Letter writing as the mingling of souls: remote knowledge exchange among eighteenth-century Naqshbandis

Abstract

Historians of Islamicate intellectual practices in pre-colonial South Asia have long argued that authoritative knowledge was located in persons rather than books, and that religious texts were thus typically transmitted in the context of face-to-face meetings between teacher and student. While it has been noted that some early modern Sufi networks engaged in the remote transmission of authoritative knowledge by means of letters, with reduced emphasis on face-to-face meetings, the causes for this development are still debated.

Looking at the correspondence, theoretical treatises, and authorisations (ijāzas) produced in the circle of the celebrated eighteenth-century Naqshbandi reformer Shah Wali Allah of Delhi, this article argues that the willingness to engage in the transmission of remote knowledge was not simply a product of the changing material conditions of late-Mughal India, but rather was underwritten by emergent spiritual and psychological ideas about the nature of personhood. Because a person was not merely a material entity bounded by a corporeal (living) body, bodily proximity between two individuals was less valuable than their spiritual congruence. This congruence could be strengthened during periods of face-to-face companionship but could also be generated and maintained through letters alone. Indeed, these scholars sometimes assert the superiority of the letter over physical companionship because it allowed for a coming together of two spirits without the intrusion of the gross material body. Working within this intellectual framework, scholars in this network regularly exchanged books of all genres as well as ijāzas remotely (often over vast distances).

Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle Soules;

For, thus friends absent speak.

John Donne, To Sir Henry Wotton

وکم من فراق کان قرباًحقیقة

وکم من فراق کان للوصل جالباً

Shah Wali Allah to Muhammad Ashiq Phulati

Shortly after Ramazān in 1165 (August 1752), the great Islamic reformer of eighteenth-century Delhi, Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762), wrote to his closest disciple and brother-in-law Muhammad Ashiq Phulati (d. 1773) to inform him that he had nearly finished a draft of his Persian commentary on Hizb al-bahr, an apotropaic text written by the Maghribī Sufi, Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 1258).¹ The commentary had been written during the intense 40-day period of seclusion, fasting, and prayer that Wali Allah undertook every year. He wrote the text following a waking vision in which the face of Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, pale and sparsely bearded, had appeared to him like a flash of lightning. In the vision, Wali Allah had been ‘placed in the spiritual station’ of al-Shadhili and was given access to knowledge previously disclosed only to him.² In the letter, Wali Allah mentions, almost in passing, that once the draft was finished, he would have another disciple produce a fair copy (mubayyaz sāzand) and that this would then be sent to Muhammad Ashiq (firistāda khwāhad shud) in Phulat, a village some 60 miles north-east of the imperial capital.³

Given that historians of pre-modern Islamic learning in South Asia have long argued for the centrality of the oral transmission of texts, what is notable here is not Wali Allah's claim to rarefied spiritual states but that he considered it completely unexceptional to send a newly written book to his disciple without the need for a face-to-face meeting.⁴ This was not a one-off: the practice of sending books to trusted disciples by means of privately hired messengers (qāsids) and other intermediaries, often over vast distances, is mentioned repeatedly in Wali Allah's letters and those of his circle but, perhaps because of the routine way it is discussed in primary sources, it has received little scholarly attention.⁵ These remotely transmitted books included works of tasawwuf and metaphysics, as well as logic, philosophy, Quranic commentaries, and poetry.⁶ Collections of letters of this time also reveal that multi-volume hadith works, the genre most commonly understood as reliant on various modes of oral/aural transmission, were sometimes sent by mail.⁷ It should not surprise us, then, that one of the earliest extant manuscripts of Wali Allah's masterpiece on the ‘secrets of hadith’, Hujjat Allāh al-bāligha, was originally commissioned by his son Abd al-Aziz (d. 1822) and sent to the scion of an illustrious scholarly family in Lucknow in 1799 along with other books of various genres.⁸ Although this article primarily focuses on Shah Wali Allah's inner circle, references to the remote exchanges of books of various genres are found in a range of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Naqshbandi epistolographic sources.⁹ The evidence that we have for these exchanges, primarily in the form of brief remarks in letters, is necessarily fragmentary and we cannot enumerate with any precision the scale of such practices. Nevertheless, in an environment where private, silent reading was a significant feature of intellectual life, the routine nature of these remote exchanges suggests the limitations of models of textual transmission in Islamicate South Asia that exclusively focus on questions of oral transmission in the context of extended periods of face-to-face companionship between teacher and student.¹⁰

This willingness to transmit books remotely should be seen in a broader context in which we see an intensification of long-distance communication among South Asian Sufis affiliated with various Sufi ways (tarīqas).¹¹ Questioning the notion that the adoption of the lithographic press in the early decades of the nineteenth century represented a moment of profound intellectual rupture, Nile Green has argued that the eighteenth century witnessed a broad transition from an Islamic epistemology rooted in embodied practices towards one of private textual study.¹² He argues that the increased bureaucratisation and centralisation of the state in the late-Mughal period was a major catalyst for ‘the transformation of bodily into bookish knowledge, of corporeal and oral knowledge into the written record’.¹³

This article accepts the idea that embodied intellectual practices began attenuating long before the widespread adoption of print. At the same time, it suggests that the Naqshbandi networks’ embrace of remote transmission of knowledge did not simply stem from imperial bureaucratisation.¹⁴ On the one hand, the political volatility of the eighteenth century appears to have rendered remote transmission of knowledge more attractive. Letters from this period include numerous complaints about the dangers of travel as well as the declining availability of patronage that would have made possible lengthy sojourns in distant cities.¹⁵ But, in addition, we must also take into account intellectual trends that played a central role in this transformation. While scholars in these networks were aware that their practices differed from idealised norms of face-to-face communication, they made sense of their practices by drawing on long-standing Sufi epistemological and psychological theories about the relationship between the material and non-material aspects of self.¹⁶ These scholars would not, for example, have accepted the idea that the increasing willingness to send books by courier represented a shift from ‘anthropocentric’ to ‘bibliocentric’ modes of knowledge transmission.¹⁷ Rather, their writings challenge the idea that person-to-person transmission relies on the physical proximity of two individuals because, in their view, a ‘person’ is not merely, or even primarily, a material entity bounded by a corporeal (living) body.¹⁸

