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A PERSIAN SUFI IN BRITISH INDIA: THE TRAVELS OF MIRZA HASAN SAFI ‘ALI SHAH (1251/1835-1316/1899) By Nile Green Oxford University! INTRODUCTION ‘The migration of Persian Sufis to India forms one of the great themes in the intellectual history of Iran and one of the neglected chapters in the history of Sutism. If India is often seen asa peripheral part ofthe Muslim world, the ties between India and the wider Muslim world which were cemented through ongoing pattems of migration into India suggest that this per- spective was not one which was always common to the past. In eleventh-century Lahore, the first prose text of Persian Sufism, the Kashf al-mahjii of al-Hujvir (d, 4465/1072), was composed by one such migrant, and over the following centuries many other Persophone Sufis followed Hujviri along the road to India, The Sufis were, of course, only a small part of a wider movement of people — of scholars and administrators, soldiers and merchants — who tied the societies which they formed in India into a high degree of contiguity with the wider world of Islam. It was for this reason that a North Aftican like Ibn Battita could find employment at the court in Dethi and that the name of the Safavid sultan could be repeated in Friday sermons in the territories of the Decean Sultans. And it was of course a common language, principally Persian and to lesser degree Arabic, that allowed this interchange to run smoothly. India was a land of opportunity, the different tastes and requirements of its various courts over time offering possibilities of useful employment to suit ll manner of migrants. While all ofthese interchanges are common enough knowledge with regard to the precolonial period, the significance of their continuity through the nineteenth- century has been less recognised, The greater narrative of the nineteenth-century history of India has until recently tended to emphasise the tying of India into a new colonial geography, centring on Britain and linking India into a trade network dominated by the commercial networks of Britain's wider colonial sphere (East Africa, Malaya, etc). For their part, the ‘main currents of nineteenth-century Iranian history are 201 seen to link Qajar fran politically and intellectually with developments in the Russian empire and Istanbul ‘While these were pethaps the grand currents of the age, they have overshadowed the continuity in religious, political and commercial exchange that persisted between India and Iran throughout the nineteenth century. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the per- sistence of mercantile connections between Indian and Iranian merchants during the colonial period. Kerman ‘continued to maintain a population of Indian merchants ‘throughout the nineteenth century, while the renewed ties between the Zoroastrians of Yazd and their co-reli tgionists in British India assured the presence of a ‘wealthy contingent of Indian merchants in that city also, Bombay increasingly became the commercial focus for the traditional trading cities of central and southem Iran. In 1830, Bombay's total trade with Iran amounted to 350,000 rupees, but by 1858-59 the trade in horses alone came to 2,625,000 rupee nineteenth-century Iranians, India. cor the same opportunities for trade, refuge and writing that it had for centuries. The precise conditions for these opportunities were certainly altered by the fact of British colonial power in India and its introduction there of the modem technologies of Europe. But it was precisely these conditions — a certain religious and political liberalism, enhanced communications, renewed trading opportunities — that those moving between Iran and India were careful to make best use of. We began by discussing the migration of Sufis from Iran to India and itis time to tur to a case study of one such Sufi during the period in question whose travels embody many of the qualities of the age. Mirza Hasan Isfahan, better known by his Sufi title of Safi ‘Ali Shah, was bom into a merchant family in the city of Isfahan in 1251/1835% Having become cenamoured of the Sufi life at an early age, he travelled to Shiraz to be initiated by the leading Ni‘matullahi ‘master Rahmat ‘Ali Shah (d, 1278/1861). During this period, he spent around three years in Yazd and a 202 JOURNAL OF PERSIAN STUDIES shorter period of time in Kerman before making three joumeys to India, beginning in 1280/1863-64, during the course of which he also visited Mecca and the Shiite shrine cities of Iraq? While in Bombay, he completed the Zubdat al-asrar, the first of the long ‘mystical poems that were to make him famous. The poem was first published in Bombay in 1289/1872 After another journey to India in the late 1860s, Saft settled in Tehran in 1288/1871, Here he was able to build up an aristocratic following and spend the last decades of his life writing and publishing a series of ‘other long poems and a smaller number of prose works ‘on speculative mysticism.* The most significant of his later works was the so-called Tafsir- Saft in which, in line with the modemist intellectual tendencies of the period, he tried to communicate the inner meanings of the Quran to a Persian speaking audience. A Khdnagah was built for Safi ‘Al Shah in Tehran by the Qajar prince Muhammad Mirza Sayf al-Dawla (a grandson of Fath ‘Ali Shah), and it was here that Safi died and ‘was buried in 1316/1899.? Within months of his death, the anjuman-i ukhwat emerged out of his order, a modemising institution sometimes linked with the Constitutional Revolution whose association with Saft himself remains unclear.'® ‘Although the broad outlines of Saft’s career are thus clear enough, the finer details of his life remain a matter of mystery. But of great importance 10 our understanding of his life is an account of his early life and travels apparently written down according to Safi’s own words by his younger brother and shayk, Aga Riza Huse ‘Ali (better known as Shams al-“Uraft). ‘The account has been published in a modern Persian study of the history of the Ni'matullahi order." While the precise motivation for its composition is unclear, intemal references suggest that it was writen during the last few years of Safi’s life. Along with this account, we also possess a short biography of Saft that was published in his own lifetime in the monthly journal Sharaf in 1308/1890-91, a publication which specialised in portraits of nobles and statesmen accom- panied by their biographies.'? A number of years later, a lightly edited version of this account was included and expanded upon by Na’ib al-Sadr Shirazi (d. 1344/1926) in the Nitmatullahi history Tara’ig al- hhagatig.* This article aims to place the early life and travel itineraries that are contained in these accounts into a wider context of nineteenth-century Indo-Iranian cultural exchange. In doing so, the aim is not so much to try to discover an objective history of Safi’s early life. Rather, the intention is to use these biographical materials (0 try to see how towards the end of his life Sali’s early career was understood by himself and his commemorators and how this remembered life fitted into the broader cultural processes of the period. What ‘we are looking at is therefore the retrospective creation of a life, a personal narrative that is nevertheless inter- connected with the grander collective narrative we think of as history EARLY LIFE AND TRAVELS IN IRAN Although bom into a merchant family in Isfahan, the extent of Sati’s early involvement in commerce is unsure. Given his family background it may, however, be assumed that a training in commercial matters formed the basis of his education. Like his contempo- rary and fellow Isfahani, the great merchant Hajj Muhammad Hasan Amin al-Zarb (1250-53/1834-37 to 1316/1898), Safi may well have attended a maktab in Isfahan to acquire the basic skills in literacy requisite for a mercantile career." Looking back on his early life, however, he was to pour scom on those who surrounded him in his youth, describing his early teachers as merchants of the most superficial mentality (gishri manish) who forbade him from meeting with fagirs.!> Elsewinere he describes an episode in which several profligate members of his family tried to tempt him into joining their wine-drinking sessions.'© ‘The accounts tell us that, from an early age, Saft ‘was drawn to spirituality and sought out a variety of obscure masters in his home city. Apart from the anonymous recluses of Isfahan, Safi’ first teacher was a certain Mulla Hasan of Na’in whom he found after a search around the city’s madrasas. Saft describes him as both a leamed and ascetic man from whom he gained much.!” This reference to his early teacher is pethaps telling, since Safi’s adult prose style is certainly suggestive of more than the rudimentary formal education typical of members of the merchant classes. In his ‘Irfan al-hagg, for example, he entered the domain of philosophical discussions of the onto- logical qualities of being (vwizd) and divine realty (hagq)."* While this period of Safi’s early life will probably remain obscure, it seems possible that what Mulla Hasan taught him was the basis of the philo- sophical understanding and technical language of A PERSIAN SUFI IN BRITISH INDIA 203 Shi‘ite ‘fan that remained as part of the legacy of the school of Isfahan." Looking back in the last years of his life at this carly apprenticeship with Mulla Hasan, Safi reflected ‘on how the Mulla had responded when he had begged to be initiated; he had told him simply to be himself. ‘The Mulla’ pithy reply echoed one of the great themes of the Islamic mystical tradition, as reflected in the hadith, “He who knows himself knows his Lord” (man ‘arafa nafsahu qad ‘arafa rabbahu). Saft ended this first anecdote of his memoirs with the advice that whether one is a dissolute drunkard (rindi kharabati) ‘ora workd-renouncing ascetic (zahid va parhizkar), the ‘most important thing in life is to show oneself as one is, Here we are reminded of the edifying and exemplary nature of the Sufi biographical tradition within the confines of which Safi’ life story was being formulated 2” By the mid-nineteenth century, the Ni‘matullahi revival was well under way in Iran2! For much of the first fifteen years of Sali’s life, the patronage of Muhammad Shah Qajar (1250-64/1834-48) had censured the Nitmatullahi dervishes a secure place in society from which to propagate their doctrines, and the fame oftheir leaders had spread widely inthe cities of central Iran, It is not mentioned whether Safi came into contact with any Ni'matullahi shayks in Isfahan itself, but itis claimed that it was after a dream led him to visit the tomb of Fayz ‘Ali Shah that he received help from the latter's spirit and decided to leave Isfahan for Shiraz. While itis a classic trope of Sufi biography, this visionary initiation certainly reminds us of the parallel dream in Ni'matullahi hagiography in which Riza ‘Ali Shah Dakani (d. 1214/1799) was instructed to send Ma'stim Ali Shab to Iran and so to re-introduce Sufism to Iran from India a generation earlier? ‘The accounts in the Sharaf and the Tard’ig al- ‘haga’ig tell us that Saft left Isfahan aged twenty (i around 1271/1854) to seek out the famous Sufi Mirza Kiichak (Rahmat ‘Ali Shah) in Shiraz.2> Having met him and been accepted as his pupil, Safi travelled to Yaad at his command and stayed there for a period of three years. Yazd was during this period the main centre of the Indian trade in Iran, but as we have seen there is no mention of any trading activities in the account of his travels.