by Ed Husain
With his emphasis on drinking wine, metaphysical or otherwise, Khayyam communicates a variety of themes and messages that give us an insight into Khayyam the Sufi, the dissenter, the free thinker, the flying soul. In the lines below he is downplaying the importance of this mortal life, and pointing out its fleeting nature, a key Sufi theme intended to move human hearts away from a focus on this world to love of the Divine:
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes – or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face
Lighting a little Hour or two – is gone.
And again, emphasising the ephemeral nature of worldly existence, Khayyam invites us to go with him and abandon the learned to their empty talk:
Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.
But go where? Like Jalaluddin Rumi, Khayyam leads us to seek unity with the Divine:
There was a Door to which I found no Key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
Some little Talk awhile of ME and THEE
There seemed – and then no more of THEE and ME.
This was not the Sufism of masters and disciples, but the wild Sufism of divine love: free of rules and guidance, and diving onto and into the divine fire again and again. And in this all-enveloping consumption, the lover and beloved become one. Here is Khayyam on his reliance on God, after a night of drinking:
In tavern rather I to Thee confide
Than pray without Thee at the Pulpit-side;
O Thou, who art creation’s First and Last,
Now burn or bless me as Thou may’st decide.
Despite the focus on Omar Khayyam’s love for wine and drinking, there is no doubt that he was a devout Sufi Muslim. Khayyam’s philosophical and scientific treatises all started and finished with praise for the Prophet and thanksgiving to God. Some have argued that he was merely adhering to the norms of his time, but such a view does not hold up to scrutiny – there was more to Khayyam’s religiosity than beginning each piece of writing with a prayer.
Toward the end of his life Khayyam fell ill, and when scholars wrote to him with scientific questions he wrote back saying that he was ill, and ‘may God grant us and our brothers a good ending’. This ‘good ending’, or husn al-khatimah, was a prayer that the Prophet and generations of Muslims have made before and since. A close observer of Khayyam, his son-in-law Imam Muhammad al-Baghdadi, recorded Khayyam’s last day in detail:
He was studying the Shifa [the celebrated biography of the Prophet Mohamed, then recently published] while using a golden toothpick, until he reached the section on ‘unity and multiplicity’. He marked the section with his toothpick, closed the book, and asked his companions to gather so he could state his will of testament. When his companions gathered they stood up and prayed, and Khayyam refused to eat and drink until he had performed his night prayer. He prostrated himself, putting his forehead on the ground, and said: ‘O Lord, I know you as much as is possible for me; forgive me, for my knowledge of you is my way of reaching you’ – and then died.
This was the ‘good ending’ he wanted.
So one of our greatest scholars, poets and Sufis was a drinker – as were many others before and after him, including caliphs. Let the drinkers drink, and let the rest of us abstain. It is not the business of governments or clerics to interfere and condemn people to be flogged in the name of their literalist Islam. Wherever that happens, hypocrisy reigns. I have seen this at first hand in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where the elite drink wine and whisky imported from Europe and Russia, but poor lorry drivers and village folk who drink homemade concoctions languish in prison or are flogged in public.
For a millennium, from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries, Muslims lived out their faith by venerating their Prophet, reciting the Quran, observing the sharia and enjoying the ecstasy of Sufism. These were the mainstays of Muslim life. The evidence surrounds us in every Muslim city, in poetry praising the Prophet and Quranic calligraphy engraved in the walls of major buildings, honouring the saints and fortifying the Hajj routes for hundreds of years. There were tensions between the worldly and the otherworldly, between Sufism and literalism, and caliphal dynasties and rivalries. But a balance was found in honouring the sharia, praying, giving zakah (alms) and going on the Hajj, but doing so in the Sufi spirit of love, devotion and purity. The survival of Sufi orders, books, music and gatherings in dergahs, khanqahs and zawiyas, shrines and meeting-rooms, speaks to us of continuity through a long age of this Muslim way of life.
However, the tensions between the spirit and the letter of the law, between mysticism and literalism, eventually came to a head in a way exemplified by the court struggles of the Muslim Mughals in seventeenth-century India. The struggle between mysticism and literalism, as fought out then between two princes, with their Sufi sister as arbitrator, continues to this day.
