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Exercises in peace: Āẕar Kayvānī universalism and comparison in the School of Doctrines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2022

Daniel J. Sheffield Open the ORCID record for Daniel J. Sheffield [Opens in a new window]
Daniel J. Sheffield*
Affiliation:
Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America Email: djs5@princeton.edu
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Abstract

In 1650, an encyclopedia of comparative religion known as Dabistān-i Maẕāhib (the School of Doctrines) was completed near the city of Hyderabad. Asserting that the religions of the world are reflections of a single inner truth, its author Mīrzā Ẕu'l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī, known by the poetic penname ‘Mūbad’, travelled widely across India to record encounters with diverse religious figures. This article re-examines the composition and legacy of the Dabistān in light of new manuscript evidence relating to its author and the world he inhabited. It argues that the Dabistān's universalist project reflects a widely held theory of the interrelatedness of the macrocosm, in which sociality with diverse populations was understood to be a spiritual exercise leading to saintly perfection in the same way that venerating the cosmos and ascetic bodily practices were. The article provides a close reading of the Dabistān's shortest chapter on the religion of the Tibetans, the earliest such description in Persian. Situating the Dabistān within the diverse expressions of ‘Universal Peace’ (ṣulḥ-i kull) during the Safavid and Mughal periods, it argues that the Dabistān's project of recovering a universal theology that was attributed to ancient Iran and India led to expressions of dual religious belonging—to particular religions of revelation as well as to the universal religion of the philosophers—parallel to and connected with what Jan Assmann has termed the ‘religio duplex phenomenon’ in early modern Europe. Finally, the article briefly traces the legacy of the Dabistān into the modern period.

      The free do not think of religion, doctrine, and spiritual guidance—
      Those shackled by seeking liberation are not truly free.
      For how long must we wander the alleyways of religion and nation?—
      There is no highway through the land of verification (taḥqīq) besides heresy (ilḥād).
      —‘Mūbad’ Mīrzā Ẕu'l-fiqār Āẕarsāsānī (fl. 1060s ah/1650s ce)1

Keywords

Comparative religionSafavid IranMughal IndiaZoroastrianismTibet
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 56 , Special Issue 3: Sulh-i Kull as an Oath of Peace: Mughal Political Theology in History, Theory, and Comparison , May 2022 , pp. 959 - 992
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 rastagān-rā fikr-i dīn u maẕhab u irshād nīst / ān-ki ū dar band-i āzādī-st ham āzād nīst. chand dar paskūchahā-i maẕhab-u millat dawīm / shāhrāh-i kishvar-i taḥqīq juz ilḥād nīst. From Dīvān-i Mūbad, Khudabakhsh Library, Patna, MS 3727, fol. 21r.

2 The term ḥaqīqat-i dīn appears to invert the Quranic identification of Islam as the Religion of Truth (dīn al-ḥaqq). As discussed at length in Moin's framework article in this special issue, the term dīn al-ḥaqq appears in the Sūrat al-Tawba of the Quran (9:33) to denote the priority of the dispensation of Muḥammad over all religion: ‘It is he who sent his messenger with guidance and the religion of truth to make it prevail over all religion, although those who associate others with God dislike it’ (huwa lladhī ʾarsala rasūlahu bi-l-hudā wa-dīni l-ḥaqqi li-yuẓhirahu ʿalā d-dīni kullihi wa-law kariha l-mushrikūna).

3 Drawing attention to reflections upon and processes of comparison, rather than the act of comparison itself, see the essays in Renaud Gagné, Goldhill, Simon and Lloyd, Geoffrey (eds), Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology (Leiden: Brill, 2019)Google Scholar.

4 Matthew Melvin-Koushki proposes that a new investigation of the tension between taḥqīq and taqlīd (‘independent inquiry’ and ‘blind imitation’) should be the foundation of a new early modern intellectual history. See Matthew Melvin-Koushki, ‘Taḥqīq vs. Taqlīd in the Renaissances of Western Early Modernity’, Philological Encounters 3, no. 1–2 (2018), pp. 1–45.

5 On past misunderstandings regarding the authorship of the Dabistān, and the decision to render mūbad as ‘magus’ rather than as ‘Zoroastrian priest’ in English, see below.

6 Barzgar, Karīm Najafī (ed.), Dabistān-i maẕāhib: chāp-i ʿaksī-i nuskha-yi khaṭṭī-i sāl 1060 H./1650 M. (New Delhi: Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif-i Īrān va Hind, 2010)Google Scholar, fol. 149r–v; Raḥīm Riżāzāda Malik (ed.), Dabistān-i maẕāhib (Tehran: Ṭahūrī, 1983), p. 188.

