Introduction
‘Every line was in pure Persian, but a change in the diacritics made them Arabic. If those words were altered they turned Turkish. And when written again, they became Hindi.’
Shahnawaz Khan, Ma’āsir al-Umarā
Sometime between 1741 and 1747 in the Deccan state of Hyderabad, a retired Indian nobleman penned a brief biographical portrait of a Sufi at the Mughal emperor Akbar's sixteenth-century court.Footnote 1 The Sufi in question was ‘Abdul ‘Azim, later to be distinguished as Sultan Khwaja Naqshbandi. The descendant of a long line of Naqshbandis from Samarqand, ‘Abdul ‘Azim later became the imperial Amīr Hāj or Commander of the Pilgrimage in the middle decades of Akbar's reign. Entrusted with funds and the oversight of Hajjis from India, he was also sent to the Hijaz to bring back first-hand information on the renouncing Sufi mystics (tajarrud-manishān) in that part of the world.Footnote 2 Yet, ‘Abdul ‘Azim's eighteenth-century biographer Shahnawaz Khan clearly wanted to place this historical figure in further context. He thus continued in his writing to provide some comments on the broader cultural ambience of the epoch. To give an idea of the famously eclectic religious ideology of the Akbari regime, he wrote of local and trans-local influences, of Brahmans, Jews, Nazarenes, Sunnis, and Shi‘as at the Mughal court. He also wrote of how Akbar had once summoned from Iran the head of the Zoroastrian community there. But, we are told, the latter declined the invitation. All the same, in his place he sent a book to Hindustan, one whose fabulous contents are described in the epigraph.Footnote 3
Both the ‘fictional’ account of this codex—and the more ‘factual’ story within which it was embedded—throw into sharp relief an early modern world of Indo-Islamic piety in motion. They gesture to an Islamic religious ecumene spanning India, Central Asia, Iran, and the Ottoman empire, and to the exceptional place of the Hajj and itinerant Sufi pilgrims in bringing it all together. They speak too of how even in the late Mughal period, Indian men of letters could imagine and occupy a larger Perso-Turkic space of learning and conversation which, though diverse, could nevertheless be ‘translated’ to fit local patterns of thought. This article picks up some of the historical threads and themes underscored by Shahnawaz Khan. In doing so, it draws attention to a little-known but sprawling network of Indian Sufi lodges across the Ottoman empire. Using principally Turkish sources and archives, the article illustrates how Indian Sufis and their pilgrim movements gradually cemented in the early modern Ottoman world an important but historically overlooked institutional assemblage. Variously referred to by Ottoman Turks as ‘Hindi’ or ‘Hindu’—that is to say ‘Indian’—tekkes, these Sufi lodges were fundamental in functioning as waystations and as centres of hospitality for pilgrims who embarked on the long road to the Hijaz.Footnote 4 But though their histories reached back to the beginnings of the early modern era, I argue that their significance as hubs for the communal activities of Indian Sufis only began to gather significant social force and acceleration over a ‘long’ and ‘eventful’ eighteenth century (circa 1695–1808).Footnote 5
Past scholarship on the Ottoman empire and Mughal India alike has demonstrated how political decentralization in this period led to the parallel formation of new elite and middling groups. As the centralist hegemony of these empires ebbed, new fiscal practices and methods of rent extraction led power to coalesce at the local and provincial levels.Footnote 6 Meanwhile, new forms of sociability mushroomed in multiple sites and locations—including in coffee houses, elite households, bazaars, myriad channels of oral and written communications, and, indeed, in Sufi lodges.Footnote 7 In a sense the aim of this article is to conjugate these two previously discrete terrains of historical inquiry, and to further evaluate the ‘global thrust’ that led South Asians to engage in trans-imperial webs spanning India and the wider Muslim world.Footnote 8 My contribution to the literature therefore makes a case for viewing the Indian Sufi lodges of the Ottoman empire as spaces of patron-client sociability, but also as institutions that gave corporate meanings and values to the practices of itinerant pilgrim piety.
This article thus reflects on the careers of the Indian Sufi lodges through a period of rapid political transition in the late Ottoman empire. It achieves this through two overlapping, if distinct, interventions. It shows, first and foremost, the significance of the tekkes in mediating exchanges between South Asia and the Ottoman domains, and how these links transformed with emergent pilgrimage and state connections over the course of the eighteenth century. Second, it argues that the mobile and migrant Indian Sufis utilized local intellectual, legal, and fiscal regimes to root both their pious practices and themselves in substantive ways in the Ottoman empire. At the most general level, then, what follows also concerns the logistical demands of Sufi pilgrim movements on the wider circuits of the Hajj. I offer a closer look at the humdrum but essential activities and politics of having to feed, lodge, set in transit, and, in the case of death, bury Indian Sufi pilgrims in the early modern Ottoman world. But I also ask: precisely how were these Sufi networks of hospitality established with reference to both local practices of Sufi-disciple clientship and to the broader structures of empire?
By way of an introduction to the Indian Sufi tekkes, the first part of this article provides a historical sketch of the two Indian lodges in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. Throughout this section, I identify and dwell on a conceptual problem, one that centres on the names of the Indian lodges and some of their transient patrons and inhabitants. I reveal how the names given to them by Ottoman Turks—‘Hindi’/‘Hindu’—reflected in their discursive logic and usage some constitutive ideas of difference and belonging in the early modern Ottoman world.Footnote 9 As well, I note that these ideas were to exhibit signs of change as the eighteenth century progressed and the institutional affiliations of ‘foreign’ Sufis pilgrims realigned. The section therefore unfolds a narrative that attempts to make sense of the category of ‘Indian’ as it was applied to the Sufi lodges. It sifts through the ways in which it was invoked by Ottoman imperial scribes, men of letters, poets, bureaucrats, and an everyday urban public to examine how the Hindi tekkes came to act as more frequent institutional hosts for South Asian pilgrims in this period. Even as I develop this conceptual history from the vantage point of the two lodges of Istanbul, my account nonetheless takes the reader to different corners of the Islamic world—to Central and South Asia, the Middle East, and to the Indian Ocean world.
In the next section of the article, my focus moves out of the imperial city and into the routine functions of the various Sufi lodges in Konya, Bursa, Antakya, and Aleppo, to name just a few provincial cities that hosted Indian Sufi lodges. Here I home in to explore the practical dimensions of their day-to-day procedures of organizing piety, while arguing that Indian Sufi pilgrims were another variety of ‘trans-imperial subjects’ present in contemporary Ottoman society.Footnote 10 To this end, I focus on how Sufis engaged in oral and textual forms of social communications to extend their networks of corporate clientship in an era of imperial decentralization in the Ottoman world. Special attention is thus paid to how Indian Sufis participated in debate and dialogue with both fellow Sufis and provincial authorities, and made concerted efforts to arbitrate with the imperial state through the formal instrument of the petition, or ‘arzuhal. As we shall presently see, Sufi petitions to the Ottoman sultan were not quite the story-like ‘prolix’ narrative forms of early modern Europe.Footnote 11 They were instead terse communicative acts—documentary statements of frequent interactions between professionalized chanceries and growing social information orders.
The view from Istanbul
There was arguably no real ‘centre’ to this Indo-Ottoman Sufi assemblage. Yet if a specific region of the world acted as an axis around which this Eurasian constellation of caravans, lodges, and pilgrims revolved, it was the Hijaz. We could therefore loosely conceive the Indian lodges as ‘feeder’ destinations: stops on the way to the more important locations of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Nevertheless, the towns and urban areas in which these lodges were located remained relevant for their own peculiar political, organizational, and spiritual significance. There were Indian lodges in Damascus and Cairo, for example. These large metropolises were instrumental in acting as the urban springboards for the two ‘official’ caravan routes for the Hajj under the Ottomans, with the provincial governors in each city being vested with the titular distinctions of the Commander of the Pilgrimage (Mir ül-Hac).Footnote 12
The lodge in Jerusalem, meanwhile, accommodated pilgrims on their visits to what many took to be the most sacred city in Islam after Mecca and Medina.Footnote 13 Certainly the Sublime Porte also recognized this. So when in 1774 it responded to petitioners from the Indian Sufi lodge (Hindiyan zaviyesi) in the neighbourhood in Jerusalem by Herod's Gate, it also made sure to invoke some well-worn maxims regarding the city, referring to it as ‘the site of the Noble Prophet's Ascension to heaven (mahal-ı mi‘rac-ı Nebi-i kerim)’, and the ‘third among the Holy Places (salis el-Haremeyn eş-Şerifeyn)’.Footnote 14 Even lodges in smaller cities had their specific roles as part of this assemblage. Tarsus, on the southeastern Mediterranean belt of Anatolia, is one of several places in the Muslim world claiming to host the burial site of the prophet Daniel. And evidently, from their nearby lodge, Indian Sufis were, in the early eighteenth century, frequent visitors to the Ulu Mosque complex that had been built around this tomb.Footnote 15
By the very nature of the paper trail, however, any fruitful consideration of these Indian Sufi lodges must begin in the bureaucratic heart of the Ottoman empire. After all, some significant aspects of their administration, management, and fiscal support fanned out from the capital in Istanbul. Further, the evidence we have at hand is thickest for the two Indian Sufi lodges of Ottoman Istanbul—one tekke in Aksaray abutting the very core of the imperial city (Asitane), and another, less prominent, lodge just across the Bosphorus strait, in Üsküdar. Briefly reconstructing here something of their long histories might provide grist for the discussions to follow, both in terms of background and as a reflective gloss on other such lodges stretching from the Balkans to the Red Sea.Footnote 16 Besides, such a thumbnail study might well serve as an attempt to unpack the conceptual coordinates of what, in the hands of Ottoman scribes, bureaucrats, and laymen alike, was a thoroughly diffuse term: to wit, the word ‘Hindi’ itself.
