Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus by Waleed Ziad (review)

Abstract

This book explores the teachings and activities of the Mujaddidi Sufi Fazl Ahmad and his spiritual and familial descendants to construct a cultural landscape stretching from Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan in late precolonial India to Bukhara and Khoqand under imperial Russia. Mujaddidis took their identity from their training in the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624). Ziad argues that Mujaddidi sainthood constituted a “hidden caliphate” in the form of a Persianate sacro-cultural sphere; this study of Fazl Ahmad’s lineage maps out a domain of exchange and circulation of Mujaddidi “scholarly, sacred, and diplomatic goods and services.” Chapter 3 and the associated Appendix B track the reproduction of two manuals in print and manuscript form (thirteen of one and nine of the other) presenting a model for understanding the transmission of spiritual knowledge and the extension of the Mujaddidi Sufi order. These manuals served as a Mujaddidi curriculum and, repackaged with texts produced by other lineages, constitute a continuous Mujaddidi tradition from Sindh to Khoqand. Ziad tells us that these texts were demanded by disciples who carried them back to remote villages to serve as teaching aids. Commissions reveal a literate reading class, rulers, and courtiers among the audience for these texts. Ziad’s presentation of this material is highly instructive in proposing a model for understanding the regional dispersal of a spiritual tradition and undergirds his treatment of the Mujaddidi Sufi order as a unified tradition by providing evidence of Mujaddidi teachers providing spiritual services demanded by their students and other social elites. In chapters 4–9, Ziad examines the lives and careers of Fazl Ahmad and some members of his family and lineage “beyond the Oxus and the Indus.” Chapters 4 and 5 present Fazl Ahmad’s teaching and activities in Peshawar, a node of activity in which Fazl Ahmad’s personnel managed caravan trade routes, correspondence and land grants from the 1760s until his death in 1816, and in Bukhara where he established a second khanqah. Ziad makes good use of twentieth century Urdu language hagiographies and waqf documentation located in the Uzbekistan national archives to situate Fazl Ahmad. Chapter 7 examines Fazl Ahmad’s adaptation to a non-sedentary environment through his deputization of the illiterate Faqir Sahib who was already a spiritual leader in his own right, and the latter’s base of operations in Zakori and in the Powindah tribal