Princess Jahanara Begum was the favourite daughter of the Indian emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666), a Sunni Muslim ruler closely aligned with the Sufi Chishti order of India. Jahanara was seventeen years old when, in 1631, her mother, Shah Jahan’s favourite wife (of three), died, plunging him into deep mourning that brought him close to mental collapse. He vowed to create a magnificent mausoleum – the Taj Mahal – for his deceased wife that would testify to his love for her, and glorify her Creator.
Hindus cremated their dead, and orthodox, literalist Muslims forbade ostentatious ‘worshipping at graves’, which they feared could smack of idolatry. So the building of elaborate mausoleums for Muslims in India was chiefly influenced by Sufi Islam. When completed, the Taj Mahal was a triumph of Mughal Muslim architecture, complete with its own mosque, and with Quranic verses inscribed throughout in Arabic calligraphy, together with Sufi symbolism and poetry.
Shah Jahan’s most loved children, Jahanara and her younger brother Crown Prince Dara Shikoh, were both drawn to Sufi mysticism too. Dara Shikoh’s Sufi mentor was a leading mystic from Lahore, Baba Mian Mir, who had excellent relations with the Sikh community, rivals of the Muslims. At Dara Shikoh and Jahanara’s request, Baba Mian Mir laid the foundation bricks of the great Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Dara Shikoh, enthused by his Sufi teacher’s spiritual openness, went further. He translated the Hindu Upanishads – considered by orthodox Muslims to be blasphemous and idolatrous – into Persian, the lingua franca of Indian Muslims at the time. Dara Shikoh even claimed that the Upanishads were God’s ‘most perfect revelation’, and saw no contradiction between the deeper messages of early Hindu scripture and that of the Quran. The prince’s closest friends included Sikhs, Hindus, and even Sarmad the Jew, a wandering Jewish mystic who was verbally abused by anti-Semitic Muslim clerics of the time. In all of this, the princess supported Dara Shikoh, claiming ‘my brother and I are one soul in two bodies’.
As the emperor’s preferred daughter, Jahanara was at the heart of the imperial dynasty, and a wise and constant counsellor to both her father and her brother, the crown prince. She was instrumental on more than one occasion in ensuring that this Muslim empire was not threatened from within. Jahanara was a hafizah, meaning that she had committed the Quran to memory. She was fluent in Arabic and Persian, and probably Hindi as well – it was she who reintroduced her father to his old love of Hindi music after her mother died, as she tried to console him in his months of grieving. When he appointed her as Princess of the Court, the First Lady, it was the first time a daughter, and not a wife, had held such a prominent position in a Mughal court.
She also became increasingly drawn, in public and private, toward Sufism. At first she was a disciple of the Qadiri order of Baghdad, under the guidance of a living local teacher, Mullah Shah Badakhshi (d. 1616). Badakhshi testified in his writings about the princess that ‘she has attained so
extraordinary a development of the mystical knowledge that she would be worthy of being my representative – if she were not a woman’. Badakhshi’s teachings of humility and love for God and godly people stayed with the princess, but being a Qadiri Sufi did not stop her turning to the Chishti order too.
The Chishtis had a strong presence among Muslims in India at the time, and still do today. The order was founded by Muin ad-Din Chishti (d. 1236), and his tomb in Ajmer, near Delhi, was a regular place of pilgrimage among Muslims then, as now. Chishti’s appeal extends, interestingly, beyond Muslims: Hindus and Sikhs in India also visit the shrine of this Sufi to be connected to something of the afterlife, the metaphysical. Also at these shrines there is Qawwali Sufi devotional music, mastered and popularised by globally renowned musicians such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
When I visited Ajmer in 2012, the keepers of the shrine showed me the damage done in recent bombings by literalist Muslims, who consider this multicultural gathering an abomination. Yet despite the threat to their lives, devotees of the Sufis from Sikh, Hindu and Muslim backgrounds continue to gather in their millions, united in their shared commitment to the Divine.