In broad strokes, then, we can trace the history of the first Indian Sufi lodge in Istanbul back to the foundations of the city as the Ottoman capital. Apparently decreed into official existence soon after the fall of Constantinople, and at the behest of Sultan Mehmed II the ‘Conqueror’ (r. 1444–46/1451–81), the lodge in Aksaray had in time also acquired the name ‘horhor’ after the street on which it once stood, but also in onomatopoeic regard for the sound of running water from a nearby ablution fountain. Yet, more usually and simply, it was referred to as the Sufi lodge for Indians, namely, the ‘Hindular’ or ‘Hindiler Tekkesi’.Footnote 17 Aside from the main tekke compound in Aksaray, Mehmed II had also commissioned the building of a small mosque (mescit) for the dervishes of the lodge, but no detritus or evidence of that building has survived.Footnote 18 Still, the connections between the lodge and the first Ottoman ruler of Istanbul ran deep in local memory. As late as the eighteenth century, chroniclers took care to mention that the sultan's personal weapons bearer (silahdar) was a routine visitor to this lodge. And upon being ‘marked by divine ecstasy’, he had ‘ended his life having dwelt for some time in the [Horhor] zaviye’. The silahdar was eventually also buried by the entrance to the mosque (see Figure 1).Footnote 19
Ablution fountains, Horhor Hindi Sufi lodge, Aksaray, Istanbul. Source: Photograph by author.
Much less is known or indeed has been written about Istanbul's other Indian Sufi lodge in the Selamsız neighbourhood of Üsküdar, near the so-called ‘Chinese’ mosque (Çinili mescit). Modern historians and Ottoman chroniclers alike have suggested that one Sheikh Saiyid Faizullah-i Hindi established this tekke in the first half of the eighteenth century, in 1150 H./1737–38 CE to be precise (Figure 2).Footnote 20 There is in fact little reason to doubt this claim: by the mid-nineteenth century at least, Ottoman officials had begun to refer to the lodge eponymously after its founder. A state survey in 1843 of the Sufi lodges in Istanbul referred to it not as an ‘Indian’ lodge per se, but rather as the ‘Hindî Feyzulah Efendi Tekyesi’.Footnote 21 The same holds true when one turns to registers that logged the monetary amounts disbursed by the state to the tekke in 1855–56,Footnote 22 1856–57,Footnote 23 1858–59,Footnote 24 and 1860–61,Footnote 25 respectively. Perhaps this was a way for bureaucrats to make a verbal distinction between this latter-day Hindi lodge and the older one in Aksaray. And indeed, towards the end of the period in question, government scribes were wont to refer to the Horhor tekke as an ‘ancient lodge (kadim zaviye)’.Footnote 26 Whatever the case may be, like its counterpart across the Bosphorus, over the course of its existence the Faizullah lodge too had acquired a more quotidian name, and Ottomans hailing from the locality of Üsküdar itself spoke of it as the ‘Sufi lodge for Indians’, the ‘Hindiler’ tekke.Footnote 27
Tombstone of Faizullah Hindi at the ‘new’ Indian Sufi lodge, established 1737–38, Üsküdar, Istanbul. Source: Photograph by author.
Locations of ‘Hindi’
Such density of historical information on the two lodges of Istanbul notwithstanding, some problems of accuracy persist. Who after all were these ‘Indians’? And what did the service elites and tekke-goers of the Ottoman empire mean precisely by ‘Hindi’ and ‘Hindu’? It is worth noting here that up until the eighteenth century, in the Persianate world ‘Hindu’ had held a certain creative—because poetic—‘prehistory’. Together with their use as a demonym to single out a person or object of ‘Indian’ origin, they had been in steady circulation since medieval times as a broad metonym for ‘blackness’. The doyenne of modern scholars of Sufi poetry, Annemarie Schimmel has attributed this to an early conceptual dichotomy conceived by Muslim intellectuals in India and Persia, grounded on a contrast between the ‘purity’ and ‘whiteness’ of the ‘Turk’ against the dark ‘infidelity’ of the ‘Hindu’.Footnote 28 Such an evaluation was later echoed by a study focusing on Sufism in India, which further suggested that their usage was not always limited to the derogatory as such. The words as concepts were in sufficient flux for them to have worked at more flattering registers in the Indo-Persian world, and from the Ghaznavid era onwards, they were also used to denote, for example, the ‘dark tresses’ or ‘black mole’ of the proverbial beloved.Footnote 29
In time such meanings behind these concepts almost completely vanished. Before they did, however, what Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have argued was an early modern Persianate intellectual and textual sphere — culminating in a ‘republic of letters’ in the eighteenth century—encouraged the wide dissemination of these terms across imperial frontiers.Footnote 30 Recent studies have justifiably questioned the assumption that ‘Turk’ and ‘Hindu’—as discursive concepts or otherwise—were always already in categorical conflict with each other.Footnote 31 On the other hand, it is apparent that early modern Turkish poets were obviously aware of these literary symbols, as both Persian and Indo-Persian forms and styles of verse had a discernible impact on their aesthetic idioms.Footnote 32 Thus, for example, the Ottoman court poet Mahmud ‘Abdülbaki Baki's (1526–1600) allusions to the ‘florid Hindu ornament (Hindû-yı benefşe zîneti)’ or black mole of his poetical beloved.Footnote 33
But to compound confusion beyond lyrical drift, there were a few other referents still in the early modern Ottoman world for ‘Hindi’ and ‘Hindu’. Now, there is little question that the words were meant to imply ‘foreignness’ of a kind within Ottoman realms. Judging from Ottoman records, it is certainly evident that ‘Hindi’ designated ‘outsiders’ of sorts in the eyes of the state. Nevertheless, the specificity of Hindi’s referents frequently varied. An imperial petition to the Ottoman sultan from Hajj pilgrims in the sixteenth century illustrates, for instance, that ‘Hindi’ at times referred not to India, but to certain parts of Southeast Asia.Footnote 34 Take here also the case of the name of the founder of the Horhor Hindi lodge in Istanbul: the same sheikh at whose request Mehmed II had established the tekke in the fifteenth century—Sheikh Ishaq Buhari-i Hindi or, to put it differently, Sheikh Ishaq, of Bukhara and India. Consider also the suggestion, by at least one scholar, that in the case of the Üsküdar lodge, ‘it is debatable whether the founder of the tekke, Feyzullah-ı Hindi was even in fact of Indian origin, or if he was rather one of the [many] Central Asian Turks who arrived in Istanbul or went on the Hajj byway of India’.Footnote 35 This, despite the insistence of Ottoman tekke surveyors that between Faizullah-i Hindi's death in 1748 and that of the sixth successive sheikh in 1822–23, all but one of the masters of the lodge had the title of ‘the Indian’ or ‘el-Hindi’ after their names.Footnote 36 To put things squarely then, the confusion therefore arises from the fact that the Ottoman Turks deployed ‘Hindi’ or ‘Hindu’ as a rather fuzzy, but nevertheless complex, locative concept. If at times it pointed to the Indian subcontinent, it was also habitually used to indicate other regions of the Muslim world.
This point can be clarified further with two more explanations. The first of these has to do with the specific nature of the routes taken by pilgrims from West and Central Asia for the Hajj. Whether from Bukhara, Samarqand, or the Fergana Valley in the Transoxanian tract, or even from present-day Afghanistan, many pilgrims from these regions would choose to forego the overland path and instead cross into South Asia, where they would board ships that conveyed them to the Arabian Peninsula and the Ottoman domains.Footnote 37 As a matter of fact, much of this traffic was also threaded through a network of Ottoman Sufi lodges dedicated to Central Asian pilgrims on their way to the Hijaz, and the histories behind those institutions have been relatively better documented when compared to their Indian counterparts.Footnote 38 Yet it was by the very fact of this frequent ‘detour’ via the subcontinent that many of these Central Asians within the territorial limits of the Ottoman empire came to be labelled, somewhat one-sidedly as it turned out, as ‘Hindis’.