In decoupling personhood from bodily materiality, Wali Allah and others in his circle argued that companionship did not necessarily require the coming together of two gross material bodies but was, in its ideal form, the communion of two spirits.¹⁹ As a result, face-to-face companionship and letter writing were not completely distinct modes of communication. Rather, both served as the means for creating and invigorating bonds between the spirits (arwāh, sing. rūh) of two individuals. As with their contemporaries in early modern Europe, they felt that letters could substitute for conversations and were thus, in Dena Goodman's memorable phrase, ‘an absence made present’.²⁰ Generally, these figures argued that bodily proximity was more efficacious—it was, after all, commonly said that ‘written correspondence is equal to half a meeting (al-mukātabāt nisf al-mulāqāt)’.²¹ In certain cases, however, they claim epistolography to be superior to face-to-face companionship as an exchange of letters might make perceptible the spiritual traces of the writers while circumventing the sensuous materiality of bodies.²² And while speech and writing were generally a necessary means for generating companionship between two spirits, two individuals whose spirits were predisposed to harmonious union could, in certain circumstances, commune over vast distances (and even times) without any external aids at all.

Taking the small and close-knit circle of Shah Wali Allah as a case study, this article investigates the implications of this novel early modern theoretical framework on epistolographic practices. It shows that because scholars understood letters exchanged between trusted friends and disciples as a form of spiritual companionship, they were willing to circulate draft manuscripts as well as finished books, send one another authorisations to transmit texts, and even work on long-distance collaborative book projects. In so doing, it suggests that historians must consider the embedded and contextual nature of reading practices of particular socio-textual communities in pre-colonial India.

Letter writing as a Sufi practice

It has often been argued that the focus on orality in the Islamic world arose from a fundamental scepticism towards the written word and a fear that unguided reading could lead to epistemic chaos.²³ We must note, however, that Sunni scholars of North India, even in the pre-Mughal period, did not distrust texts quite as much as such accounts suggest. In jurisprudential contexts, for example, the remote transmission of legal opinions via mail was sanctioned, albeit guardedly, by Hanafi jurists as early as the twelfth century. In the preface to his manual on fiqh that was widely circulated in pre-colonial Hindustan, the jurist Qazi Khan (d. 1196) argued that if a mufti who is a muqallid (that is to say, a jurist who lacks the requisite capacity for independent judgement or ijtihād) encountered an issue for which the available textual sources offered no ruling, he should ‘follow the view of the person who has, according to him, the greatest expertise in fiqh (yakhudhu bi-qawl man huwā afqah al-nās ʿindihi)’. Were that person to live in another city, however, ‘he should have recourse to him by writing (yarjaʿ ilayhi biʾl-kitāb), and should not speculate for fear of attributing a falsehood to God (iftirāʾ ʿalā allāh) in making the permissible prohibited’.²⁴ While clearly not ideal, the remote transmission of legal knowledge was considered tolerable and certainly better than the alternative.

In Sufi circles, too, we find an early and widespread turn to the use of remote written communication. As Ahmet Karamustafa notes, all of the extant writings of Junayd al-Khazzaz (d. 910), the ninth-century Sufi of Baghdad, ‘belong to the category of correspondence with fellow Sufis’.²⁵ In South Asia, as early as 1346, the Suhrawardi Sharaf al-Din b. Yahya Maneri (d. 1381) famously wrote his ‘Hundred Letters’ to Qazi Shams al-Din, the governor of Chausa, over the course of a year, precisely because Shams al-Din was unable to attend his study circle.²⁶ These letters were then circulated as an independent work. His disciple Shams al-Din Balkhi (d. 1400) is, likewise, noted for his letter writing both to scholars and to political figures.²⁷ The famous sixteenth-century Chishti of Gangoh, in the Upper Doab, Abd al-Quddus (d. 1537), had his letters collected in two volumes.²⁸

By the late seventeenth century, we see an intensification of these trends. The letters of the famous Naqshbandi and mujaddid of the second millennium, Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624), who maintained a vigorous correspondence with his disciples throughout his life, were circulated widely and became models for emulation.²⁹ Collecting and editing the letters of one's spiritual master became a central part of the Naqshbandi tradition of discipleship.³⁰ These letter collections were themselves circulated and studied independently, and their contents formed the subject of further epistolary exchanges within the tarīqa.³¹ Later in the seventeenth century, Sirhindi's son, Muhammad Masum was, likewise, an avid letter writer.³² In the eighteenth century, the Naqshbandi Mirza Jan-i Janan (d. 1781) and his disciple Sana Allah Panipati regularly exchanged letters;³³ Faqir Allah Shikarpuri (d. 1781), a Naqshbandi from Sindh, maintained correspondence with a wide range of Sufis and scholars across the subcontinent;³⁴ Shah Ahl Allah, the brother of Shah Wali Allah, collected the letters of his father, Shah Abd al-Rahim (d. 1719);³⁵ and Shah Wali Allah's letters were collected by Muhammad Ashiq and his son, Abd al-Rahman (d. 1755). This enthusiasm for letter writing is also found among contemporary Chishtis: Kalim Allah Jahanabadi (d. 1729) maintained contact with disciples in the Deccan via letters.³⁶ Indeed, one of the most salient features of eighteenth-century North India was the significant volume of Sufi correspondence that flourished despite and, sometimes because of (given the difficulty of travel), the fragmentation and decentralisation of the Mughal imperial order. Naqshbandi discussions of hadith and law, as well as philosophy and metaphysics, were often carried on with individuals beyond the boundaries of the dwindling Mughal state, and even the subcontinent.

