Sirhindi, Ahmad
Sirhindi, Ahmad (Sirhindi) (Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi) (Imām Rabbānī Shaykh Ahmad al-Farūqī al-Sirhindī) (b. 1564, Sirhind, Patiāla, India - d. 1624, Sirhind, India). Islamic philosopher who became the eminent divine and mystic of Muslim India. He was born in Sirhind (India).
Sirhindi is a Sufi saint of the Naqshbandi order who, on account of his scholarship, reformist views, and piety, came to be regarded as the “renewer of the second millennium.” His family claimed descent from Caliph Umar I. Shaikh Ahmad received his early education at his birthplace, Sirhind (in the Punjab), from his father, Shaikh Abdul Ahab, and later moved to Sialkot for further studies. The emperor Akbar invited him to Agra, where he came into contact with Abu’l Fazl and Faizi. At the age of twenty-eight, he joined the Naqshbandi order at Delhi and became a disciple of Khwaja Baqi Billah. Shaikh Ahmad soon gained great popularity and his disciples were spread over large parts of India and Central and West Asia. The three volume collection of his letters is an important source of information about his teachings and activities. It has been translated from Persian into Arabic, Turkish, and Urdu. His views raised opposition in certain quarters, leading to his imprisonment for a year at Gwalior by Jahangir.
Shaikh Ahmad criticized the religious experiments of Akbar. He rejected Ibn Arabi’s doctrine of wah-dat-ul-wujud (“unity of being”) and put forward his own theory of wahdat-ul-shuhud (“unity of vision”). He preached adherence to the laws of Islam and the traditions of the Prophet. Shaikh Ahmad was opposed to mystic music and preferred a life of sobriety to a life of ecstasy. Some of his ideas seem to have influenced Aurangzeb, who was deeply attached to the saint’s descendants. Shaikh Ahmad’s tomb at Sirhind is visited by a large number of people even today.
Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi was primarily a mystical thinker and Sufi master. His activities in reformulating major Sufi ideas led to his being given the epithet “Renewer of the Second Millennium” (Mujaddid-e-Alf-e-Thani) since the dates of his life (971-1034 A.H.) spanned the opening years of the second millennium of the Islamic calendar. According to a tradition of the Prophet Muhammad, a great Muslim leader would arise at the beginning of each Islamic century to renew the religion. In his writings, Sirhindi elaborated on the role of this “Renewer” -- this Mujaddid. Ultimately, Sirhindi became recognized as the Mujaddid and the branch of the Naqshbandi order which he founded came to be known as the Mujaddidi.
The influence of the Mujaddidi eventually spread far beyond India to the Arab Middle East, Central Asia, Turkey, and other regions, and it remains one of the most vital spiritual and occasionally political forces in the contemporary Muslim world.
Islamic scholars generally speak of two phases to Sirhindi’s career. The early phase featured training in the Islamic intellectual tradition and initiation in two major Sufi orders, Chishti and Qadiri, after which he attained a respectable position as a scholar of Islam at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar.
The second phase of Sirhindi’s career began in 1598 C.C. in Delhi, where he met Khwaja Baqi bi’llah, a Naqshbandi Sufi master from Afghanistan who had recently come to India. Under this master, Sirhindi attained higher states of spiritual realization, which convinced him of the necessity of combining orthodox practice of the Islamic tradition with mystical experience.
Sirhindi became a prominent spiritual teacher in the Naqshbandi order and wrote extensively on matters of Islamic mysticism, theology, and his own spiritual experience. At certain points in these writings he also commented on the religious policies that he felt should be adopted by the Mughal state.
Scholars differ concerning the prominence of political opinions in Sirhindi’s thought. The most recent European and European American academic studies conclude that Sirhindi was primarily a Sufi theorist. In South Asia, however, Sirhindi’s image has gradually developed so as to portray him as an incipient Muslim nationalist who challenged the syncretistic religious tendencies of the Mughal court. Proponents of this view cite as evidence the fact that he was publicly reprimanded and even imprisoned for about a year in 1619 C.C. before being released and ultimately honored by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. Those who emphasize the Sufi element of Sirhindi’s concerns note that Jahangir complains in his memoirs about Sirhindi’s arrogance and theories, rather than objecting to any specifically political recommendations on his part.