># Even in these remembrances of his arliest years, we can already see the careful shaping of a Sufi life. We have seen his desire for enlightenment at an early age, the early opposition of his family, an initiatory dream and encounter with the soul of a dead master and the archetypal dervish’s journey on foot halfway across southern Persia. While ‘we need not doubt the truthfulness or sequence of events per se, the selective nature of these youthful remembrances surely shows us that hagiography was shaping memory and in tum biography. But there is also another way in which we may see this process, for it may not only have been a case of one text shaping another. For it was conceivably the case thatthe classic narratives of the Sufi life were here shaping the actual ‘enactment ofthe life of an aspiring Sufi. We should not overlook the way in which Sufi hagiographical traditions were intended to be emulated in the lives of their readers and listeners Whatever $aft’s relationship with his family business during this period, living in Isfahan, Kerman and Yard he could not have remained unaware of the changes which shifts in trading pattems were having on Iranian society. By the 1850s, the import of British goods (textiles in particular) had begun to have profound effects on the Iranian economy, and Glasgow and Manchester cottons were a common sight in the Isfahan bazaar. The domestic handicrafts industry was collapsing in the face of imports to such an extent that, in Kashan and Yazd, the main traditional industry of silk-weaving virtually disappeared, In Yazd, the sik mills were being turned into opium gardens, and from the early 1860s opium began to dominate the export trade. As cities with their roles in the trading chain between Bushehr, Bandar Abbas and Bombay and with growing communities of British Indian merchants, the source of these changes can scarcely have gone unnoticed while Saft was in Kerman and Yaz. For centuries, Sufis had invariably pursued the same itineraries as merchants, and on the next leg of his joumeys Safi travelled along the well-known trade route from Yazd to Kerman. Like the joumey from Isfahan, this was an arduous route and when E.G. Browne made the same journey three decades later he came across a group of pilgrims bound for Karbala lost in the desert and dying of thirst. As a major trading city, Kerman, like Yazd, had begun to witness great changes in its economic life. Since so much of the city’s trade was done with Bombay, itis no surprise thatthe British Consul there, Keith Abbot, should have described the presence in Kerman of a great many British goods, and Hindu traders (especially from 208 JOURNAL OF PERSIAN STUDIES Shikarpur in Sind) were another notable feature of the city’s commercial life» But Kerman was also notable as the major centre of the Ni‘matullahis in Iran, and amid the approximately 25,000 people who lived in the city during this period there were apparently several thousand members of the order27 Nonetheless, a couple of decades later, Abbot's successor, Perey Sykes, put the number of Sufis in Kerman at only 1,200 out of a population that had by then reached some 49,000. Safi tells us that during this period he spent time in both Kerman and at the shrine of Shah Ni‘matullah Vali in Mahan, In Kerman itself he stayed at the Ni‘matullahi khdndgah, which probably acted as the main centre of the order at this time, Reflecting on this period, he recounts an event demonstrating the classic Sufi theme that the dervish should never speak of matters outside the shari‘a2 While there is certainly a classic trope-like quality to this anecdote, it would have certainly been of specific relevance to the period during which it was set in the early years ofthe reign of Nasir al-Din Shah (1264-1313/1848-96) when the Sufis found themselves in an extremely precarious position in Iran, We are similarly reminded in another anecdote, in which Saff tells us of an event that cccurred during his period in Kerman, concerning what was still a widespread and longstanding antipathy to the practices of the Sufis in Iranian society. This anecdote related to a disciple of Mushtaq ‘AIT Shah (4. 1206/1792), the follower of Ma‘sim ‘Ali Shah. ‘Mushtaq ‘Ali's disciple wanted to be buried atthe foot of the grave of his pir." The diseiple’s son, however, tumed against the dervishes and, demanding that his father should instead be buried in Najaf in accordance with more normative Shi‘te pious practice, had his father’s body dug up. While Safi explains that the disciple’s head mysteriously detached itself from the rest of the corpse and so remained in its original resting place, we are nonetheless reminded of the often fierce ‘opposition to the Sufis that no amount of miracles could preclude. Safi’s account of the origins during his stay in Kerman of his first long poem, the Zubdar al-asrar, is also of interest in this context." Ina classic Sufi picture of the origins and purpose of poetic inspiration, he describes how, among a gathering of fags in Kerman, hee sent several of the fagirs into a state of ecstasy by reciting a few of his own couplets. On witnessing this very Sufi manifestation of a poet's discovery of his ‘métier, Safi’s master Rahmat ‘Ali Shah instructed him to write a masnavi. What is of special interest, however, is Rahmat ‘Alls specific instructions that it should be a poem describing the secrets of the martyrdom of Husayn (asrdr-i shahadat-i haérat Husayn). For one of the key characteristics of [Ni‘matullah literature during the nineteenth century (in the Tara’ig al-haga’ig and Zayn al-Abidin s Kash al-ma‘érif, for example) was the emphasis on the compatibility of Sufism with Shiism, In Rahat ‘Ali Shah's command to Safi we therefore see a reflection ofthis wider apologetic programme in which the Ni‘matullahis were engaged, one against a wider background of both popular and clerical suspicion of Sufism as being a form of Sunnism that ‘was inherently opposed tothe basic Shi‘te principle of the authority ofthe Imam." twas also atthe command of Rabumat ‘Ali Shah that Safi made his first joumey to India, and in a Sufi biography we would expect nothing less than such a presentation of motive in terms of the command of a pir. While it has been suggested elsewhere that he first travelled to India as a merchant on family business, the Jong intertwining of piety and commerce in Islam by no ‘means render the two motives incompatible But as we have already seen, by the 1890s, Saft’s biographical self was that of a cosmopolitan Sufi of Tehran and not that of a travelling merchant from the provinces. However, before he departed Kerman for India he first asked his master for permission to visit the shrine ofthe order's founder Shah Ni‘matullah Vali at Mahan with the intention of performing a retreat (arba‘in). The shrine of Shah Ni‘matullah had originally been con- structed through the patronage of the ruler of the Deccan, Ahmad Shah Bahman (825-39/1422-36). Its celebrated tiled dome was later added during the Safavid period, while several graceful minarets and extra courtyards were constructed during the Qajar era. This revival of royal interest in the shrine had begun before Sal's arrival there in the early 1860s, for Muhammad Shah Qajar (r. 1250-64/1834-48) had already granted the shrine half of the land in Mahan.35 ‘The shrine’s interior was similarly rich, containing a large Safavid medallion carpet that was supposedly asiven by Shah ‘Abbas (though it was woven with the post mortem date of 1067/1656). Two decades after Saf’s visit, Percy Sykes observed fine shawls covering the sepulchre itself and adoming the walls were a pair of black buck hors that had been brought from India.>* ‘A PERSIAN SUFI IN BRITISH INDIA 205 ‘The shrine’s extensive library was also probably still in situ by the time of Safi’s visit during what amounted to its second heyday. The shrine maintained a regular community of dervishes who resided in the various chambers attached to the shrine for this purpose (E.G. Browne later rested in a qahvakhana located there for the entertainment of Visitors)2” Safi described how he prepared himself to undergo a retreat at the shrine but onthe frst night, Shah ‘Nimatullah appeared to him in a vision. The saint assured him that he was his guest in Mahan and then informed him that since he would in any case receive ‘everything that he desired, there was no need to make a retreat (chila) after all. Safi then saw the saint wander over to another dervish, a sayyid called Ahmad who was sleeping nearby, before disappearing quietly back into tomb. Safi offered the other dervish some tea, and in conversation leamed from him that Shah Ni‘matullth had come to gently wake him up but had made no special dispensation of the kind granted to Saf ‘Somewhat ironically, the anecdote is completed with the ‘moral that the kindness of God is never freely given, since one has always to do something to deserve it Such acts of special favour granted by a saint to an aspiring newcomer are one of the hallmarks of Sufi hagiography, and Safi here is clearly remembering his life according to a template established much earlier. What is, however, perhaps more interesting is the central role in which shrine visitation continued to be placed in a Sufi autobiography written inthe last years of the nineteenth century. For amid a circle in which some of the most radical changes in the organisation of Sul life for centuries were about to be effected through the establishment of the anjuman-i ukluvwat, we sti see a continued emphasis on the traditional Sut practices of zivdrat and the mystical election of Sufi authority through the visionary appearance of deceased ‘masters. In the last years of his life, Safi was therefore reaffirming the importance of the saints, their shrines and the visions through which they communicated with their chosen representatives. ‘TRAVELLING THROUGH A SUFI GEOGRAPHY As Saft’s vision of Shah Ni'matullah demonstrates, a life that was in tune with the will of the dead masters was a key feature of his spirituality. It was also a theme that was central to the narratology of his biographical life. Saf's travels make this particularly clear, for the itinerary which he trod is one which combined both a broadly Shitte and a specifically Ni‘matullahi sacred geography. His journey to India played a central role in this, Shah Ni‘matullah was himself regarded as having travelled to India in the course of his wanderings. But it was especially in the hands of his son, Khalilullah, and three of his grandsons that the order made its firmest connections with India through the patronage of Ahmad Shah Bahman at his capital of Bidar in the heart of the Deccan.5* Ahmad Shah’s patronage was suich that he not only contributed to building the shrine for Shah Ni'matullah at Mahan itself but also con- structed a large residence for Shih Ni'matullah’s family at Bidar whose surviving gateway is one of the masterpieces of Indo-Muslim _stone-carving.»