My Kaaba is the blessed Kashmir.
Whoever has seen the Shah has not sought the Kaaba,
This is the effect of gazing at his countenance.
O Kaaba-goer, grasp the Shah’s hem!
Since you are the Kaaba’s hem-grasper.69
The prince not only equates Mulla Shah’s residence of Kashmir with the Kaaba, but also likens it to the saint’s countenance itself. Mulla Shah is a Kaaba to rival the Meccan sanctuary, and is himself a destination for pilgrims. Dara’s repeated mentions of his pir as the shah have the double effect of not only referencing the Sufi teacher’s name, Mulla Shah, but also imbuing him with imperial attributes.
The prince and his pir had been corresponding for a while, when, early in 1642, a sudden and new responsibility caused Dara to seek Mulla Shah’s blessings and guidance. The emperor’s intelligence agents reported that the young Safavid ruler, Shah Safi, harbored designs on regaining the fortress city of Qandahar. Shah Safi had sent his commander Rustam Khan to wait nearby in Nishapur, a city in the Iranian kingdom’s eastern province of Khurasan. Quick action was needed to preempt the Safavid Shah. Shuja was occupied in distant Bengal where he was governor, while Aurangzeb administered the Deccan. This left Dara Shukoh as the obvious choice to lead the campaign.70
The twenty-seven-year-old prince had not yet had a chance to fight on the battlefield, having been recalled early from his previous expedition to Qandahar. He was no doubt waiting to prove himself by carrying out such an important assignment. He turned to his pir for guidance. In response, Mulla Shah wrote part of a Quranic verse in the header of his letter to Dara: “You threw not, when you threw, but God threw.”71
Dara Shukoh would have immediately grasped the context and intent of this excerpt from the divine revelation. The interpretive tradition associated with the Quran views this verse as originally addressed to the Prophet Muhammad during the battle of Badr against the Meccan infidels who persecuted the early followers of the Prophet. One popular classical commentary in Arabic explains: “O Muhammad, you did not strike the group of [infidels] when you threw stones, rather it was God who did so by making the stones reach them.”72 Dara Shukoh, as a true seeker of God, should not fear, his teacher tells him, because ultimately it is the divine who will act. But this is not all, for a wujudi-inflected interpretation of the verse goes a level further. Mulla Shah elaborates in another letter to Dara that the words “You threw not” signify our unity with the divine. Indeed, he says, there is not a single particle in all of existence that is independent of God.73
Shah Jahan made sure that his eldest son would be well prepared to take on the Iranians. He sent Dara Shukoh with an army of fifty thousand horsemen and forty high-ranking chiefs. Among these officers were the Rajputs Raja Jai Singh and Raja Jaswant Singh. The emperor also ordered Ali Mardan Khan, the former Safavid governor of the city now stationed in Kabul, to assist Dara as best as he could. He sent Murad Bakhsh to wait at the banks of the Indus in case his support was needed. Dara took leave of the emperor at Lahore in a ceremony during which his father gave him several gifts, including a valuable turban ornament, his own string of pearls and rubies, and several bejeweled weapons.74
As soon as Dara Shukoh crossed the Indus River, in May 1642, he received word that the Safavid emperor had died. In Lahori’s words, Shah Safi, “drunk on the wine of ignorance and intoxicated by the dreams of youth … filled up the measure of his life in Kashan.”75 He was not yet thirty-two. This was divine intervention, Dara Shukoh felt, aided by Mulla Shah’s intercession. He would write, recalling Mulla Shah’s recent letter to him, “God, the glorious and exalted, that very month dealt the ruler of Iran such a blow that he could not rise up. The people killed him by giving him poison.”76 The prince’s attribution of the cause of Shah Safi’s death contradicts the official Safavid accounts. Indeed the Persian ruler’s well-known affinity for both opium and wine may have contributed to his untimely demise.77
Dara Shukoh informed his father of Shah Safi’s death, but Shah Jahan wanted the news doubly confirmed. He instructed Dara to dispatch the officers Khan-i Dauran and Said Khan with a contingent of thirty thousand to Qandahar. Meanwhile, Dara Shukoh was to wait at Ghazni. After the initial news was corroborated, Dara hastened to Lahore.78
The prince may have had mixed feelings about Shah Safi’s untimely death. On the one hand, it was a welcome miracle, ridding the empire of a hostile neighbor. The Shah’s successor, his son Abbas, was still a young child, and it would be some time before he would become a serious threat. But this time, again, Dara had been deprived of the chance to achieve glory on the battlefield. He was the only one of his brothers not to have fought in a military expedition.