Like many of their contemporaries in the Sunni intellectual world, Naqshbandi shaykhs from the seventeenth century onwards had embraced the idea that students should engage in independent study or ‘deep reading’ (mutālaʿa) of texts and their commentaries.³⁷ While some Indian scholars were beginning to argue that a student with a good grasp of Arabic linguistic sciences might do without a teacher entirely, the Naqshbandis did not generally favour entirely unguided reading.³⁸ However, they often encouraged the independent, or at least semi-independent, study of texts that had been approved by one's shaykh using a set of embodied techniques that would allow the student to derive the greatest spiritual and ethical benefit from the text.³⁹ Shah Abd al-Rahim of Delhi, Shah Wali Allah's father, for example, wrote a letter in which he advised one of his disciples that one ought to ‘study independently (mutālaʿa) the books of the mendicants (darwīshān) because it strengthens the intention of the student’. As the student read the text, he was told ‘to study (mutālaʿa) your own heart and hold your breath (habs-i dam)’.⁴⁰ Clearly, this was an instruction to practise independent, silent reading—the oral recitation of text while holding one's breath would have been impossible—but, most importantly for our purposes, this willingness to guide students’ study by means of letters suggests that Naqshbandis of this period were less sceptical of remotely guided reading than we might expect.

Naqshbandi reading

In his letters to his disciples, Wali Allah makes it clear that exchanges of letters served as a form of companionship. He repeatedly asserts that correspondence (mukātaba) is a kind (nawʿ) of companionship (istihāb) or direct address (mukhātaba) that occurs despite the separation of two bodies. This transmutation was feasible, he writes in one letter, because of a certain ‘enchantment’ (nayrang) that writing makes possible.⁴¹ In his view, this ‘enchantment’ could occur because the spiritual bonds that existed between two individuals had their origins in a pre-material state. Face-to-face meetings were not, in themselves, valuable except as a way to renew and strengthen these pre-material spiritual affinities.

To understand this form of epistolographic ‘enchantment’ requires that we place it within a broader framework of Naqshbandi reading practices in this period. Biographical dictionaries or tazkiras—in particular—were recommended for novices in these circles. These texts, containing records of the statements and actions of the shaykhs of the tarīqa, provided models for the student's own spiritual wayfaring. Beyond serving as models of ‘exemplary behaviour’, the act of reading tazkiras was understood as a tool for generating spiritual companionship with the spirit of the deceased masters of the tarīqa.⁴² Readers viewed these texts, in other words, as a technology that would allow them to ‘see’ an individual whose material body was no longer accessible. Nur Allah Budhanwi (d. 1782), a disciple of Shah Wali Allah, describes his experience of this kind of independent study:

One day, I was studying (mutālaʿa) Anfās al-ʿārifīn, a work of [Shah Wali Allah] in which he mentions the states of [his father Abd al-Rahim] and [his uncle] Abu al-Riza Muhammad. When I reached the [description of the] state of Hafiz Abd Allah, sleep came over me and the aforementioned book lay on my chest. In a vision (wāqiʿa), it appeared to me as if the spirit of every great individual that is mentioned in the book were present underneath their names, as if there was a great light underneath each word of the treatise. The words were like eyeglasses (misl-i ʿaynak) in relation to those spirits and lights. And I remained in this [state of] witnessing of the manuscript for two to three hours. After that I woke up.⁴³

Once again, it is clear that Nur Allah was reading this book alone: a reader would hardly fall asleep for several hours in the course of reciting a text in front of his shaykh. His description of the text's connection to the world of spirits, however, is even more striking. Rather than describe the written text as second-order and inferior to significations of speech, he portrays it as an instrument of perception, specifically eye-glasses, which allowed an individual, with suitable spiritual preparedness, to witness the luminous spirits of the pious dead.⁴⁴ Classically, such states of spiritual communion were achieved through proximity to the body of a shaykh, often during pilgrimages to the graves of the dead. Eighteenth-century Naqshbandis, however, were evidently attaining such states through books instead. The aim of reading these texts, then, was to cultivate a particularly heightened spiritual state whereby the book ‘rendered itself…epistemologically obsolete’.⁴⁵ In other words, Nur Allah was reading the book not simply for the information it contained but rather as a way to attain a vision (wāqiʿa) that allowed him to perceive the spirits of the dead, individuals who retained a certain spiritual identity but whose material bodies had long since decayed.

Spiritual companionship in letters

This mode of reading has important implications for conceptions of eighteenth-century epistolography that allows us to make sense of the language that Shah Wali Allah uses to describe epistles that he has received and his ability to perceive the sender. Just as Nur Allah described the spiritual witnessing made possible by reading the tazkira, so too does Shah Wali Allah describe letters that he has received in sensory terms: as bearers of luminescence or odour, and as a means of expressing the modes of spiritual companionship that such writings make possible.⁴⁶ We see this, for example, in a response to a letter that Shah Wali Allah had received from Mawlawi Abd al-Qadir, a rationalist scholar of Jaunpur, which Shah Wali Allah began with the following verse:

Greetings to the enfolded [letter] that made visible its creator:

It brought radiance from the light of the one who folded it.

When winds blow from Jaunpur, contented,

The world, and whatever's in it, become fragrant.

ahlan biʾl-malfūfa adhat muʿāmilahā

tuhdī ilayya sanan mīn nūr thānīhā

min jawnfūr idhā habba riyāh ridan

minhā taʿatturat al-dunyā wa mā fīhā ⁴⁷

Here Wali Allah's description of his experience of seeing the folded paper as a luminous body, or experiencing the words as a fragrance-bearing breeze, is not suggesting that he has seen light with the external sense of sight, nor smelled an odour with the external olfactory sense. Rather, the image suggests the sensations experienced by the internal senses.