The second cause for this confusion, on the other hand, is historically more intricate. But it owes much to the numerous intellectual, political, and institutional passages paved by the Hydra-like diffusion of two influential spiritual orders. These were, respectively, the Naqshbandi and the Qadiri Sufi orders (tārīqas). Briefly, we can summarize the matter by noting that these two Sufi groups—which at any rate had grown deep and connected roots in India, Central Asia, and the Ottoman empire earlier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—would also go on to become the dominant orders as far as the Indo-Ottoman Sufi lodges were concerned.Footnote 39 This was especially true for the Naqshbandi order, which for a mixed array of political-religious reasons enjoyed a preferred position among the Ottoman elite.Footnote 40 And though somewhat spurned in the earlier Mughal period in favour of the Chishtis—whose religious notions were more amenable to the ideological inclinations of the imperial courtFootnote 41 —the more vigorous participation of the Naqshbandis in eighteenth-century Indo-Ottoman connections perhaps owed something to the now-curtailed reach of the state in these matters. At a minimum, this is also borne out in the commanding authority exercised by towering Naqshbandi figures in late Mughal India such as Shah Waliullah of Delhi (1703–1762), whose intellectual vision was also partly grounded in the experience of pilgrimage in the Ottoman Hijaz. Naturally, thus, the importance of the Naqshbandis in bridging connections between South Asia and the Near and Middle East remained unchallenged from this period onwards.Footnote 42 Yet it was precisely on account of the ecumenical embrace of the Naqshbandis, and to a lesser extent the Qadiris, that the Indian Sufi lodges in Istanbul and the Ottoman provinces became destinations not just for South, but also West and Central Asians. And the doubled thrust behind the name of the ‘Indian’ Sufi lodges itself owed something to the socioculturally diverse character of their congregations.
In tandem with their composite cultural layout, it is apparent that the particular Sufi affiliations of the Indian lodges were also frequently diversified. Founded in 1692–93 and 1754, respectively, throughout their existence the two Uzbek Sufi lodges in Istanbul remained devoted to Naqshbandi Sufism.Footnote 43 Likewise the Afghan lodge, which was established at the end of the eighteenth century.Footnote 44 The Horhor Indian tekke, on the other hand, leaned at times towards the pious precepts of the Qadiris, but more often than not to that of the Naqshbandis. Certainly under Mehmed II's dispensation the lodge and the mosque annexed to it were constructed for explicit use as Naqshbandi structures.Footnote 45 But over the years the site also attracted Qadiri adherents, and quite a few sheikhs who acted as masters (postnişin) of that lodge promulgated the disciplinary and spiritual regimes of that particular order. Turkish accounts of these developments are scattered, but (at least in the nineteenth century) it is evident that the Horhor lodge became, above all, a site for the religious practices of the Qadiris.Footnote 46 Meanwhile, in some ways the Üsküdar Indian tekke mirrored the elaborate trajectories taken by the lodge in the main quarters of the city. Although periodically it was reported to have been a Naqshbandi lodge,Footnote 47 equally it was asserted by others that the Sufis there conformed to practices of the Qadiri lineage or silsila.Footnote 48
But perhaps all of the above still does not quite resolve the issue. It might well be argued at this juncture that, given the complexity of the problem at hand, it would be difficult to know in any true measure if the ‘Indians’ in question were really from South Asia at all. No descriptive first-person account written by an Indian Sufi of the Ottoman lodges is extant. And scholars of South Asia have paid scant—if any— attention to the history of these Indo-Ottoman tekkes. In what remains of this section, it would make some sense therefore to provide an abridged sketch of precisely how, by the end of the century, the ‘Indian’ lodges in the Ottoman capital began to welcome more and more Sufis from the subcontinent. We may begin with an account of the Horhor Indian lodge excerpted from an important and far-reaching survey of Istanbul's mosques conducted in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Compiled by the scion of an Ottoman family of service elites, Hafız Hüseyin Ayvansarayi's (d. 1787) account is in fact worth quoting at some length:Footnote 49
The Mosque of the Hindiler Tekke near the Congregational Mosque of Murad Pasha.
The abovementioned zaviye is a lodge of the Nakşbendi dervish order. His Majesty ‘Abülfeth Sultan Mehmed Han built it at the request of Hoca Ishak Buhari-i Hindi. The abovementioned sheikh is buried before the mihrab [with] the Horhor fountains on one side. The administration is entrusted to the sheikhs. An income for its expenses is provided from the pious endowments (vakıf) of His Majesty the aforesaid sultan. Subsequently, at the request of Saiyid Faizullah Efendi-i Hindi, the founder of the [Indian] lodge in Üsküdar, Grand Vizier Yeğen Mehmed Pasha assigned it a daily income from the customs duties. In those days, the sheikhs of the lodge were from the lands of India (türabi-i Hindi idi)—may God have mercy on them all.Footnote 50
Aside from drawing from the above an idea of how the two Istanbul Indian lodges often worked together in some aspects of their functional pursuits, we can understand from Ayvansarayi's description that in the first half of the eighteenth century anyway—that is, ‘in those days’ of Faizullah-i Hindi's tenure at the Üsküdar tekke—the Horhor lodge was home to sheikhs from India, if not also many unaccounted-for Indian Sufis. Furthermore, if we are to treat this text seriously, we might also conclude that in the latter decades of the same century this scenario had changed somewhat, and the incumbent sheikhs then at Horhor were not of Indian, but rather of Central Asian, extraction.
However—and here we arrive at the crux of the matter—what we can declare with some more confidence is that ‘Hindi’ only sharpened as a concept towards the end of the eighteenth century. Its usage in this period thus anticipated many of the developments of the next century by gradually becoming an increasingly site-specific adjective, one that with further precision referred to the South Asian subcontinent.Footnote 51 Accordingly, it was also over the course of this long century that Istanbul witnessed the establishment of the three Sufi lodges that were more-or-less exclusively dedicated to accommodating Sufi pilgrims arriving from West and Central Asia (see Figure 3). Thus, with the founding of the so-called Uzbek and Afghan tekkes, there might have also been a consequent and gradual parting of ways between the numerous varieties and categories of ‘Hindis’, so that the word thereafter came to stand for less rambling (but maybe also less ‘cosmopolitan’) geographical allusions. Indeed, we thus see that in the generation that followed the completion of Hafız Hüseyin Ayvansarayi's tour d'horizon of Istanbul's religious skyline, the ‘demographic’ scenery at the Hindi tekkes of the city very rapidly reverted back to the order of that earlier era of which he makes mention, and several subsequent postnişins at the Horhor lodge were most certainly Sufi sheikhs who arrived from distant South Asia. So we know, for example, that the Horhor sheikh Ahmad Efendi bin Muhammad Shah (1795/96–1870) was not only a ‘Hindi’, but even more unequivocally, a Kashmiri—or to express it in the language of his Turkish contemporaries, Keşmirli. In point of historical fact, the next seven head sheikhs to follow at Horhor were also ‘Indians’ of one variety or another.Footnote 52
The Afghan Sufi lodge, established 1792–93, one of several tekkes founded in eighteenth-century Istanbul for West and Central Asians, Üsküdar, Istanbul. Source: Photograph by author.