As Jahanara continued to counsel her father in court, she also threw herself into writing about Sufism. In 1640 she completed a book entitled Confidant of the Spirits, a biography of Sheikh Muin ad-Din Chishti highly regarded among scholars of the time for its impeccable sourcing and research.
In November 1643 she went to Chishti’s mausoleum with her father. The First Lady and her emperor father’s visit to the most important and popular Sufi shrine in India was partly for purposes of protocol and to consolidate support among the populace, but for Jahanara it was more significant. She was no longer a mere student of Sufism, but was deeply enthralled by it. She wrote about her attachment to the tomb, referring to herself as ‘this lowly faqeera’, a Sufi term for someone who is spiritually needy and yearns for God’s riches to be bestowed on them. She wrote about the various places in the mausoleum that she visited, and how she was touched deeply by the sanctity of the Sufi who was buried there, with an extraordinary humility and veneration:
With an hour of daylight remaining, I went to the holy sanctuary and rubbed my pale face on the dust of that threshold. From the doorway to the blessed tomb I went barefoot, kissing the ground. Having entered the dome, I went around the light-filled tomb of my master seven times, sweeping it with my eyelashes, and making the sweet-smelling dust of that place the mascara of my eyes.
India’s First Lady had a brush with death in 1644, when the 31-year-old princess attempted to put out an accidental fire that had engulfed a servant, and her flowing silk garments, perfumed with oil, caught fire. Six of her maids rushed to put out the blaze on Jahanara’s body, and in the process inflicted further damage. She nearly died. Two of the maids did die, as a result of their own wounds. The emperor brought in the best doctors from Persia and Europe to attend his daughter, including a physician from the royal court of England.
It was at this point, just as the princess looked weakest, that she emerged at her strongest. In her fragile state, she struck her heaviest blow for Mughal power by using her position as the most senior princess in court to broker peace between her father and her warrior brother, Aurangzeb. For years, there had been rivalry and suspicion between them. Aurangzeb had put their father under house arrest in Agra as he fought Crown Prince Dara Shikoh for control of the empire. Aurangzeb’s battle cry was to liberate his father from ‘the infidel, Dara Shikoh’ and others. By reconciling Aurangzeb and the emperor, Jahanara made it possible for Aurangzeb to win over leading courtiers and consolidate his path to the Mughal throne. It was this one action that put Aurangzeb in his sister’s debt, and when he did eventually become king in 1658 (until 1707), he would look to Jahanara for counsel.
Not only did the Sufi prince Dara Shikoh lose the war for succession to the Mughal throne, but he was put on trial for apostasy and dishonouring Islam with his liberal utterances of praise for Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and others. The victorious Aurangzeb sent Dara Shikoh’s head to the now frail emperor Shah Jahan, who was traumatised by seeing it.
So Aurangzeb won the throne, but Dara Shikoh’s words at his trial have been preserved, and still serve as inspiration to Muslims and others seeking to stand up to the literalists. When asked in court if he could consider himself a Hindu or Sikh, he responded robustly:
Of course I couldn’t, because I am Muslim, but my humanness is shared with anyone and everyone. If we choose to love one special person, does it mean that they are the only person worthy to be loved? ‘To you your faith, to me mine.’ ‘There is no compulsion in religion’ – straight from the Quran. We cannot force our religion on others ... our duty as Muslims, whose God tells us that there is no obligation in religion, is to allow all faiths to flourish. Is that not what our empire is built on, the very reason the Mughals are great? We were the minority; who were we to march in to new territories and impose our creed on a massive majority of different faiths? Babur knew that. Akbar the Great knew it; Jahangir knew it ... Akbar’s genius was to harness traditions, and his reward was a vibrant, prosperous kingdom. Akbar made his governors read poems by Rumi!
To the very end, Dara Shikoh kept advancing a pluralist, Sufi vision of the Mughal approach to power, every element opposed by his stronger younger brother Aurangzeb. Despite protesting: ‘Of the twenty references to apostasy in the Quran, not one prescribes death!’ he was subsequently killed by Aurangzeb’s henchmen.