Upon his arrival in Lahore on September 10, 1642, he was greeted by high-ranking nobles such as Islam Khan, who brought him to pay his respects to the emperor with an offering of a thousand gold coins. Shah Jahan, pleased at the elimination of his Iranian rival, rewarded Dara Shukoh by conferring on him the same title that his own father, Jahangir, had earlier given him, “Shahzada-yi Buland Iqbal” (Prince of Lofty Fortune).79 The title stamped a seal on what the emperor had already made clear: Dara Shukoh was his favored heir. Henceforth, all those addressing the prince and writing about him were ordered to use it.
Once back at court, Dara Shukoh returned to his studies and his writing on spiritual perfection. He continued working on a new book that he had been composing, a sequel of sorts to his Safinat ul-auliya. This was a tribute to his Sufi masters, Miyan Mir and Mulla Shah, and to the Qadiri order, interspersed with his own spiritual autobiography. He had already started to pen accounts of his time with Miyan Mir, the aged Sufi’s disciples, and his sister, Bibi Jamal Khatun. During and after his time in Kashmir, he may well have written about Mulla Shah and his companions. Now, sometime during the Hijri year 1052, between April 1642 and March 1643, he completed a collection that he entitled Sakinat-ul-auliya (The Tranquility of Saints).
This work is more than a mere collection of admiring anecdotes compiled by a faithful disciple about his teachers. We also cannot dismiss it as the journal of a naive young prince’s spiritual experimentation either. There is a deliberately crafted set of arguments running throughout the Sakinat-ul-auliya. The collection is a multilayered religious manifesto. Its opening lines introduce the premise that Dara Shukoh has been uniquely and divinely endowed with the capacity to attain great spiritual heights. Here, Dara refers to his early wish to join a group of Sufis and relates God’s promise to him of a gift that no emperor had ever received before:
The faqir without a care, Muhammad Dara Shukoh, says: Because I had always desired of the omnipotent emperor and the master of unity that he should put me among his friends and lovers … and that my heart be attached to a group of dervishes … God the most high … deigned to answer the petition of this helpless one. On a Thursday of my twenty-fifth year, I was asleep when a hidden voice called out and repeated four times, “That which had not been possible for any emperor on earth, God the most high has given to you.” After awakening, I said to myself that such felicity must of course be gnosis. Indeed, God the most high would give this good fortune to me … for his best gift is the gift of his love which has no equal and no price, and is hard-won and rare. This blessing is tied to his endless favor and mercy.
Emperors, implies Dara Shukoh, were generally dilettantes when it comes to spiritual matters. By comparing himself to past sovereigns, the prince is already coming to think of himself as a ruler. And only he, Dara Shukoh, blessed with divine grace, can resolve the opposition between dervish and ruler. He separates himself from Mughal nobility and the scholarly class by disavowing any connection with the ahl-i zahir, “literalists” or “exotericists,” a label that Sufis use for people concerned with only the external elements of religious practice, who fail to cultivate its interior aspects. The prince writes that he was transformed by Mulla Shah’s instruction, “Now, even though I appear to be of the exotericists, I am not one of them
, and I know their ignorance and wretchedness. And even though I am removed from the dervishes, I am one of them.”80
Dara Shukoh further establishes his religious credentials by quoting the Persian mystic Hujwiri, who said, “A man is not worldly by virtue of the abundance of possessions and is not a dervish by their scarcity.” The prince explains Hujwiri’s statement in the following way: “He who holds poverty to be superior, does not become worldly by virtue of his wealth, even if it is proprietary. He who rejects poverty is worldly, even if he is in distressed means.… He who is named by God ‘faqir,’ is poor though he may be wealthy. He is doomed who thinks he is not a prisoner, though his position may be a throne.”81
While Dara uses Hujwiri’s statement to establish that, for him, there is no contradiction in remaining a prince while pursuing his spiritual agenda, he does not believe that this applies to other royals as well. The underlying theme of the Sakinat-ul-auliya is that Dara alone, among all the other Mughal dynasts, possesses the characteristics of a true spiritual master and has been divinely chosen to play an important role through his ties with the Qadiri order.