The proliferation of, and ultimately the divisions between, the various Ottoman Sufi lodges dedicated to particular ‘ethnic’ pilgrim identities—Indian, Afghan, Uzbek—signalled as well an atmosphere of heightened competition that came to structure social relations at the lodges. These transformations often also drew in the state, as for instance to reconcile factional disputes at the tekkes. Thus, one other detail to take away from Ayvansarayi's observations regards the express involvement of the Ottoman state at the Indian Sufi lodges. Incidentally, this went beyond the fiscal support of the tekkes that the author so judiciously cites in praise of a former sultan. Though we will have occasion to return to the theme of state-Sufi relations later in this article, suffice to note here that the state often intervened in the internal procedures of the tekkes as well, as when controversies of succession arose following the death of a particular sheikh. So although the rules of a postnişin’s assumption of office were conventionally governed by hereditary and agnatic patterns, affairs on the ground were not always as clear-cut as that. For example, when Sheikh ‘Abdullah Efendi of the Indian zaviye in Damascus died in 1799, a minor scramble broke out for his erstwhile position. It was argued that ‘because his two sons are unfit for the Office of the Sheikh’, a certain ‘‘Abdulwahid Hindi from the ranks of men of merit has been deemed by all means to be worthy of the aforementioned position of the Sheikh’. As it happened, the Porte in Istanbul was also in agreement with this. So to settle matters, it sent off to the local judge at Damascus an official order of appointment (berat-ı şerif) in explicit support of ‘Abdulwahid's candidacy.Footnote 53
Yet an even more central point to take from this is that such statist interventions also concerned the candidacy of sheikhs with regard to their places of origin. Because, ultimately, we find that the Sufis themselves began to claim that the nominal identities of the tekkes—increasingly rooted in patterns of ‘regional’ distinctiveness—had to be reinforced by the endorsement of the Ottoman government. Furthermore, such arguments were often delineated with reference to the allocations of the financial resources of the lodges. It thus remains a compelling reminder that, despite the hitherto confusing (and confused) locutionary targets of ‘Hindi’ and ‘Hindu’, the imperial government at times closed in to demand that, well, ‘Indians’ administer their ‘Indian’ lodges. At least on one recorded occasion, the Porte therefore ordered that a Sheikh Tahsin Efendi step down from the position of postnişin of the Horhor lodge. This was not only on account of multiple allegations against him of graft, gross negligence of duty, and for keeping the company of ‘inappropriate men (uygunsuz adamlar)’, but also, and more bluntly, because he was ‘not a real Indian (aslin [sic] Hindî olmayıp)’. It was in fact a written petition from the dervishes at Horhor that had occasioned such a drastic move. As well as voicing many other kinds of grievances, the petition demanded that a person of Indian origin ought to be the rightful sheikh of the Horhor Hindi lodge.Footnote 54
We might venture here to suggest that the hardening of the ‘communal’ characters of the Ottoman tekkes were in the end reflective of wider and deeper changes caused by imperial shifts within the Ottoman and Islamic worlds. Recently, Nile Green has shown how steam travel to Mecca afforded essential transformations within pilgrimage itineraries in the modern era, and led to the ‘undoing’ of the routes of the Hajj as exclusively Muslim spaces. In other words, the broader spatial reach and the novel industrial dimensions of pilgrimage after the 1850s led more Muslims to encounter circumstances ‘governed by ideas, peoples and technologies of non-Muslim provenance’.Footnote 55 But if visions of difference here were predicated on Muslims crossing paths with non-Muslims, the case of ‘Hindi’ offers an earlier variant on Green's observations, set in the context of expanding institutional networks for Sufi co-religionists from different parts of the Islamic world.
After all, it has been argued influentially that notions of ‘old patriotisms’ based on faith-based identifies were already on the rise across late Mughal India.Footnote 56 Susan Bayly further observed that the formation of corporatized religious outfits played a key role in bringing to the fore these new associative patterns.Footnote 57 Yet the making of distinctive identities premised on cultural difference were no less the hallmarks of a decentralizing Ottoman imperial society. Evolving ‘xenophobic’ attitudes, banded identities based on affiliations of religion, ethnicity, and even ‘race’ and ‘nationality’ all emerged as the empire underwent sweeping transitions.Footnote 58 As M. Şükrü Hanioğlu explains, ‘political, military, and economic instability’ in the eighteenth century allowed ‘ethnic consciousness comparable to modern nationalism’ to redefine social relations within the Ottoman empire.Footnote 59 In this respect, the ‘Hindi’ Sufis—and the ‘Hindi’ tekkes—were no exceptions. But, the reformatting of this marker of identity perhaps also owed to the remarkably elaborate connections that the Hindi lodges were beginning to nurture with powerful political regimes in South Asia.
Death and diplomacy at the Horhor Hindi lodge
Viewed from this perspective, the argument outlined above—namely, that ‘Hindi’ in the case of the Sufi lodges began to gather increasing traction in the late eighteenth century as a word meant more exclusively for the Indian subcontinent—can be taken a little further. There are more ‘concrete’ reasons to suggest that as the Hindi Sufi lodges of Istanbul gradually veered away from their earlier Central and West Asian links to function as institutions more oriented towards India, they also began to act as more frequent haunts for South Asians of high-ranking and elite status who passed through the city. Crucially, such visiting Sufis included state dignitaries from India, whose influential presence at these sites might have helped to further fortify the specifically ‘Indian’ character of the Hindi tekkes (though this should not be taken to mean that the lodges abruptly began to disallow entry to Sufis from other regions).
What I offer below is thus a vignette of one such occasion when incoming state actors from India ventured through the gates of the Horhor Hindi tekke. And, as a vignette, it should be read as a ‘political’ echo of the cultural and conceptual transition I have tried to define so far. Because beyond sheikhs, Sufis, and pilgrims, there were others who arrived at this lodges on the heels of global political developments and eventful historical conjunctures. The relationship between states and the lodges was therefore far from asymmetrical, as the Sufis themselves actively hosted political actors with tenacious ties to the worlds of imperial, and indeed trans-imperial, governance. Direct evidence of such an entanglement between Indian statesmen and their Sufi counterparts in the Ottoman world can still be found at the cemetery of the Horhor tekke. For it was here that a grave was dug sometime around 1786–87, a little while after the ambitious ruler of the Deccan state of Mysore dispatched a large ambassadorial contingent to the court of the Ottoman emperor, ‘Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–89).
Historians have widely speculated on the reasons why Tipu Sultan—the ‘Tiger of Mysore’ (r. 1782–99)—felt compelled to send some 900 of his subjects on a diplomatic mission to distant Turkey.Footnote 60 Aside from his wish to pry open new oceanic trade connections with the Ottoman port city of Basra in the Persian Gulf, or his intention to shore up a new kind of Islamic legitimacy with the Turkish caliphate in mind, a more balanced perspective on the issue has emerged in more recent studies.Footnote 61 It is now more certain that Tipu's embassy was really the result of a twinned development on the Indian home front—the rapid retreat of Mughal power up north, and the encroaching belligerence of the English East India Company state from further west.Footnote 62 The embassy was therefore also meant to solicit military support from the Ottoman empire, given that the Mughals certainly could not assist Tipu in this regard. So even if at this point the Ottomans did not possess any of the clout they once did in the Indian Ocean arena, and were indeed staggering from their own military crises on both the European and eastern fronts, the prestige of that distant regime nevertheless grew in this period in the eyes of Indian rulers like Tipu Sultan.Footnote 63 This was made truer not only by the practically hollowed-out character of Mughal rule in India, but also because of the comparatively weak hegemony exercised by the newly consolidated Qajar state in Iran.
In any event, the Indian embassy to Istanbul set off from the city of Srirangapatna in 1786 and, from the port of Tadri on the Malabar Coast, advanced through the Arabian Sea and up the Persian Gulf to Basra. Once in Ottoman Iraq, requests and orders swiftly moved between that province and Istanbul. The governor of Baghdad, Süleyman Pasha, evidently assisted in no small amount with their transit. Throughout, he also maintained close contact with the four principal representatives (wakīls) of the diplomatic expedition, especially Saiyid Ghulam ‘Ali Khan, but also one Shah Nurullah Khan. Notably, the movement of this large embassy from India through the Middle East was punctuated by frequent stops and pilgrim detours to various Sufi tombs and shrines, including the burial site of Ibn Hanafiya in Kharg Island in the Gulf, and that of a Companion of the Prophet in az-Zubayr in Iraq.Footnote 64
While in Baghdad, it was agreed that the pasha would assist the Indian envoys in at least crossing into northern Iraq and Kurdish lands to reach Mardin in upper Mesopotamia. To facilitate this transit and their subsequent journey to Istanbul, the Porte also authorized the release of some 20,000 kuruş in silver currency.Footnote 65 From Mardin up to Diyarbakir, and then due northwest through the arid and uneven sweeps of Anatolia, they at last arrived in Istanbul in September 1787.Footnote 66 What happened thereafter need not take up much space here. But in brief, the Ottomans were unwilling (or, more plausibly, unable) to provide any promises of actual support. Letters and gifts were exchanged between the sultan and Tipu's emissaries, however, and come early spring in 1788, the Indians again set sail for home.Footnote 67 The journey back took them through the Aegean and the Mediterranean on to Egypt and, significantly, to Mecca and Medina for the Hajj. At length they reached Calicut in India at the very end of 1789.