Amidst the bloodshed of Aurangzeb’s rule, the Sufi princess survived and tried, unsuccessfully, to be a force for peace and reconciliation. She nevertheless continued to enjoy influence in court: the new king had not forgotten his sister brokering peace with their father. But as a Mughal princess and high lady of the court, she was not to be married. A husband might threaten the throne, and so, to keep lovers at bay, rumours were put about that the emperor poisoned all suitors. In her memoirs, she wrote passionately about her relationship with a Hindu lover – a relationship she did not consummate but promised to continue in the next life. She lobbied her brother to annul the old laws of Akbar the Great that forbade the princess to marry. Prince Dara Shikoh had agreed that if he became king, he would overturn the ban. But Aurangzeb was only too keen to ensure that outsiders did not marry into the royal harem.
Whatever the truth about her emotional life, we do know that Jahanara had a penchant for wild nights, and this troubled Aurangzeb deeply. A Venetian observer of the Mughal court wrote:
The princess was fond of drinking wine, which was imported for her from Persia, Kabul and Kashmir. But the best liquor she drank was distilled in her own house. It was a most delicious spirit, made from wine and rosewater, flavoured with many costly spices and aromatic drugs. Many a time she did me the favour of ordering some bottles of it to be sent to my house, in sign of gratitude for my curing people in the harem ... The lady’s drinking took place at night, when various delightful pranks, music, dancing were going on around her. Things arrived at such a pass that sometimes she was unable to stand, and they had to carry her off to bed.
In 1666, Emperor Shah Jahan died. Jahanara lamented her father’s passing with words reminiscent of the Sufi poet Rumi’s lines on reeds:
I cry from grief like a reed, with only wind
to grasp;
I burn from sorrow like a candle, but only
smoke rises from my head.
Her grief may have been for something more than just her father’s death: the family legacy, the Mughal inheritance, was under threat. As she and other members of the family laid the late emperor inside the Taj Mahal, beside her mother, the liberal and inclusive intellectual and artistic spirit of Sufism was under threat from the militantly orthodox Aurangzeb.
Despite her father’s and brother Dara Shikoh’s deaths, and due to her own popularity inside the royal court and among the general populace, as well as Aurangzeb’s trust in her, Jahanara remained First Lady of the Mughal empire. But h
er liberal instincts could not persuade the new emperor. The days of Jahanara’s father and his grandfather, Akbar the Great – who had attempted to establish deen-e ilahi, a syncretistic mixture of Hinduism and Islam – were over.
Aurangzeb wanted to move away from the Islam of shrines, art, music, drinking and the rest. His rule was to be defined by a more literalist understanding of scripture. Aurangzeb banned court music, court poetry, and even the keeping of an official chronicle, saying this was too vainglorious for a pious Muslim. He abruptly ended his daily balcony appearances before his subjects – the Indian practice of Jharokha Darshan – on the grounds that this could be idolatrous. He went on to forbid alcohol, cannabis, and sexual relations outside wedlock.
Aurangzeb’s literalism seems to have stemmed from his upbringing as a child. While Dara Shikoh and Jahanara were mentored by Sufi-inclined spiritual Muslims, Aurangzeb was fostered as a prince by literalist Muslims – though in later life he was critical of his own teachers, arguing that they had focused too much on ritual and not enough on how he could be a better warrior or monarch.
His sister Jahanara claimed in her memoirs that Aurangzeb had had a Hindu female lover at a younger age. He allegedly drank wine with her to prove that he would bend to her will and love her regardless of rules and social expectations, but somehow their relationship still broke down. Aurangzeb never quite forgave himself for his ‘sins’, and his revived literalism may therefore have been a form of penance. Ultimately, in his determination to be different from his Sufi elder brother and Sufi-influenced father, he opted for what they opposed: puritanical religion.
The permissive spirit of the Mughals thus came to an end, and was never revived again in India. Aurangzeb’s ideas, attitudes and legacy were to set the scene for the bloodbath in 1948, when nearly 2 million Muslims were killed during the partition of India to create Pakistan. Dara Shikoh’s instinct was to live among, and love, Hindus and Sikhs as God’s people; Aurangzeb’s was to ensure that Muslims always had the upper hand, that his religion reigned supreme.