Following his release from prison, Sirhindi returned to Sirhind and for the rest of his life continued his literary and spiritual teaching activities. His sons, in particular, Muhammad Ma‘sum (d. 1668 C.C.), and their successors continued the Mujaddidi Sufi line and left their own collections of letters and practical Sufi manuals in the tradition of their illustrious ancestor.
The most important literary legacy of Sirhindi is undoubtedly his three volumes of collected letters, known as the Maktubat, most of which are written in Persian, although some entire letters and many phrases are written in Arabic. The 534 letters were collected and edited during his lifetime by three of his disciples under his supervision. About a third of the letters are in the form of answers to questions he was asked. About half of the letters run less than twenty lines, although a few of them are as long as twenty pages.
The tradition of writing one’s major ideas in the form of a personal letter but with a wider audience in mind is quite typical of this period of Sufism, both within and beyond South Asian Islam. Numerous collections of such letters exist. The challenge to the scholar is that the letters must be carefully sifted through, as the doctrines presented in them are not organized thematically or presented systematically.
Among the major points discussed in the Maktubat are “the unity of appearance,” practical mysticism, and the respective ranks of the prophet and the saint. Within each of these topics one may point to a humanistic factor, in the sense of affirming the purpose and significance of human activities in reforming both the inner self and outer world, which works throughout Sirhindi’s thought.
The concept of the unity of experience essentially concerns the relationship between the Creator and the Creation. One of the more intensely debated issues in Sufism in the later periods was tension between monism and dualism in mystical thought and, more generally, in the Islamic worldview. Since these Sufi philosophical doctrines were often expressed in very abstract symbols and expressions, it is difficult to explicitly characterize figures such as the Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240) as having been exclusively monistic. Based primarily on the thought of Ibn ‘Arabi’s successors and on the popularization of his ideas through vehicles such as mystical poetry, many Sufis came to consider that the doctrine of the “Unity of Existence” (wahdat al-wujud), which they attributed to Ibn ‘Arabi, was uncompromisingly monistic.
In response to this metaphysically monistic and ethically relativistic outlook Sirhindi propounded a complex cosmological system that detailed the relationship between God and the world in such as way as to provide a more positive existential status to the creation and human activities.
Sirhindi’s theory came to be known as the “Unity of Appearance” (wahdat al-shuhud). In formulating it, Sirhindi criticized some aspects of the “Greatest Shaikh’s” (Ibn ‘Arabi’s) teachings, but remained highly influenced by others and often cites him approvingly. Among the features of Sirhindi’s philosophical system is the idea that in the creative process the divine names are emanated from the mind of God into the world, where they must encounter their opposites in order to be fully discerned and experienced. The world, therefore, is not the same as the Divine Being, but rather has a shadowiy or adumbrated reality of its own. By positing this reality as apart from that of God, Sirhindi is able to assert a real existential status to evil, as opposed to the relativism entailed by absolute monism.
For Sirhindi, living according to the tenets and practice of orthodox Islam is a prerequisite for traveling the Sufi path of individual purification and realization. The main purpose of this path is certainty of faith rather than hidden knowledge. However, those who grasp the essence or the inner dimension of the Islamic Law (shari‘a), are at a higher level than those who simply enact the outer formal requirements.
Sirhindi continued to stress the element of sobriety of characteristic of Naqshbandi Sufis. In this context, he disapproved of mystical practices incorporating dancing, music, or trance states. He advocated the practice of silent dhikr, the calm and focused recitation of the names and attributes of God and other pious phrases. According to Sirhindi, the spiritual aspirant, under the close supervision and guidance of a Sufi master, pursues an itinerary of spiritual progress that reverses the process of the descent of the divine reality into physical manifestation.
Each person possesses a subtle body composed of ten spiritual centers knwon as the lata’if, including the “heart” and “spirit.” These spiritual centers are arranged at two levels, which correspond to the two cosmic levels: (1) The eternal, spiritual realm of God’s command (‘amr), which precedes empirical manifestation, and (2) the temporal world of physical creation (khalq).
Through specific practices of contemplation and recitations combined with the interventions of the Sufi master, the aspirant activates the energy focused in these centers in order to initiate and pursue spiritual awakening and ascent.
Another aspect of Sirhindi’s perspective on monism and dualism was his exposition of the respective states of the “Prophet” and the “Saint.”
