Sufism in Eighteenth-Century India

Academic interest in the Sufi reformist movement of the 18th century known as Ṭarīqah-yi Muḥammadīyah has been around for some time, not least tying it to broader reformist discourses and practices within what was called ‘neo-Sufism’, the Shāh Walīullāh tradition of North India and the disputes of the Naqshbandī tradition on Sufi metaphysics and spirituality, and the legacies of the Ibn Idrīs Sufi tradition in North and North-Western Africa. Most of those studies consider the political contexts of imperial decline and wane and the centripetal pull of the Ḥijāz in determining new intellectual and spiritual trajectories. In much of this work, apart from some excellent research on Mīr Dard (d. 1785) by Schimmel, Ziad, and more recently the late and much regretted Soraya Khodamoradi (d. 2023, who was also at Erfurt and a student of Jamal Malik), there has been little attention paid to the poesis of that Sufi tradition and on the work of Mīr Dard’s father, Muḥammad Nāṣir ʿAndalīb (d. 1759), about whom Mīr Dard did attest that much of what he knew of the Ibn ʿArabī tradition (within which and with which the ṭarīqah-yi Muḥammadīyah defined itself) came from the work of his father.

Saghaee’s published dissertation is very much an intellectual biography of ʿAndalīb as a window into his conception of Sufism and, in particular, the conception of the ‘Muḥammadan path’ as a movement within the Naqshbandī order. The work therefore comprises three long chapters prefaced by an introduction that contextualises the study within the context of reformist Sufism that in the upheavals of the 18th century and the seeming dissolution of the Mughal Empire (he witnessed various sacks of Delhi including the invasion and looting of Nādir Shāh) sought a return to a pristine, Prophetically-authorised mysticism.