Letter writing as a Sufi practice

It has often been argued that the focus on orality in the Islamic world arose from a fundamental scepticism towards the written word and a fear that unguided reading could lead to epistemic chaos.Footnote ²³ We must note, however, that Sunni scholars of North India, even in the pre-Mughal period, did not distrust texts quite as much as such accounts suggest. In jurisprudential contexts, for example, the remote transmission of legal opinions via mail was sanctioned, albeit guardedly, by Hanafi jurists as early as the twelfth century. In the preface to his manual on fiqh that was widely circulated in pre-colonial Hindustan, the jurist Qazi Khan (d. 1196) argued that if a mufti who is a muqallid (that is to say, a jurist who lacks the requisite capacity for independent judgement or ijtihād) encountered an issue for which the available textual sources offered no ruling, he should ‘follow the view of the person who has, according to him, the greatest expertise in fiqh (yakhudhu bi-qawl man huwā afqah al-nās ʿindihi)’. Were that person to live in another city, however, ‘he should have recourse to him by writing (yarjaʿ ilayhi biʾl-kitāb), and should not speculate for fear of attributing a falsehood to God (iftirāʾ ʿalā allāh) in making the permissible prohibited’.Footnote ²⁴ While clearly not ideal, the remote transmission of legal knowledge was considered tolerable and certainly better than the alternative.

In Sufi circles, too, we find an early and widespread turn to the use of remote written communication. As Ahmet Karamustafa notes, all of the extant writings of Junayd al-Khazzaz (d. 910), the ninth-century Sufi of Baghdad, ‘belong to the category of correspondence with fellow Sufis’.Footnote ²⁵ In South Asia, as early as 1346, the Suhrawardi Sharaf al-Din b. Yahya Maneri (d. 1381) famously wrote his ‘Hundred Letters’ to Qazi Shams al-Din, the governor of Chausa, over the course of a year, precisely because Shams al-Din was unable to attend his study circle.Footnote ²⁶ These letters were then circulated as an independent work. His disciple Shams al-Din Balkhi (d. 1400) is, likewise, noted for his letter writing both to scholars and to political figures.Footnote ²⁷ The famous sixteenth-century Chishti of Gangoh, in the Upper Doab, Abd al-Quddus (d. 1537), had his letters collected in two volumes.Footnote ²⁸

By the late seventeenth century, we see an intensification of these trends. The letters of the famous Naqshbandi and mujaddid of the second millennium, Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624), who maintained a vigorous correspondence with his disciples throughout his life, were circulated widely and became models for emulation.Footnote ²⁹ Collecting and editing the letters of one's spiritual master became a central part of the Naqshbandi tradition of discipleship.Footnote ³⁰ These letter collections were themselves circulated and studied independently, and their contents formed the subject of further epistolary exchanges within the tarīqa.Footnote ³¹ Later in the seventeenth century, Sirhindi's son, Muhammad Masum was, likewise, an avid letter writer.Footnote ³² In the eighteenth century, the Naqshbandi Mirza Jan-i Janan (d. 1781) and his disciple Sana Allah Panipati regularly exchanged letters;Footnote ³³ Faqir Allah Shikarpuri (d. 1781), a Naqshbandi from Sindh, maintained correspondence with a wide range of Sufis and scholars across the subcontinent;Footnote ³⁴ Shah Ahl Allah, the brother of Shah Wali Allah, collected the letters of his father, Shah Abd al-Rahim (d. 1719);Footnote ³⁵ and Shah Wali Allah's letters were collected by Muhammad Ashiq and his son, Abd al-Rahman (d. 1755). This enthusiasm for letter writing is also found among contemporary Chishtis: Kalim Allah Jahanabadi (d. 1729) maintained contact with disciples in the Deccan via letters.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, one of the most salient features of eighteenth-century North India was the significant volume of Sufi correspondence that flourished despite and, sometimes because of (given the difficulty of travel), the fragmentation and decentralisation of the Mughal imperial order. Naqshbandi discussions of hadith and law, as well as philosophy and metaphysics, were often carried on with individuals beyond the boundaries of the dwindling Mughal state, and even the subcontinent.

Like many of their contemporaries in the Sunni intellectual world, Naqshbandi shaykhs from the seventeenth century onwards had embraced the idea that students should engage in independent study or ‘deep reading’ (mutālaʿa) of texts and their commentaries.Footnote ³⁷ While some Indian scholars were beginning to argue that a student with a good grasp of Arabic linguistic sciences might do without a teacher entirely, the Naqshbandis did not generally favour entirely unguided reading.Footnote ³⁸ However, they often encouraged the independent, or at least semi-independent, study of texts that had been approved by one's shaykh using a set of embodied techniques that would allow the student to derive the greatest spiritual and ethical benefit from the text.Footnote ³⁹ Shah Abd al-Rahim of Delhi, Shah Wali Allah's father, for example, wrote a letter in which he advised one of his disciples that one ought to ‘study independently (mutālaʿa) the books of the mendicants (darwīshān) because it strengthens the intention of the student’. As the student read the text, he was told ‘to study (mutālaʿa) your own heart and hold your breath (habs-i dam)’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Clearly, this was an instruction to practise independent, silent reading—the oral recitation of text while holding one's breath would have been impossible—but, most importantly for our purposes, this willingness to guide students’ study by means of letters suggests that Naqshbandis of this period were less sceptical of remotely guided reading than we might expect.

