Siyāda and Imamate in Eighteenth-Century India

Abstract

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the central authority of the Indian Mughal Empire was gradually replaced by multiple centres of power and culture, the long-standing debates between the different denominations such as the Sunnīs and the Shīʿīs over their contested Islamic traditions thrived again. Shīʿī rulers of the newly emerging centres patronised their religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ) and seminaries and helped disseminating Shīʿī practices and rituals. In response to this development, Sunnīs began to reconsider their relationship with Shīʿism and produced a considerable number of polemical texts. Sunnī religious revivalists in South Asia even made the discussions about Shīʿism part of their reform agendas. Outstanding reformers such as Shāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762), Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān (d. 1780), Muḥammad Nāṣir ʿAndalīb (d. 1758), Khwāja Mīr Dard (d. 1785), and Shāh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (d. 1824) engaged with the issue in different ways and for various aims, which ranged from uniting the main Islamic denominations to rebutting the Shīʿī position altogether. Among these revivalists, the Sufi reformer Mīr Dard, the theoretician of the Ṭarīqa Muḥammadiyya Khāliṣa (“Pure Muḥammadan Path”) founded by his father, ʿAndalīb, paid specific attention to denominational polemics. He propounded the notion of ṭarīqa wāthiqa (“trustworthy path”) as a framework for the reconstruction and reinvigoration of the doctrines of siyāda (“blood affiliation with the Prophet”) and of the imamate. This was presented by him as a solution for the sectarian and theological conflicts between the Shīʿīs and the Sunnīs. It was also supposed to support his and his father’s authority as descendants of the Prophet and as inheritors of the knowledge transmitted by his cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib. This attempt came at a time when the decline of the imperial power created a dispute over moral and religious authority among different Islamic groups. Focusing on Dard’s texts and employing both conceptual-semantic and contextual-historical methods of analysis, this chapter explores the role of siyāda and imāma (leadership) in Dard’s philosophy of Ṭarīqa Muḥammadiyya. It searches for the reason behind his insistence to be recognised as a member