But to return to the point, and to Istanbul—in that winter of 1787–88, the Indian embassy suffered a series of distressing losses. Many from the group died from various causes while on their sojourn, including a spell of cold weather in the city, but largely due to the outbreak of a serious plague in the capital.Footnote 68 This particular epidemic also resulted in the apparent decimation of a third of Istanbul's population.Footnote 69 Thus by late January it was reported at the Sublime Porte that the deaths among the ranks of the Indian envoys were ‘in excess of one hundred and twenty’. So much so, that it led the Porte to slash the ration amounts it had earmarked for the embassy for its stay in the capital. We know from very meticulous inventories that following these deaths there was a considerable reduction in the quantities of goods that were dispensed to the Mysore emissaries. These included cuts in basics like candles (şem‘i), milk (süt), eggs (yumurta), salt (tuz), beans (nohut), vegetables (sebzevat), and poultry (tavuk), but also, among other things, in the amounts of such costly spices as saffron (za‘feran), cardamom (kakule), and cinnamon (darçin).Footnote 70
Yet all save one, those of Tipu's envoys who died in Istanbul did not leave behind any material evidence of their time in Turkey. Among the gravestones at the burial ground at the Horhor Sufi lodge, one particular site therefore distinguishes itself from the others by being the only one not dedicated to a professed sheikh or Sufi dervish. Unlike the petrified and so-called tepeli kavuk or Nakşibendi turbans that have been sculpted on the other headstones in typical Ottoman fashion, this lone fedora-like turban also recalls more unfamiliar styles, such as the headgear depicted in most miniature portraits of a distant Indian sovereign. Even as a single example, the particular class of ‘foreign’ headgear, together with the name and associative title etched onto the gravestone, indicate that distinct markers of ‘Indian’ identity had clearly begun to filter into the Hindi tekkes of Istanbul. In turn, these markers illustrate one of the many routes taken by the Indian tekkes—and of course, by ‘Hindi’ itself—to ultimately distance themselves from the other ‘ethnic’ Sufi institutions of Istanbul.Footnote 71 Buried at that particular gravesite at Horhor, as per the epitaph, was a certain Muhammad Imam Sardar, who died in 1202 of the Hijri (circa 1787–88) (Figure 4).
Grave of Muhammad Imam Sardar (d. 1787–88), military ambassador, Horhor Hindi Sufi lodge, Aksaray, Istanbul. Source: Photograph by author.
Presumably, this grave is that same person whom Tipu himself mentions in an earlier letter to Ghulam ‘Ali Khan from February 1786, some time before the embassy's departure from India. Listing the primary group of envoys from the delegation, Tipu refers to a troop commander or jauqdār by the name of Muhammad Imam, who belonged to a local cadre of armed revenue collectors (sazāwal jaish). For the journey to Istanbul, he was put in charge of a regiment of 100 travelling musketeers.Footnote 72 Indeed, this might also have been the same Muhammad Imam referred to by the embassy's news-writer: while in the Gulf, he was at once a sardār (‘chief’) and a jauqdār; the same person, we are further told, who went about seeking an appropriate punishment for a suspected deserter from the ranks of his men, when the latter showed up in Basra, having disappeared in Masqat.Footnote 73 Irrespective of his precise identity, what we do know, of course, is that the Muhammad Imam Sardar who died in the Ottoman capital was deemed sufficiently important, and was perhaps even a frequent-enough visitor to the Horhor lodge during his stay in Istanbul, to warrant the distinction of a burial place at this old Sufi site. Perhaps too, he was a Naqshbandi or Qadiri devotee. Beyond all that, Muhammad Imam's gravestone tells us that he was known by his contemporaries at the Horhor Tekke as a ‘military envoy (‘asker elçi)’, and also that he was in the service of a faraway ruler by the name of Tipu Sultan, whose name was known among the Sufis of Horhor as ‘Tepu Sultan Hindi’.Footnote 74
Indian Sufis as Ottoman subjects
Beyond Istanbul, there were ‘Hindi’ Sufi lodges scattered throughout the Ottoman provinces. Their particular histories offer a fuller picture of the social lives of Sufis at these tekkes. They bring to light important clues as to the organizational dimensions of the tekke’s pilgrim networks. And above all, they offer insights into the specific features of state-Sufi relations in the Ottoman empire. To be sure, it is often avowed that the ‘esotericism’ of Sufi Islam generated fraught relationships with governance, shot through with anxieties of political influence eroding the moral fabric of piety.Footnote 75 Though modern scholarship has done much to add nuance to such understandings, it is evident that from time to time Sufis too viewed things this way. A terse Turkish Sufi rhyme thus salutes those who ‘love not the sultan’, but ‘his slaves (bendesi)’, that is to say, his Sufi subjects.Footnote 76 Reality differed from preaching however. So from their bases at the Hindi lodges, there were recurrent conversations between Sufis and sultans, and between Sufis and provincial figures of authority. As Hajjis, Sufis from the Hindi lodges petitioned the Porte to facilitate their pilgrim movements.Footnote 77 As custodians of a built institutional network, they enjoined regional and imperial administrators to make repairs on ruined sites.Footnote 78 And as bearers of rent-exempt pious endowments, they shuffled through bureaucratic offices to claim mixed bundles of fiscal rights from the empire.
Recent work has characterized the movement of early modern agents, converts, and dragomans between Venice and Istanbul as that which gave way to ‘dispersed’ yet rooted conceptions of ‘trans-imperial subjecthood’ along the Mediterranean routes of the Ottoman world.Footnote 79 I suggest that Indian Sufi pilgrims at their Hindi tekkes, whose ‘subject’ identities were similarly shaped by frequent legal-petitioning activities, may be viewed in a similar light.Footnote 80 Yet in contrast to their Mediterranean counterparts, the cultural identities of the Sufis were not radically altered during their stay in the Ottoman empire, nor were their legal personas refashioned.Footnote 81 The changes in their subject position had more to do with the social specificities of the eighteenth-century Ottoman world, when decentralization allowed authority to increase at the margins of empire, and that often at the expense of the central administration.Footnote 82 Matters were also spurred on by the escalation of what Şerif Mardin referred to as a social communications ‘fever’ in this period, which witnessed an expansion in the use of textual and bureaucratic media by different segments of Ottoman society.Footnote 83 Corporatized Sufis at the Indian lodges took advantage of such profound realignments. They employed the written word for a variety of motives, but they also utilized chancery forms to pursue dialogue with the official administration in the provinces and in Istanbul.
In this sense, the Indian community of Sufis resembled in kind—if not in degree—the social negotiations of the new ‘communities on the verge’ who rose to spectacular prominence at this stage of Ottoman history.Footnote 84 Agents and subjects of empire that nevertheless grew distant from the centralist exigencies of the Ottoman regime, these groups included the famed Phanariots, elite military households, a‘yan notables, ‘efendis-turned-pashas’, scribal groups, and lifelong holders of tax-farming contracts.Footnote 85 As Dina Rizk Khoury has so cogently put it, the ascendancy of these social brackets produced ‘lasting change in the composition of the provincial power-holders’.Footnote 86 True, the Indian Sufi community was largely a transient one, and was not continually under the direct ambit of this transforming imperial order as such. But insofar as they crossed state frontiers to establish deep connections with the broader landscapes of eighteenth-century Ottoman state and society, their trans-imperial subject positions, I offer, crystallized at the political edges of empire.