Naqshbandi reading

In his letters to his disciples, Wali Allah makes it clear that exchanges of letters served as a form of companionship. He repeatedly asserts that correspondence (mukātaba) is a kind (nawʿ) of companionship (istihāb) or direct address (mukhātaba) that occurs despite the separation of two bodies. This transmutation was feasible, he writes in one letter, because of a certain ‘enchantment’ (nayrang) that writing makes possible.Footnote ⁴¹ In his view, this ‘enchantment’ could occur because the spiritual bonds that existed between two individuals had their origins in a pre-material state. Face-to-face meetings were not, in themselves, valuable except as a way to renew and strengthen these pre-material spiritual affinities.

To understand this form of epistolographic ‘enchantment’ requires that we place it within a broader framework of Naqshbandi reading practices in this period. Biographical dictionaries or tazkiras—in particular—were recommended for novices in these circles. These texts, containing records of the statements and actions of the shaykhs of the tarīqa, provided models for the student's own spiritual wayfaring. Beyond serving as models of ‘exemplary behaviour’, the act of reading tazkiras was understood as a tool for generating spiritual companionship with the spirit of the deceased masters of the tarīqa.Footnote ⁴² Readers viewed these texts, in other words, as a technology that would allow them to ‘see’ an individual whose material body was no longer accessible. Nur Allah Budhanwi (d. 1782), a disciple of Shah Wali Allah, describes his experience of this kind of independent study:

Once again, it is clear that Nur Allah was reading this book alone: a reader would hardly fall asleep for several hours in the course of reciting a text in front of his shaykh. His description of the text's connection to the world of spirits, however, is even more striking. Rather than describe the written text as second-order and inferior to significations of speech, he portrays it as an instrument of perception, specifically eye-glasses, which allowed an individual, with suitable spiritual preparedness, to witness the luminous spirits of the pious dead.Footnote ⁴⁴ Classically, such states of spiritual communion were achieved through proximity to the body of a shaykh, often during pilgrimages to the graves of the dead. Eighteenth-century Naqshbandis, however, were evidently attaining such states through books instead. The aim of reading these texts, then, was to cultivate a particularly heightened spiritual state whereby the book ‘rendered itself…epistemologically obsolete’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In other words, Nur Allah was reading the book not simply for the information it contained but rather as a way to attain a vision (wāqiʿa) that allowed him to perceive the spirits of the dead, individuals who retained a certain spiritual identity but whose material bodies had long since decayed.

Spiritual companionship in letters

This mode of reading has important implications for conceptions of eighteenth-century epistolography that allows us to make sense of the language that Shah Wali Allah uses to describe epistles that he has received and his ability to perceive the sender. Just as Nur Allah described the spiritual witnessing made possible by reading the tazkira, so too does Shah Wali Allah describe letters that he has received in sensory terms: as bearers of luminescence or odour, and as a means of expressing the modes of spiritual companionship that such writings make possible.Footnote ⁴⁶ We see this, for example, in a response to a letter that Shah Wali Allah had received from Mawlawi Abd al-Qadir, a rationalist scholar of Jaunpur, which Shah Wali Allah began with the following verse:

Here Wali Allah's description of his experience of seeing the folded paper as a luminous body, or experiencing the words as a fragrance-bearing breeze, is not suggesting that he has seen light with the external sense of sight, nor smelled an odour with the external olfactory sense. Rather, the image suggests the sensations experienced by the internal senses.

This concept of internal perception, which allowed awareness far beyond what was immediately present to the external senses, had deep roots in Naqshbandi circles. Najm al-Din Razi Daya (d. 1257), whose Mirshād al-ʿibād min al-mabdaʾ ilā al-maʿād was an immensely popular text with early Naqshbandis, describes these internal senses as parallel to the external, physical senses: ‘The heart has an eye with which it beholds visions of the unseen; an ear with which it listens to the speech of the inhabitants of the unseen and the speech of God; nostrils with which it smells the perfumes of the unseen; and a palate with which it perceives the taste of love, the sweetness of faith, and the savor of gnosis.’Footnote ⁴⁸ These internal senses were thus capable of experiencing things not immediately available through sight or touch.

