ABSTRACT
They may be long treatises, fatwas or short articles (prabandha). One end of the scale is formed by manuals briefl y exposing darbār etiquette, ḏikr rules, etc. In view of the fact that it is not possible to speak of a separate and independent Maijbhandari theology, it is all the more important to consider the traditions of Islamic and specifi cally Sufi c-Islamic theologies that are or have in the past been current in Bengal as possible frames within which these writings operate. A full-scale account of such developments would require expert knowledge of Islamic theology in general and a close study of regional developments and debates, and must be left to future scholarship. The contextualisation of Maijbhandari theological thought relies on the relevant secondary materials available, and pays heed to three different branches of Sufi c writings. The fi rst of these is the medieval Muslim literature in Bengali that has been made available in editions by Abdul Karim Sahityavisharad and Ahmad Sharif, and is the object of the in-depth studies by Asim Roy (1981) and David Cashin (1995) (as well as, partly, Enāmul Hak 1995). No direct link, and certainly no tradition, can be established between those pũthi writings and the Maijbhandari texts we are going to discuss in this chapter – in sharp contrast to the Maijbhandari songs.1 The second category of texts that would need consideration are the predominantly Persian writings of medieval Sufi s in the urban court environment mostly of the former capitals Gaur, Pandua and Dhaka. Unfortunately no work on these is available except the largely historical account by Latif (1993) that lacks depth in matters of theology, doctrine, etc. The historical link is even harder to establish here. Thirdly, we will take into consideration a number of ‘pan-Sufi c’ authors, most of them Sufi classics, who have informed Maijbhandari theological thinking and served as references from its very beginning. Such frequently quoted traditional Sufi authors include Ibn ʿ Arabi (d. 1240), Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273), Farid al-Din ʿAttar (d. 1220), Muʿin al-Din Chishti (d. 1236) and, of course, albeit with less frequency, the founder of the Qadiriyya ṭarīqa, ʿAbd al-Qadir Gilani (d. 1166). Other than with Maijbhandari songs, and very signifi cantly in the context of the structure of the Maijbhandari movement, theological traditions of other religious backgrounds, such as the various streams of Hindu thought, hardly interact with Maijbhandari theological ideas. What is noteworthy about Maijbhandari text production as a whole, and the theological and hagiological writings in particular, is its very local provenance. Translations and commentaries on the Islamic scriptures and Sufi classics such as Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Masˍnavī are not absent, but the larger part of writings are independent works by local writers, hailing either from Chittagong proper or other parts of Eastern Bengal. There are occasional references of course to contemporary Islamic writers on the subcontinent and beyond, but there is little interlinkage with other Sufi traditions and institutions of the twentieth century. The authors of Maijbhandari theologial tracts are generally closely affi liated to one or the other branch of the movement. Some of them are ʿulamāʾ and local
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religious authorities who have become disciples of Maijbhandari saints.2 Others are themselves pīrzādas or even sağğādanašīns.3 Thirdly, there are also disciples without any formal religious education who venture into systemising their religious views.4 It would in all of these cases be misleading to conceive of this group of writers as a separate faction within the movement. Many among them have also authored hagiographies and songs and would hardly consent to view these activities as separate in any practical sense. What, then, is the nature of the texts we are going to examine? Here are short characterisations of the texts in chronological order.5 The fi rst major tract to appear from Maijbhandar is Aminul Haq Farhadabadi’s (1866-1944) Tuḥfat al-aḫyār fī dafʿ šarārat al-šarār (‘The precious gift of the good regarding the refutation of the evilness of the evil’, 1906/7; Tuḥfat), a fatwa mainly on the legitimacy of samāʿ, listening to music, and a few other controversial topics. Originally written in a mixture of Arabic and Persian, the text was circulated as a manuscript (pũthi) with a Bengali translation in paẏār metre prepared by the author himself. Since the topics treated here are mostly of a legalist nature, this text will concern us only marginally in the present chapter. The second treatise, and one we will have to investigate closely, is the most extensive book on Maijbhandar and runs across the genre distinctions made above: Abdul Ghani Kanchanpuri’s voluminous Urdu compendium Āʾīna-i Bārī (‘Mirror of the Lord’), written and published in 1915, is simultaneously a hagiographical account of Ahmadullah’s life, a collection of more than 100 Urdu ghazals, and an exposition of the theological foundations of the movement. This work is the most comprehensive outline of Maijbhandari theology available to this day. A more concise survey of basic theological tenets, together with the typical apparatus of darbār regulations, behavioural rules, etc. that also features in the abovementioned work, is Abdussalam Isapuri’s Persian tract Fuyūẓāt al-Raḥmāniyya fī ṭarīqat al-māʾiğbhand˙āriyya. A ḫalīfa of Gholam Rahman, Isapuri also wrote hagiographies of both Maijbhandari founding saints; his works are not dated, but the tract in question can safely be estimated to have been written around 1950,6 and the use of Persian in the mid twentieth century remains a striking feature of this text.7