The Porte, the provinces, and the politics of itinerant piety
To an extent, the Sublime Porte and its Imperial Council (Divan-ı Hümayun) remained alert to the circulations of Indian Sufis and sheikhs within the empire's ‘well-protected domains’. Far from impeding their movement from city to city, or from tekke to tekke, it even made possible these and subsequent stays in the empire. As early as 1729, the Porte therefore sent off an imperial edict to the Hindi Sufi lodge in Adana. This ferman ordered the supersession of one Sheikh Ism‘ail, who—it was claimed—had ‘seized’ for his own use funds from the endowment of the lodge. These were funds meant for the ‘costs and expenses of washing, swathing, and arranging for funeral’ the remains of those ‘Indians who pass away in the province of Adana’. Visibly revealing the steady hand played by the central state in accommodating the sundry needs of circulating Indian Sufis, the order continued: ‘When the world-obeying ferman reaches the abovementioned city’, Sheikh Ism‘ail ‘should be relieved of the management and overseeing of the financial affairs of the Indians’. Upon his abdication, the Porte also noted that one Sheikh Muhammad ought to be placed as the sheikh of the lodge, as an earlier petition had maintained that the latter was, after all, the ‘chosen elect of all the Indians (cümle-i Hindi)’ present in the city.Footnote 87
This is not to suggest that that central government always sustained a thick presence in the provinces. The settings for state-Sufi relations in the period were after all far removed from the nearly claustrophobic political mandates of the post-Tanzimat era.Footnote 88 Nevertheless, it remains true that the imperial government of the eighteenth century frequently attempted to meet the needs of the provincial tekkes. In so doing, it left its imprint on their workings and infrastructure, but also provided itself with an uneven account of the flow of Sufis in and out of the empire. Again in the first half of the eighteenth century, Istanbul thus answered the appeal of Sufis in Tosya. In the characteristic language of responses to petitions, it rebuked one of its base slaves (kemine)—an ‘Indian by the name of Hasan’—for doing an ‘injustice’ to the endowment funds of the Indian lodge following the death of its sheikh, Muhammad Hindi.Footnote 89 Much later, in 1776, we notice in the imperial records the activities of a Hajji Muhammad in Tosya, who was among a group of itinerant Indians (Hindi seyyahlarından) passing through the town. Conceivably, the Sufi traveller—identified as a Naqshbandi—was there to visit the Indian lodge. Most certainly, he was credited with the restoration of a ‘completely ruined’ zaviye at the heart of Sufi veneration in Tosya—the tomb of the medieval saint Hamza Baba of Khorasan.Footnote 90
Partly, it was also the pull exerted on this network by the great capital that made it so visible to the state. Sufis regularly dispersed out to the various provincial lodges after visiting Istanbul, and this is likely to have brought them under the direct gaze of the empire. The early nineteenth-century itineraries of the first sheikh at the Hindi lodge in the city of Konya is revealing in this regard. As is well known, Konya is noted as the fountainhead of what is today the most celebrated branch of Turkish Sufism, that is the Mevlevi order of the ‘whirling’ dervishes founded by Celaleddin Muhammad Rumi. It was also in this city that Fazil Husain—whose name was later styled under the Turkish nom de guerre eş-Şeyh Fazıl Hüseyin Efendi—founded the local Indian Sufi lodge. In time, this lodge would come to be known as the ‘speechless’ Sufi lodge or söylemez zaviyesi. We know that Fazil Husain was born in the village of Ahmadpur near the city of Allahabad, within the Doab region of the Gangetic plain. His father's name was ‘Ali Jauhar. His ‘speechlessness’, on the other hand, was variously attributed to be the result of a vow of silence he had assumed, or his inability to communicate in Turkish. While exact dates for his peregrinations are unavailable, we know too that he left North India for Mecca for the Hajj, then travelled to Istanbul, from where he went to the Anatolian cities of Akseki and Karaman. He moved finally to Konya, where he settled, involved himself with a madrasa, contracted a vakıf deed, and built his zaviye.Footnote 91
Fazil Husain might well have been less than forthcoming in speech. Yet he was actively involved in Konya's intellectual circles, in terms of both his written works and the books he produced as a scribe. Known in his own time for wielding an experienced pen with the most ubiquitous Indo-Persian calligraphic craft of the nastaʻlīq, he was equally deft in composing in the sulus and naskhī hands. Within his bibliographic oeuvre, there are at least two known Persian manuscripts. One is a self-composed work, entitled the Tārīqa-nāma, and another a volume consisting of a mere eleven folios, the Silsila-nāma. Both concern more esoteric aspects of Sufi culture and practice.Footnote 92 Moreover, judging merely from its physical extent, the söylemez lodge surely held a vibrant position within the social map of Konya's Sufi community. It included two complexes of three and two bedrooms each, a stable, and a water well, to name only those parts of the property solely dedicated to accommodating visitors from outside the lodge. As an authority on the history of Konya's Sufi lodges suggests, these structures were indeed meant ‘especially for sheltering dervishes and guests who came from India’.Footnote 93
Visits to Istanbul by Indian Sufis like Fazil Husain might have been occasioned by curiosity or attraction. However, such trips could also result from controversy, as when provincial politics at the lodges spilled over so violently as to compel the capital's mediating assistance. Something like this occurred when Fazil Husain's compatriot, ‘Abdurrahman bin ‘Abdullah arrived later at the Indian Kalendarhane in the former Ottoman capital of Bursa.Footnote 94 What followed thereafter was recounted by the last postnişin of the local Misri Sufi lodge, Mehmed Şemseddin, whose late-Ottoman chronicle remains a most vital narrative on the history of the city's tekkes.Footnote 95 Şemseddin writes that soon after this person of ‘Indian origin’ became the postnişin at the Hindiler Kalendarhanesi—‘bit by bit, by making much illicit gains in Bursa and by giving lessons and teaching Persian at the dergah, he confirmed his position [as a person] of knowledge and virtue’. Unlike the taciturn Fazil Husain, ‘Abdurrahim therefore put to good pedagogical use oral forms of communications at his lodge to advance his own career. But as Şemseddin adds, he also put it to other, less edifying uses. He soon arrogated to himself various followers (including, interestingly, the mothers of some of his students), ‘and began to direct words against the community of the [Sufi] friends of God (cemi‘-i evliya'i’l-lah ‘aleyhinde idare-i kelama başlamış)’.
What caused the intense factionalism between ‘Abdurrahim and the other Sufis of Bursa? On this score, Şemseddin provides only a few explanations. And while informative, they are coloured by his own prejudices against the ideological investments of the Indian Sufi and polemicist. In this narrative of the events that followed, ‘Abdurrahim sought to reinterpret—or rather, misinterpret—the works of jurisprudence and Qur'anic exegeses that were passed down by scholars like Sa‘ad al-Din Taftazani (d. 1390) and ‘Ali al-Qari (d. 1606). We are told that he even extended such disrespect and malediction (küfür) to ‘many other refined Sufis whom he accused of heresy (tekfir)’. They included Celaleddin Rumi and Şeyh el-Ekber Muhyiddin el-‘Arabi, the latter better known as Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240). In the event, even if it were only the simple-minded (lit., ‘simple-hearted’) among Bursa's religious elites and scholars who took ‘Aburrahim's side in these debates, it was still the case that it caused serious ‘discordance’ within the city's ‘ulema (beyne'l-‘ulema bir tefrika husule getirmiş). In the absence of further evidence, it makes for a difficult task to seek out the exact reasons why ‘Abdurrahim took such forceful exception to the interpretations of past Islamic legists and mystics. Still, his story illuminates the ways in which intellectual disputes emanating out of the Indo-Ottoman tekkes often had wider ramifications.
Indeed, ‘Abdurrahim's example is suggestive of deep forms of South Asian engagement with the polemical worlds of Ottoman Sufism, both in Anatolia and elsewhere. For in due course, the budding intellectual battles in Bursa went on to rock the worlds of local urban politics, and implicated in their trajectories different echelons of power and authority. Or, as Şemseddin put it, ‘and by the by, this seed of malice became the fruit of altercation (ve git gide bu tohm-ı fesad semere-bahs olmuşdur)’.Footnote 96 But ‘the Indian’ and his ‘allies’ only continued to sharpen their diatribes and abuses, to the point of almost kindling a ‘revolution (ihtilal)’ in Bursa. ‘Clashes even took place at coffeehouses.’ In the interim, local men of learning and piety—who had up until then maintained unimpeachable reputations—compromised their respectability by lending support to ‘Abdurrahim. Ultimately, leading members among the city's ‘ulema and sheikhs came together in a meeting to resolve the crisis. It was decided that a request should be sent off to the Porte for its assistance in putting an end to the ongoing controversies. A petition was therefore drafted, appealing that ‘the aforesaid agitator be taken by [the cover of] night to Dersa‘adet’—by which, of course, was meant Istanbul, the ‘Abode of Felicity’.Footnote 97
Taken together, the above examples reveal historical patterns that show it was not the imperial state in Istanbul that went out of its way to ‘seek out’ Sufis. On the contrary, the latter used existing infrastructures of communications to augment their networks and facilitate their movements around the Ottoman world. It was through similar means that they produced localized eddies of debate and dialogue with fellow Sufis and scholars, but also with provincial and imperial authorities. In this way Sufis built up limited bases of power and influence, and like Fazil Husain in Konya, fashioned stable worlds of social and intellectual involvement from their tekkes. Yet as the story of ‘Abdurrahim demonstrates, their involvements could at times unlock processes that spiralled out of their own control. A further consequence of their social lives at the provincial tekkes, then, was that the Sufis were ultimately caught up in fragile (because irregular) webs of interaction with the central administration in Istanbul. The remainder of this article will attempt to explore the nature of this relationship in more detail.
Networks of the sultan's supplicants, or the writ regimes of corporate Sufism
The kinds of networks used by the Sufis did not simply include the informational matrices of bibliographic exchange, transmission of knowledge, and contentious discourse. An important imperial structure that commonly brought together Sufi authority and communications at the various tekkes was the law. And within the grids of the law, a most significant thread was the practice and process of the written petition. This imperial document was arguably a keystone in establishing state-subject relationships in the early modern Ottoman empire.Footnote 98 Indian Sufis, whose tekkes were located along major courier and pilgrimage routes, were certainly aware of this.Footnote 99 But among historians, Suraiya Faroqhi recognized this some time ago. Discussing the pivotal place of the petition as empowering what she called ‘initiatives from the bottom up’ in Ottoman state and society, she also hinted at how its political role might have unfolded in the eighteenth century, when ‘organizations possessing a corporate character played a more significant role than had been true in the past’.Footnote 100 Indeed, it was at the very beginning of this era that the aggregate number of imperial petitions in the early modern period peaked, leading to the creation of a separate unit for their storage at the Porte.Footnote 101
At its most basic, the petition was used to make different forms of official and personal requests and complaints. It was also utilized to pursue litigation through both canonical Shari‘a (Tr. Şeri‘at) and Sultanic (Kanuni) law. More elaborately, it connected Ottoman subjects to provincial judges (kadıs), jurisconsults (muftis), and the office of the Şeyh ül-Islam (the chief mufti in Istanbul). Furthermore, at its most ‘imperial’, the petition brought far-flung subjects of the empire to the attention of the Grand Vizier's Imperial Council at the Porte. Indeed, petitioners sometimes arrived in Istanbul in person, where theatrical expressions of injustices done and customary rights breached were incorporated into the formal presentation of a complaint. Generally, however, provincial scribes proficient in handling its formulaic diction drafted the text on behalf of supplicants for a small fee.Footnote 102 For the Sufis at the Hindi lodges, the petition was above all a means by which they obtained diverse forms of fiscal assistance from the empire, and this was mainly through benefits produced by vakıf endowments. Variously described as a form of ‘social welfare’ or ‘pious endowment’, the vakıf was an official legal and imperial arrangement through which particular ‘charitable’ institutions were exempted from rent and allowed to cover their operational costs through both statist and private sources of revenue.Footnote 103 Vakıf funds were utilized (or were meant to be utilized) for various projects at Sufi lodges, some of which were welfare-oriented. No doubt, it also enabled Sufis to shore up their networks of authority in the provinces.