7 Mūbad writes, ‘Some dear friends have said that the (books) Milal wa-Niḥal and Tabṣirat al-ʿAvāmm, in which doctrines and beliefs have been explained, are not devoid of partisanship (jānib-rūʾī), and the truth of religion (ḥaqīqat-i āʾīn) remains veiled. To rectify this, I set about writing this book’: Najafī Barzgar (ed.), Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 301r. The β recension of the Dabistān adds ‘Moreover, since the time (of those books), many (new) groups have formed’: Riżāzāda Malik (ed.), Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 267. On Mūbad's repurposing of Shahrastānī's schematization of religion to suit his universal framework, see Carl Ernst, ‘Concepts of Religion in the Dabistan’, in his It's Not Just Academic! Essays on Sufism and Islamic Studies (New Delhi: Sage Publishing, 2018), pp. 441–46. On his relocation of Shahrastānī's descriptions of Presocratic philosophy to describe ancient sects and on the sources for the interreligious polemic invoked in the religious debates at Akbar's court, see Gerald Grobbel, ‘Das Dabistān-i Maḏāhib und seine Darstellung der Religionsgespräche an Akbars Hof’, in Islamische Grenzen und Grenzübergänge, (eds) Benedikt Reinert and Johannes Thomann (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 100–01, 122–26.

8 On Mūbad's method, see, in particular, Behl, Aditya, ‘Pages from the Book of Religions: Encountering Difference in Mughal India’, in Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800, (ed.) Pollock, Sheldon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 210–39Google Scholar.

9 While avoiding theological polemics, Bīrūnī's book on India famously begins with the statement that Indians ‘differ from us [Muslims] in everything which other nations have in common’ (yubāyinūnanā bi-jamīʿ mā yushtarak fīhi l-ʾumam): Sachau, Edward (ed.), Alberuni's India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030 (London: Trübner, 1887), p. 13Google Scholar. On Bīrūnī's approach to comparative religion, see, most recently, Kozah, Mario, The Birth of Indology as an Islamic Science: Al-Bīrūnī's Treatise on Yoga Psychology (Leiden: Brill, 2015)Google Scholar; Abbasi, Rushain, ‘Islam and the Invention of Religion: A Study of Medieval Muslim Discourses on Dīn’, Studia Islamica 116, no. 1 (2021), pp. 1–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 darīn kirdāristān-i ʿaqīdat-ābād az iʿtiqādāt-i furuq-i mukhtalifa ānchi nigāshta āmad az zabān-i ṣāḥibān-i ān ʿaqīda va kitab-i īshān ast va dar guzārish-i ashkhāṣ va rijāl-i har firqa-rā chunānki mutbiʿān va mukhliṣān nām barand ba-taʿẓīm s̱ abt nimūd tā bū-yi taʿaṣṣub va jānib-rūʾī nayāyad va nāma-nigār-rā az īn guzārish juz manṣab-i tarjumānī nīst. Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 301r: Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 367.

11 Sheffield, Daniel, ‘The Language of Heaven in Safavid Iran: Speech and Cosmology in the Thought of Āẕar Kayvān and His Followers’, in No Tapping around Philology: A Festschrift for Wheeler Thackston's 70th Birthday, (eds) Korangy, Alireza and Sheffield, Daniel (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), pp. 161–83Google Scholar.

12 In Moses the Egyptian, Assmann argued that the Abrahamic religions broke away from the ancient notion that diverse ‘cosmotheist’ religions shared a common ground and were thus translatable. By contrast, what Assmann termed the ‘Mosaic distinction’ characterized a rupture at the emergence of monotheist beliefs from a universal worship of the cosmos to a specific belief in a single divinity wherein all other forms of religious belief were characterized as false. It should be said that such a stark schematization no doubt oversimplifies the Mosaic faiths’ historical encounters with religious Others and makes no attempt to account for Islamic history.

13 Assmann, Jan, Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion, (trans.) Savage, Robert (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 8Google Scholar.

14 Throughout the article, the term ‘spiritual exercises’ is used in the sense coined by the historian of Neoplatonism, Pierre Hadot. Hadot writes of Classical philosophical schools that each ‘practices exercises designed to ensure spiritual progress toward the ideal state of wisdom, exercises of reason that will be, for the soul, analogous to the athlete's training or to the application of a medical cure. Generally, they consist, above all, of self-control and meditation.’ Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, (trans.) Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 59. My understanding of Hadot is informed by Sajjad Rizvi's insightful application of Hadot to early modern Islamic philosophy in Rizvi, S., ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life in the World of Islam: Applying Hadot to the Study of Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635)’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 75, no. 1 (2012), pp. 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 See, for instance, the classic study of Shaw, Gregory, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

16 This simplistic understanding of ṣulḥ-i kull has been challenged, most recently by Rajeev Kinra, ‘Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility: The Global Historical Legacy of Mughal Ṣulḥ-i Kull’, The Medieval History Journal 16, no. 2 (2013), pp. 251–95 and by several of the contributions to this special issue.