This concept of internal perception, which allowed awareness far beyond what was immediately present to the external senses, had deep roots in Naqshbandi circles. Najm al-Din Razi Daya (d. 1257), whose Mirshād al-ʿibād min al-mabdaʾ ilā al-maʿād was an immensely popular text with early Naqshbandis, describes these internal senses as parallel to the external, physical senses: ‘The heart has an eye with which it beholds visions of the unseen; an ear with which it listens to the speech of the inhabitants of the unseen and the speech of God; nostrils with which it smells the perfumes of the unseen; and a palate with which it perceives the taste of love, the sweetness of faith, and the savor of gnosis.’⁴⁸ These internal senses were thus capable of experiencing things not immediately available through sight or touch.

Investigations into the internal senses are found in Wali Allah's technical treatises, too. Working within a modified Avicennan psychological framework, he explains that there are certain existent things (mawjūdāt) that can only be perceived by these internal senses. In al-Khayr al-kathīr he argues that just as there are five external senses, so too are there three internal senses (the sensus communis, the perception, and the estimative faculty) that are properties (khasāʾis) of an individual's pneuma (lit. ‘the airy body’ al-badan al-hawāʾī).⁴⁹ Indeed, it is only the internal ‘perceptive’ faculty that perceives a person as a person—‘the pure individual’ (al-shakhṣ al-sirf)—as opposed to an assortment of colours and shapes. Similarly, the estimative faculty (wahm) apprehends the ‘intention’ (maʿnā) of a thing rather than its external form (surat).⁵⁰ As Wali Allah states, as well as perceiving the spiritual ‘light’ that an individual produces during pious acts like prayer, the wahm allows us to experience ‘accidental, intuitive matters (umūr ʿaradiyya wijdāniyya)’ like anger and love.⁵¹ When, for example, a perceptive individual (dhakiyy) sits with someone who is grieving and afflicted (mahmūm maghmūm), the grief transfers to him (taʿaddāhu al-hamm waʾl-ghamm) by means of the wahm.⁵² Although the grief is not his own, this perception can produce physical effects in the one perceiving it: he might turn pale and lose his appetite, for example.

Even during periods of physical proximity, then, companionship was predicated on these non-material, supra-formal perceptions. In the case of two spiritually concordant individuals with extremely sensitive faculties, such perceptions could occur even when their material bodies were not proximate or immediately evident to the external senses.⁵³ Thus, when Shah Wali Allah describes the letter as a fragrance-bearing breeze, he is suggesting that the words of the letter served to focus his internal senses in such a way that allowed for a supra-formal connection between himself and the letter writer.

Throughout his correspondence, Wali Allah draws on these ideas to explain the long-established Sufi notion that the spirits of two individuals might be connected over vast geographical differences. Writing to his long-time correspondent Muhammad Muin (d. 1747) of Thatta in Sindh, Wali Allah describes the emotion aroused by his letter: ‘Your noble letter arrived and stirred up much tenderness (sahīfa-i sharīfa rasīd muhayyij-i ishfāq-i farāwān gardīd).’ He assures Muhammad Muin that because of the strength of their spiritual bond, a face-to-face meeting was largely unnecessary: ‘In a situation where spiritual congruence is strong, it is likely the case that bodily meeting has become obsolete (jā-yi ki iʾtilāf-i rūhānī mustahkam ast nazdīk ast ki suhbat-i jismānī bī kār uftad).’ To illustrate this statement, he composed a short verse:

What need has friendship for face-to-face meeting?

The wind of Yemen is still absorbed in the perfume of Arabia.

musāhabat chi zarūr ast āshnāʾī rā

hunūz bād-i yaman mahw-i nakhat-i ʿarabīst ⁵⁴

The central conceit of this verse—the intense longing of the wind for the scent of Arabia—is ultimately derived from the hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad remarked that he felt the ‘breath of the All-Merciful’ (nafas al-rahmān) coming from Yemen.⁵⁵ This hadith was understood by the Naqshbandis to be a reference to the relationship between the Prophet Muhammad and the Yemeni shepherd, Uways al-Qarni. According to traditions that developed over the centuries, Uways was unable to travel to meet the Prophet because he had to remain in Yemen with his ailing mother, and the two men never physically met.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, Uways developed an intense spiritual connection with the Prophet and became a Muslim.⁵⁷ This relationship became paradigmatic for Naqshbandi Sufis who received direct communications from the Prophet in the form of visions or dreams. In Nafahāt al-uns, a book Wali Allah read in his youth, the great Naqshbandi Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 1492) cited Farid al-Din Attar's (d. 1221) description of such individuals: ‘There is a group of friends of God whom shaykhs of the mystical path and the great ones in the [way of] reality call Uwaysīs. And, externally, they have no need for a guide (pīr), because the Lord of Messengership—may the peace and blessings of God be upon him—guides them with his particular care, without the mediation of another, just as he guided Uways.’⁵⁸ Although the Naqshbandis always emphasised the need for a living guide, they took, as one historian has argued, ‘special pride in the practice of nonphysical Uwaysī transmission’.⁵⁹ Shah Wali Allah's father Abd al-Rahim was one such Uwaysi, having received, in the imaginal world, an authorisation (ijāza) directly from the Prophet as well as from Baha al-Din Naqshband (d. 1389).⁶⁰ Shah Wali Allah's description of letters as a Yemeni breeze is, therefore, a way of suggesting that letters might bear the trace, perceptible only by the inner senses, of an individual from whom one was physically separated.