Investigations into the internal senses are found in Wali Allah's technical treatises, too. Working within a modified Avicennan psychological framework, he explains that there are certain existent things (mawjūdāt) that can only be perceived by these internal senses. In al-Khayr al-kathīr he argues that just as there are five external senses, so too are there three internal senses (the sensus communis, the perception, and the estimative faculty) that are properties (khasāʾis) of an individual's pneuma (lit. ‘the airy body’ al-badan al-hawāʾī).Footnote ⁴⁹ Indeed, it is only the internal ‘perceptive’ faculty that perceives a person as a person—‘the pure individual’ (al-shakhṣ al-sirf)—as opposed to an assortment of colours and shapes. Similarly, the estimative faculty (wahm) apprehends the ‘intention’ (maʿnā) of a thing rather than its external form (surat).Footnote ⁵⁰ As Wali Allah states, as well as perceiving the spiritual ‘light’ that an individual produces during pious acts like prayer, the wahm allows us to experience ‘accidental, intuitive matters (umūr ʿaradiyya wijdāniyya)’ like anger and love.Footnote ⁵¹ When, for example, a perceptive individual (dhakiyy) sits with someone who is grieving and afflicted (mahmūm maghmūm), the grief transfers to him (taʿaddāhu al-hamm waʾl-ghamm) by means of the wahm.Footnote ⁵² Although the grief is not his own, this perception can produce physical effects in the one perceiving it: he might turn pale and lose his appetite, for example.

Even during periods of physical proximity, then, companionship was predicated on these non-material, supra-formal perceptions. In the case of two spiritually concordant individuals with extremely sensitive faculties, such perceptions could occur even when their material bodies were not proximate or immediately evident to the external senses.Footnote ⁵³ Thus, when Shah Wali Allah describes the letter as a fragrance-bearing breeze, he is suggesting that the words of the letter served to focus his internal senses in such a way that allowed for a supra-formal connection between himself and the letter writer.

Throughout his correspondence, Wali Allah draws on these ideas to explain the long-established Sufi notion that the spirits of two individuals might be connected over vast geographical differences. Writing to his long-time correspondent Muhammad Muin (d. 1747) of Thatta in Sindh, Wali Allah describes the emotion aroused by his letter: ‘Your noble letter arrived and stirred up much tenderness (sahīfa-i sharīfa rasīd muhayyij-i ishfāq-i farāwān gardīd).’ He assures Muhammad Muin that because of the strength of their spiritual bond, a face-to-face meeting was largely unnecessary: ‘In a situation where spiritual congruence is strong, it is likely the case that bodily meeting has become obsolete (jā-yi ki iʾtilāf-i rūhānī mustahkam ast nazdīk ast ki suhbat-i jismānī bī kār uftad).’ To illustrate this statement, he composed a short verse:

The central conceit of this verse—the intense longing of the wind for the scent of Arabia—is ultimately derived from the hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad remarked that he felt the ‘breath of the All-Merciful’ (nafas al-rahmān) coming from Yemen.Footnote ⁵⁵ This hadith was understood by the Naqshbandis to be a reference to the relationship between the Prophet Muhammad and the Yemeni shepherd, Uways al-Qarni. According to traditions that developed over the centuries, Uways was unable to travel to meet the Prophet because he had to remain in Yemen with his ailing mother, and the two men never physically met.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nevertheless, Uways developed an intense spiritual connection with the Prophet and became a Muslim.Footnote ⁵⁷ This relationship became paradigmatic for Naqshbandi Sufis who received direct communications from the Prophet in the form of visions or dreams. In Nafahāt al-uns, a book Wali Allah read in his youth, the great Naqshbandi Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 1492) cited Farid al-Din Attar's (d. 1221) description of such individuals: ‘There is a group of friends of God whom shaykhs of the mystical path and the great ones in the [way of] reality call Uwaysīs. And, externally, they have no need for a guide (pīr), because the Lord of Messengership—may the peace and blessings of God be upon him—guides them with his particular care, without the mediation of another, just as he guided Uways.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Although the Naqshbandis always emphasised the need for a living guide, they took, as one historian has argued, ‘special pride in the practice of nonphysical Uwaysī transmission’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Shah Wali Allah's father Abd al-Rahim was one such Uwaysi, having received, in the imaginal world, an authorisation (ijāza) directly from the Prophet as well as from Baha al-Din Naqshband (d. 1389).Footnote ⁶⁰ Shah Wali Allah's description of letters as a Yemeni breeze is, therefore, a way of suggesting that letters might bear the trace, perceptible only by the inner senses, of an individual from whom one was physically separated.

In the same letter to Muhammad Muin, Shah Wali Allah explains why such ‘spiritual friendship’ (dūstī-yi rūhānī) was, in fact, superior to face-to-face meetings.Footnote ⁶¹ He writes that the materiality of the body disturbs the more refined inclinations of the human pneuma that, as mentioned above, was the seat of the wahm and other internal senses:

As Shah Wali Allah explains, the pneuma is naturally drawn to the pre-material imaginal world, a level of reality that lay between the world of materiality and the world of pure spirits, ‘distinguished by the fact that it has no material existence but contains forms in the images of material bodies’.Footnote ⁶³ In Shah Wali Allah's view, although some manner of pre-material individuation exists at this level of reality, all souls share a single, indivisible ‘life’ because they are not yet corporealised into distinct material bodies. Reading the letter of a friend, without the intrusion of physical bodies that drag the pneuma back towards the physical world, allows for something of this pre-material unity to be attained.