* However, by the time of Safi’s journey to India, Bidar had long since fallen into provincial obscurity and, though it remained in the hands of the Nizam of Hyderabad, it was poorly connected to either Hyderabad ‘itself or to anywhere of importance in British India. But while the history of the Ni‘matullahis in India remains obscure, it does Seem that some of the descendants of Khalilullah retained a degree of lo importance in Bidar and survived to reach the notice of Ghulam Yazdani, the first surveyor of its monuments, in the 1920s. It is uncertain whether Safi had any idea of this branch of the order, and the account of his travels makes no reference to Bidar at all, He did, however, claim to have visited Hyderabad and to have spent time there in the khinagah of Riga ‘Ali Shah Dakani where hhe had gone in search of spiritual aid (himmat)s Safi reported thatthe khnagah was being run by an old pir of around ninety years of age by the name of Sayyid Huztr. While the name of Riza ‘AIi’s successor in Hyderabad is usually given as Husayn ‘Ali Shah, this does not negate the possibility of the appellation Sayyid Huzor as a ttle of respect. Ifthe latter name does have a generic quality to it, the chronology of the ‘journey in the mid-1860s does leave open the possibi ity that this elderly sayyid was one of the last disciples of Riza ‘Ali Shah himself, Although Sayyid Huétr spent his nights interpret- ing the Quran and his days with Saft in prayer and the chanting of litanies (awrdd), it was a rather different kind of Sufi activity that Safi chose to involve himself in during his stay in Hyderabad, He leamed telepathi- cally that there was a decrepit old dervish living nearby 206 JOURNAL OF PERSIAN STUDIES from whom he might learn much, although on reading his thoughts Sayyid Huzar tried to warm him away from this unseemly personage. Undeterred, Safi came across this dervish while wandering outside of the city ‘one evening, a scene as redolent of Indian miniatures of Sufi meetings as it is of classical poetic imagery and actual Sufi practice itself. Declaring that he had chosen badness (kiarabi) for himself and given success (abadi) to the pir at Riza ‘Ali Shah's khdnagah, this dervish appeared to be something like the dark twin of Sayyid Huzar. His dealings with Saft are interesting, however, in that they circled around the provision of opium. Safi was surprised when the dervish asked him for a box of opium, since Safi claimed that someone had given him a box of good opium on the very day that he had left Bombay for Hyderabad but that he had left it in Bombay. Having missed the opportunity to partake in this divinely ordained spell of narco-traf- ficking, in the event Safihad to borrow several tubes of ‘opium from Sayyid Huzar back at the Khdnagah and promise to replenish its stocks by sending more from Bombay when he retuned there. Itis difficult to know how to interpret this narrative. While there is possibly a moral dimension to it somewhere, what is more striking is the ethnographic insight it lends us into dervish life during this period. For Safi makes clear references to his own opium smoking around this time in his Zubdat al-asrar, and even the respectable E.G. Browne managed to fall into such bad habits in the company of the dervishes of Kerman a few decades later? Whether or not we can speak of an increase in opium use in this period is difficult to say, but the hugely increased produetion and trade in opium in such cities as Yazd and Kerman from the 1860s onwards provides an interesting factor from the perspective of supply. It is certainly notable, however, that shorlly after Safi’s death, the leader of a rival branch of the Ni‘matullahis in Iran, Nar ‘Ali Shah Gunabadi (d. 1918), wrote a treatise condemning both the Sufi and the popular use of opium that he saw as being so widespread in the early years of the twentieth century. But placing these wider social factors aside, in Safi’s opium story and in the poem in his diwan, in ‘which he attributed the heartache after his wife’s death ‘and his general world-weariness as the causes of his ‘opium smoking, we manage to break through the stan- dardising imagery of Sufi biography to feel a very ‘human presence that is far from the conventional picture of the Muslim saint. Beyond this specifically Ni‘matullahi geography of Kerman, Mahan and Hyderabad, Safi’s journeys also reflect the place of travel within a more familiar mode of Shi‘ite piety through the pilgrimages which he made to Mecca, Karbala and Najaf. Interestingly, his eventual departure from India for Mecca was prompted by a meeting he had with a yogi outside the port city of Surat, Saft explained to the yogi that it had not been possible to make his arrangements forthe Aaj and that hhe must wait another whole year before he could depart, but the yogi promised him that all of his arrangements would be made ihe hurried. When Saft retumed (presumably to Surat), he encountered his friend ‘Ali Shah, the son of Aga Khan Maballati and future Aga Khan I, who informed him that a ship was indeed due to depart for Mecea the next morning. Saft ‘was careful to inform the reader that ‘Alt Shah’s ‘mother personally prepared his belongings and brought them to him and that it was in the company of some fourteen servants that he eventually boarded ship. Clearly, this was very much to be a pilgrimage made in the style of the wealthy religious notable or merchant. Despite the generosity of the family of Aqa Khan Maballti, Safi finished the narrative by pointing out that this was in fact all due to the mystical help (nafas, literally “breath”) of the yogi. 1's integration into the mercantile world of his age is further hinted at by the reception that he recalled on reaching Jiddah, On arriving there, he went to the house of one of the city’s merchants with whom he clearly had an arrangement and presented him with a barat, the draft or payment order that was the basis of ‘Qajar commercial life.“ It was only after this rather ordinary entrance to the Hijaz that Safi’s picaresque adventures began. Sailing further down the coast in a small boat, both he and his oarsman were washed overboard. Just as the waves began to pass over his head, Safi sought refuge with God and an anonymous figure suddenly appeared to lift him to safety and bring his oarsman back into the boat to retum and rescue hhim, Such maritime interventions were of course speciality of Khizr and as such figure in many other Sufi narrative traditions. But Safi leaves a deliberate ambiguity over whether the reader is meant to identify the rescuer with Khir, with Safi's own pir or else directly withthe intervention of God himself, Having retumed to Jiddah and set off in the direction of Mecca by donkey, Safi’s misfortunes began again. There is a slightly comical air to the A PERSIAN SUFI IN BRITISH INDIA 207 descriptions of him bouncing uncomfortably on his donkey through the cold of the desert night and his superior Persian references to his donkey-keeper as an ignorant Arab (‘arab-i nafahm). His discomfort was such that eventually he had to get down from his donkey and he soon found himself left behind in the desert. Once again, providence intervened and a mysterious figure (mard-i ghaybi) appeared to lead jim into the path of the caravan of a hospitable Ottoman. Comfortingly, the Ottoman gentleman treated Safi with much respect, lending him servants to ‘walk beside his well-saddled donkey and a silk cloak to throw around his shoulders, Here we surely catch something of the urbane tastes and sensibility of this late Qajar gentleman dervish. After completing the ay and retuming to India, Saft decided to make a visit to Najaf before retuming to Iran. Here we see him partake in a standard aspect of Shi‘te piety by combining a visit to Mecca with a pilgrimage to the ‘afabar of Iraq, While in Karbala he tells us that he performed a retreat during which he received many spiritual bounties (fitzan.s ‘As presented in Safi’s memoirs, the itinerary of his travels ties together several overlapping and comple- ‘mentary aspects of Iranian spirituality, through fusing together broadly Shi‘ite and specifically Ni'matullahi destinations. It is perhaps no coincidence that the oral tradition of the life of Shah Ni'matullah Val Sykes collected in Mahan described the as comprising Mecca, Karbala, Najaf, India, Shiraz and Mahan and his nisba (like the altemative nisba of Safi hhimself) as Yazdi® For Shah Ni‘matullah’s Wanderlegende in this way invoked a sacred geography and a travel itinerary that was precisely mirrored in Safi ‘Ali Shah’s own presentation of his life as a dervish, IRAN’S INDIAN WINDOW TO THE WORLD. While certain stages on Safi’s joumeys clearly associate him with a long-standing sacred and ‘mercantile geography, it is his visit to Bombay that connects him most clearly to his own age. AS Bombay's commercial importance increased throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, its importance in social and cultural terms was similarly beginning to develop. By the mid-century, the city’s ruling classes (comprising prominent Parsi merchants as well as British administrators and merchants) ‘embarked on a programme of civic improvements that gave the face of Bombay a physiognomy more fitting with its elevated place in the world of commerce. While Lucknow and Cairo in this period saw “oriental” cities being replaced or revised into architectonic symbols of European style modemity, the burghers of Bombay were able to create a public architecture for a city which had little by way of an older history to bury or compromise.#7 The city’s dockyards and the adjoining esplanades were one of the great architectur- al projects of the age. As nineteenth-century travellers between the two ports remarked, in its monolithic basalt or carefully whitewashed plaster Bombay’s seaward public face could scarcely offer the traveller a greater contrast to the mud brick walls and date palm dwellings of Bushehr.