17 See Irfan Habib, ‘Sikhism and the Sikhs, 1645–46: From “Mobad,” Dabistān-i Mazāhib’, in Sikh History from Persian Sources: Translations of Major Texts, (eds) J. S. Grewal and Irfan Habib (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2001), pp. 59–84.

18 An annotated German translation of the account of these debates is given in Grobbel, ‘Das Dabistān-i Maḏāhib und seine Darstellung der Religionsgespräche an Akbars Hof’.

19 See Carl W. Ernst, ‘The Dabistan and Orientalist Views of Sufism’, in Sufism East and West, (eds) Jamal Malik and Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 33–52.

20 The earlier recension is that published in facsimile by Najafī Barzgar in 2010, which was anticipated by Irfan Habib, ‘A Fragmentary Exploration of an Indian Text on Religion and Sects: Notes on the Earlier Version of the Dabistan-i Mazahib’, Proceedings of the Indian History Conference 61 (2001), pp. 474–91. The later recension was most recently published as Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension]. See also Sudev Sheth, ‘Manuscript Variations of Dabistān-i Mazāhib and Writing Histories of Religion in Mughal India’, Manuscript Studies 4, no. 1 (2020), pp. 19–41.

21 Mūbad is mentioned in several contemporary letters from the Quṭbshāhī court of Hyderabad. Regarding the favourable reception of his writing style quoted here, see the letter by Naẓīr al-Mamālik Ḥājī ʿAbd al-ʿAlī Tabrīzī to Mīrzā Muʿīn describing his attempts to obtain copies of Mūbad's compositions, British Library MS Add. 6600, 100v–101r. On the intellectual milieu of late Quṭbshāhī Hyderabad, see Hundy Bandy, ‘Building a Mountain of Light: Niẓām al-Dīn Gīlānī and Shīʿī Naturalism Between Safavid Iran and the Deccan’, PhD thesis, Duke University, 2019.

22 A comprehensive survey of the dozens of surviving Dabistān manuscripts is much desired.

23 John Shore Teignmouth, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence, of Sir William Jones (London: Printed for J. Hatchard, 1806), Vol. 2, p. 293.

24 See Bruce Lincoln, ‘Isaac Newton and Oriental Jones on Myth, Ancient History, and the Relative Prestige of Peoples’, History of Religions 42, no. 1 (2002), pp. 1–18; Urs App, William Jones's Ancient Theology, Sino-Platonic Papers 191 (Philadelphia: Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania, 2009).

25 Francis Gladwin (ed.), The New Asiatic Miscellany (Calcutta: Joseph Cooper, 1789), pp. 86–136; David Shea and Anthony Troyer (trans), The Dabistan, or, School of Manners (London: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1843). This translation, which remains the only complete study of the text in any European language, is unfortunately seriously handicapped by its translators’ lack of familiarity with Islam.

26 See Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Ernst, ‘The Dabistan and Orientalist Views of Sufism’.

27 Fardunji Marzbānji (trans.), Dabestān ketābni tālim pehli: Irāni lokonā̃ mazhab (Muṃbai: Mobed Fardunji Marzbānjinā̃ Kārkhānā, 1815).

28 Pandit Shraddha Ram Phillauri (trans.), Uṣūl-i Maẕāhib: Dabistān-i maẕāhib kā Urdū tarjuma (Lahore: Maṭbaʿ-i Mitravilās, 1896).

29 Annemarie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent (Köln: E. J. Brill, 1980), p. 101.

30 For a critique of popular accounts of Akbar's reign, see Kinra, ‘Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility’.

31 See Rula Abisaab, Converting Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).

32 The Dabistān's account of these events may be found in the chapter on the beliefs of the Vāḥidīs, the text's term for the group conventionally called Nuqṭavīs.

33 See Abbas Amanat, ‘Persian Nuqtawis and the Shaping of the Doctrine of “Universal Conciliation” (Sulh-i Kull) in Mughal India’, in Unity in Diversity: Mysticism, Messianism and the Construction of Religious Authority in Islam, (ed.) Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 367–91.

34 ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Navāʾī, Shāh ʿAbbās: Majmūʿa-yi Asnād va Mukātabāt-i Tārīkhī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Bunyād-i Farhang-i Īrān, 1973), Vol. 3, pp. 353–54. Cf. the translation in Henry Beveridge (trans.), The Akbarnāma of Abu-l-Faẓl (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1899), Vol. 3, pp. 1008–14. The text is preserved in numerous sources, including the Akbarnāma, Mukātabāt-i ʿAllāmī, and several other collections of inshāʾ. See Riazul Islam, A Calendar of Documents on Indo-Persian Relations (Karachi: Institute of Central and West Asian Studies, 1979), Vol. 1, pp. 123–24.