Shah Wali Allah was not alone in considering letters as a means for developing spiritual connections between two individuals. On one occasion a young scholar from Jaunpur Abd al-Qadir wrote Shah Wali Allah a letter that reads something like modern fan mail. The younger man describes how he had heard people praising Shah Wali Allah's qualities and lamented that he was unable to travel to Delhi to meet him in person:

In his response to Abd al-Qadir, Shah Wali Allah reasserted the idea that the exchange of letters is not only a kind of companionship but has advantages over a physical meeting because it occurs at the level of a spiritual union without the mediation of gross physicality: ‘Indeed, the exchanging of letters is a kind of companionship and that which is worthy of consideration [occurs] through the mutual relating of spirits, not with the drawing near of dust (al-mukātaba nawʿ min al-istihāb wa al-ʿibra bi-munāsabat al-arwāh lā bi-muqārabat al-turāb).’Footnote ⁶⁵

One might be tempted to understand Shah Wali Allah's response as simply a heightened form of epistolary civility, a witty inversion of the emphasis usually placed on face-to-face companionship—or, perhaps, a polite way of encouraging Abd al-Rashid not to visit Delhi after all (certainly, the relationship between the two men does not seem to have developed after this initial exchange). However, Shah Wali Allah was very much committed to the idea of ‘spiritual friendship’, one for which a number of his letters give textual support, by citing a hadith recorded in both Bukhari and Muslim: ‘The spirits are like conscripted soldiers. Those with whom they are acquainted [among the other spirits] they unite with them and those they do not know they conflict with them.’Footnote ⁶⁶ In his famous commentary on Muslim's Sahīh—a commentary with which Shah Wali Allah was very familiar—Abu Zakariyya al-Nawawi (d. 1277) gives a brief explanation of this hadith. According to al-Nawawi, the hadith's use of the verb taʿārafa—‘to become acquainted with one another’—was a reference to the sympathy or compatibility (muwāfaqa) between the attributes of the spirits of different individuals. He wrote that ‘[the spirits] were created as a [single] group and then became divided into their [different] bodies (khuliqat mujtamaʿatan thumma furiqat fī ajsādihā)’. He reasoned that whenever an individual's traits (shiyam) corresponded to those of another individual, they would have affection for one another. On the other hand, he would shun and feel enmity towards whomever had traits different from his own.Footnote ⁶⁷ As al-Nawawi's commentary suggests, this hadith was generally understood to mean that individuals were drawn to one another because their spirits (arwāh) had established a mutual affinity in the pre-material world that manifested as a mutual attraction in the material world after their individuation into separate bodies. Wali Allah draws on these ideas to argue that, in the right spiritual state, it might be possible for two individuals to attain something of this pre-material unity.

Figures within Wali Allah's circle argued that, in cases of intense spiritual congruence between two individuals, written communications might, somewhat paradoxically, be rendered superfluous. Muhammad Ashiq, Wali Allah's closest disciple, describes how another one of the disciples—literally, ‘servants’ (khādimān)—performed a 40-day retreat (chilla) in his own village, a long way from Wali Allah's ‘blessed court’ (astāna-i fayz ashyāna) in Delhi. During his retreat, he sent frequent letters to Shah Wali Allah with questions about his spiritual progress and received written responses before the disciple's letters had even reached him. Moreover, ‘whatever [Shah Wali Allah] had ordered [that the disciple do] in order to obtain those states, he had infused that state into the words [of the letter itself] so that even as [the disciple] read [Shah Wali Allah's] noble letter, that state became manifest [in him]’.Footnote ⁶⁸ While this narrative highlights Wali Allah's own powers, it also suggests the paradoxical nature of epistolography: while used as a tool for maintaining close bonds between master and student, it also remained subordinate to spiritual connections intense enough for a master to understand his student's concerns and to produce spiritual states in him as if he were immediately present.

Maintaining bonds

In most cases, the regular exchange of letters was considered imperative for maintaining bonds that had been strengthened during periods of face-to-face companionship. We frequently encounter complaints of letters going unanswered and the attendant fear that these spiritual bonds were therefore withering. In one such letter Abd al-Aziz, Shah Wali Allah's son, writes to an old disciple of his father, rejoicing that a letter had finally arrived ‘more delicate than the breeze and sweeter than divine blessings (araqq min al-nasīm wa ahlā min al-naʿīm)…giving news of the constancy of [your] love and the firmness of [our] bond (mukhbira ʿan wakīd wadd wa muhakkam ʿaqd)’. Prior to the arrival of the letter, their correspondence had lapsed to the extent that Abd al-Aziz ‘thought that the roar of [our] love had diminished (al-muwadda qad intaqasa zaʿīruhā)’. Had the situation not been resolved, he warned, ‘it would have necessitated the forgetting of [our] love and resulted in the disintegration of [our] customary connection (awjaba nisyān al-widād wa addat bi-fasl al-wasl al-muʿtād)’.Footnote ⁶⁹