In the same letter to Muhammad Muin, Shah Wali Allah explains why such ‘spiritual friendship’ (dūstī-yi rūhānī) was, in fact, superior to face-to-face meetings.⁶¹ He writes that the materiality of the body disturbs the more refined inclinations of the human pneuma that, as mentioned above, was the seat of the wahm and other internal senses:

[Face-to-face companionship] is not [completely useless] but it is likely that it interferes (mukhill) [with the congruence of spirits] because in corporeal companionship (suhbat-i jismānī) the shadowy external form of the body (hayʾat-i ghāsiqa-i badaniyya) intrudes upon the pneuma (nasama), and [the pneuma's propensity for] turning in the direction of spiritual congruence (iʾtilāf-i rūhānī) is reduced…The view of this weak one is that the pneuma (nasama-i hawāʾiyya), that supports [the existence of] the dark, external form [of the body] (hayʾat-i nafs-i insāniyya), has an aversion (iʿrāz) to the lower [carnal] human soul (nafs-i insāniyya), and an attachment to the material of the imaginal world (mādda-i misāliyya), and there [i.e. in the imaginal world] all the souls (nufūs) have one [single] life (hayāt) [and there, unlike in the material world,] it is not the case that each individual has a separate life.⁶²

As Shah Wali Allah explains, the pneuma is naturally drawn to the pre-material imaginal world, a level of reality that lay between the world of materiality and the world of pure spirits, ‘distinguished by the fact that it has no material existence but contains forms in the images of material bodies’.⁶³ In Shah Wali Allah's view, although some manner of pre-material individuation exists at this level of reality, all souls share a single, indivisible ‘life’ because they are not yet corporealised into distinct material bodies. Reading the letter of a friend, without the intrusion of physical bodies that drag the pneuma back towards the physical world, allows for something of this pre-material unity to be attained.

Shah Wali Allah was not alone in considering letters as a means for developing spiritual connections between two individuals. On one occasion a young scholar from Jaunpur Abd al-Qadir wrote Shah Wali Allah a letter that reads something like modern fan mail. The younger man describes how he had heard people praising Shah Wali Allah's qualities and lamented that he was unable to travel to Delhi to meet him in person:

Indeed, it is not appropriate that friendship between persons and mutual acquaintance between individuals be restricted to perception with the eyes, or that it be confined to conversation with tongues. How could it be so? For whatever reached my hearing in regard to you in the way of noble and excellent qualities, and whatever came to my ears in the way of [your] laudable attributes, manifest and non-manifest, filled my innards and spread through my limbs, until I desired that, along with [what I had heard], there would be something in the way of correspondence with you that might draw us together, and would be counted as a kind of mutual connection before I attained the blessing of meeting [you], and I accomplished the good fortune of [physical] proximity.⁶⁴

In his response to Abd al-Qadir, Shah Wali Allah reasserted the idea that the exchange of letters is not only a kind of companionship but has advantages over a physical meeting because it occurs at the level of a spiritual union without the mediation of gross physicality: ‘Indeed, the exchanging of letters is a kind of companionship and that which is worthy of consideration [occurs] through the mutual relating of spirits, not with the drawing near of dust (al-mukātaba nawʿ min al-istihāb wa al-ʿibra bi-munāsabat al-arwāh lā bi-muqārabat al-turāb).’⁶⁵

One might be tempted to understand Shah Wali Allah's response as simply a heightened form of epistolary civility, a witty inversion of the emphasis usually placed on face-to-face companionship—or, perhaps, a polite way of encouraging Abd al-Rashid not to visit Delhi after all (certainly, the relationship between the two men does not seem to have developed after this initial exchange). However, Shah Wali Allah was very much committed to the idea of ‘spiritual friendship’, one for which a number of his letters give textual support, by citing a hadith recorded in both Bukhari and Muslim: ‘The spirits are like conscripted soldiers. Those with whom they are acquainted [among the other spirits] they unite with them and those they do not know they conflict with them.’⁶⁶ In his famous commentary on Muslim's Sahīh—a commentary with which Shah Wali Allah was very familiar—Abu Zakariyya al-Nawawi (d. 1277) gives a brief explanation of this hadith. According to al-Nawawi, the hadith's use of the verb taʿārafa—‘to become acquainted with one another’—was a reference to the sympathy or compatibility (muwāfaqa) between the attributes of the spirits of different individuals. He wrote that ‘[the spirits] were created as a [single] group and then became divided into their [different] bodies (khuliqat mujtamaʿatan thumma furiqat fī ajsādihā)’. He reasoned that whenever an individual's traits (shiyam) corresponded to those of another individual, they would have affection for one another. On the other hand, he would shun and feel enmity towards whomever had traits different from his own.⁶⁷ As al-Nawawi's commentary suggests, this hadith was generally understood to mean that individuals were drawn to one another because their spirits (arwāh) had established a mutual affinity in the pre-material world that manifested as a mutual attraction in the material world after their individuation into separate bodies. Wali Allah draws on these ideas to argue that, in the right spiritual state, it might be possible for two individuals to attain something of this pre-material unity.

Figures within Wali Allah's circle argued that, in cases of intense spiritual congruence between two individuals, written communications might, somewhat paradoxically, be rendered superfluous. Muhammad Ashiq, Wali Allah's closest disciple, describes how another one of the disciples—literally, ‘servants’ (khādimān)—performed a 40-day retreat (chilla) in his own village, a long way from Wali Allah's ‘blessed court’ (astāna-i fayz ashyāna) in Delhi. During his retreat, he sent frequent letters to Shah Wali Allah with questions about his spiritual progress and received written responses before the disciple's letters had even reached him. Moreover, ‘whatever [Shah Wali Allah] had ordered [that the disciple do] in order to obtain those states, he had infused that state into the words [of the letter itself] so that even as [the disciple] read [Shah Wali Allah's] noble letter, that state became manifest [in him]’.⁶⁸ While this narrative highlights Wali Allah's own powers, it also suggests the paradoxical nature of epistolography: while used as a tool for maintaining close bonds between master and student, it also remained subordinate to spiritual connections intense enough for a master to understand his student's concerns and to produce spiritual states in him as if he were immediately present.