* Whatever its bold strides towards modemity, Bombay was by no means a British city at heart. With the mix of economic and cultural innovations in which the city’s different communities took part, Bombay ‘was in many respects the first great cosmopolis of the modern age. The commercial prominence of the Parsis in Bombay’ was such that by the 1850s their economic ‘wealth had found social and cultural expression in the patronage of educational institutions, charities and libraries. One feature of the Parsi renaissance was an increased interest in their Persian heritage, resulting in the publication of works in Persian on this subject and the renewal of direct contact with Iran. The cultural and trade relations ofthe Parsis with Iran were also the ‘means by which far-teaching changes were introduced into Iranian society, and Bombay provides much of the key to this. The Bombay Parsis sent a series of instruc- tors (most famously Manikji Limjt Hataria) to help their co-religionists in Iran, founding the first modern schools and, via the anjuman-i zartushtiyan of Yaz (c: 1275/1858), one of the earliest modem associations in Iran, In addition to the movement of Zoroastrians between Iran and Bombay, the latter also became a notable centre of Baha’ activities as refugees from Iran gathered therein increasing numbers during the second half of the centurys® Some sense of the importance of Bombay among Iranian Sufis may be seen from the number of references to the ety in Tard’ig al-haga’ig as a place of both publishing and visitation by figures associated with the Ni‘matullahi order ° Iranian Shi'ites also formed their own distinct community in nineteenth-century Bombay, possessing 208 JOURNAL OF PERSIAN STUDIES their own mosque and Husayniyya. Like the Parsis, the Iranian Shi‘ites of Bombay were principally a merchant community and were much involved in the trading of textiles, horses, dried fruits and opium between Bushehr and Bombay.*! Official statistics record the presence of 1,639 Iranians in Bombay in 1864 out of a total population of 816,562, though given the transitory nature of this community the figure seems likely to have been an underestimate? However, their influence often far outweighed their demographic weight. As such, politics and reform formed the intellectual aspect of this traffic and it was perhaps Jamal al-Din al- Afghani (1254-1314/1838-97) who was the most sig- nificant Iranian Muslim visitor to Bombay during this period. Indeed, it was in Bombay around 1273/1857 that al-Afghani first came into contact with Europeans and leamed of their domination of a Muslim society that would become the main topic of his long career:> On a retum visit t© Bombay and Hyderabad between 1296/1879 and 1299/1882, al-Afghant wrote and published in Persian the first of his writings, including his major work, the Hagiqati madhhab-i naychari va bayin-i hai naycharivéin, written in rejection of the ideas of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. This text was first published as a lithograph in Hyderabad in 1298/1881, with a second edition soon following in Bombay.** It was not until 1848 that Bombay’s most prominent Iranian citizen arrived, when Aga Khan Maballati moved from his early period of exile in CCaleutta to his new home in Bombay. Safi’ fiend Aga ‘Ali Shah had joined his father Aga Khan Maballati in Bombay in 1268/1852. After this date, the city also became the focus for the Isma‘lli communities that, like the Zoroastrians and Twelver Shi'ites, were spread throughout India and tran, partly due to Aqa ‘Ali ‘Shah's visits to the various Ism&‘lli communities ofthe subcontinent.S> Within a short period, Agi Khan Maballati and his successor Aga ‘Ali Shah Aqa Khan Il acquired the rights to an income from different sma‘ communities and institutions (shrines in particular) that afforded them a social prominence that brought respectability in British eyes. Safi's time in India during the mid-1860s probably’ coincided with the beginning of the Agi Khins’ greatest wealth in Bombay and by 1870 Aga Khan Mahallti entertained the Duke of Edinburgh on his visit to India, while the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) visited in 1875.% By 1880, Saf’s friend Aga Ali Shah Aga Khan II had been appointed to the Bombay Imperial Legislative Council and was also a leading patron of the Westem India Turf Clubs? Unsurprisingly, as probably the most prominent and wealthy Iranians in Bombay, such honours also won them a renewed prominence in the eyes of Iranian visitors to the city. Nonetheless, Iranians also entered other hallowed institutions of colonial life in Bombay, and the Persian consul during this period, Mirza Muhammad ‘Ali Khan, was an Honorary Member of the Freemason Lodge Concord at Byculla* The relationship between the Ni'matullahi order and the leaders of the Isma‘liyya may stretch back as far as the sixteenth century, and for his part Safi made his own contributions to this shared history.*° For when hhe announced his intention to leave Bombay for Baghdad, Aqa ‘Ali Shah asked him to deliver a gift to ‘certain Shaykh Murtaza in Baghdad and pass on ‘message to him concerning his marital intentions. Saft claims that, while in Najaf, he helped to negotiate the ‘marriage of Aqa ‘AIT Shah, the future Aga Khan I with the daughter of Shams al-Dawla. The nature of this mission may well suggest that Aqa ‘Ali Shah also contributed to Saf’s travel expenses. Certainly, Saft presents himself as having acted as an apologist for both Aqa ‘Ali Shah in particular and forthe Isma‘iis in general. For when Shaykh Murtaza took great exception to Aga ‘Ali Shah and his people, Safi defended them as Shittes who as descendants of Fatima were also sayyids.® Adding a characteristcally esoteric touch to his defence of Isma‘ilism, he also declares that they were people of gnosis (‘urafa). Saft claims that his protestations worked so well that the Shaykh consented to the marriage. But what is perhaps most interesting about this episode is the involvement of a Sufi in a polemical defence of Isma‘Tlism, adding an interesting footnote to the history of Ni'matallahi and Isma‘ili relations. Safi ends the anecdote about his interview with Shaykh Murtaza by recalling how the sshaykh had said that he had read his Zubdat al-asrar and found it a good but difficult book. In both a defence and promotion of the truth claims of the Zubda, Safi replied that this difficulty came from the fact that he had written it while in a state of ecstasy (jazba) during which the reigns of authorship were out of his controls! According to Saft’s own words the Zubdat al-asrar was completed in Bombay and published there in 1289/1872 withthe help of Aqa ‘Alt ‘Shah, “whom God,” he asserted, “had made a friend of [A PERSIAN SUFI IN BRITISH INDIA 209 Safi’s memoirs reveal more about his relationship with Aga ‘Ali Shah and his family in Bombay. We have already mentioned his descriptions of the roles played by Aqa ‘Ali Shah and his mother in helping prepare for both his hai and his visit to the ‘atabat. However, Saft also recounts several more anecdotes in which Aga ‘AIT Shah and Aga Khan Mahallat feature. One of these describes a party given by the latter to celebrate the ‘month of Ramazan Safi was invited and “shown lots of kindness” by Aga Khan Mahallai. During the course of the gathering, the later asked one of his intimates @ question concerning the reason for ‘Ali being addressed as ‘Ali ‘Imrin during prayers. The person gave a false answer, but not wishing to embarrass him Saft recalled that he chose to stay silent. However, in what is hardly ‘one of his most endearing moments, the next moming Safi was unable to resist meeting Aga Khan again privately and explaining the correct answer to his question. Evidently pleased with the answer Safi gave, Aga Khan sent him a purse containing one hundred and ten gold coins (ashrafis). AS in almost all of the anecdotes in Safi's memoirs, Saf! concludes the narrative by giving an esoteric moral to the story conceming the bounties that God grants us if we conquer our lower soul (naf). But there is clearly also a self-aggrandising element to the story, for in it we are reminded of Saf’s claims to the possession of normative Shi'ite leaming as well as the ‘fan ofthe dervish. On a more material level, we also have a clear admission of ‘Agi Khan Mahallat’s lavish patronage of Saft In another anecdote, Safl makes a reference to having been in the company of Aga Khan Mahala during a visit tothe city of Puna, and as we saw earlier, he also describes himself as being with Aqa ‘Ali Shah in Surat. This latter claim certainly has a ring of eredi- bility in view of Aga ‘Ali Shah’s journeys during the 1860s to visit the Ismaili communities of Gujarat and ‘Sindh, Clearly, these were grand associations of which inthe last years of his life Saf remained proud enough to mention several times. Although only hinted at in the oblique style in which royal or courtly associations regularly feature in Sufi hagiographical writings, we should bear in mind that such a friendship brought recognition in Tehran no less than Bombay. Nasir al- Din Shah, for example, set a diamond-studded robe of honour from Tehran to Aga ‘Ali Shah after he succeeded his father to the title of Aga Khan, Safi’s relationship with the family of Aqa Khan Maballati in Bombay positioned him among. a number of other Iranian visitors to the city who enjoyed the hospitality of a family that, given Aqa Khan Maballati’s earlier political ambitions, was in some senses an Iranian court in exile, Na’ib al-Sadr Shirazi (4. 1344/1926), the Ni'matullahi redactor of the history of the masters of the order, the Tara’ig al-haga'ig, stayed in Bombay for a year in 1298/1881 with Aga Khan’s family, for example. The family’s hospitality ‘was by no means limited to Isma‘tli or Ni‘matullahi visitors, and in c, 1292/1875 the great Baha’ ‘missionary Jamal Effendi (d, 1316/1898) visited Aga Khan II in Bombay prior to making his proselytising joumeys through South-East Asia." Another reflector of Sali’s experience was Abu ’/-Hasan Mirza (better known as Shaykh al-Ra’is). A co-agitator of al- Afghani, in 1312/1894 this dissident Qajar prince published his Jf al-Islam, the first Persian work on Pan-Islamism, while also staying in Bombay as a guest of the Aga Khan.