As the rhyming prose of this Arabic letter suggests, epistolographic exchanges often displayed great eloquence and rhetorical skill.Footnote ⁷⁰ Although these spiritual bonds were considered to be something beyond speech, the letters themselves—like face-to-face meetings—required strict adherence to the protocols of correct comportment (ādāb), a manifestation of the underlying harmony between the spirits of the two individuals.Footnote ⁷¹ As Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi have demonstrated, Persianate epistolography as an artform required a mastery of the forms of address and structure relevant to the relative ranks of the receiver and the sender.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, schoolchildren learned the protocols of epistolary politesse as a core component of their education. In his late eighteenth-century letter-writing manual, Munshaʾāt-i dil-kushā (‘Letters that Ravish the Heart’), Sayyid Nisar Ali of Bareilly emphasised that his work would teach children the correct ādāb of letter writing: ‘[the book includes] a number of letters [of a kind] that the people of the time write to one other, with the courtesies and titles found in each, using language that should be suitable for the temperament of children who are in elementary education, and that should be easy [for them] to comprehend’.Footnote ⁷³ Likewise, in his Manāzīr al-Inshāʾ, the fifteenth-century Deccani wazīr Mahmud Gawan (d. 1481) wrote that ‘writing according to rank is the greatest quality of a scribe’.Footnote ⁷⁴ This was perhaps even truer for the Naqshbandis: as one oft-cited epigram had it, ‘Correct deportment is everything on the path of spiritual wayfaring (al-tarīqa kulluhu ādāb).’Footnote ⁷⁵

There was a resultant concern to avoid sending letters without proper attention for epistolography protocol. Wali Allah once excused himself for not writing to Muhammad Ashiq during a period of bodily and spiritual affliction because he had not wished to produce a letter that was ‘unartful’ (bī tasannuʿ). Such letters were, he claimed, citing the Abbasid poet al-Mutannabi (d. 965), ‘winds blowing with that which the ships do not desire’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Even with an ethical imperative to maintain an exchange of letters with an absent friend, standards had to be maintained.

The Umani letters

To understand how Wali Allah's theoretical framework of ‘spiritual friendship’ and ‘spiritual congruence’ translated into practice, it is worth considering a series of letters that I term the Umani letters’. These letters illustrate clearly that Shah Wali Allah was willing to instigate a relationship with an individual for whom he had a pre-material spiritual affinity, and to receive an ijāza from him, without ever having a face-to-face meeting. Moreover, Shah Wali Allah wrote these letters to an individual known to him exclusively through a process of spiritual unveiling (kashf).Footnote ⁷⁷ Shah Wali Allah did not know the individual's name: only his lineage (Yemeni), place of residence (Uman), physical characteristics, and intellectual outlook. Indeed, we have no evidence that the individual ever existed (at least, in the material world) and, as we shall see, Shah Wali Allah failed in his attempt to locate him.

The story of this unusual correspondence began in July 1750 (Shaʿbān 1163). Every year, it was Muhammad Ashiq's established habit to travel from Phulat to Delhi to join Shah Wali Allah for a 40-day period of seclusion (iʿtikāf-i arbaʿīn). During this time, which lasted from the end of Shaʿbān and continued throughout the month of Ramazān, Shah Wali Allah would receive spiritual unveilings that he would relate to Muhammad Ashiq who would write them down. It was during these periods of intensive spiritual ‘unveiling’ that Shah Wali Allah produced a number of his shorter treatises on tasawwuf and metaphysics. In 1750, however, because of some domestic obligation (iltizām-i maqām-i ābāʾ-i īn mustahām),Footnote ⁷⁸ Muhammad Ashiq wrote to Shah Wali Allah regretfully informing him that this year he would have to remain in Phulat.Footnote ⁷⁹ Shah Wali Allah responded by telling Muhammad Ashiq it had occurred to him that, in recompense (talāfī) for their necessary and apparent separation (mufāraqat-i sūriyya-i zarūriyya), he would address his comments to Muhammad Ashiq's ‘imaginal form (sūrat-i misāliyya)’ and write down on paper whatever was feasible in the way of subtle points that would ordinarily have been discussed orally (biʾl-mushāfaha).Footnote ⁸⁰ In this way, he continued, the conjuration (nayrang) suggested by the phrase ‘the exchange of letters is a kind of [oral] discourse (al-mukātaba nawʿ min al-mukhātaba)’ would become apparent. Muhammad Ashiq tells us that after receiving this initial letter from Shah Wali Allah, he eagerly awaited his spiritual guide's ‘discourses’ (mukhātabāt).Footnote ⁸¹

It was in the first of these Ramazān discourses that Shah Wali Allah described a vision he had received of an unknown Umani scholar:

Shah Wali Allah took this vision very seriously indeed. He was convinced that he had a spiritual connection with the Umani scholar, despite not having met him in the material world. In fact, he resolved to contact this scholar in order to receive an ijāza from him as a precursor to a face-to-face meeting. Although they already had a spiritual bond, Shah Wali Allah was eager to generate connections in the material world, too. Therefore, he wrote the Umani scholar a letter (in Arabic, naturally):