35 This unpublished text may be found in Tehran University Library MS 4864, pp. 54–55; the text in the British Library India Office MS Islamic 379, fol. 52r introduces many mistakes. On this letter, and the possibility that it was never sent, see Riazul Islam, Indo-Persian Relations: A Study of the Political and Diplomatic Relations between the Mughul Empire and Iran (Tehran, 1970), pp. 63–65; Islam, A Calendar of Documents, Vol. 1, pp. 128–29. The verse at the end of the passage is taken from the Shāhnāma. See Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh (ed.), Shāhnāmah (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1987), Vol. 6, pp. 229–30.

36 On the Testament of Ardashīr, see Mario Grignaschi, ‘Quelques spécimens de la littérature sassanide conservés dans les bibliothèques d'Istanbul’, Journal asiatique 254 (1966), pp. 1–142. For a translation of the Arabic text from which this quotation is drawn (itself reflecting a lost text of the Sasanian period), see Shaul Shaked, ‘Esoteric Trends in Zoroastrianism’, Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 3, no. 7 (1969), pp. 214–19.

37 jang-i haftād u du millat hama-rā ʿuẕr bi-nih / chun nadīdand ḥaqīqat rah-i afsāna zadand. See Ghazal 179:4 in Parvīz Nātil Khānlarī (ed.), Dīvān-i Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiż (Tehran: Farhangistān-i Adab va Hunar-i Īrān, 1980), pp. 374–75.

38 dar ḥalqa-yi rindān-i karābāt may-ā / tā ṣulḥ bā haftād u du millat nakunī. See Aḥmad Kitābī, ‘Jilvahā-i madārā dar shiʿr-i Ḥāfiż’, Iṭṭilāʿāt, 27 November 2013, http://www.ettelaat.com/?p=30605, [accessed 20 August 2021]. The line imitates a well-known poem of fourteenth-century poet Khwājū Kirmānī.

39 ṣulḥ-i kull dar raqm-i nāṣiya dārī fayżī / ki ṣalīb-i tu dar-īn butkada miḥrābī būd. Ghazal 412:9 in E. Ṭ. Arshad (ed.), Kullīyāt-i Fayzī (Lāhaur: Intishārāt-i Idāra-yi Taḥqīqāt-i Pākistān, 1967), p. 369. Also worth noting is Fayżī's use of the phrase mukammil al-ʿawālim wa-muṣallih al-kull (‘Perfectioner of the Worlds and Universal Peacemaker’) to gloss the Quranic rabb al-ʿālamīn (‘Lord of the Worlds’), in Fayżī, Sawāṭiʿ al-ilhām fī tafsīr kalām al-malik al-ʿallām, (eds) Murtaẓā Āyatullāhzāda Shīrāzī and ʿAbdullāh ibn Muḥammad Riḍā Shubbar (Qom: M. al-Shīrāzī, 1996), Vol. 1, p. 49. See also Carl W. Ernst, ‘Fayzi's Illuminationist Interpretation of Vedanta: The Shariq al-Ma'rifa’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, no. 3 (2010), pp. 356–64.

40 See H. Blochmann (ed.), The Ain-i-Akbarī (Calcutta, 1872), Vol. 1, p. 3.

41 ṣulḥ-i kull kardīm bā kull bashar / tu ba mā khaṣmī kun u nīkī nigar. Nān va Ḥalvā, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Acc. 1999.157, p. 22.

42 bar sar-i jang ast bā mā bī-sabab dāʾim kalīm / garchi ṣulḥ-i kull ba haftād u du millat karda-īm. Ḥusayn Partaw Bayżāʾī (ed.), Dīvān-i Abū Ṭālib Kalīm (Tehran: Khayyām, 1957), p. 280.

43 ʿārifān ṣāʿib zi saʿd u naḥs-i anjum fārigh-and / ṣulḥ-i kull bā s̱ābit u sayyār-i girdūn karda-and. Ghazal 2486:8 in Muḥammad Qahramān (ed.), Dīvān-i Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī (Tehran: Shirkat-i Intishārāt-i ʿIlmī va Farhangī, 1985), p. 1221.

44 kufr u dīn har du ʿadam mānad dar ān khalvat-zār /ṣulḥ-i kull yād ba haftād u du millat dādam. Girdhari L. Tikku, Barguzīda-ī az Pārsī-sarāyān-i Kashmīr (Tehran: Anjuman-i Īrān va Hind, 1963), p. 59; Girdhari L. Tikku, Persian Poetry in Kashmir, 1339–1846: An Introduction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), p. 130.