* Like his relationship with Aga Khan, Safi’s publi- cation in Bombay of his first work also therefore places him within a wider current of the writing and publishing activities of Iranian exiles and other Persophone scholars with connections to the city. The Iranian Shiite scholar Ahmad b, Muhammad ‘Ali Isfahani Behbahani had visited Bombay in 1220/1805 ‘en route to Hyderabad and had penned a graphic account of Bombay. The city maintained a place in Iranian letters throughout the nineteenth century, and in the early 1860s served as the refuge of the anti-Qajar poet Shaykh Hasan-i Shirizi, from where he wrote a satirical poem on Nasir al-Din Sha that so incensed the king as to contribute strongly to his adoption of a censorship system (sansir) in Tran.” While Bombay's role in the development of printing in Persian is of as much interest as its role as a sanctuary for political refugees, the two were inescapably connected. At the heart of Safi’s own circle in Bombay, the city’s most notable exile, Aga Khan Maballati himself, published a lithographic edition of his memoirs in Bombay in 1278/1861. Published a full decade before the Zubdat al-asrar, itis a clear indication of the links of Aga Khan’s family to Bombay's quickly developing business in Persian lithographic publishing. Such activities continued throughout the century. We have already mentioned the publishing efforts of al-Afhant and Shaykh al-Ra'is, and to these should be added the works of more religiously motivated dissidents like “Abdullah ibn Ahmad al-Ahs®’, the son of the founder 210 JOURNAL OF PERSIAN STUDIES ‘of the Shaykhi school Shaykh Ahmad Absa (4 1241/1826). His biography of his father, entitled Sharh-ihalét-i Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahs@7, was published in Bombay in 1310/1893. The later Nitmatullahi guest of Aqa Khan Il, Na’ib al-Sadr, wrote like Safi an account of his travels to India and Mecca, which, like the Zubdat al-asrar, was first published as a lithograph in Bombay in 1306/1889. Reflecting the discursive as well as. practical importance of travel in Sufism, much of the book in fact concems the theory of travel. However, Bombay's Persian publishing industry concemed newspapers as well asthe vanity projects of the wealthy. Although the first Persian newspapers were published in Calcutta, by the 1850s they were also being printed in Bombay, some of them becoming known in Iran Mu’ayyid al-Islam Jalal al-Din al- Husayni (4, 1929), the major Iranian reformer and publisher of the reformist newspaper Hab! al-matan, hhad begun his life as a merchant travelling to India and ‘was in exile in Bombay in the early 1890s.” Bombay also acted throughout the nineteenth century as the intellectual and publishing centre for a revival in Zoroastrian scholarship. Like poems and newspapers, the fruits of these priestly Zoroastrian efforts were swiftly shipped to Iran to reinvigorate the sleeping Zoroastrian masses, in a way that paralleled the activities of Muslim and Babi political exiles and reformers.” ‘The traffic was not only one way, and a central role in the development of Bombay's Persian publishing industry was played by Mirza Muhammad Shirazi (b. 1269/1852-53).” In 1285/1868-69 this entrepreneur from Shiraz opened one of Bombay's first Persian- Tanguage bookstores and publishing houses. In the following years he published new editions of various classical works, such as Dawlatshah Samargandi’s Tagkirat al-shu‘ara, as well as several commemorative writings of his own conceming female poets and histo- riography. Over time, works on the doctrines of Shitism also became recipients of publication, including an edition of Samarqand?’s Aydt al-vldye, a work upholding traditional Shi'ite claims of ‘Ali's succession to Mubammad, from the press of Mirza ‘Muhammad, The latter's concer with poetry and his- toriography was reflected more generally in other Persian publications in Bombay during the 1870s and 1880s, when the publication of histories of the Muslim world (including a translation of Sir John Maleolm’s History of Persia), as well as of England, competed with new editions of classical poetry and the ‘occasional newly-patronised poetic work. Numerous lithographic editions of the Masnavi of Riimi were also published in Bombay from the 1260s/1840s onwards, against the background of which Saft’s own imitation Zubdat al-asrar was published.” A comparison between the numbers of Persian books published in Iran and India during the nineteenth century gives final proof ofthe importance of Persian lithography in India, for it has been calculated that while 2,569 books were published in Iran during this period, at least 912 Persian books were published in India. It is worth noting in this context that books could be legally exported from Bombay without incurring customs duties. Here then, at the economic heart of British colonial power in India, small but prominent trans- national communities with ties to Tran sponsored small but flourishing spate of Persian literary production in the age of the printing press. Asa Shiite religious poem in a deliberately classi cising form written by an Iranian merchant-cum-Sufi in association with a member of Bombay’s permanent ‘community of Iranian exiles, the Zubdat al-asrar is in ‘many respects a typical product of the Persian printed world of books that was evolving in Bombay in the second half ofthe nineteenth century. For like the pub- lication of his poem, Safi’s presence in Bombay was no less a part of a wider movement of religious and political exiles from Iran, hinting at the undervalued role which the city played in ran’s history during the nineteenth century. IRANIAN ORIENTALISM OR SUFI FORMS OF RESISTANCE? Despite its many fascinating tales, Safi's descrip- tion of hs time in India is equally interesting for what it fails to mention. For in his entire account of his travels in India we do not hear of a single encounter ‘with a European, Nor is there any sense of his entering a domain governed by new political ideas, by a new power or by new forms of technology. Instead, his India remains a realm of white-bearded Sufi elders, venerable Mustim notables and contortionist. yogis (darvish-i-jitgi) Wt was miracle and magic rather than science which proved for Safi the chief wonder of India, He relates four separate stories concerning his, A PERSIAN SUFI IN BRITISH INDIA au ‘meetings with yogis. While two of them fit into a wider narrative framework with which Safi and his companions interact, the two others almost stand alone as the kind of exemplary tales long familiar to the Persian literary tradition. In Surat, Safi went to visit ‘one such yogi with a companion and along the way the companion killed a sparrow with his whip.” When they arrived at the yogi’s residence, he was telepathi- cally aware of this act of cruelty and responded by not allowing Safi’s companion to enter his home. ‘Acquiescing, Saft entered alone and, after discussing the nature of perfection with the yogi, lft to rejoin his companion and return to Surat, noticing along the way thatthe yogi had even correctly described the sex of the dead sparrow. In the other story of this kind, Saft was in the company of Aqa Khan Maballati in Puna when he saw a Hindu go to his temple to pray before an idol (but) in the hope of receiving four rupees.”” When Aga Khan later unwittingly gave the Hindu precisely that sum, to Aqa Khan's annoyance the Hindu rushed back to thank the statue instead. The Hindu then chided Aga Khan’s egoism by explaining that in reality itis only the master of all masters (piri pirdin) who can bestow anything, ‘What is clear from these anecdotes is Safi's respect for the yogis as men of divine wisdom and, indeed, he referred to one of them as being among the pure and enlightened ones. He is also keen to present himself as having learmed from them, whether through engaging in learned discussions or simply through hearing their inspired gnomic utterances. He is in this sense only positioning himself within a long tradition of Sufi travellers to India who were regarded as having leamed much from their encounters with India’s spiritual masters, including Hallaj, Fakhr al-Din ‘Iraqi and Shah Ni‘matullah himself. It is noteworthy, however, that in his shorter biography Safi speaks only of having simply met with recluses (giisha nashindn) and the “people of ‘ALi (murtazan) rather than with yogis or Hindus more generally.” It is an earlier tradition of Sufi encounters with India that is more clearly echoed in Saft’s other two anecdotes concerning the yogis. One is presented as a story that he heard while in Surat and recounts a rather bloodthirsty series of events by which a yogi allowed a guest to stay in his house, who then successfully plotted to rob his wife of her jewels before cutting off her head.” However, rather than break the principles of hospitality, the yogi allowed his treacherous guest to leave freely and even took the blame for the murder himself, Safi clearly thought this gesture was marvellous, and the yogi certainly echoes a very notable tradition of anti-uxorial sentiments in Persian Sufi literature." But in his rather skewed fashion, the yogi also of course echoes the classic Sufi theme of chivalry Gavanmardi). The second anecdote of this type concems a yogi who has spent so many years holding his arm in the air that a weed has taken root in it! Safi enquires the reason for this, and the yogi tells hhim that in his next life he hopes to become a king. On hearing this, Safi mourns that such efforts should be so wasted when, had they been performed solely for God, they could have led the yogi to the highest stations (magamat) of wisdom. Such an employment of stereo- typical images of Hindus was by no means new to Sufi literature in Persian, and Safi’s literary past master Rami also famously included an allegorical story of a Hindu and his forbidden lover in his Magnavi® ‘There is a certain gusto and charm about these anecdotes, a spectacular and comic element that has the undeniable ring of the traditional teller of tales. And indeed, in his short autobiography, Safi speaks of trying to refrain from recounting his many extraotdi- nary travel adventures for fear that they should be thought of as travellers’ tall tales (afsana-yi siyahatgardn). But of course, as the writer of two ‘masnavis, Safi was in part a storyteller, and it is perhaps only natural that imagination and memory should intertwine in the recounting of his travels. Moreover, the exoticism and stock imagery of the yori stories also reminds us of the gissa tradition which, transmogrified into the form of lithographic editions of such old tale cycles as the adventures of Aba Hamza and such new ones as the adventures of Hajt Baba of Isfahan, was undergoing renewed popularity in Qajar Iran! What is more remarkable, however, is the contrast that Safi’s tales of an exotic and mystical Hindustan make with other travel narratives that survive in abundance from Qajar Iran in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nasir al-Din Shah had already published his own travel diary, describing his journey to both Karbala and Europe and in the late 1880s the Siydihatndma-yi Ibrahim Beg also began to appear. The accounts of the pilgrimages to Mecca of Sayf al-Dawla in 1279/1863 and Mirza Husayn Farahani also fall into this genre.