Dara contrasts the warm welcome he received from the Qadiris with the experience of the late emperor Jahangir, who had also approached Miyan Mir. He does not hide his dislike of his grandfather. The months he spent in his childhood as a hostage of Nur Jahan and Jahangir must have been deeply etched in his memory. In this regard, his assessment of his grandfather in the Sakina is quite telling:
The Emperor Jahangir did not believe in saints and dervishes, and would inflict torments on this group, and exhibit bad behavior. Despite this, he sent one from among his close circle to the service of Hazrat Miyan Jio, and invited him to his own residence, saying apologetically, “Had I heard of you when I was in Lahore, I would have gone to be at your service. But because I departed from the city at an opportune time, I cannot come again. You come to see me, please.”82
Jahangir, as we remember, had imprisoned Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, the Naqshbandi Sufi, who wrote prolific missives that were sometimes critical of the Mughal state. Even Abd-ul-Haqq did not escape the emperor’s ire.83 Dara Shukoh must have been referring to these instances when he mentions his grandfather’s repressive measures against Sufis.
Would Dara, a Qadiri, have sympathy for Sufis from rival lineages? Many modern writers treat Sirhindi as a bastion of Islamic orthodoxy, in contrast to the religious figures associated with Dara.84 But such polarized divisions between mystical piety and orthodox authority did not operate in the same way during the seventeenth century: though a devout jurist, Sirhindi was importantly also an initiate of both the Naqshbandi and Qadiri orders. The Safinat-ul-auliya even mentions a meeting between Miyan Mir and Sirhindi. Dara represents the latter in a positive light, as someone capable of producing miracles.85
According to Dara, Miyan Mir agreed to visit Jahangir. The emperor became greatly affected. He even offered to abandon his empire and all his wealth if the Sufi pir so wished. Miyan Mir retorted, “The true Sufi is he for whom rocks and jewels are the same. Whenever you say ‘In my view, a rock and a jewel are equal,’ then you are also a Sufi.” When the emperor pleaded with him, Miyan Mir relented, saying that Jahangir could appoint a substitute to supervise the kingdom and that he would train the emperor in spiritual matters. Pleased by these words, the emperor asked, “Do you wish for anything from me?” Miyan Mir responded, “Will you give me what I seek?” He replied, “Of course I’ll give it to you.” The Sufi said, “I ask for just this, that you give me leave to go.” The emperor was then forced to allow him to depart.86
By demonstrating the reverence that Dara’s own forebears had had for Miyan Mir, this anecdote elevates the Sufi as a great spiritual figure worthy of respect, and underscores his charisma and independence. Here, as in the earlier story where Miyan Mir rebukes Shah Jahan, the former comes across as a stronger spiritual force, one who was not afraid of emperors.
But Dara’s anecdote is not a mere fabrication. Jahangir’s meeting with the holy man was important enough for him to include in his memoirs. After hearing of the the Sufi’s piety and freedom from need of the world, wrote Jahangir, his desire to meet him increased and he invited Miyan Mir to the court. His ill health notwithstanding, the Sufi complied and went to visit the emperor. Jahangir recalls their meeting as follows: “He is a truly noble person, a rarity in this age. I went out of my way to sit with him, and from him I heard many lofty words on mysticism. Although I wanted to offer him a token of my esteem, since I found him too high-minded for such a thing, I couldn’t do it. I offered him a white antelope skin for a prayer mat. Immediately thereafter he bade me farewell and returned to Lahore.”87
Though Jahangir’s account of their meeting does not entirely contradict Dara’s, it offers a different perspective on the encounter. The ailing Sufi cannot afford to ignore the ruler’s invitation; when he visits him, the emperor is impressed by his erudition, reticence, and modesty.
But for Dara Shukoh, these anecdotes about his forebears meeting Miyan Mir served a function beyond eulogizing his teacher. They underscore that Dara, unlike his father and grandfather, has been able to successfully integrate himself into a community of the spiritual elect. He is a unique royal for whom there is no contradiction in also being a Sufi adept.