Having written this letter, the question then arose as to how Shah Wali Allah would ensure that it reached the nameless Umani scholar, known only by his attributes (sifāt). He decided to entrust it to one of his most learned students, Hafiz Jar Allah Panjabi, who happened to be travelling to the Haramayn for pilgrimage.Footnote ⁸⁴ Jar Allah most likely set off for the pilgrimage the following year (1751) because, had he travelled in 1750, there would not have been enough time between the end of the rains in North India (late September)—when travel became feasible—and the beginning of the Hajj season that year (early November).Footnote ⁸⁵ Shah Wali Allah wrote to Jar Allah with an unusual request: namely, to find this elderly scholar as he passed through Uman.Footnote ⁸⁶

Shah Wali Allah wrote a letter to Jar Allah with instructions on how to locate the Umani scholar. He begins with a description of the initial vision: the wording is identical to that found in the passage cited above. Shah Wali Allah then continues:

Jar Allah travelled on the pilgrimage and sought out the scholar when he disembarked from his ship at Muscat.

Unfortunately (though perhaps unsurprisingly), Jar Allah was unsuccessful in his attempts to find the nameless scholar. He wrote to Shah Wali Allah informing him of his failure. We know this because Shah Wali Allah sent another Arabic letter to Jar Allah while he was still in the Haramayn:

Though this attempt failed, more importantly, it demonstrates that Wali Allah felt that his spiritual connection to this individual existed prior to any face-to-face meeting. As his citation of the hadith ‘the spirits are conscripted armies’ suggests, he understood their relationship to exist at a pre-material level of reality and he sought only to replicate and strengthen that connection in the material world.

Ijāzas: textual authorisations?

As we saw earlier, Wali Allah was willing to exchange ijāzas with this enigmatic Umani scholar without feeling the need for a face-to-face meeting. In order to fully appreciate the significance of this, and therefore understand his framework of remote knowledge transmission, we must partially delink the granting of ijāzas from practices of oral knowledge transmission. Indeed, the misrecognition of remote transmission of knowledge in Islamicate South Asia derives, in part, from a number of misconceptions about the function of the ijāza as a technology.Footnote ⁹⁰ Among historians of South Asia, the ijāza is often understood to be a document that was granted to a student on the basis of a satisfactory oral recitation of a book and a demonstration of their mastery of the text's meaning.Footnote ⁹¹ According to this view, the teacher's presentation of the ijāza authorised the student to transmit that particular text to their own students.Footnote ⁹² Scholars have argued that students would collect ijāzas for all of the individual texts that they had recited before a teacher or teachers.

While the genre of the ijāza cannot be discussed here in detail, it is worth noting that it was rather more fluid than such accounts suggest. Nor do these accounts reflect how ijāzas often functioned in eighteenth-century Naqshbandi circles.Footnote ⁹³ Ijāzas produced by Wali Allah for his closest students clearly show that oral transmission of knowledge was not the only, or indeed the primary, purpose of companionship. Indeed, most ijāzas in Wali Allah's circle were not attestations of the correct recitation of a particular text. Rather, they were testimonies to the intellectual, spiritual, and ethical attainments of the recipient, as well as written records of the spiritual and affective bonds that existed between the granter and the recipient.Footnote ⁹⁴

In cases where the prospective granter of an ijāza assessed the prospective recipient as capable but intellectually and spiritually undeveloped, the prospective recipient would undergo a rigorous period of companionship aimed at strengthening their capacities. This would usually involve a period of intellectual formation, including close study of certain texts in the context of face-to-face meetings as well as independent study and a demanding process of spiritual and ethical training (including the memorisation of prayer formulae, with their accompanying practices and the performance of menial tasks to inculcate humility). While an oral recitation of a text (or sections from certain texts) concluded the process, this was often performed in a ritualistic and ceremonial manner. Under no circumstances did it require the recipient to recite all of the ijāza-granter's own writings, let alone all of the texts that he was himself authorised to teach and transmit.Footnote ⁹⁵ This was the case even in the context of hadith transmission where a prospective ijāza recipient usually only recited the opening sections of the various hadith collections.Footnote ⁹⁶ In other words, while this process of formation did include relatively short textual recitations, these were viewed as representative of the student's intellectual and spiritual attainments more broadly.

In these contexts, ijāzas tended to authorise the holder to transmit an entire corpus of texts or even whole fields of knowledge and practice mentioned in the document. Indeed, upon receipt of the ijāza, a student was sometimes permitted to transmit all texts and spiritual practices that the teacher was authorised to teach and transmit, or that he had himself written earlier or, indeed, that he would write in the future.Footnote ⁹⁷ This kind of ijāza, sometimes described as a ‘general ijāza’ (ijāza-i ʿāma), obviated the need for further periods of face-to-face companionship (although, of course, this was desirable).Footnote ⁹⁸

If a prospective ijāza granter felt that a prospective recipient was already intellectually and spiritually advanced, he might grant one without the need for an extended training process. While there might be a ceremonial recitation of sections (usually the openings) of particular texts, teachers sometimes issued ijāzas without requiring a face-to-face meeting at all. This generally occurred when a scholar was issuing an ijāza to another already established scholar or an individual from an illustrious scholarly lineage whose reputation preceded them. As we saw in the case of the Umani letters, established scholars, including Wali Allah, would sometimes write to other scholars and request an ijāza prior to a face-to-face meeting. In another letter, Shah Wali Allah wrote to Muhammad Wazih of Rae Bareilly, scion of the illustrious family of Sayyid Alam Allah, to tell him that ‘everything for which I was granted permission by my own shaykhs is permitted [to you to use and transmit]’.Footnote ⁹⁹ It does not seem that the two men ever had a face-to-face meeting, but Wali Allah had no compunction in authorising him to transmit these texts and spiritual practices.