45 On the sources for establishing the contours of Āẕar Kayvān's life, see Takeshi Aoki, ‘The Role of Āzar Kayvān in Zoroastrian and Islamic Mysticism’, in K. R. Cama Oriental Institute Third International Congress Proceedings (Bombay: K. R. Cama Oriental Institute, 2000), pp. 259–77.

46 This point was exhaustively demonstrated by Sheriarji Dadabhai Bharucha, The Dasâtîr (Bombay: Fort Printing Press, 1907).

47 Indeed, Āẕar Kayvān's followers themselves carefully distinguish between themselves (referred to as āẕarī, ābādī, or sipāsī) and Zoroastrians (referred to as bihdīn, gabr, or zardushtī). Similarly, Āẕar Kayvān's followers cite dozens of texts written by Muslim authors but hardly any Zoroastrian texts.

48 See E. M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948); Michael Stausberg, Faszination Zarathushtra: Zoroaster und die Europäische Religionsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998). For the more general memetic appropriation of aspects of Zoroastrianism, Stausberg suggests the term ‘Parazoroastrianism'. See Michael Stausberg, ‘Para-Zoroastrianisms: Memetic Transmission and Appropriations’, in Parsis in India and the Diaspora, (eds) John Hinnells and Alan Williams (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 236–54.

49 See Hossein Ziai, ‘The Source and Nature of Authority: A Study of al-Suhrawardī's Illuminationist Political Doctrine’, in The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi, (ed.) Charles Butterworth (Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, 1992), pp. 304–44; Henry Corbin, En islam iranien II: Sohrawardî et les Platoniciens de Perse (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); John Walbridge, The Wisdom of the Mystic East: Suhrawardī and Platonic Orientalism, SUNY Series in Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

50 On the influence of Illuminationism in Mongol and post-Mongol formulations of sacral kingship, see, in particular, Stefan Kamola, ‘Beyond History: Rashid al-Din and Iranian Kingship’, in Iran After the Mongols, The Idea of Iran Book 8, (ed.) Sussan Babaie (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019), pp. 55–74; Sajjad Rizvi, ‘Practicing Philosophy, Imagining Iran in the Safavid Period’, in Safavid Persia in the Age of Empires, The Idea of Iran Book 10, (ed.) Charles Melville (London: I. B. Tauris, 2021), pp. 185–210.

51 ‘Kingship is a light (furūgh) emanating from the peerless creator and a ray emanating from the world-illuminating sun, the index of the tomes of all virtues, the receptacle of all aptitudes. In contemporary language it is called farr-i īzadī and in the ancient tongue it is called kiyān khẉarra.’ H. Blochmann and H. S. Jarrett (trans), The Ain i Akbari (Calcutta: printed for the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1873), Vol. 1, p. 2.

52 This text was first published in the nineteenth century and has subsequently been reprinted. See Mīr Ashraf ʿAlī (ed.), Jām-i Kaykhusraw va sharḥ-i mukāshafāt-i Āẕar Kayvān (Bombay: Fażl al-Dīn Khamkar, 1848). A brief English summary of the text was published by Nowroji Dorabji [Khandalavala], ‘A Parsi Ascetic’, The Theosophist 1 (1880), pp. 194–96. Further, see Carl Ernst, ‘Poetry and Ishraqi Illuminationism among the Esoteric Zoroastrians of Mughal India’, in Faces of the Infinite: Neoplatonism and Poetics at the Confluence of Africa, Asia and Europe, Proceedings of the British Academy, (eds) Stefan Sperl, Trevor Dadson and Yorgos Dedes (London: British Academy, forthcoming).

53 Mīr Ashraf ʿAlī (ed.), Jām-i Kaykhusraw va sharḥ-i mukāshafāt-i Āẕar Kayvān, p. 4.

54 The phrase recalls the famous chapter of the Kalīla wa-Dimna attributed to the late Sasanian physician Burzōy, who, being unable to cure human suffering by medical means, set about investigating every religious group he could find in order to discover secure knowledge of the hereafter, and yet, ‘In not one [religion] did I find that degree of rectitude and honesty which would induce rational persons (dhawu l-ʿaql) to accept their words and be satisfied with them […] I will limit myself to those deeds which all men recognize as good and which the religions agree on (tuwāfiq ʿalayhi l-adyān).’ See François de Blois, Burzōy's Voyage to India and the Origin of the Book of Kalīlah Wa Dimnah, Prize Publication Fund (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1990), Vol. 23, p. 26. The translation is from the important new article by Thomas Benfey, ‘A Secular-Religious Distinction in Late Sasanian Iran’, forthcoming.