* Yet in these travel diaries, it is the modemity of the outside world that is stressed, at times by explicit comparison with the back- 212 JOURNAL OF PERSIAN STUDIES ‘wardness of Qajar Iran.* (Among Indian Muslims the same point may be made with regard to the nineteenth. century travelogues of Munshi Ismail and Sir Say ‘Almad Khan that describe their visits to London.)*” The impact of the technological and political modemity of the outside world was therefore one of the core characteristics of Iranian travel during the nineteenth century. And this was no less the case with forms of travel carried out with what we might regard a traditional format or intentionality, such as the ‘hij. For by the second half ofthe century, the principal route for the pilgrimage to Mecca from Iran brought pilgrims into contact with the great motorised “fire wheels” in the harbour at Alexandria, for pumping ‘water to the city as well as introducing them to rail travel via the Alexandria-Cairo railway. Many Iranian travellers described their encounters with these wonders, and for the early industrialist Haj Muhammad Amin al-Zarb, the experience of European technology while performing the hajj in 1279/1863 proved one of the key moments in his career. ‘There is something extraordinary, then, in the utter absence of modemity in the stories of Safi’s travels. Like al-Afghani, he travelled to Bombay and Hyderabad in the wake of the repression of Indian Muslims that was an after-ffect of the Great Revolt of 1857, Yet in Safi’s memoirs we hear of no political awakening or sense of a threat to Muslim civilisation at the hands of the British, even though in discussing the “still current” prophecies of Shah Ni‘matullah Vali, Perey Sykes claimed that one of his prophecies was “on everyone's lips” during the mid-nineteenth century ‘and was even “a cause, ifnot a main one, ofthe Indian ‘Matiny”.® Like his contemporary and fellow Isfahani merchant Amin al-Zarb, Safi would also have encoun- tered new forms of technology on his travels. Asia’s first train service had begun in Bombay in 1853, carrying 450,000 passengers init frst year, and by the time of Saf’s arival the city was connected by long distance routes to Baroda in Gujarat and other destina- tions.” With its rich mix of different religious and social groups, its huge modem docks, its clock-towers and buildings for such new institutions as its university, Bombay was at the centre of all manner of social and technological changes during the 1860s. Yet of all these things, almost the only trace of the nineteenth century to enter Safi’s travel narrative is a reference to ‘telegraph in the account of the murder of the yogi's wit. In Iran itself, the telegraph was laid from 1858 ‘onwards, and by the 1870s the first railway conces- sions were being granted; it therefore seems possible that, by the time of the writing of Safi’s memoirs during the 1890s, the introduction of such technologies to Iran had robbed his memory of the impression they hhad made upon his younger self. With his connections in Tehran to a court both infatuated and familiar with the trappings of European technological advancement, it is also possible that any reference to his early ‘encounter with European science may have presented Safi as being unduly provincial. Certainly, this would have proved an effect at odds with the general rhetorical drift of the memoirs in presenting Safl as a well-travelled gentleman of wide learning and experience. But despite these considerations, the fact remains that the India which Safi chose to remember and describe was one that was devoid of some of the most basic facts of the age. Instead of being the location for social and technological changes wrought by the coming of European domination, Safi’s India is by contrast a realm of leamed Sufis, gymnosophist yogis and expatriate Iranian aristocrats. It is at once a timeless and a pre-colonial Indi India had always possessed an aura of mystery and magic for much of the wider Muslim world, and Safi’s travel narratives were by no means the first to emphasise these qualities. Such earlier Persian trave- logues as those of the Sufi-inclined seventeenth- century travellers Mutribt al-A‘sam Samargandi and Mahmid b. Amir Vali are similarly replete with observations on the magical and exotic qualities of India and its peoples! With its descriptions of the author's adventures in India and Arabia and a host of other regions, the Sufi travel narrative Bustan al- siyaha of Haji Zayn alAbidin Tamkin (4. 1253/1837-38) undoubtedly provides the closest parallel to the account of Saft’s travels, though it is not possible to draw any conclusions regarding the influence of the Bustan al-sivaha.” But des earlier tradition of conceptualising and writ India, the social and technological changes which Safi would have observed in India surely suggest that hhe was not a passive continuer of this convention in Persian leters. Rather, the very fact of what might be described as a Persian orientalism seems in Safi’s ‘writing to be in itself an act of deliberate resistance to European knowledge and the forms of modernity it represented.” A PERSIAN SUFI IN BRITISH INDIA 213 In his travel narratives, omission seems to act as a form of rhetoric. It is a rhetoric that suggests that, the enlightened eyes of the dervish, what India has to offer of value is nota second-hand model of European ‘modernity but rather an authentic and indigenous form of learning which is manifestly superior to other forms ‘of knowledge. For what India represented to Safi was authenticity and antiquity, represented in both a general form through references to the wisdom of the yogis and in a specific form by reference to persons and places associated with his own tradition of Ni‘matullah ‘rfan. Safi’s pregnant ignoring of the effects of modernity and colonialism may therefore be read as a strategy of defending the branch of Muslim Knowledge which he represented. But at the same time, in disregarding the modernity of the India which hhe encountered in favour of a timeless India of sages and wonders, it was a form of inverse orientalism that, with its own brand of rejection of technological ‘modemity, is comparable with the India of contempo- rary Western travellers If much has been made of this meaningful absence, it is because it fits in both with what may be seen as a central characteristic of Safi’s wider writings and also connects him with a broader intel- lectual movement in Mustim thought during the second half of the nineteenth century. For like the biographical writings, perhaps the most striking char- acteristic of Saft’s writings is their studied continuity with an earlier tradition of Muslim thought, to the exclusion of any apparent form of European influence. As. traveller, we have compared him to al- Afghani and Amin al-Zarb, but a similarly fruitful comparison may be made of him with the poet Hal. ‘A few years after Safi had published his Zubdat al- asrar in Bombay in 1289/1872, in 1296/1879 the Urdu poet Altaf Husayn Hall published in Delhi his ‘own long poem, the Musaddas.* The central concems of this poem — the loss of Muslim spiritual and intellectual greatness, the effects of colonisation, the sense of an end to a tradition signalled in Hali’s choice of language and style — were the very issues which Safi’s own poetry neatly side-stepped. Whil some respects we have seen his literary career in India making him very much a man of his age, when compared to al-Afghani and Hali, his reaction to India’s situation in the nineteenth century could not have been more different. CONCLUSIONS If we have heard little of Safi’s suspected early profession of a merchant, then this can only remind us that he was telling his story as a Sufi and not as a ‘merchant. It was a specifically Sufi narratology that he offered, and in the previous pages, itis something of the interface of this Sufi narratology with the external world that we have seen. It is, therefore, as a remembered life, as the memoirs of a successful pro- fessional Sufi living out his last years in Tehran, that wwe need to understand Safi’s tales of his early travels and adventures. In their moulding of the personal and the stereotypical, we see something of the interface between selthood and desire that frames so much ofthe experience of the mystic. At the same time, we see ‘memory as a powerful means of shaping a vision of the world, a private world which, in Saft’s case, resisted ‘movements from both within and outside Islam to dis- enfranchise it of the meanings which for centuries it hhad contained for Sufi seekers. Between Isfahan, Bombay and Tehran, Safi stood at the very centre of the economic, technological and cultural changes that were transforming India, Iran and the Persianate civilisation that had tied them together for the best part of a millennium. Unlike thinkers like al-Afghani and poets like Hali, who in their different ways tried to meet the threat of Europe head on, Safi’s response was an attempt to reaffirm the essential validity of Islamic ‘fan through a vigorous formula of continuity with all of its traditional forms. On the one hand, this involved his self-presentation as a wandering dervish pursuing a vision quest with the help of both living and dead masters in accordance with the classic models of Sufi hagiography. On the other hand, it involved him in a literary career charac- terised by writing in the masnavi form in an explicit and self-confessed imitation of Jalal al-Din Rami (d. 672/1273), whom he frequently quotes in his writings. Yet this does not mean that Safi’s writings remain untouched by the currents of his age, and the uunadomed simplicity of his prose style alone is testament to his connection with wider currents in the Persian literature of the Qajar period, Like the revival inthe use of Persian for works of mystical philosophy, Saf’s prose writings are no less connected to the currents of his age than those of his direct Ni‘matullahi predecessors, 214 JOURNAL OF PERSIAN STUDIES Sal's programme of continuity, with a form of Muslim knowledge kept apart from and “unreformed” by European thought and its Muslim transmitters, had ‘much in common with that of the North African defender of the tradition of Ibn ‘Arabi, ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri (4. 