5
THE CHOSEN
1642–1652
MORE THAN THREE YEARS would pass before Dara Shukoh and Jahanara returned to Kashmir. The siblings remained by their father’s side, as usual. For much of this period, they were based in Agra, where their mother’s splendid mausoleum was nearing completion.1 In the autumn of 1643, Shah Jahan made another pilgrimage to the tomb of the revered Chishti saint, Khwaja Muin-ud-Din, at Ajmer. There, in a very public display of devotion, he asked that food prepared for the devotees be cooked with the meat of nilgai (antelope) that he himself had hunted.2 Dara and Jahanara, who almost always also traveled with their father, would have taken part in this trip. Jahanara, of course, was a long-term devotee of the Chishtis. For Dara, too, there would have been merit in paying homage at the shrine even though his recent writings elevated the Qadiris above all other orders.
Meanwhile, the links between Mulla Shah’s Qadiri order in Kashmir and the court were unbroken, even strengthened. As we learn from Tawakkul Beg, several imperial servants joined Mulla Shah’s community of Sufis, some actually withdrawing from imperial service. One Muhammad Shafi, the son of Qazi Afzal, a religious scholar and jurist at the court, became Mulla Shah’s disciple after taking leave of Dara and Jahanara at Akbarabad.3 A servant of Dara’s younger brother, Shuja, governor of Bengal, received permission to enter Mulla Shah’s order.4 (Tawakkul Beg may have had a hand in this, as he had earlier served under Shuja.) The nobleman Mutaqid Khan, son of the “house-born” courtier, Najabat Khan, also visited Kashmir to receive Mulla Shah’s initiation.5
Mulla Shah even interceded with Dara on behalf of the religious scholar Mulla Juki Kabuli. The Nuskha describes Mulla Juki as an outstanding man of learning, with complete mastery of the rational sciences. Dara Shukoh became upset with him over an unspecified fault. Mulla Juki took leave of the emperor and went to Mulla Shah. The Sufi shaikh consoled him. He let Mulla Juki participate in his mystical gatherings and imparted to him the “mysteries of self-knowledge,” which, Tawakkul Beg explains, was the same as “knowledge of the eternal.”6 After a year had passed, Mulla Shah wrote Dara, interceding on Mulla Juki’s behalf. The prince replied warmly, expressing appreciation that Mulla Juki had attained the felicity of being with Mulla Shah. He inscribed the letter in his own hand, a gesture expressing high regard for his spiritual master. Dara Shukoh also wrote separately to Mulla Juki, declaring that, for his part, he had cleared away the “dust of resentment.”7 Though Mulla Juki would have been considered one of the ulama, it was perfectly normal at the time for him to associate with Sufis.
This movement of people back and forth, between the centers of power and Mulla Shah’s order in Kashmir, reflects t
he pir’s growing influence at court. Previous Mughal emperors, especially Akbar and Jahangir, co-opted the charismatic authority of sufis.8 Much as a Sufi pir would, they initiated a special set of courtiers as their disciples. In this case, select members of the court became Mulla Shah’s disciples, instead of Shah Jahan’s. Moreover, it was common for leading Sufis to style themselves as alternative rulers—emperors of the spiritual realm. Mulla Shah also had a court, albeit without all the trappings of pomp and glory that earthly emperors possessed. In his case, now, the rival “court” of the Sufi merged into an extension of the imperial court.
Tawakkul Beg’s account suggests that in addition to Dara and Jahanara, the emperor was a driving force in fostering close relations with Mulla Shah. For instance, one of Shah Jahan’s own servants, Marhamat Khan, had previously been a disciple of Mulla Shah.9 Similarly, during this time, Tawakkul Beg came from Kashmir, at Mulla Shah’s behest, to work in Dara Shukoh’s retinue.10 Imperial servants, especially those who had inherited their positions from a family member, were considered part of the emperor’s household and enjoyed a special status.11 Here, with some leaving the court to join Mulla Shah’s household, and others coming from Mulla Shah’s service to that of the emperor, the retinue of the imperial family began to overlap with the Sufi’s household. This fostered a unique kind of intimacy between the two. It would be hard to imagine anyone else with whom the emperor could be so familiar that their households shared this mutual permeability.
* * *
BY EARLY APRIL 1644, it was warm in Agra, though summer’s most scorching heat loomed ahead. The emperor’s family had not yet left for their next trip to the Himalayas. “During these days,” says Lahori, “when the clouds sowed imperial favors, and the hopes of mortals sprung lush and green, all of a sudden, treacherous fortune and the crooked heavens brought forth despicable dispositions, and unlikeable characteristics. The world’s happiness mingled with sorrow.”12
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