55 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fols 22v–23r; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 27. Compare the lengthier commentary on the passage from Mīr Ashraf ʿAlī (ed.), Jām-i Kaykhusraw va sharḥ-i mukāshafāt-i Āẕar Kayvān, pp. 4–8.

56 For a broader discussion of the place of akhlāq in Mughal governance, see the classic study by Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

57 Muḥammad ibn Asʿad Davvānī, Akhlāq-i Jalālī, (ed.) ʿAbdullāh Masʿūdī Ārānī (Tihrān: Intishārāt-i Iṭṭilāʿāt, 2012), p. 255. See also the discussion of this passage in Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 467–71.

58 Ghiyās̱ al-Dīn Manṣūr Dashtakī Shīrāzī, Akhlāq-i Manṣūrī, (ed.) ʿAlī Muḥammad Pushtdār (Tihrān: Muʾassasa-yi Intishārāt-i Amīr Kabīr, 2007), p. 225.

59 For an exploration of the idea of the language of heaven in light of Āẕar Kayvānī ideas of language, see Sheffield, ‘The Language of Heaven in Safavid Iran’.

60 See Daniel J. Sheffield, ‘Zoroastrian Scripture or Illuminationist Theurgy? On the Sources of the Dasātīr-i Āsmānī’, forthcoming. On Suhrawardī's devotional materials themselves, see the comprehensive work of Łukasz Piątak, ‘Between Philosophy, Mysticism and Magic: A Critical Edition of Occult Writings of and Attributed to Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (1156–1191)’, PhD thesis, Warsaw University, 2018. See also his remarks on the similarity of the Dasātīr to the prayers of Suhrawardī (p. 511). See also John Walbridge, ‘The Devotional and Occult Works of Suhrawardī the Illuminationist’, Ishraq: Islamic Philosophy Yearbook 2 (2011), pp. 80–97; Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā Suhrawardī, L'archange empourpré: quinze traités et récits mystiques, (trans.) Henry Corbin (Paris: Fayard, 1976).

61 See Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul; Yochanan Lewy, Chaldaean Oracles and Theurgy: Mysticism, Magic and Platonism in the Later Roman Empire, (ed.) Michel Tardieu (Paris: Institut d’Études augustiniennes, 2011; 3rd edn).

62 ‘There was in Persia a people (ummatan) guided by truth and doing justice according to it. They were virtuous philosophers not at all resembling the Magi (ghayr mushabbah bi-l-majūs), to which bore witness Plato and the philosophers who preceded him. We have breathed life into their noble enlightened philosophy in the book entitled The Philosophy of Illumination.’ Translation adapted from Walbridge, The Wisdom of the Mystic East, p. 60. See Ragıp Paşa MS 1480 f. 207v, cf. Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī, Three Treatises, (ed.) Najafqulī Ḥabībī (Lahore: Institute of Persian Studies, 1977), p. 117.

63 These are MSS Ahmed III 3377, 3183, and 3217. For full discussion, see Maria Mavroudi, ‘Pletho as Subversive and His Reception in the Islamic World’, in Power and Subversion in Byzantium, (eds) Dimeter Angelov and Michael Saxby (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), p. 188.

64 Most recently, see the debate between Siniossoglou and Hladký. Niketas Siniossoglou, Radical Platonism in Byzantium: Illumination and Utopia in Gemistos Plethon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Vojtěch Hladký, The Philosophy of Gemistos Plethon: Platonism in Late Byzantium, between Hellenism and Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 2014).

65 Mavroudi, ‘Pletho as Subversive and His Reception in the Islamic World’, p. 189.

66 C. M. Woodhouse, George Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 24.

67 Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, (trans.) Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 76–84; Stausberg, Faszination Zarathushtra, Vol. 1, pp. 35–92.

68 Bahrām ibn Farhād, Shāristān-i Chahār Chaman, (eds) Bahrām Bīzhan et al. (Bombay: Maṭbaʿ-i Muẓaffarī, 1862), pp. 244–45.

69 See Amanat, ‘Persian Nuqtawis and the Shaping of the Doctrine of “Universal Conciliation” (Sulh-i Kull) in Mughal India’.

70 British Library MS Or. 11967. The manuscript must have been written before 1138 ah/1725–1726 ce, as this is the date found on one of its ownership seals.