Maintaining bonds

In most cases, the regular exchange of letters was considered imperative for maintaining bonds that had been strengthened during periods of face-to-face companionship. We frequently encounter complaints of letters going unanswered and the attendant fear that these spiritual bonds were therefore withering. In one such letter Abd al-Aziz, Shah Wali Allah's son, writes to an old disciple of his father, rejoicing that a letter had finally arrived ‘more delicate than the breeze and sweeter than divine blessings (araqq min al-nasīm wa ahlā min al-naʿīm)…giving news of the constancy of [your] love and the firmness of [our] bond (mukhbira ʿan wakīd wadd wa muhakkam ʿaqd)’. Prior to the arrival of the letter, their correspondence had lapsed to the extent that Abd al-Aziz ‘thought that the roar of [our] love had diminished (al-muwadda qad intaqasa zaʿīruhā)’. Had the situation not been resolved, he warned, ‘it would have necessitated the forgetting of [our] love and resulted in the disintegration of [our] customary connection (awjaba nisyān al-widād wa addat bi-fasl al-wasl al-muʿtād)’.⁶⁹

As the rhyming prose of this Arabic letter suggests, epistolographic exchanges often displayed great eloquence and rhetorical skill.⁷⁰ Although these spiritual bonds were considered to be something beyond speech, the letters themselves—like face-to-face meetings—required strict adherence to the protocols of correct comportment (ādāb), a manifestation of the underlying harmony between the spirits of the two individuals.⁷¹ As Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi have demonstrated, Persianate epistolography as an artform required a mastery of the forms of address and structure relevant to the relative ranks of the receiver and the sender.⁷² Indeed, schoolchildren learned the protocols of epistolary politesse as a core component of their education. In his late eighteenth-century letter-writing manual, Munshaʾāt-i dil-kushā (‘Letters that Ravish the Heart’), Sayyid Nisar Ali of Bareilly emphasised that his work would teach children the correct ādāb of letter writing: ‘[the book includes] a number of letters [of a kind] that the people of the time write to one other, with the courtesies and titles found in each, using language that should be suitable for the temperament of children who are in elementary education, and that should be easy [for them] to comprehend’.⁷³ Likewise, in his Manāzīr al-Inshāʾ, the fifteenth-century Deccani wazīr Mahmud Gawan (d. 1481) wrote that ‘writing according to rank is the greatest quality of a scribe’.⁷⁴ This was perhaps even truer for the Naqshbandis: as one oft-cited epigram had it, ‘Correct deportment is everything on the path of spiritual wayfaring (al-tarīqa kulluhu ādāb).’⁷⁵

There was a resultant concern to avoid sending letters without proper attention for epistolography protocol. Wali Allah once excused himself for not writing to Muhammad Ashiq during a period of bodily and spiritual affliction because he had not wished to produce a letter that was ‘unartful’ (bī tasannuʿ). Such letters were, he claimed, citing the Abbasid poet al-Mutannabi (d. 965), ‘winds blowing with that which the ships do not desire’.⁷⁶ Even with an ethical imperative to maintain an exchange of letters with an absent friend, standards had to be maintained.

The Umani letters

To understand how Wali Allah's theoretical framework of ‘spiritual friendship’ and ‘spiritual congruence’ translated into practice, it is worth considering a series of letters that I term the Umani letters’. These letters illustrate clearly that Shah Wali Allah was willing to instigate a relationship with an individual for whom he had a pre-material spiritual affinity, and to receive an ijāza from him, without ever having a face-to-face meeting. Moreover, Shah Wali Allah wrote these letters to an individual known to him exclusively through a process of spiritual unveiling (kashf).⁷⁷ Shah Wali Allah did not know the individual's name: only his lineage (Yemeni), place of residence (Uman), physical characteristics, and intellectual outlook. Indeed, we have no evidence that the individual ever existed (at least, in the material world) and, as we shall see, Shah Wali Allah failed in his attempt to locate him.

The story of this unusual correspondence began in July 1750 (Shaʿbān 1163). Every year, it was Muhammad Ashiq's established habit to travel from Phulat to Delhi to join Shah Wali Allah for a 40-day period of seclusion (iʿtikāf-i arbaʿīn). During this time, which lasted from the end of Shaʿbān and continued throughout the month of Ramazān, Shah Wali Allah would receive spiritual unveilings that he would relate to Muhammad Ashiq who would write them down. It was during these periods of intensive spiritual ‘unveiling’ that Shah Wali Allah produced a number of his shorter treatises on tasawwuf and metaphysics. In 1750, however, because of some domestic obligation (iltizām-i maqām-i ābāʾ-i īn mustahām),⁷⁸ Muhammad Ashiq wrote to Shah Wali Allah regretfully informing him that this year he would have to remain in Phulat.⁷⁹ Shah Wali Allah responded by telling Muhammad Ashiq it had occurred to him that, in recompense (talāfī) for their necessary and apparent separation (mufāraqat-i sūriyya-i zarūriyya), he would address his comments to Muhammad Ashiq's ‘imaginal form (sūrat-i misāliyya)’ and write down on paper whatever was feasible in the way of subtle points that would ordinarily have been discussed orally (biʾl-mushāfaha).⁸⁰ In this way, he continued, the conjuration (nayrang) suggested by the phrase ‘the exchange of letters is a kind of [oral] discourse (al-mukātaba nawʿ min al-mukhātaba)’ would become apparent. Muhammad Ashiq tells us that after receiving this initial letter from Shah Wali Allah, he eagerly awaited his spiritual guide's ‘discourses’ (mukhātabāt).⁸¹

It was in the first of these Ramazān discourses that Shah Wali Allah described a vision he had received of an unknown Umani scholar:

On one occasion, this image formed [before me] that in the realm of Uman, of which the port of Muscat is the coastal region, there is a righteous dear one [i.e. a member of a Sufi Way], characterised by the attributes of the people of God. He is aged in years and [although] in origin he is from the tribe of Himyar and is from Yemen, he finds himself in Uman. God looks towards him with mercy and his predilection is for the scholars of hadith. It is understood that this dear one is a Shāfiʿī [in jurisprudence] and Ashʿarī [in theology], and he is brilliant and well-known, even though he is dark-complexioned and chooses to live in obscurity and seclusion.⁸²

Shah Wali Allah took this vision very seriously indeed. He was convinced that he had a spiritual connection with the Umani scholar, despite not having met him in the material world. In fact, he resolved to contact this scholar in order to receive an ijāza from him as a precursor to a face-to-face meeting. Although they already had a spiritual bond, Shah Wali Allah was eager to generate connections in the material world, too. Therefore, he wrote the Umani scholar a letter (in Arabic, naturally):