1300/1883). While ‘Abd al-Qadir’s early life of militant resistance to European domination of his native Algeria is well-known, it is important that ‘we see the threads of continuity in his subsequent Sufi “retirement” from the world as no less an act of resistance than the events of his early career. Like Safi, “Abd al-Qadir also connected the experience of his own life with the lives of earlier Sufis by literally walking in the Footsteps of Tbn ‘Arabi during his years in Damascus. As Safi went to Risa ‘All Shah’s khanagah in Hyderabad, ‘Abd al-Qadir lived in Ibn “Arabi’s house in Damascus and was eventually buried beside his grave. ‘Abd al-Qadir's major written work, the Kitab al-Mawégif, reaffirms the validity of tradi- tional Sufi knowledge no less than the writings of Safls® And like Saf’s biographical writings, his book recounts ‘Abd al-Qadir’s visionary encounters with the souls of the dead masters, while in his attempts to save and publish the writen works of Ibn ‘Arabi himself, “Abd al-Qadir is no less keen to take practical steps towards the preservation of the tradition he represents, The career and writings of the nineteenth-century Turkish Sufi Shaykh Ahmad —Gumdshkhanevi (1228-1311/1813-94), whose Jami* al-usil also reworked ideas drawn from Ibn ‘Arabi, may also provide a parallel with Safi.% How far the deliberate conformity with tradition in Safi’s writings was actually a feature of his wider intel- Jectual and personal life outside his writings, is very difficult to assess. With its radical de-centring of the place of the Sufi master, the emergence of the anjuman-i ukhuvvat out of Safi’s Sufi order in 1317/1899, within a few months of his death, suggests that the continuity with tradition emphasised in Saft’s ‘writing may not have always been the dominant note in his wider intellectual life. The emergence of the anjuman from the circle of his closest followers does suggest that ideas of modemisation and reform were present in his direct milieu. Moreover, in the notice in the Tara’ig al-hagi’ig on the actual recorder of Safi’s travel reminiscences, his brother Aga Riza Huzir ‘Ali, it is related that many dervishes (Aga Riza included) had taken to learning the new French and “European knowledge” (‘ulim-icjadidi farangi) >” This direct context of the adaptation of European ideas makes the traditionalist tone of Sa’s travels and writings all the more striking. While litte is known of the details of Saf’ life in ‘Tehran during the years after his retum from India, we do possess an account of a possible meeting with him in the writings of the British Consul, Perey Sykes. Around 1897, Sykes was in Nain where he visited the shrine of a Sufi by the name of Haji ‘Abd al-Wahha. ‘At the shrine Sykes encountered a Sufi by the name of Hajt Aga Hasan, who, he added, later died in 1899, While we cannot make any certain identification, both the name and death date of this figure suggest that he may have been Safi ‘Ali Shah himself. As his early biography in the Sharaf shows, Safi was better known in his lifetime as Aqa Haji Mirza Hasan, and we may recall that hs frst teacher originated in Navin.%* Sykes described this Haji Aga Hasan as “an extraordinarily well-read and travelled dervish”, and during their con- versation the subject tumed towards a discussion of the ruins and sculptures at Persepolis. Sykes’ Persian companion, Nasr Allah Khan, became depressed atthe thought that Persepolis showed the state of decline in which the Iranians had fallen. “Be of good cheer”, Hat Aga Hasan responded to him, “We in those early days cared only for material progress, which we have now abandoned for higher things, whereas Europeans have just reached the stage of material progress.” While there is no way of knowing if it was Saft ‘Alt Shah whom Sykes met, for Sykes's personal diaries have not survived, the words of this “extraordinarily well-read and travelled dervish” clearly present Sufi forms of mystical knowledge as a self-conscious alternative to European models of modemity. Such an attitude was in itself part of a wider problematisation in Qajar Iran of the nature of cultural integrity as addressed in the late nineteenth century by such intellectuals as ‘Abd al- Rahim Talibaf (4. 1329/1911), whose own Masai al- ‘mulsinin had structured teachings around a (fictional) narrative."® This may suggest that the defence of traditional knowledge also acted as a form of cultural resistance to European hegemony. Notes | This article was written with the support of the Gordon Milburn Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford University. | am grateful to Lloyd Ridgeon for an invitation to present A PERSIAN SUFI IN BRITISH INDIA, an eale version at colloquium on Sufism in moder ran at Glasgow University and to Fariba.Adelkhah and Leonard Lewisohn fr their comments See NS. Green, “Migrant Sufi and Sacred Space in South ‘Asian Islam, Contemporary South Asia XI (2003), pp. 493-509 On diplomatic and economic relations, sce R. Greaves, “iranian Relations with Great Britain and British Indi, 1798-1921", in P. Avery, G. Hambly and C. Melle (ed), Hr, vol. VIl, From Nadir Shah tothe Islamic Republic (Cambridge, 1991); A.R. Sheikholestami, “Integration of ajar Persia in the World Capitalist System”, Franian Journal of iterational fairs XW2 (2000), pp. 285-312. See SIF. Dale, Indian Merchants and the Eurasian Trade 1600-1750 (Cambridge, 1984; C. Markovts, The Global World of Indian Merchans, 1750-1947 (Cambridge, 2000). On earie aspects ofthese trading connections, see S. Subrahmanyam, “Iranians Abroad: Ints-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modem State Foundation Journal of Asian Seaies LV2 (1992), pp. 340-63. See M. Mohiuddin and 1K. Poonawala, art. “Bombay: Persian Muslim Communities" in Br Fc modem accounts of the life and following of Saft ‘Al Shah, see‘A.K. Bag, Justi dar all va chr Saf ‘Alt ‘Shai (Tehran, 1352/1973), N. Chahardahi, Sapri dar tasavvuf Tehran, 1361/1982), pp. 1-83: M. Hom Tart slsilaey tarigaryi ni matulahisye dar in (London, 1371/1992), pp. 243-334. While no extensive studies of Saf’ life and works have been published in European languages, the history of the Saf ‘AI Shab order has been extensively studied in M. van den Bos, Mystic Regimes: Sufiom and the State in Iran, from the Late Qajar Era to the Islamic Republic (Leiden, 2002 However, see also R. Gramlich, Die Schitischen Derwischorden Persiens (Wiesbaden, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 61-64; and L. Lewisohn, “An Introduction tothe History cof Modern Persian Sufism, Par I the Niall Order: Persecution, Revival and Schism", BSOAS, LXI (1998), 1p. 453-56. Saf reached Bombay via the Bushchrto Bombay route, By farthe most important route during this period, with around per yearariving in Bombay from Bushee during ‘the mid-eighicen sitios. Given te higher concentration of rivals during the summer months, Saf! was statistically ‘mast likely to have arrived in Bombay in Safar to Raby ale awwal 1280/uly to August 1863. The names ofthe ships and heir captains arving in Bombay fom Bushebr during these months may be found inthe Bombay Almwanack and Directory for 1864 (Bombay, 1864). 218 Fora translated selection of Sas writings, see N. Green, “Mira Hasan Safi‘Al Shah: A Persian Sufi inthe Age of Printing (Intoduetion and Seleted Transations", in L. Ridgeon (ed), Religion and Poles in Iran: A Reader (Condon, foricoming) ‘The foundation date of 1294/1877 is given by Homayani, op. cit,p.243. However, ater dates found in M, Kiyani, Tike’ Khanag dar irs Tehran, 136911990). 244 ‘See‘A. Anwar, a. “Anjoman-e Okowwat” in Er [A prose version hasbeen published in Homan, op cit, Pp. 246-74, On Shams al Ura, see Navi al Sade Shiri, Teardig abagitig (Tebran, 1339-48/1960-66), vol. I, 1p. 452-8, He isnot to be confused with Sayyid Husayn- i Husayn Shams al“Uraf 1353/1935). See Sharaf, issue no, $4 (1308/1890-91), repub. in Dara isnt sharaf va shardfa (Tehran, 1). See Nai al Sade Sha, op cit, vl I p. 441-47. This account has formed the basis of most subsequent summaries of $af's fife found in modem Persian and European language works. (On merchant fife in Qajar ran, see AK. Lambton, “The Case of Hat ‘Abd alKarim: A Study of the Role of Merchants in Mid-Ninteenth Century Iran’, in CE. Bosworth (ed), fran and Islam: In Memory of the Late lair Minors (Edinburgh, 1971, pp. 331-60; and S. Mahiavi, For God, Mammon an Country: A Nineteenth Century Persian Merchant (Bouldet, 1999) [a'b abSdr Shiraz, op cit, vo. Ip 442. Homayant, op. cit, p. 243 and pp. 267-68 respectively id, 246. See Mirza Hasan Safi ‘Ali Shh, rn alshagg, ham asd asrir alma‘ va mizin al-ma‘ifa (Tehran, 1378/1999), On the continuation ofthe school of Isfahan during the ‘Qajar period, sce SH. Nast, “The Metaphysics of Sadr al- Din Shirai an IlaniePhilesophy in Qajar Ian’, in CE. Bosworth and C. Hillenbrand (ets), Qajar Ira: Poitical, Social and Cultural Change, 1800-1925 (Edinburgh, 10985), pp. 177-58. For a general study of Sufi biographies, see JA. Moja, The Biographical Tradition in Sufism: The Tabagat Gene from a-Sulami Jami London, 2001)-On Sufi autobiographical wring, se C. Kafadar, “Self and (Others: the Diary of a Dervish in Seventcenth Century Istanbul and First-Person Narratives in Ottoman Literature, Studia Ilamica LXIX (1979), pp 121-50; Terzogl,*Man inthe Image of Godin the Image of the Times: Sufi Self-naratives and the Diary of Nivazli Mise (1618-99), fbi, XCIV (2002), pp. 139-66. 216 Lewisohn, op. cit, and WR. Royoe, “Mir Ma‘sim ‘Al ‘Shah and the Ni'mat Alli Revival, 1776-77 to 1796-97 (unpubl. PAD. dissertation, Princeton University 1979). See A. Amanat, Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of ‘the Babi Movement in Iran 1844-1850 (ihca, 198), pp. 72-74, and Ne'ib alSadr Shirazi, op. cit, vol. Il, pp. 332-34, ‘id, vo. . 442. By 1267/1880 as many afi shops in Yad were dealing solely with Brish goods from India and ten British subjects (Hindus fom Sind) were engaged there in trade See Amanat (ed), Cities and Trade: Consul Abbot on the Economy and Society ofan, 1847-1866 (London, 1983), pp. 79-82 and 131-36 See Amanat, op. cit and Mahdavi op. it See PM. Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia or Eight Years in Tran (London, 1902), p. 205. Amanat, op. ct, p. 151. Sykes, op. cl. 195 Hosmayoni op. cit . 265 Ibid, pp. 265-66 Bid, p. 269, See N. Pourjavady, “Opposition to Sufism in Twelver Shism’, in B. Radtke and F. De Jong (es, Jslamic Mysticism Contested: 13 Centuries of Controversies and Polemies (Leiden, 1999). For the claim of Sas trading activites in India see HL Alla, et. “Nimatllaiyya", in EP. ‘On Qujar additions tothe shrine, see R. Hillenbrand, “The Role of Tradition in Qajar Religious Architecture”, in Bosworth and Hillenbrand (ds), op. cit, p. 384 Sykes, op. cit, p. 149. On the broader intellectual and social history of Kerman in this period, see MAR. Daryagasht, Kirmin dar Qalamrawi Talgiga-i It (Kirman, 1370/1992); J. de Groot, “Kerman in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Regional Study of Society and Social Change” (unpubl, D.Phil, thesis, University. of Oxford, 1978); and Abad ‘Alt Khan Vaz, Trl! Kinin (Salryya) (Tebran, 1335 1S.) Sykes, op cit, p- 149. The hanging of imlaroms may be observed at Musi shrines in many ober regions from ‘Yemen to Badaklshan. EG. Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians (Cambridge, 1926), p. 587. On the Indian chapter of Ni'matullah history, see T. Graham, “The Ni'matu'lahi Order under Safavid ‘Suppression and in Indian Exile”, in L. Lewisohn and D. Morgan (eds), The Heritage of Sufism, vol. I, Late Classical Persianate Sufism (Oxford 199), pp 165-200. JOURNAL OF PERSIAN STUDIES See G. Yazdani, Bidar: Its History and Monuments (Delhi, 1996 [orginally 1947), pp. 100-2. Ibid, 148, Homayan, op. cit, pp. 255-57, Cited in Barg, op. cit, pp. 14-15. For a Qajar painting of an opium-smoking dervsh, see J.W. Frembgen, Dervische und Zuckerbacker: Bilder aus einem Oriemtlischen Basar (Munich, 1996), pp. 96-97. | am grateful to Matthijs van den Bos fr this information, Homayant, op. cit, p. 260. On the use of bards, see Mahdavi, op. cit, pp. 41-43, Homayini, op. cit, p. 244 See Sykes, op. cit, pp. 148-49. On Shah Nimatullah’ ite, see T. Graham, “Shah Ni‘matullah Walt: Founder of the ‘Ni'matullaht Sufi Order", in L, Lewisohn (ed), The Heritage of Sufism, Nol. ll, The Legacy of Medieval Persian Sufism (1150-1500) (Oxford, 1999), pp. 173-90. Cf. M, Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay Cit, 1845-1875 (Delhi, 1996); T. Mitchell, Colonsing Egypt (Cambridge, 1988); and V=T Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-1877 (Dethi, 1989), For a comparative description of Bombay and Bushehr during ths period, see WAA. Shepherd, From Bombay to Bushire and Bussora (London, 1857), especially pp. 123-63. Saft has also been accused of entering relations with the Baas. While this remains possible, given his movements in both Bombay and Iran, there is litle overt evidence on the matter See N. Chahardahi, Ssilahd-yi Sifiya.yt Iran (Tebran, 1360/1981), pp. 18, 167 (cited in van den Bos, Mystic Regimes). See Navibal-Sade Shirazi, Trdg al-hagdig, vol. Il, pp. 117, 328, 373, 399, 434, 438-39.464-66, 471, 510, See NM. Parvoez, “Indo-Britsh Trade with Persia”, Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, 3d series, XXII (1907), Bombay Almanack and Directory for 1865 (Bombay, 1865), p. 563, Sce N.R. Kea, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din ‘al-Afghcn A Political Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), especially pp. 22-32; and J... Cole, “New Perspectives fon Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afhani in Egypt’, in R ‘Matthee and B. Baron (eds,), Iran and Beyond Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie (Costa Mesa, 2000), pp. 13-34, Ithas even been claimed, albeit without supporting evidence, that al-A han himself a pupil of Saft. See Chahardakt, Sayri dar tasavvuf,p. 163. ‘A PERSIAN SUFI IN BRITISH INDIA “The book was later translated into Arabic by Mukuunad “Abdu and published in 1886 in Beit under its beter know te of a-Radd ‘ala edalviyin (“The Refitation ofthe Materials"). H. Algar “The Revol of the Agha Khan Mahala and the ‘Transference of the Ismail Imamate to India", St. Is XXIX (1969), pp. 43-69, Z. Noraly, “The First Agha Khan and the British” (unpubl. MA thesis, Unversity of London, 1964). NJ. Dumasia, The Aga Khan ae his Ancestors (Bombay, 1939), .61, Mirea Mubammad’s name is fisted in the feemasonry sections of several editions ofthe Bombay Almanack and Directory fom the 1860, See 8. Bombay Almanack and Directory for 1866 (Bombay, 1866), p. 759. While many Paris were members of eher lodges in he city (especialy Lodge Rising Star of HI. in Colaba, which was entirely Pars-controlled), Mirza. Muammad’s was the only “Mustim name mentioned during this period i he frema sonry istings ofthe Bombay Almanac. See N. Pourjavady and P.Lambor-Wilsn, “sms and ‘itmatllahis", Se Ist XLU (1973), pp. 113 (On the changing doctrinal face of Ismaism i the years after this episode, see M. Boivin, “The Reform of Islam in Wl Shim ffom 1885 491957", in F, Delvoye (ed), Confluence of Culures: French Contributions to Indo- Persian Studies (Deh, 1994), pp. 121-39. “Another dificlty that remains concerning this encedote ‘concems the question of chronology Since the Zu al- ‘srr as not published in Bombay until 1289/1872, this rust necessarily mean that Sas etum journey to Iran via Najaf cannot have taken place unt afer this date. Ether, as seems likely, this praise was merely invented or Homaydn's chronology of Saf’ travels is as uncertain as those suggested by Bar op. cit and Lewisohn, “An Introduction tothe Histor of Modem Persian Sufism" Homaytn, op. ct, p. 244 id, p. 263-64 ‘See M. Momen, “Jamal Efendi and the Early Spread ofthe Baha Faith in Asia", Baha Studies Review 1X (1999-2000), pp. 47-80. See H. Alga, Mirza Malkum Khan: A Study in Islamic Modernism (Berkely, 1973), pp. 225-26, On Shaykh al- Rat's eater acvites, see IRL, Cole, “Autobiography and Silence: The Early Career of Shaykh ala’ Quja?, in LC. Blrgel and 1. Schayani (eds), Iran im 19. Jarhundert und die Enistehung der Baha'i-Religion (Civic, 1998), pp. 91-126. 217 % The account i found in his Mire alana jah. SeeC.A. Storey, Persian Literate: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey (London, 1927-), vo. I, pat 2, pp. 1130-32. The Zabdatat-asr i unlikely to have been the first magna ‘writen in Bombay. Safdar ‘Al Shah Munsi' magia on the British wars in India, Jes. razm, may have been writen during its author’s tay in Bombay. See C. Riew, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British -Miscum (London, 1879-98), vol. Il. 725. © See P. Avery, “Printing, the Press and Literature in Modem Iran in CH, vo. Vp. 828. Nai al-Sadr Shir, Tifa al-ardmayn: Safrnioa-yi [Natt al-Sadr Shiro dar sycnati Maka va sya Irn (Tehran, 1361/1983). The original eition was published in Bombay in 1306/1889, © See E.G. Browne, The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia (Cambridge, 1914), pp. 362, 368. The earliest Persian newspaper was in fact published by the great Hinds reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), copy of which ‘was set to Iran Avery, op. it, pp. 834-35. % See LR. Hinnells, art. “Bombay: The Zoroastrian Community” in Er. See Mohiuddin and Poonawala ar, “Bombay: Persian ‘Mastim Communities” in Eh % On these Bombay Maynais, see AJ. Arbery, Catalogue ofthe Library of the India Office, vo. I, pat 6, Persian Books (London, 1937), pp. 301-3. > Cited in MLE, Nizam-Mafi, “The Emergence of Tehran as the Cultural Capital of Iran”, in‘C, Adle and B. Hourcade (as), Teheran: Capitale bicentenaire (Paris“Tehran, 1992), p. 137. The figures based ae on K. Mushar, Frist ‘kia chip fst ght ta akhar-i sli 1345 (Fehran, 1382361974), % Bombay Almanack and Directory for 1865 (Bombay, 1865), p. 151 2% Homiyini op. cit, pp. 258-62. 7 Did, p.264. ™ Ibid, p. 244, The same account appears in Na'ib al-Sadr Shir, op it, vol Ip. 42. Homayan, op. eit, pp. 257-58 % On this theme, see Riaz Islam, Sufism in South Asia Impact on Fourteenth Century Muslim Society (Delhi, 2002), pp. 216-33. 8 Homayan, op ci p. 270 © See Mawlana Jalal al-Din Balkhi, Masne-y ma‘nav, ed. RA. Nicholson rep. Tehran, 1378/1999), Book Six, pp. 703-7. 218 See U. Marzolph “Persian Popular Literature inthe Qajar Period”, Asian Fotkiore Stdies LX/2 (2001), pp. 215-36; idem, Narrative Musration in Persian Lithographed Books (Leiden, 2002). JW. Redhouse (te), The Diary of HM. The Sha of Persia During His Tour Though Europe in A.D. 1873 (ep. Costa Mesa, 1995). See Sultan Mubammad Sayf alDawia, Safarndma-yi Maka, ed. A.A. Khudaparast (Tehran, 1363/1985); Mirza Husayn Farthani, A. Shiite Pilgrimage to Mecca (1885-1886): the Safarndmeh of Mirsi Mohammad Hosayn Farah, ed, ad. M. Gulzar and E.L. Daniel (Austin, Texas, 1990), % On this theme, see MIM. Ringer, “The Quest forthe Seeret of Strength in Iranian Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature: Rethinking. Tradition in the Safarmamel, in NR. Keddie and R, Matthee (eds.), Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Polite (Seatle, 2002), pp. 146-61 See S. Digby, “An Eighteenth Century Narrative of a Journey from Bengal to England: Munshi Ismi's New History”, nC, Shackle (ed), Unt and Muslin South Asia: Studies in Honour of Ralph Russell (London, 1989), pp. 49-65. See Mahdavi, op. ct, pp. 48-51 © Sykes, op. city p. 149. On similar readings of Shih Nitmatlla’s apocalyptic poems, see E.G. Browne, 4 Literary History of Persia (Cambridge, 1920-24), vo. Il, pp. 463-73. In an interestingly parallel, couplets fom Saf’s own verse were widely repeated and interpreted as prophesies in Iran during the Islamic Revolution in 1979 {personal communication, A.R. Sheikholeslami. See M.D. David, Bombay” The City of Dreams (Bombay, 1995). 81 Soe R.C. Foltz, “Two Seventeenth Century Central Asian ‘Travellers to Mughal India", JRAS, series 3, vol. VI (1996), pp- 367-17. For other influential Muslim atitudes JOURNAL OF PERSIAN STUDIES to India, see Y. Friedmann, “Medieval Muslim Views on Indian Religions", JAOS XCV (1975), pp. 24-21; and V. Minorsky, “Gardizt on India", BSOAS XII (1948), pp. (625-40. The exotcism of India continues in Persophone environments this day and in Tajikistan the magical arts are still known as “Kashmiri knowledge” (imi ashi. See A‘. Sian, art. “Bostn a-Si" in Ele (On Persian “orientalism”, see also J.RI. Cole, “Miror of the World Iranian ‘Orientalism’ and Early Nineteenth Century India, Critique: Journal for Critical Studies ofthe Midale East VIN (1996), pp. 41-60, See C. Shackle and J. Majeed (ed. and tr), Halis Musaddas: The Flow and Ebb of Islam (Delhi, 1997). See M. Chodkiewiez, The Spiritual Writings of Amir ‘Abd ‘al-Kader (New York, 1995). ‘An undated lithographic edition ofthe Jimi aus was published in Turkey, and a later version in Cairo in 1331/1913, See B, Abu-Mannch, “Shaykh Ahmed Ziya"ddéin eL-Gimishanevi and. the Ziyati-Khalids Suborder”, in F. De Jong (ed), Shi'a islam, Sects and Sufism (Utrecht, 1992), pp. 105-107 [Nei al-Sadr Shir, op. ct, vol. I p. 452. Sykes op. cit, pp. 345-46, Saf's connections to Na‘in are also seen via one of his shayks, Mahmid Khan Navini (4. 1338/1919-20), who claimed the right to succeed him upon his death Sykes, op. cit, p. 346 See M. Ringer, Education, Religion and the Discourse of Cultral Reform in Qajar Iran (Costa. Mesa, 2001). Another aspect of Sufi resstanee to European hegemony’ ‘was see in ninetenth-century European travellers to Ian ‘encountering great hostility fom dervshes. Thus Arthur Arnold, traveling in 1875, found himself regularly cused and threatened by dervishes. See his Through Persia by ‘Caravan (London, 1877), vo. I, pp. 265,271, 282-83, vol pp. 123-24

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