All Muslims hold that the Prophet Muhammad was the best of creation. In mystical and Shi‘i thought, however, there tended to be an emphasis on the continuation of charismatic qualities in the world even after the death of the Prophet. The role of the saint (walaya) was increasingly elaborated on by Sufis as a kind of metaphysical template for human spiritual progress. Some Sufis had even seemed to suggest, according to Sirhindi, that the status of the saint was existentially higher than that of the Prophet since the saint was conceived of as having remained absorbed in the contemplation of the divine reality rather than descending into the turbidity of worldly matters.
Consistent with his upholding of the value and meaningfulness of human efforts, Sirhindi posited that the level of Prophecy (nubuwwa) both incorporated and transcended the saintly level of intoxication and union with the divine in order to return to the world with a sober approach and a focus on a reformist mission. Citing a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad – “My Satan has submitted” -- Sirhindi elaborated on the status of Prophet as one who fulfills a mission of transforming both himself and the world by being willing to descend deeply back into worldly existence even after having attained the highest level of mystical heights of annihilation (fana) in the divine, for, “the descent occurs proportionately to the ascent.”
What then, could be the highest state available to the Sufi, since Muhammad was the Last of the Prophets, according to Islamic belief? Today’s spiritual aspirants could pursue the state of being followers and heirs of the Prophet in order to ensure the continuity of this reformist mission in the world.
Sirhindi became a prominent spiritual teacher in the Naqshbandi order and wrote extensively on matters of Islamic mysticism, theology, and his own spiritual experience. At certain points in these writings he also commented on the religious policies that he felt should be adopted by the Mughal state.
Scholars differ concerning the prominence of political opinions in Sirhindi’s thought. The most recent Western academic studies, based on the content of Sirhindi’s writings and the response of his contemporaries and successors to them, conclude that he was primarily a Sufi theorist. In South Asia, however, his image has gradually developed so as to portray him as an incipient Muslim nationalist who challenged the syncretistic religious tendencies of the Mughal court. Proponents of this view cite as evidence the fact that he was publicly reprimanded and even imprisoned for about a year in 1619 before being released and ultimately honored by the emperor Jahangir. Those who emphasize the Sufi element of Sirhindi’s concerns note that Jahangir complains in his memoirs about Sirhindi’s arrogance and theories, rather than objecting to any specifically political recommendations on his part.
An interesting and controversial aspect of Sirhindi’s teaching was his idea of his own special mission. Although alluded to in a fairly esoteric fashion in his works, this stimulated controversy and even some condemnations for heresy among his contemporaries. In an esoteric reference in his work, Mabda’-o-Ma‘ad, Sirhindi claims that a new age has been initiated with the coming of the second Islamic millennium in which the cosmological state known as the “Reality of Muhammad” would unite with that of the “Reality of the Ka’ba.” A new composite higher state known as the “Reality of Ahmad” would be the result, ushering in a new period of fulfillment and spiritual progress for Muslims. This is apparently a thinly veiled reference to his own name, Ahmad. Further, using number mysticism, he spoke of the individual instantiation of the “Reality of Muhammad” in the form of the historical Prophet as having been twofold, spiritual and human. The balance between the human and the spiritual sides of the Prophet had, over time, become disturbed in favor of the spiritual dimension, with consequent detrimental effects on the Muslim community’s affairs in the world. He claimed that in the Second Millennium, following the lead of the “Renewer” (Mujaddid), the “Perfections of Prophecy” would be restored through the efforts of the heirs and followers of the Prophet.
Sirhindi's more extravagant, almost messianic claims were not entirely alien to the history of Islamic mystical thought, and thus Sirhindi’s statements, while clearly controversial, did not result in his being universally condemned for heresy during his lifetime. Over time the image of Sirhindi as a heroic reformer and advocate of uncompromising adherence to Islam became increasingly evocative for the Muslims of India and Pakistan. One can understand the appeal of Sirhindi’s more activist, world affirming outlook to Muslim reformers who partially blame mystically inspired quietism for the decline of Muslim power and influence in the world in later centuries.
Sirhindi see Sirhindi, Ahmad
Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi see Sirhindi, Ahmad
Imām Rabbānī Shaykh Ahmad al-Farūqī al-Sirhindī see Sirhindi, Ahmad