From the one who stands in need of generous God's mercy, Wali Allah son of Abd al-Rahim—may God make their final resting places a permanent blessing—to the person he knows [only] by his attributes: namely, that he is Yemeni of origin, living in Uman, a scholar of hadith, a scholar of Shāfiʿī [jurisprudence], Ashaʿrī [in theology], with unbroken and elevated chains of transmission, one who has met shaykhs and studied with them, who is old in age, ruddy in complexion, and well-proportioned in height. Oh, my master, peace and God's mercy and blessings be upon you. This needy one is desirous of you: between us there is a spiritual congruence (iʾtilāf rūhānī). If God almighty wills a meeting, then it will occur. Please be so kind as to give me a report of your chains of transmission and the texts that you read to teachers (maqrūʾāt) and [the names of] your teachers, and all of the benefits [from your learning] and please be so kind as to grant an ijāza, so that my heart will be becalmed by that until the time of a [face-to-face] meeting. And ask God for the welfare and blessings of me, my children and my companions. Peace be upon you.⁸³

Having written this letter, the question then arose as to how Shah Wali Allah would ensure that it reached the nameless Umani scholar, known only by his attributes (sifāt). He decided to entrust it to one of his most learned students, Hafiz Jar Allah Panjabi, who happened to be travelling to the Haramayn for pilgrimage.⁸⁴ Jar Allah most likely set off for the pilgrimage the following year (1751) because, had he travelled in 1750, there would not have been enough time between the end of the rains in North India (late September)—when travel became feasible—and the beginning of the Hajj season that year (early November).⁸⁵ Shah Wali Allah wrote to Jar Allah with an unusual request: namely, to find this elderly scholar as he passed through Uman.⁸⁶

Shah Wali Allah wrote a letter to Jar Allah with instructions on how to locate the Umani scholar. He begins with a description of the initial vision: the wording is identical to that found in the passage cited above. Shah Wali Allah then continues:

Therefore, if you pass by Uman either as you are going [to the Haramayn] or at the time of returning, please make great effort to find this dear one. If you find him you will derive great benefit from him. Give him my greetings and tell him: ‘This needy one [i.e. Wali Allah] has a particular spiritual love for you, in accordance with the hadith: “[The spirits are conscripted armies,] those which they recognise [from among the spirits], they are in harmony with them [and those they do not recognise, they are in disagreement with them].”’⁸⁷ And if the divine will is that [we] meet physically, the [truth of this hadith] will become manifest… According to how much time you have, please write to me with an ijāza for [the transmission of] hadith and a statement of your unbroken and elevated chains of transmission. If I have the capacity to do so, I will visit you/Travelling headlong and walking joyfully. If you do not have the opportunity to go to Uman, depute one of your friends or acquaintances to do so. Because underneath this is a subtle point. And God Almighty knows best the subtleties of affairs.⁸⁸

Jar Allah travelled on the pilgrimage and sought out the scholar when he disembarked from his ship at Muscat.

Unfortunately (though perhaps unsurprisingly), Jar Allah was unsuccessful in his attempts to find the nameless scholar. He wrote to Shah Wali Allah informing him of his failure. We know this because Shah Wali Allah sent another Arabic letter to Jar Allah while he was still in the Haramayn:

Your letter reached me and I read in it of the efforts that you made in the search for the man of the land of Uman and that it was not possible [for you] to meet him and that you did not hear news of him. May your good deed be attributed to Allah and may Allah reward you with a good reward. Indeed, your effort belongs to Allah and is in Allah. And perhaps here there is a secret about which you will be informed later. Do not struggle further in this search, for indeed the search has reached its point of maturation. But know that the sought-for man is elderly, tall, black in colour, and [wears] the clothes of a merchant. He is not among those who are known for their knowledge. Indeed, he is obscure and unknown. Do not continue to struggle in the search for him more than you have already.⁸⁹

Though this attempt failed, more importantly, it demonstrates that Wali Allah felt that his spiritual connection to this individual existed prior to any face-to-face meeting. As his citation of the hadith ‘the spirits are conscripted armies’ suggests, he understood their relationship to exist at a pre-material level of reality and he sought only to replicate and strengthen that connection in the material world.

Ijāzas: textual authorisations?

As we saw earlier, Wali Allah was willing to exchange ijāzas with this enigmatic Umani scholar without feeling the need for a face-to-face meeting. In order to fully appreciate the significance of this, and therefore understand his framework of remote knowledge transmission, we must partially delink the granting of ijāzas from practices of oral knowledge transmission. Indeed, the misrecognition of remote transmission of knowledge in Islamicate South Asia derives, in part, from a number of misconceptions about the function of the ijāza as a technology.⁹⁰ Among historians of South Asia, the ijāza is often understood to be a document that was granted to a student on the basis of a satisfactory oral recitation of a book and a demonstration of their mastery of the text's meaning.⁹¹ According to this view, the teacher's presentation of the ijāza authorised the student to transmit that particular text to their own students.⁹² Scholars have argued that students would collect ijāzas for all of the individual texts that they had recited before a teacher or teachers.

While the genre of the ijāza cannot be discussed here in detail, it is worth noting that it was rather more fluid than such accounts suggest. Nor do these accounts reflect how ijāzas often functioned in eighteenth-century Naqshbandi circles.⁹³ Ijāzas produced by Wali Allah for his closest students clearly show that oral transmission of knowledge was not the only, or indeed the primary, purpose of companionship. Indeed, most ijāzas in Wali Allah's circle were not attestations of the correct recitation of a particular text. Rather, they were testimonies to the intellectual, spiritual, and ethical attainments of the recipient, as well as written records of the spiritual and affective bonds that existed between the granter and the recipient.⁹⁴

In cases where the prospective granter of an ijāza assessed the prospective recipient as capable but intellectually and spiritually undeveloped, the prospective recipient would undergo a rigorous period of companionship aimed at strengthening their capacities. This would usually involve a period of intellectual formation, including close study of certain texts in the context of face-to-face meetings as well as independent study and a demanding process of spiritual and ethical training (including the memorisation of prayer formulae, with their accompanying practices and the performance of menial tasks to inculcate humility). While an oral recitation of a text (or sections from certain texts) concluded the process, this was often performed in a ritualistic and ceremonial manner. Under no circumstances did it require the recipient to recite all of the ijāza-granter's own writings, let alone all of the texts that he was himself authorised to teach and transmit.⁹⁵ This was the case even in the context of hadith transmission where a prospective ijāza recipient usually only recited the opening sections of the various hadith collections.⁹⁶ In other words, while this process of formation did include relatively short textual recitations, these were viewed as representative of the student's intellectual and spiritual attainments more broadly.

