
the means to discern between these two. This is why I have qualified my
description of “exaggerated claims” with “apparently” or “seemingly” be-
cause of my own lack of knowledge and the overall lack of standard criteria
to measure spiritual development. Perhaps in the future scholars will be
trained experientially in consciousness exploration like anthropologists
are now required to be trained in actual experiential fieldwork.38 What
scholars can do now is consider the context of contemplative practice,
which, among other things, will rectify the often distorted scholarly evalu-
ations of Sirhindi vis a vis Ibn al-
Arabi.

Ahmad Sirhindi and Ibn al-
Arabi and experiences of unity

Much has been written about the supposed antithesis of Sirhindi’s

term “unity of contemplative witnessing” (wahdat-i shuhud) and the term
“unity of being” (wahdat-i wujud), commonly but mistakenly associated

37) See Shah Waliullah’s (d. 1762) “proofs” of renewal in
Abdulahad Wahdat
Sirhindi, Sabil al-rashad, Urdu translation by Ghulam Mustafa Khan (n.p.,
1979), 4–8; and Pagani, Il Rinnovamento Mistico, p. 254 referrring to a passage in
Sirhindi, Maktubat letter 1.260.
38) Those studying Transpersonal Psychology are seeking to pioneer such kinds

of inquiry.

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Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update 135

with Ibn al-
Arabi.39 What is almost universally unrecognized in prior dis-

cussions is that Sirhindi’s perception of the unity of God is based upon his
own contemplative experience and its subsequent interpretation in light of
other sufis’ experience of unity. It is (mostly) non-sufi commentators who
have reified Sirhindi’s contemplative experience by associating it with a
dogma, creed, philosophy, ideology, or doctrine. In my translation of Sir-
hindi’s letters, I have chosen letters to highlight Sirhindi’s contemplative
insights so that scholars who reify aspects of Sirhindi’s experiences will
need to do so in a suitably larger context, namely the post-rational domain
of contemplative experience outlined in Maktubat.
Let’s review Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi’s experience. Under the tutelage
of Baqibillah, Sirhindi finally had his own breakthroughs in contemplative
experience that changed his life. He experienced the (apparent) ontological
unity of being that his father
Abdulahad had taught him from books.
A common way of explaining this experience conceptually is to compare
normal consensus-reality consciousness with a dark night and a sky full of
stars, representing multiplicity.40 In the beginning stages of successful sufi
practice, one gets blasted ecstatically into bright sunlight, representing
unity. With the resulting intoxication, the aspirant only sees the sun and
there is nothing else in existence except the sun. Experientially, the multi-
plicity of the conventional phenomenal world disappears and one inter-
prets God to be everything. With the collapse of the ego-self, one’s con-
sciousness becomes ecstatically drowned in the ocean of God. When the
aspirant necessarily comes back to consensus-reality, the world of multi-
plicity is interpreted as illusion. From here, it is a very short step to consider
shari
a practices superfluous. Sirhindi called the sufis who interpreted
the phenomenal world as illusion and/or who mistakenly interpreted these
experiences as experiences of God “wujudis.”
Baqibillah made sure that Sirhindi went beyond this stage as soon as
possible.41 From there, Sirhindi was able to experience both multiplicity
and unity, in other words, he metaphorically saw the stars and the sun sim-

39) William Chittick has an intriguing idea that Sirhindi’s emphasis on the

unity of contemplative witnessing was to foil the opponents of wahdat-i wujud.

I would rephrase this observation to say that Sirhindi’s use of this perspective
opened up the possibility of sufi practice for more jurists. See Chittick’s “Rumi
and wahdat al-wujud,” in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rumi,
eds., Amin Banani, Richard Hovannisian, and Georges Sabagh (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), 90.
40) Sirhindi uses this metaphor in Maktubat 1.43.6–7.
41) This is detailed in Maktubat letter 1.290.