Sufis customarily practised various kinds of social ‘outreach’ programmes from the tekkes. Principally, this entailed a tekke kitchen feeding incoming Sufis and pilgrims, but also the general poor and those who visited to offer prayers at the tombs of saints. Doors to such Sufi ‘soup kitchens’ were open especially on particular festive days in the religious calendar.Footnote 104 The money required for rituals and festivals alike were drawn from vakıf endowment contracts, but that involved complex procedures of revenue extraction. In 1797, for example, the Porte received a petition from the Indian lodge in Antep. This particular ‘petition from the slaves residing at the tekke’ requested the funds required for the boarding of the fakirs at the Hindi Sufi Lodge. But for the convenience of the Porte, the petition also located the means through which the said amount of money (20 akçe) could be funnelled into the hands of the Sufis. It thus pointed in the direction of Aleppo, little under a hundred miles distant from Antep, and the funds generated from revenues from the commerce in coffee there. In the typical vocabulary of this textual genre, the petition also added: ‘The decision and decree (emr ü ferman) remains that of the regal, benevolent, merciful, my sultan, his majesty.’Footnote 105
In fact, the coffee revenues of Aleppo seem to have been a favoured source with which to support the vakıfs of neighbouring Sufi lodges. The Indian Sufi Lodge (Hindular tekkesi) in Aleppo itself had put out a similar petition some 30 years before, requesting that revenue officials discharge the necessary money from that source for the benefit of the lodge.Footnote 106 But aside from the revenues from commercial commodities, the money defrayed for a lodge's means of subsistence (medar-i ma‘aişet) could arrive from other sources as well. In 1795 the Porte noted that the same Hindi tekke in Aleppo should be allotted 60 akçe from the Islamic jizya (Tr. cizye) tax polled from that province.Footnote 107 It is likely too that this particular order was the direct result of an earlier petition, when the Qadiri sheikh of that lodge, ‘Abdulkarim, sent out a request not only to the Imperial Council, but also to the offices of the local judge and that of the city's revenue bailiffs (muhassıllık). At least for the sake of the Grand Vizier, he also painted in graphic colours the ‘night and day’ work of piety at his lodge. So even if they did not currently possess the capital required for it, the sheikh informed the Porte that he and his dervishes were ‘passing time reciting prayers in remembrance of the unity of God in a pious and reclusive state (zikr ü tevhid ile evkat güzar ve salih ve mütevari bir zat olup)’.Footnote 108 As has been argued by historians of the petitioning process, strategic requests to multiple tiers of governance could ultimately serve as political leverage in the provinces.Footnote 109 Even if it did not respond in reality, a pending decision from Istanbul could after all be used to influence local officials, here, for example, to tug at the purse strings of nearby bureaucratic-fiscal regimes. In this instance, ‘Abdulkarim's petitioning ‘gambit’ clearly paid off.
Needless to add, soup kitchens for the poor (‘imaret) were not the sole prerogatives of Sufi lodges, and could also be run under the direct auspices of the state. Yet no matter who managed the flow of food from these kitchens, works of charity served to reinforce ties of patronage and clientship.Footnote 110 They promoted a religious agenda too in that they fulfilled a foundational tenet of Islam: alms-giving. What makes charitable work most interesting in the case of Sufi lodges is that they functioned at levels that conjoined Ottoman state-led concerns (the legal sanction of contractual vakıf endowments; the steady movement of monies and information)Footnote 111 with issues related to the clustering of corporate influence at a provincial tekke (its embodied practices of sheikh-dervish discipleship; its networks of pilgrims and information). As expected, concerns related to boarding consequently went hand-in-hand with questions of lodging at Sufi sites. An imperial document drafted in Istanbul at the tail end of the eighteenth century therefore stipulated that a ‘sufficient sum of funds’ be conveyed to the Indian lodge in Jerusalem from the customs duties levied at the Mediterranean port of Jaffa. The money was designated for the necessary costs of food prepared at the lodge's kitchens (ta‘amiye). But it was also meant for meeting the cost of repair work for those parts of the lodge that had fallen into disrepair, so that the hangah could continue to host ‘dervish guests who move in and out’ of its premises.Footnote 112
But for the tekkes, the mobility of Sufis was an issue in its own right. As sedentary patrons of a broader, circulating world of pilgrims, the Indian lodges provided a way for the seat of government in far-off Istanbul to make the travels of their guests a reality. Naturally, journeys to Mecca, Medina or other pilgrim destinations were at the forefront of concerns. These journeys also entailed pilgrims joining pre-organized imperial caravan routes. Yet it is remarkable that Sufis even asked the empire to assist with the logistical minutiae of their travels. This could mean putting out a request to come to the aid of just one traveller, or just one pilgrim. A case in point occurred in 1787, when Sheikh Hasan at the Indian zaviye in Damascus sent off a petition to Istanbul to seek assistance on behalf of a Sufi residing at his lodge. The would-be traveller, Muhammad, was identified in the petition as an ‘Indian dervish’. He was apparently making preparations for a journey by sea, and his sheikh thus asked the capital to instruct tariff officials to provide him with the necessary monetary aid for the trip. For the financially disadvantaged dervish, this meant that Istanbul only needed to cover the expenses for his fare and the provisions required for the maritime journey (nevl-i sefine ve zad-ı zahire).Footnote 113 If nothing else, this Sufi's case illustrates how the imperial petition was crucial in casting a wide net for itinerant activity. The information parcelled within petitions thus facilitated the criss-crossing of Indians within Ottoman domains, and in doing so it paved the way for the establishment of the Hindi tekkes themselves.
Notwithstanding imperial decentralization and the advent of corporate dispositions at the Sufi tekkes, the Sublime Porte and the sultan himself remained touchstones for generating modes of authority in the provinces. In this respect, the petition served another distinct purpose. It permitted Sufis to marshal imperial backing to succeed as sheikhs and vakıf trustees at a specific lodge.Footnote 114 In the same way as they deployed written supplications to tap into sources of funding, Sufis utilized the document to legitimate changes within sheikh lineages and thereby plant new patron-client links of sociability. Besides, requesting official orders of appointment also allowed quondam tax-free vakıf arrangements not to be suspended in the event of a sheikh's death. Consider, for instance, the following petition from 1787:
The regal, benevolent, merciful, my sultan, may his majesty live long (sultanım hazretleri sağ olsun).
The petition (‘arzuhal) of this supplicant is thus. At the Sufi lodge for Indians at the bridgehead (köprübaşında) at the city of Adana, the successive deaths of the sheikhs and administrators of its endowment—Saiyid Muhammad and Saiyid ‘Ali and Saiyid Wali-ud-Din—has caused a lapse in its administration and sheikhdom. It is hoped that the lapsed [offices] of the deceased will be turned over to this supplicant, and a document of royal favour issued. The decision and decree is that of my regal sultan, his majesty.