What is most significant for the purposes of this article is that ijāzas were also attestations of the spiritual bond that had formed between the recipient and the granter. This bond figured in the text of the ijāzas as a form of corporeal identity between student and teacher. In one ijāza dated to 1733, for example, Wali Allah writes of his student that, after a long period of intellectual and spiritual training, ‘his hand is my hand, and his tongue is my tongue’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As with the sensory imagery discussed above, this suggests the spiritual congruence between the two individuals formed through periods of companionship. Once this connection had been established and the student had moved to a distant locale, these bonds might then be sustained through letters. Because the ijāza was a testament to the student's attainments—rather than evidence of an oral recitation of a particular text—the ijāza granter would, depending on the nature of the relationship, have little compunction in sending new books and other forms of written communication to a student on the assumption that they possessed the right intellectual, spiritual, and ethical preparedness to study it alone.

The remote transmission of texts in these networks was quite distinct, then, from the anonymity of print culture. Texts continued to be circulated within close-knit networks of trust based on intellectual and spiritual attainment. However, recognition of these modalities of circulation allows us to move away from a model of textual transmission that relies on the stark binary between oral and written culture.

Remote book collaborations

As we have seen, important figures in eighteenth-century Naqshbandi networks regarded the exchange of letters as a form of spiritual companionship. With this framework in mind, the following section shows how this intellectual theory underwrote the remote exchange of texts. Members of Wali Allah's circle often conducted their scholarly activities remotely with trusted disciples and students, sometimes over significant distances. Indeed, the remote exchanges of books, both completed and draft manuscripts, were central to a number of Shah Wali Allah's scholarly projects. Whenever he had finished a book, Shah Wali Allah would usually send a clean copy (mubayyaz) to his chief disciple Muhammad Ashiq by post. As mentioned above, Wali Allah sent him a finished copy of Hawāmiʿ, his extensive and extremely dense commentary on Hizb al-bahr. In another letter, which we can date to around 1749, Shah Wali Allah wrote to Muhammad Ashiq to lament that he was struggling to write Musaffā, his commentary on Imam Malik's famous early hadith collection Muwattaʾ, and to reassure him that he would send it to him once it was finished.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Although Shah Wali Allah's long-term amanuensis Muhammad Amin KashmiriFootnote ¹⁰² was responsible for turning drafts into clean copies before they were sent, Shah Wali Allah would sometimes send drafts directly to Muhammad Ashiq who would then produce a finished version that was ready for circulation and send it back to Delhi.Footnote ¹⁰³

Because Wali Allah lived in Delhi and Muhammad Ashiq lived in Phulat, Wali Allah sought to manage Muhammad Ashiq's writing activities remotely. At some point, most likely in the 1740s, Wali Allah instructed Muhammad Ashiq to work on producing a ‘Collected Works’ (kulliyyāt) that was to include al-Intibāh fī salāsil awliyāʾ Allāh, Anfās al-ʿārifīn, and Lamahāt. He also instructed Muhammad Ashiq on what to include in his well-known collection of short treatises and poems, al-Tafhīmāt al-ilāhiyya. As well as instructions for the production of the texts, Shah Wali Allah sent Muhammad Ashiq the materials necessary to prepare the manuscripts, noting that, along with his letter, the messenger should have brought ‘paper, red dye (shangarf), and a ruler [for drawing straight lines] (mistar)’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Shah Wali Allah also remotely guided Muhammad Ashiq on what should be included in al-Qawl al-jalī, the biography of Shah Wali Allah that he was then in the process of writing. He told Muhammad Ashiq to include in the biography a letter that the recently deceased Muhammad Muin of Thatta had written to one Sayyid Saʿd Allah, adding that Muhammad Ashiq should provide his own interpretation (tarjuma) of it. He gave further instructions about including letters that he (Wali Allah) had written, as well as a treatise by his uncle Shah Abu al-Riza and (a now-lost) treatise of his father, Māʾasir-i rahīmiyya. In the same letter, Shah Wali Allah also instructed Muhammad Ashiq to finish his incomplete commentary on al-Khayr al-kathīr and told him that, if he did not finish it, he should include the major points in his own book, Dirāyāt.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Even when face-to-face meetings were not possible, Shah Wali Allah was thus able to remotely guide the literary production of his leading disciple.