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136 Arthur F. Buehler

ultaneously, and could discern between them. Finally he was able to see
the sun and stars separately, as one does in consensus-reality. What had
changed in the interim between these experiences was that he had become
an incredibly transformed human being. With this realization, Sirhindi
noted that large numbers of sufis were ending their journey thinking that
the sun-only version of unity was the end of the path. It distressed him
that they were interpreting their unity-of-being experience as an experi-
ence of God. Sirhindi had conclusively confirmed through experience what
his mentor had told him, namely that they were merely experiencing the
shadows of the attributes of God. Even more distressing was their increas-
ing disregard for the shari
a injunctions. Sirhindi went from being a bright
freshly certified sufi teacher to a man with a mission.
Before we go any further, it is important to remember not to project
Sirhindi’s stance against wujudi sufis and their version of the unity of
being on to Ibn al-
Arabi, who probably would have agreed wholeheartedly
with Sirhindi’s critique. On the practical day-to-day level, Sirhindi’s main
work, unlike that of Ibn al-
Arabi (it seems), was teaching and supervising
the teaching of a large number of disciples. In that pedagogical context,
Sirhindi perceived the aforementioned learning challenges in his disciples,
one of which he called “asserting the unity of being” (tawhid-i wujudi).
To deal with this learning impediment, he emphasized the unity of con-
templative witnessing (wahdat-i shuhud), namely that the unity one ex-
perienced was subjective, not ontological. In this way, the phenomenal
world was not trivialized as a figment of one’s subjective imagination,
along with the shari
a. When one came out of contemplation, the world was
the world. In contemplation God was God. This perspective of unity ex-
plicitly honored God’s ultimate incommensurability, which might have at-
tracted more jurists into learning about sufism.
The term “unity of contemplative witnessing” (wahdat-i shuhud) was
first popularly used by
Ala’uddawla Simnani (d. 1336). Sirhindi, however,
uses this technical term in his own way on the basis of his own experiences
and the needs of his students. Sirhindi primarily objected to the perspective
of the unity of being on the basis of his contemplative experience, while
Simnani objected to this perspective for juridic reasons.42 There is a temp-
tation to equate Simnani’s and Sirhindi’s thinking because of their differ-
ences with Ibn al-
Arabi (which are usually more apparent than real).43 Cit-

42) See Maktubat letter 1.42.

43) Sayyid Ashraf Jahangir Simnani (d. 1425 Jaunpur), who studied with

Ala’uddawla Simnani as a young man, responds to
Ala’uddawla’s ideas in Lata’if-i
ashrafi fi bayan-i tawaf-i sufi, 2 vols. (Karachi: Maktabat-i Simnani, 1999)

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Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update 137

ing Simnani in
Abdurrahman Jami’s (d. 1492) Nafahat al-uns, Baqibillah

noted that Simnani had agreed with Ibn al-
Arabi when he had experienced
what Ibn al-
Arabi had discussed, but disagreed with Ibn al-
Arabi over what
he had not experienced.44 Perhaps he is obliquely teaching Sirhindi (men-
tioned right after these comments), who might have been grappling with
these two shaykhs’ perspectives at the time.45 Later, Baqibillah points out
that the differences between Ibn al-
Arabi and Simnani were semantic.46
In my reading of Maktubat, it appears that these two perspectives on
unity are important for beginners to know because they function as
markers on the path. One characteristic marker for aspirants experiencing
the unity of being is intoxication and ecstasy. Before being tempted to
bask in the experience of intoxication and ecstasy, they realize that they
need to move beyond that point. Sirhindi evidently stayed in this intoxi-
cated state for ten years.47 With his experiential insights and later reflec-
tion, he devised training methods so his disciples did not get stuck there.48
In Sirhindi’s juridic sufism, the differences between these two perspectives
are significant because the unity of contemplative witnessing is more jur-
ist friendly. In addition, it would be more difficult for a jurist’s mind and
ego-self to reject sufism. Such considerations have repercussions in a sufi
training setting.

2:129–150. His answer to
Ala’uddawla begins on p. 144 of the 27th latifa. See also,
Hermann Landolt, “Der Briefwechsel zwischen Kashani und Simnani über Wahdat
al-Wujud,” Der Islam 50 (1973), 29–81; and his “Simnani on Wahdat al-Wujud,” in
Collected Papers on Islamic Philosophy and Mysticism, edited by M. Mohaghegh
and Hermann Landolt, (Tehran: Institute of Islamic Studies, 1971), 93–111.
44) See Baqibillah, Kulliyat-i Baqibillah, eds., Abu’l-Hasan Zayd Faruqi and

Burhan Ahmad Faruqi (Lahore: Din Muhammadi Press, ca. 1967), 28.
45) Sirhindi appears to be in this situation at the end of letter 1.11. His disciple,

