ABSTRACT
This essay is an effort to understand the position taken by the celebrated seventeenth-century Chishtī Sufi ‘Abd al-Rahmān Chishtī in his Mir’āt al-Asrār, a hagiographical dictionary (tazkira) of past Sufi holy men. I have read this tazkira together with ‘Abd al-Rahmān’s other writings but focused in particular on his long preface to this work in which he elaborates his definition of tasawwuf and asks what the real religion of the Sufi should be. ‘Abd al-Rahmān also undertakes a far-reaching reassessment of key elements in the wider traditions of Indian Islam. Drawing on a range of Indian and Middle Eastern influences, he rejects the narrow law-centred formulation of the Naqshbandīs and offers a distinctive vision of Chishtī spiritual support at the heart of the Mughal political order. His work opens up for us the wider landscape of religious debate and contestation that characterized Indian Islam during the Mughal era, which later generations of historians have overlooked in their preoccupation with more ‘conservative’ strains of Muslim thought.