As mentioned earlier, it was not uncommon in these circles to send books of all genres by post. This included collections of hadith. We know, for example, that Muhammad Muin of Thatta sent Shah Wali Allah instalments of Abu Bakr b. Abi Shayba's (d. 849) voluminous hadith collection, Musannaf, over the course of several years.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Wali Allah had only met Muhammad Muin once in 1730 as he made his way, via Sindh, to the Hijaz and the two men developed a close relationship, exchanging ijāzas before Wali Allah's departure.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Despite meeting only once, and despite their increasingly divergent views on a number of crucial issues, they continued a regular exchange of extremely affectionate letters for some 17 years until the older man's death in 1747.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This remote hadith transmission was not a one off: we also have a letter in which Wali Allah mentions that he has sent a book of musalsalāt hadith to Muhammad Ashiq.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Although hadith transmission is often viewed as paradigmatic for the practice of oral transmission, we see here how the model of spiritual friendship developed in this network meant that the remote transmission of hadith also took place.

We also have evidence that somewhat obscure Sufis, perhaps aspiring to become better known through a connection to important figures, would send their books to these celebrated individuals for them to read and perhaps publicise within their own networks. We have, for example, a letter in which Wali Allah responds to the missive of a now-obscure figure from Muzaffarnagar called Shah-i Awliya Muzaffarnagari. The original letter had arrived with a book (kitābī) that Wali Allah describes as ‘containing secrets and full of subtle points’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Although Wali Allah expresses a desire to meet his correspondent (shawq-i mulāqāt ba-ham rasīd) at some point in the future, his review of the book was politely withering.

Books of poetry were sent by post as well, on one occasion serving as the medium for the transport of the letter itself: in a letter written by Shah Abd al-Aziz, Shah Wali Allah's son, to his father-in-law Nur Allah Budhanwi, probably written in the early 1760s, he mentions that Nur Allah had sent him a copy of the dīwān of the contemporary Persian poet Muhammad Ali Hazin (d. 1776):

In the same letter, Abd al-Aziz told Nur Allah that he was unable to send him the various books, written by the then-deceased Shah Wali Allah, that he had requested because the family was being forced to flee from Delhi in the face of an impending attack (presumably by the Marathas). He informed Nur Allah that the family had packed the contents of their library into sacks so they could bring them safely out of the city. The requested books included Shah Wali Allah's Maktūb al-Madanī, written for Afandi Ismail al-Rumi, which settled the difference between wahdat al-wujūd and wahdat al-shuhūd, and his book on the Sunni caliphate, Izālat al-khafāʾ: ‘As for [your] request for the written books, the decision is that I sealed them in bags that it is not possible to extract them at the moment. I will send them, God willing, after settling in a place.’Footnote ¹¹² There is no sense in the letter that sending these books would be anything out of the ordinary.

The contents of this letter also reveal that it was not only finished books that were being circulated within these networks of trusted individuals. Although scholars have argued that the fear of textual corruption required strict protocols of oral transmission, we see that the bonds of trust among members of eighteenth-century Naqhsbandī circles meant that they were very willing to send unfinished drafts that still contained editorial amendments and other corrections. One of Shah Wali Allah's books that Nur Allah had requested—almost certainly al-Musaffāʾ—was still in draft form at the time (it was completed posthumously in 1765) and Abd al-Aziz told him that he would only send the manuscript if Nur Allah agreed to ‘not go beyond the limits [appropriate for] a draft’, because ‘in much of what is in it and in its notations—both omissions and lines written over it [for corrections]—the text is not suitable that anything be transcribed from it’.Footnote ¹¹³ This last comment suggests that a clear distinction was made between formally ‘published’ texts (mubayyaz) and drafts (taswīd/musawwada). Both were circulated remotely among trusted networks of students and disciples, but only the published manuscripts were used as the basis of citation and/or the production of further copies. We know that Abd al-Aziz did eventually send the manuscript of Musaffāʾ to Nur Allah, because in another letter he reported that the manuscript of the text had arrived safely back in Delhi.Footnote ¹¹⁴

As lithographic printing took off in Bengal in the early nineteenth century, it seems that members of this circle began to engage in long-distance projects aimed at printing Wali Allah's work. In the 1820s, in the final decade of his life, Abd al-Aziz, Wali Allah's son, agreed to commission and send a copy of Hujjat Allāh al-bāligha to two contacts in Calcutta who had requested it so that they might produce the first lithographed edition. As Nur al-Hasan Rashid Kandhlawi has shown, the scholars Munshi Amin al-Din and his brother Munshi Naim al-Din, perhaps disciples of Abd al-Aziz's father, wrote in late 1821 asking for a copy of the text for publication. Abd al-Aziz willingly agreed to the request and asked only that they send Rs 13 for copying costs.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Although this early nineteenth-century lithographic project did not come to fruition, it is notable that Abd al-Aziz, who (as noted above) was already sending uncollated manuscript copies of Hujjat to contacts in distant cities in the late eighteenth century, seemed to register no particular concern about the implications of this new technology or the threat it posed to face-to-face transmission.