Muhammad Sadiq Kashmiri Hamadani, notes that Sirhindi was attracted to Simn-
ani’s perspective and tended to veer from Ibn al-
Arabi’s. Perhaps this is because
Muhammad Sadiq was a jurist and foregrounded Sirhindi’s jurist side. See his Kali-
mat-i sadiqin, ed. Muhammad Saleem Akhtar (Lahore: al-Quraysh Publishers,
1988), 187 (Persian text).
46) See Baqibillah, Kulliyat, 37. Baqibillah explains that in the context of abso-

lute, the absolute Nondelimited (itlaq-i mutlaq), Simnani disagreed with Ibn al-

Arabi, understanding it to be “existence as negatively conditioned” (bi-shart la
shay’) when Simnani really meant “existence as relatively non-conditioned” (la bi-
shart shay’), which agrees with Simnani’s and Ibn al-
Arabi’s perspective.
47) See Maktubat 1.36.98.
48) See ter Haar, Follower and Heir of the Prophet, 34. In Maktubat letter 1.290

we get the detailed experiences that led him out of this state.

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138 Arthur F. Buehler

Even so, the so-called “controversy” generated between these two for-
mulations of unity has been vastly overstated in the scholarly literature.
Those who criticize Sirhindi for not understanding Ibn al-
Arabi or for his
not appreciating differing perspectives are doing a partial reading of Sir-
hindi’s views on the subject. Acknowledging the teaching context is critical
in seeking to understand what Sirhindi is communicating. The overall sufi
consensus is that there is no real controversy. Indeed, both Ibn al-
Arabi
and Sirhindi agree that these two valid modes of unity are simply two ways
of perceiving the One. Sirhindi’s mentor, Baqibillah, reminds us that differ-
ences in subjective experiences between protégés of God are like those
between the imams of the legal schools. That is, the differences are in the
understandings of their words not in the foundation of the actual case at
hand (which in this case is declaring the unity of God, tawhid).49 Sirhindi
was well aware that the notion of unity of being was not Ibn al-
Arabi’s for-
mulation. He also acknowledged that both the Fusus al-hikam and Futuhat
al-Makkiyya honor and encourage a Muslim to follow the shari
a guidelines
(in spite of his using the titles of these books as foils to make a point in
his letters). Sirhindi seeks to reconcile many kinds of differences, including
those between sufis and jurists and between these two experiences of
unity.50 He explains that the expressions, “All is God” and “All is from
God,” although semantically different, really are the same. The latter is
more preferable (to him) because it appeals more to jurists and it honors
transcendence.51 For Ibn al-
Arabi, the being side of the coin is the “God
side” and the contemplative witnessing side is the “human side.”52
This is yet another reminder not to jump to conclusions about a multi-
faceted sufi on the basis of a partial examination of what he has written.
The more one reads Sirhindi works, the more one sees how he acknowl-
edged other complementary perspectives. His writings did not encompass
“all” viewpoints like Ibn al-
Arabi’s,53 but in the sufi environment of Mug-

49) See Baqibillah, Kulliyat, 28.

50) In terms of reconciling sufis and jurists see Maktubat letter 3.32.
51) See Ahmad Sirhindi, Sharh-i ruba
iyat-i Khwaja Baqibillah, ed., Thana’l-

haqq Siddiqi (Karachi: Educational Press, 1966), 33–36.

52) See Qasim Kaka’i, Wahdat al-wujud bi riwayat-i Ibn
Arabi wa-Meister Eck-

hart (Tehran: Intisharat-i Hurmus, 2007), 255, 259–260. Ibn al-
Arabi says that for
sufis there is annihilation of the injunction, (fana’-i hukm) not the annihilation of
the entity (fana’-i
ayn). The former is the station of contemplative witnessing
(maqam-i shuhud) not mere annihilation (fana’). See Ibid.
53) “Ibn al-
Arabi responds [to Ahmad Sirhindi] by pointing out quite rightly

that in the Futuhat, he has already said everything such critics have said, because