71 Of these, the identification of the ‘Zand’ and the Arabic source texts are certain—the ‘Zand’ texts consist of the Zoroastrian liturgies Xwaršēd Nyāyišn (f. 52r–54v) and the Āfrīn ī Zarduxšt (f. 55r–56r); the Arabic, of al-Suhrawardī's Wārid taqdīs al- aʿlā li-kull yawm (f. 58r–v). The other prayers are not immediately identifiable. The Sanskrit and the Hindavi texts are generally comprehensible as invoking a series of epithets common to the language of bhakti, while the ‘Turki’ text, which invokes Tengri, the sky-god, is composed in a bizarre language containing some genuine archaic Turkic forms alongside what appears to be numerous invented forms. What language the ‘Samrānī’ text is composed in is a mystery—from the Persian translation, it is clear that the contents of the text correspond to the description of the ‘Great Man’ of the macrocosm found in the Dasātīr in the Book of Jamshīd quoted above, though the ‘original’ language of the passage is apparently artificial, with discernible word elements of Indic origin.

72 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 274v; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], pp. 337–38.

73 Bahrām ibn Farhād, Shāristān-i Chahār Chaman, pp. 163–64.

74 Ibid., p. 327.

75 Ibid., p. 412.

76 The Dabistān indicates that he was born around 1028 ah (1618 ce) in Patna, the year after the death of Āẕar Kayvān in the same city. At the age of five (1033 ah), he met another follower of Kayvān stationed at the royal court in Agra, Mūbad Hūshyār. Three years later (1036 ah), he visited Kashmīr. He was still in Kashmīr in 1040 ah. In 1046 ah, he reports briefly having been in Bangash in present-day Afghanistan, but he was back in Kashmir in 1047 ah, where he met several Sipāsī saints.

77 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 41r; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], pp. 47–48.

78 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 28v; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 33.

79 By 1048 ah, Mūbad had come to the imperial city of Lahore, where he met Farzāna Bahrām ibn-i Farhād, the author of the Shāristān-i Chahār Chaman (The Region of the Four Meadows). Later in 1048 he travelled with the physician Mihrān back to Kashmir, where he stayed into 1049. By the end of that year, at the age of 21, Mūbad more frequently began to report meetings with Hindu sages rather than fellow devotees of Āẕar Kayvān. In 1050, he was in Wazirabad and later in Gujrat in Punjab. By 1052, Mūbad stopped at Rawalpindi en route from Lahore to Kabul. In 1053, he travelled to Mashhad in Iran for pilgrimage and returned via Kabul to Kiratpur in Punjab, where he met the Sikh guru Hargovind. In 1054, he was in Multan. By 1055, he reports that he was already writing the Dabistān, during which time he moved between Gujrat and Peshawar.

80 For this section, see the excellent translation in Habib, ‘Sikhism and the Sikhs, 1645–46: From “Mobad,” Dabistān-i Mazāhib’.

81 In 1056, he was in Dotara, near Jodhpur, in Rajasthan. In 1057, he came first to the port of Surat and then to Hyderabad, where he met the poet Sarmad. A composition of Mūbad's from 1057 (Majlis Library, Tehran, MS 5138 f. 643r) praises the Quṭbshāhī king ʿAbdullāh in pure Persian. In 1059, he briefly returned to Gujrat in Punjab before returning to the Quṭbshāhī domain.

82 The latest date given in the text in 1063 ah, while the author reports being in Srikakulam. Since the Dabistān speaks of Dārā Shikūh as still alive, the text was most likely completed before 1659 ce.

83 Mentioned in a letter addressed to Sayyid Jaʿfar. British Library MS 6660, f. 103v–104r: mūbadā ki bā vujūd-i yagāna būdan manzala-yi du shāhid-i ʿadl mītavānad būd: ‘Mūbad, who on account of his singular nature can stand in for two witnesses.’

84 See Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, South Asia across the Disciplines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), pp. 142–66.

85 See Supriya Gandhi, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020).

86 Strangely, the β recension of the Dabistān refers to the Tibetans as qarā-tabatiyān or ‘black Tibetans’, a term which in later periods refers to speakers of the Tangut rather than the Tibetan language, but perhaps here indicates Baltistan.

87 For lucid accounts of the broader history of the events leading up to Tibetan-Mughal war, see Johan Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pp. 220–28; Luciano Petech, The Kingdom of Ladakh: C. 950–1842 A.D. (Roma: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1977), pp. 57–80.

88 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fols 117v–118r; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 169. See also the discussion in Habib, ‘A Fragmentary Exploration of an Indian Text on Religion and Sects: Notes on the Earlier Version of the Dabistan-i Mazahib’.

89 These invocations, found only in the α recension, include the Persian phrase ba nām-i īzad-i bakhshāyanda-yi bakhshāyishgar to introduce the religions of the Persians; the Sanskrit phrase śrī paramātmāya namaḥ to introduce the religions of the Indians; the word kujaq to introduce the religion of the Tibetans; the phrase dīʾūs [Latin deus]—bismil-ab wa-l-ibn wa-l-rūḥ al-quds allāh wāḥid to introduce Christianity; bismillāh al-raḥmān al-raḥīm wa-bihi nastaʿīn to introduce Islam; yā allāh maḥmūd fī kull fiʿālihi / asaʿīn bi-nafsiki alladhī lā ilāha illā huwa to introduce the Wāḥidī/Nuqṭavīs; allāh nūr al-samāwāt wa'l-arḍ to introduce the Rawshanīs; allāh akbar to introduce the Ilāhīs; and ilāh yā nūr al-samāwāt wa-l-arḍ yā nūr al-anwār yā munawwir al-nūr yā wājib al-wujūd to introduce the philosophers.