The supplicant, al-Sheikh al-Haj Ahmad Hindi.Footnote 115
Mediations between provincial tekkes and the Porte were rooted in the documentary order pushed by the petition. These short communicative acts ensured the reproduction of normative Sufi authority vested within sheikh lineages in cases of death or other disruptions. Equally, they reaffirmed the functional capacities of a tekke’s wider networks. For all its encouragements of the bonds of clientship, however, Sufi petitions also confirmed the imperial writ of the sultan. So after the death of al-Haj Habib Bilawal Hindi at the Sufi lodge in Tarsus sometime around 1789, worries surfaced over the vakıf contract that he had held in mortmain until then. These endowments had thus far sustained the maintenance of the garden (bağçe), inn (han), and way station (menzil) at the Tarsus Indian tekke. In order to prevent the loss of this source of funding, a certain Hindi al-Sheikh Muhammad thus took it upon himself to adjure the Imperial Council to draft an order of appointment for his own sake. As he requested in his petition, this was so that he could continue to serve the lodge and its endowments through the charity and generosity bestowed on him by the transcendent seat of the sultan.Footnote 116
Returning for a moment to Horhor in Istanbul, we also discover that material support was not restricted to the kinds of organizational or practical needs mentioned above. ‘Logistics’ at a tekke could denote the finer points relating to the performance of piety. So when nearing the occasion of an important date in the tekke’s religious calendar, a petition from Horhor requested money that was required for the smaller accoutrements of a ritual ceremony. The mevlud or anniversary of the birth of the founding sheikh of the lodge was close at hand, and the supplicants noted that oil was required for use in the lamps that were lit at night in veneration of Sheikh Ishaq's gravesite.Footnote 117 That very same day at the Porte, another petition was received asking for additional funds required for catering at the Horhor tekke. But this time, the requested funds were not to be used towards general charitable purposes. Rather, food was required for those fakirs who would be reciting prayers for the late sheikh on the day of his mevlud.Footnote 118 Here it may also be stressed that these religious rituals had a broader significance than one might imagine. Sufi functions and practices at a lodge were not divorced from the devotional customs of the wider public. The presence of tekke traditions in the social lives of ‘popular’ urban religion is noticeable; for example, they were even raised in the literary worlds of late Ottoman fiction. Hence, in a novel set in Istanbul, we see one of the lead characters attempting to free her husband from the ‘spell’ cast on him by his mistress. Her efforts at this ‘exorcism’ sees her going to the market for religious talismans, practising various forms of counter-rituals, and making her adulterous husband imbibe water that was ‘read’ by Sufis at the Indian tekke.Footnote 119
For the networks of piety and sociability that it sustained, the petition was therefore an unquestionably multivalent document. Broadening the analytic approach to this written genre reveals how it persistently broke through the legal and official dyad of imperial state and supplicant which it obviously sustained. When read as a constituent part of Ottoman social communications, it unravels new vistas, and discloses the more complex allusions and subtleties that lie buried within its stock scribal language. For Sufis, the petition was in particular a written instrument of the social lives they sustained at the tekkes. It stimulated mobility by land and sea, secured indispensable funding for their lodges, allowed them to sustain diverse works of charity, and made possible the accommodation of footloose pilgrims. In short, and as a document fundamental to the networks of Ottoman law, the petition provided a bureaucratic bedrock for choreographing the intricate logistics of the Indian Sufi network.
And yet the utilization of petitions would not have meant much without the corporatized structures of patron-client authority fostered at the Sufi lodges. The petition fed these localized nodes of power, but it is also true that like-minded groups of Indian Sufis in the provinces benefited from its widespread usage in this period, and deployed supplications to build up their religious lineages and social bonds at the tekkes. Certainly, it was not only Ottoman subjects who petitioned the sultan; other ‘outsiders’ in conversation with the empire were known to have done the same.Footnote 120 But because it was yet another Ottoman instrument that Indian Sufis consistently utilized to reinforce the tethers of a rooted institutional assemblage, it was central to shaping their positions as trans-imperial subjects of the sultan of Rum.
Conclusion
In the wake of a recent Ottoman ‘imperial turn’, comparative studies of this polity have become legion. Scholars have rushed to examine the post-classical Ottoman empire qua empire, and not in its previous position as the ‘sick man of Europe’. Particular efforts have therefore been made at situating the Ottomans on the atlas of Eurasian imperial states. The theoretical grounds for such studies have been most persuasive, and the results they have yielded, immensely fruitful. So at this juncture in the scholarship, it is not an exaggeration to claim, for example, that eighteenth-century South Asians would not have been completely lost within the thickets of Ottoman imperial society. For many of the historical points and themes touched on in this article, identifiable parallels existed in India. There too, the ‘Turk’ was a figure of ambiguity, singled out for scorn or compromise, and invoked as a key concept for the rule of ‘barbarian’ yavana Muslims. By the same token, waqf endowments supported both ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ institutions all across India.Footnote 121 And despite Mughal decentralization, there were flourishing social-intellectual worlds of an extensive information order.Footnote 122 Finally, the scribal ‘cottage industry’ of petitioning animated state-subject connections on both sides of the precolonial–colonial divide, though scholars have only now begun to understand its broader meanings and significances.Footnote 123
Despite overt similarities, however, the case of the Indian Sufi network provides a unique object lesson for the practice of a comparative imperial historiography. Even as the tekke network made possible the pious pilgrimages of non-Ottoman Indian Muslims, it was in the final analysis an Ottoman institutional assemblage. Its workings were fuelled by Ottoman imperial funds, its networks undergirded by peculiarly Ottoman forms of social communications, and, as I have argued, its Indian Sufi founders and dwellers were themselves in many ways deracinated Ottoman subjects. Moreover, given that the Hindi tekkes were part of a larger pilgrim circuit, it is worth remembering that Mecca and Medina were still the prized possessions of the Ottoman sultan. So, as Alan Mikhail and Christine Philliou have insisted in a recent review essay, the basis for comparative work on the Ottoman empire need not always mean that historians continue to elide the vexed but important question of historical difference. Thus, when bringing to life a comparative or connected methodology, ‘difference—specificity not freakishness—must come before similarity’.Footnote 124 By highlighting the evolution of the Hindi tekkes as they were entangled in the particular constraints of the eighteenth century, this study has hopefully responded to the challenge of working out such a method of historical inquiry.
This article has put forward a twofold argument. It has elaborated a history from the heart of the Ottoman domains, but then grasped its broader implications with panoramas drawn from the provincial and trans-imperial margins of the state. To an extent, it was the enigmatic and understudied history of the Indian Sufi tekke network that necessitated this approach. Nevertheless, in both parts of this article I have suggested—in one form or another—that historical difference played an important, if paradoxical, role in shaping the trajectories of the Hindi tekkes and the mobile community of Sufis who were its patrons, caretakers, and guests. From the bewildering array of meanings and resonances behind ‘Hindi’, to the ways in which their non-Ottoman pilgrim Sufis effectively became a part of Ottoman society, the Indian tekkes thus serve as dynamic reminders of the mobile markers of difference that characterized the frontiers of imperial identity in the early modern Ottoman world.Footnote 125
Throughout, I have also singled out the networked character of these institutions, and how that engendered corporate attitudes of sociability among Sufis along the lines of patron-client and state-Sufi relations. Whether they were hosting visiting Indian statesmen, arguing against other Sufis, drafting petitions, or supplying pilgrims and a general public with room, board, and religious services, the Hindi tekkes were implicated in the wefts and warps of the broader Ottoman empire. They were participants in its conduits of social communications, they reflected internal and globally refracted political transformations, and they provided indications of changing Ottoman conceptions of cultural difference and belonging. Ultimately, it was the involvement of Indian Sufis in these same networks that drew them into a distinctively ‘Ottoman’ fold, thereby making them supplicants, grantees, and, finally, subjects of the imperial state.
It then remains a signal testament to the durability of the networks cultivated by Indian Sufis of the eighteenth century that, during the high noon of European imperialism, their lodges became the brokering sites of what Seema Alavi has referred to as the ‘trans-Asiatic’ rivalries between the British Raj and its global competitors.Footnote 126 At this twilight phase in their histories, the Hindi tekkes hosted and encouraged the political aspirations of Indian Muslims on the move between Kabul, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Istanbul, and the Hijaz. They received an influx of anti-colonial Sufi activists like the Deoband scholar originally from Sialkot, Maulana ‘Ubaidullah Sindhi (1872–1944). Together with students like Zafar Hasan Aybek, Sindhi published tracts during his stay at the Horhor Hindi lodge that outlined, with astonishing precocity, visions of a future ‘federated republic’ in a decolonized South Asia.Footnote 127 Other Sufis and their political agitations followed suit. It is a matter of record that Sheikh ‘Abdurrahman Riyaz-ud-Din Babur bin Riyazi al-Hindi (1881–1966)—a Qadiri exile from British India who served as the last sheikh of both the Jerusalem and the Horhor Indian lodges—lent his active support to the Ottoman imperial army in the Middle Eastern theatre of the First World War.Footnote 128 For his efforts, Babur Efendi, as he came to be known, was later incarcerated and allegedly also tortured by the British in Armistice-era Istanbul.
Unsurprisingly, it was also at this stage of their history that, for the first time, the British empire—now patron of the Hajj pilgrimage in its own right—took sudden notice of this labyrinthine institutional complex.Footnote 129 With the rising spectre of ‘Pan-Islamism’, pages of learned and opinion journals in London became witness to erratic mentions of its workings. Orientalists moonlighting as colonial informants spoke of a ‘Hind-Tekkesi, a kind of convent or hospice for Mohammedans . . . from India’, and of the extraordinary ‘existence of far reaching schemes’ to attract ‘Indian Mohammedans towards Constantinople’, including the Indian Sufi lodges, as well as many ‘other facilities afforded to pilgrims on their passage to the holy places of Arabia’.Footnote 130 These were the articulations of a turbulent trans-imperial climate that awoke in a later period.Footnote 131 Yet they did not surface without precedent—they were also the products of a different age of imperial transitions.