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Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update 139

hal India his criticisms largely balanced out what he considered to be the
extreme conditions of the time.54 Sirhindi had his own unique role in his
own time and place. He also had his own set of unveilings, some of which
appeared to differ with those of Ibn al-
Arabi’s, which he recognizes, like
Baqibillah before him, are like the variant interpretations of imams of dif-
ferent legal schools.55 But those differences are minor compared the over-
whelming commonality between these great shaykhs. Rare for a sufi of any
era, Shaykh Sirhindi publically acknowledged his errors.56
What can I do! Sometimes I war with shaykh Ibn
Arabi – may God rest his
soul – and other times we are at peace! He was the one who laid the foundations
of the doctrine of the mystical knowledge of God (ma
rifat wa-
irfan) and
thoroughly explained it. He is the one who spoke in detail of the Unity of God
(tawhid) and the union with him (ittisal) and who explained the origin of multi-
plicity and multiformity … Most of the Sufis who came after him chose to
follow him and most used his terminology. Even I, miserable as I am, have
profited from the blessings of this prominent man and have learned much from
his views and insights. May God reward him for this from me. Because the mo-
ments in which a man makes mistakes necessarily alternate with moments in

there he presents all valid points of view.” Cited in William C. Chittick, “On Sufi
Psychology: A Debate between the Soul and the Spirit,” in Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani
et. al., eds., Consciousness and Reality: Studies in Memory of Toshihiko Izutsu
(Leiden: Brill, 2000), 343. Such a claim might seem to be extreme, but makes sense
in the context of an interpretive community where Ibn al-
Arabi is an authority.
Reading Kaka’i’s voluminous Wahdat al-wujud, it is easy to see how Sirhindi affirms
so many aspects of Ibn al-
Arabi’s notions of sufism.
54) Here I am responding to William Chittick, noting the “unbalanced nature of

Ahmad Sirhindi’s criticisms.” See “Spectrums of Islamic Thought: Sa
id al-Din

Farghani on the Implications of Oneness and Manyness,” in Leonard Lewisohn,
ed., The Legacy of Medieval Persian Sufism (New York: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi
Publications, 1992), 205 fn 2. Teaching has its own imperatives. Anyone teaching
Islam in an upright manner in the contemporary West is going to teach it in an un-
balanced fashion–emphasizing more of the positive aspects of Islamicate civili-
zation than the negative aspects. This is because of the overwhelming negativity of
the media and resultant attitudes prevalent in contemporary western culture.
55) One of Baqibillah’s sons, Muhammad
Ubaydullah, commonly known as

Khwaja Khurd, kept needing clarifications about wahdat-i wujud and wahdat-i shu-
hud. See Muhammad Ma
sum, Maktubat-i ma
sumiyya, 3 vols., edited by Ghulam
Mustafa Khan (Karachi: Walend Military Press, nd.), 1:410–422. This letter is one
of three letters over ten pages long out of 239 letters in the first volume of Muham-
mad Ma
sum’s Maktubat (Muhammad Ma
sum was Sirhindi’s son and formal suc-
cessor).
56) See Maktubat letter 1.220 and 1.209.108.

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140 Arthur F. Buehler

which he is right and because man sometimes says the right things and some-
times not, he – whoever he is and whatever he teaches – should regard the
consensus of opinion of the majority of God’s servants as the criterion for his
being right and he should see the departure from this as proof of his not being
right.57

The Indian sufi consensus after Sirhindi went on appreciating Ibn al-

Arabi’s vast contribution to the disciplined inquiry of post-rational human
consciousness. Sirhindi’s formulation of the unity of contemplative wit-
nessing did not take the Naqshbandi world by storm, although every so
often an Indian Chishti wrote a treatise defending the unity of being.58
Shah Waliullah (d. 1762) and his son Shah Rafi
uddin Dihlawi (d. 1818)
both wrote short letters or treatises demonstrating that these two modes
of experiencing unity were essentially the same. Any differences that arose
were a result of semantics and terminology.59 The Sayyid Naqshbandi-Mu-
jaddidi Mir Dard of Delhi (d. 1785) deeply immersed himself in the books
of Ibn al-
Arabi, along with those of Mulla Sadra.60 One of the many un-
studied jewels of Indian sufism, the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Faqirullah
Shikarpuri (d. 1781), wrote sophisticated sufi treatises, blending Ibn al-

Arabi’s ideas with the ideas of Ibn al-
Arabi’s followers along with Sirhin-
di’s Maktubat and his own sufi experience.61 Even if most of the Naqshban-
di-Mujaddidi shaykhs replaced Ibn al-
Arabi’s Fusus al-hikam with Sirhin-
di’s Maktubat as a required text, as apparently they did, Ibn al-
Arabi’s sufi

57) From Maktubat letter 3.79, translated by ter Haar, Follower and Heir of the
Prophet, 130–131.
58) See William C. Chittick, “Notes on Ibn al-’Arabi’s Influence in the Sub-

continent,” the Muslim World 82/3–4 (1992), 218–241.