90 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 170v; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 213.

91 See William A. Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam (The Hague: Mouton, 1977); Sheffield, ‘The Language of Heaven in Safavid Iran’.

92 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 170v; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 213.

93 Sabine Schmidtke, ‘The Doctrine of the Transmigration of the Soul According to Shihāb Al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī and His Followers’, Studia Iranica 28 (1999), pp. 237–54.

94 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fols 170v–171r; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 213.

95 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 171r.

96 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 171r; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], pp. 213–14.

97 Najafī Barzgar, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [α recension], fol. 171r–v; Riżāzāda Malik, Dabistān-i maẕāhib [β recension], p. 214.

98 Mullā Muḥammad Ṭāhir Qummī, ‘Radd Bar Ṣūfiya’, in Mīrās̱-i Islāmī-i Īrān, (eds) Rasūl Jaʿfariyān and Sayyid Ḥasan Islāmī (Tehran, 1996), Vol. 4, p. 147.

99 On Mullā Fīrūz, see Daniel Sheffield, ‘Iran, the Mark of Paradise or the Land of Ruin? Approaches to Reading Two Parsi Travelogues’, in On the Wonders of Land and Sea: Persianate Travel Writing, (eds) Roberta Micallef and Sunil Sharma (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 14–43.

100 ‘In a hall or large room in front, we were received by Mulna [sic] Perose, the Parsee priest, who was educated fourteen years in Persia, and is not without information and agreeable manners. He showed his usual anxiety not to be suspected of believing any part of his Thirty-nine Articles [the tenets of the Church of England, here applied to the beliefs of Zoroastrianism]. He repeated what he said last year, that he was of the pheilosuf lok, or “philosophical people”.’ Sir James Mackintosh, Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh (E. Moxon, 1836), Vol. 2, p. 47.

101 ‘Thus I am always in demand / I am the fountain of celestial secrets. My book forms a portion of the Dasātīr / I am Sāsān the Sixth in experience’: z-īn sān ki hamīsha dar ravāʾī māʾīm / sar chashma-yi rāz-i āsmānī māʾīm. lakhtī az dasātīr buvad nāma-yi mā / sāsān-i shashum bi-kār-dānī māʾīm. Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Dastanbū (Lahore: Maṭbūʿāt-i Majlis-i Yādgār-i Ghālib, 1969), p. 56. On the context of Ghalib's interest in the Dasātīr, see Mehr Afshan Farooqi, Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 2021), pp. 206–26.

102 On Hataria, see Sheffield, ‘Iran, the Mark of Paradise or the Land of Ruin’. For the relationship of the Dasātīr to the history of Iranian nationalism more broadly, see Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran; Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, The Emergence of Iranian Nationalism: Race and the Politics of Dislocation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

103 Patrick D. Bowen and K. Paul Johnson (eds), Letters to the Sage: Collected Correspondence of Thomas Moore Johnson. Volume One: The Esotericists (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2016), pp. 443–45.

104 Thomas Moore Johnson, ‘A School of Philosophy’, The Platonist 3 (1887), pp. 278–79.

105 Mirza Mohamed Hadi, ‘The Celestial Desatir’, The Platonist 3 (1887), pp. 296–308, 660–70; 4 (1888), pp. 48–56, 102–06, 136–44, 183–95.

106 Mīrzā Muḥammad Hādī Lakhnavī, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq maʿ khulāṣa-i sharḥ (Hyderabad: Osmania University, 1925).

107 See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Lynn Avery Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob and W. W. Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard's Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010); App, The Birth of Orientalism.

108 See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 103–43.

109 nazd-i tūrāniyān zi īrān-am / nazd-i īrāniyān na īshānam. sunniyān shīʿa-am gumān dārand / shīʿiyān mahż nā- musalmān-am. … man az īn jumla-yi kīsh bīrūn-am / ʿārif-i muṭlaq-i khudāvand-am. mard-i manzil-shinās rah na-ravad / kāmyāb az viṣāl-i jānān-am. aʿraf-i ʿārifān-i ẕāt-i ḥaqq-am / mūbad-i mūbadān-i yazdān-am. Dīvān-i Mūbad, Khudabakhsh Library, Patna, MS 3727, f. 64v.