Tarīqah Muhammadiyyah as Tarīqah Jami‘ah

Khawājah Mir Dard’s Experience Beyond Jamāl and Jalāl

Abstract

In the context of the recent debates over the reformism which occurred in Sufism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this article seeks to articulate a reformist system of the Muhammadan Way (Tarīqah Muhammadiyyah) which was formulated by Khawājah Mir Dard of Delhi (d. 1785) in the frame of a Comprehensive Way (Tarīqah Jami‘ah). This way aims to transcend the two types of ecstatic-unitive and orthodox-oriented Sufism known in the Islamic tradition respectively as the mysticism of “intoxication” (sukr) and that of “sobriety” (sahw), offers a solution to resolve the rift between these two types, and goes beyond major Sufi binary concepts such as Jamāl-Jalāl(“beauty”–“majesty”) and wahdat al-wujud–wahdat al-shuhud (“unity of being”–“unity of witnessing”). In particular, the article analyses a major cornerstone of Mir Dard’s Comprehensive Way, namely the theory of “Divine Muhammadan Knowledge,” which comprehends all elements of reason, tradition and intuition, similar to the synthetic attempts of the Iranian philosopher Mulla sadra (d. 1640) in his Transcendental Theosophy, and paves the way for his path of intra-religious synthesis.