Most of the Naqshbandi suborders today, such as the Mujaddidi, Fultali, Saifi, Tahiri, Qasimiya and Haqqani sub-orders, trace their spiritual lineage through Sirhindi.
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Sirhindi, who through his paternal line traced his descent from the caliph 'Umar I (the second caliph of Islam), received a traditional Islamic education at home and later at Sialkot (now in Pakistan). He reached maturity when Akbar, the renowned Mughal emperor, attempted to unify his empire by forming a new syncretistic faith (Din-e-Ilahi), which sought to combine the various mystical forms of belief and religious practices of the many communities making up his Indian empire.
In 1593, Sirhindi joined the mystical Naqshbandiyah, the most important of the Indian Sufi orders. He spent his life preaching against the inclination of Akbar and his successor, Jahangir (r. 1605–27), toward pantheism and Shiʿa Islam (one of that Islam's two major branches). Of his several written works, the most famous is Maktubat (“Letters”), a compilation of his letters written in Persian to his friends in India and the region north of the Amu Darya (river). Through these letters Sirhindi’s major contribution to Islamic thought can be traced. In refuting the Naqshbandiyah order’s extreme monistic position of wahdat al-wujud (the concept of divine existential unity of God and the world, and hence man), he instead advanced the notion of waḥdat ash-shuhūd (the concept of unity of vision). According to this doctrine, any experience of unity between God and the world God has created is purely subjective and occurs only in the mind of the believer; it has no objective counterpart in the real world. The former position, Sirhindi opined, led to pantheism, which was contrary to the tenets of Sunni Islam.
The Maktubat is three volumes of Sirhindi's collected letters. Most of the letters were 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 Sirhindi 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 typical of this period of Sufism, both within and beyond South Asian Islam, and numerous such collections 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 the outer world, which works throughout Sirhindi's thought.
Sirhindi’s concept of waḥdat ash-shuhud helped revitalize the Naqshbandiyah order, which retained its influence among Muslims in India and Central Asia for several centuries thereafter. A measure of his importance in the development of Islamic orthodoxy in India is the title that was bestowed posthumously on him, Mujaddid-i Alf-i Thānī (“Renovator of the Second Millennium”), a reference to the fact that he lived at the beginning of the second millennium of the Muslim calendar. His teachings were not always popular in official circles. In 1619, by the orders of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, who was offended by Sirhindi's aggressive opposition to Shiʿite views, Sirhindi was temporarily imprisoned in the fortress at Gwalior. His burial place at Sirhind is still a site of pilgrimage.
Ahmad Sirhindi was born on May 26, 1564 in the village of Sirhind, Punjab. He received most of his early education from his father, 'Abd al-Ahad, his brother, Muhammad Sadiq and from Muhammad Tahir al-Lahuri. He also memorized the Qur'an.
Sirhindi studied in Sialkot, which had become an intellectual center under the Kashmir-born scholar Kamaluddin Kashmiri. In Sialkot, Sirhindi studied logic, philosophy and theology and read advanced texts of tafsir and hadith under another scholar from Kashmir, Yaqub Sarfi Kashmiri (1521-1595), who was a sheikh of the tariqa Hamadaniyya -- the Sufi order named for Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani. Qazi Bahlol Badakhshani taught Sirhindi jurisprudence, the Prophet Muhammad's biography and history.
Sirhindi also made rapid progress in the Suhrawardi, the Qadiri, and the Chisti traditions, and was given permission to initiate and train followers at the age of 17. He eventually joined the Naqshbandi order through the Sufi missionary Khwaja Baqi Billah, and became a leading master of the order. His deputies traversed the Mughal Empire in order to popularize the order and eventually won favor with the Mughal court.
Ahmad Sirhindi's teaching emphasized the inter-dependence of both the Sufi path and sharia, stating that "what is outside the path shown by the prophet is forbidden." Sirhindi's concept of sharia is an inclusive term encompassing outward acts of worship, faith, and the Sufi path. Sirhindi emphasizes Sufi initiation and practices as a necessary part of sharia, and criticizes jurists who follow only the outward aspects of the sharia. Sirhindi also wrote a treatise under the title Radd-e-Rawafiz to justify the execution of Shi'a nobles by Abdullah Khan Uzbek in Mashhad. In Radd-e-Rawafiz, Sirhindi argues:
Sirhindi also expressed his disdain towards Shi'as in his letters. According to Sirhindi, the worst distorters of faith "are those who bear malice against the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. God has called them kafirs (unbelievers) in the Qur'an." In a letter to his disciple Sheikh Farid, the Mir Bakhshi of the Mughal empire, Sirhindi said that showing respect to the distorters of faith -- to the ahl-e Bid'ah -- amounted to destruction of Islam.
In his Makutbat letter 193, Sirhindi is said to have stated "The execution of the accursed Kafir of Goindwal (Guru Arjan Dev Ji) at this time is a very good achievement indeed and has become the cause of a great defeat of the hateful Hindus." Jahangir writes in his Tuzuk that he had the Guru put to death and had his property confiscated.
Sirhindi, as a hard-line supporter of Islamic orthodoxy and a highly influential religious revivalist, h
ad opposed Akbar’s policy of religious tolerance. He had particular concerns about the spread of Sikhism in Punjab. So he cheered on the murder of the Guru, giving the Guru's death as a religious matter instead of a political one.
Sirhindi advanced the notion of wahdat ash-shuhud (oneness of appearance). According to this doctrine, the experience of unity between God and creation is purely subjective and occurs only in the mind of the Sufi who has reached the state of fana' fi Allah (to forget about everything except Almighty Allah). Sirhindi considered wahdat ash-shuhud to be superior to wahdat al-wujud (oneness of being), which Sirhindi understood to be a preliminary step on the way to the Absolute Truth.
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 time of Sirhindi was the 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 CC) 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 a 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 his theory, Sirhindi criticized some aspects of 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 was a shadowy 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 of 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 characteristic of Naqshbandi Sufis. In this context, he disapproved of mystical practices incorporating dancing, music, or trance states. Sirhindi 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 known as the lata'if, including the "heart" and the "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 spiritual ascent.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Sirhindi
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Shaykh-Ahmad-Sirhindi
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