59) See Shah Waliullah, al-Tafhimat al-ilahiyya, 2 vols, Ghulam Mustafa al-Qa-

simi, ed., (Hyderabad, Sind: al-Matba
al-Haydari, 1967), 2: 261–284. This letter
is translated into English by Fazle Mahmud, “Shah Walyullah’s View on Wahdatul
Wujud and Wahdatush Shuhud,” al-Hikma 1 (1964), 42–64. The nineteenth-century
Naqshbandi-Khalidi Shaykh,
Abdulqadir al-Jaza’iri (d. 1883) was a well known
master of Ibn al-
Arabi’s writings. He resolves these two perspectives (without men-
tioning them by name) clearly and concisely in less than two pages. See
A bdul-
qadir al-Jaza’iri, Le livre des haltes (Kitâb al-mawâqif) 3 vols., trans. Michel
Lagarde (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 1:552–553 (letter 191).
60) For the most detailed study of Mir Dard, see Homayra Ziad’s “Quest of

the Nightingale: The Religious Thought of Khwaja Mir Dard (1721–1785),” Ph.D.
dissertation, Yale University, 2008.
61) Two of his printed works are Faqirullah Shikarpuri, Qutb al-irshad (Quetta:

Maktaba-yi Islamiyya, 1978) and Maktubat-i Faqirullah, ed., Mawlawi Karam

Bakhsh (Lahore: Islamiyya Steam Press, nd.).

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Ahmad Sirhindi: A 21st-century update 141

framework and perspectives permeated Indian sufism.62 The unity of con-

templative witnessing as a way of interpreting the experience of unity was
retained on the pages of Sirhindi’s Maktubat. These letters functioned as
a detailed operating manual for a curriculum in contemplative practice
showing how to verify ways of knowing about unity. Read and discussed
in Mujaddidi circles led by learned and contemplatively experienced Mu-
jaddidi shaykhs, Sirhindi’s written and experiential legacy did make an im-
pact. It was the jurist-friendly version of a newly renewed sufism.

Conclusion

Scholars studying sufism over the past decades have enlarged the con-
text of their inquiry by investigating the cultural, political, anthropologi-
cal, and linguistic contexts of sufi activity in ever-increasing detail. Al-
though Friedmann and ter Haar largely steered the scholarly study of
Ahmad Sirhindi beyond the nationalistic agendas that had either demon-
ized or glorified Sirhindi, several issues and residual misconceptions have
still not been resolved. In order to address some of these more intractable
topics, this article has demonstrated the inter-regional context and socio-
logical presuppositions underlying ashrafi opposition to Akbar’s reforms,
which were probably exasperated in Sirhindi’s case by the execution of
his father-in-law. With this background, we can interpret many of Sirhin-
di’s controversial statements in a more nuanced manner. At the same time,
it remains difficult for scholars to assess Sirhindi’s (or other sufis’) appar-
ently “exaggerated claims,” a subset of problematic statements, simply be-
cause of our present lack of criteria to evaluate post-rational experience.
Although these criteria do not appear to be forthcoming in the near future,
increased scholarly attention to the contemplative context can correct the
intellectual tendency to reify sufis’ contemplative experience. By examin-
ing this contemplative data on its own terms and taking the training
environment within which many sufis operate into account, prior rigid
dichotomies like wahdat-i shuhud and wahdat-i wujud look very different.
Investigating the experiential basis of wahdat-i shuhud and wahdat-i
wujud will enable scholarly understanding to become qualitatively more
nuanced. One desideratum in the study of sufism in the 21st-century is to
continue to expand the context, particularly in the subjective realm where
our tools for comprehension are woefully lacking.

62) See Hamid Algar, “Reflections of Ibn
Arabi in Early Naqshbandi Tradi-
tion,” Journal of the Muhyiddin ibn
Arabi Society 10 (1991), 61.

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