BOOK REVIEW
The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and Political Imagination in India, 1500-1750
by Muzaffar Alam 2022
About the Author
Muzaffar Alam is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including, The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200–1800 and The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748
About the Book
Examines the relationship between Mughal political culture and the two dominant strains of Islam’s Sufi traditions in South Asia: one centered around orthodoxy, the other focusing on a more accommodating and mystical spirituality.
Extract
The study of Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, known as taṣawwuf to those closer to the sources and practices, has come a long way since Richard Eaton complained in 1978 that it was mainly studied as doctrine.1 Eaton noted that scholars tended to study the ideas of individual Sufis, with no attention to the societies and polities in which the Sufi saints lived. Eaton’s comment prefaced his seminal study of Sufis in the medieval kingdom of Bijapur in south-western India—in which he offered glimpses of the warfare, landholding, institution-building and political negotiations that these apparently other-worldly men were involved in.
Another important milestone in the study of Sufism in South Asia was Carl Ernst’s study of the Khuldabad complex of Chishtī saints.2 Published in 1992, this book challenged the persistent opposition between Islamic religious orthodoxy and Sufi heterodoxy and/or latitude. In a methodologically rigourous work that explored the various kinds of sources available for studying the history of these Muslims saints, Ernst showed these men to be fully within the Islamic tradition, and distant from the world of politics and pelf.
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