In these contexts, ijāzas tended to authorise the holder to transmit an entire corpus of texts or even whole fields of knowledge and practice mentioned in the document. Indeed, upon receipt of the ijāza, a student was sometimes permitted to transmit all texts and spiritual practices that the teacher was authorised to teach and transmit, or that he had himself written earlier or, indeed, that he would write in the future.⁹⁷ This kind of ijāza, sometimes described as a ‘general ijāza’ (ijāza-i ʿāma), obviated the need for further periods of face-to-face companionship (although, of course, this was desirable).⁹⁸

If a prospective ijāza granter felt that a prospective recipient was already intellectually and spiritually advanced, he might grant one without the need for an extended training process. While there might be a ceremonial recitation of sections (usually the openings) of particular texts, teachers sometimes issued ijāzas without requiring a face-to-face meeting at all. This generally occurred when a scholar was issuing an ijāza to another already established scholar or an individual from an illustrious scholarly lineage whose reputation preceded them. As we saw in the case of the Umani letters, established scholars, including Wali Allah, would sometimes write to other scholars and request an ijāza prior to a face-to-face meeting. In another letter, Shah Wali Allah wrote to Muhammad Wazih of Rae Bareilly, scion of the illustrious family of Sayyid Alam Allah, to tell him that ‘everything for which I was granted permission by my own shaykhs is permitted [to you to use and transmit]’.⁹⁹ It does not seem that the two men ever had a face-to-face meeting, but Wali Allah had no compunction in authorising him to transmit these texts and spiritual practices.

What is most significant for the purposes of this article is that ijāzas were also attestations of the spiritual bond that had formed between the recipient and the granter. This bond figured in the text of the ijāzas as a form of corporeal identity between student and teacher. In one ijāza dated to 1733, for example, Wali Allah writes of his student that, after a long period of intellectual and spiritual training, ‘his hand is my hand, and his tongue is my tongue’.¹⁰⁰ As with the sensory imagery discussed above, this suggests the spiritual congruence between the two individuals formed through periods of companionship. Once this connection had been established and the student had moved to a distant locale, these bonds might then be sustained through letters. Because the ijāza was a testament to the student's attainments—rather than evidence of an oral recitation of a particular text—the ijāza granter would, depending on the nature of the relationship, have little compunction in sending new books and other forms of written communication to a student on the assumption that they possessed the right intellectual, spiritual, and ethical preparedness to study it alone.

The remote transmission of texts in these networks was quite distinct, then, from the anonymity of print culture. Texts continued to be circulated within close-knit networks of trust based on intellectual and spiritual attainment. However, recognition of these modalities of circulation allows us to move away from a model of textual transmission that relies on the stark binary between oral and written culture.

Remote book collaborations

As we have seen, important figures in eighteenth-century Naqshbandi networks regarded the exchange of letters as a form of spiritual companionship. With this framework in mind, the following section shows how this intellectual theory underwrote the remote exchange of texts. Members of Wali Allah's circle often conducted their scholarly activities remotely with trusted disciples and students, sometimes over significant distances. Indeed, the remote exchanges of books, both completed and draft manuscripts, were central to a number of Shah Wali Allah's scholarly projects. Whenever he had finished a book, Shah Wali Allah would usually send a clean copy (mubayyaz) to his chief disciple Muhammad Ashiq by post. As mentioned above, Wali Allah sent him a finished copy of Hawāmiʿ, his extensive and extremely dense commentary on Hizb al-bahr. In another letter, which we can date to around 1749, Shah Wali Allah wrote to Muhammad Ashiq to lament that he was struggling to write Musaffā, his commentary on Imam Malik's famous early hadith collection Muwattaʾ, and to reassure him that he would send it to him once it was finished.¹⁰¹ Although Shah Wali Allah's long-term amanuensis Muhammad Amin Kashmiri¹⁰² was responsible for turning drafts into clean copies before they were sent, Shah Wali Allah would sometimes send drafts directly to Muhammad Ashiq who would then produce a finished version that was ready for circulation and send it back to Delhi.¹⁰³

Because Wali Allah lived in Delhi and Muhammad Ashiq lived in Phulat, Wali Allah sought to manage Muhammad Ashiq's writing activities remotely. At some point, most likely in the 1740s, Wali Allah instructed Muhammad Ashiq to work on producing a ‘Collected Works’ (kulliyyāt) that was to include al-Intibāh fī salāsil awliyāʾ Allāh, Anfās al-ʿārifīn, and Lamahāt. He also instructed Muhammad Ashiq on what to include in his well-known collection of short treatises and poems, al-Tafhīmāt al-ilāhiyya. As well as instructions for the production of the texts, Shah Wali Allah sent Muhammad Ashiq the materials necessary to prepare the manuscripts, noting that, along with his letter, the messenger should have brought ‘paper, red dye (shangarf), and a ruler [for drawing straight lines] (mistar)’.¹⁰⁴

Shah Wali Allah also remotely guided Muhammad Ashiq on what should be included in al-Qawl al-jalī, the biography of Shah Wali Allah that he was then in the process of writing. He told Muhammad Ashiq to include in the biography a letter that the recently deceased Muhammad Muin of Thatta had written to one Sayyid Saʿd Allah, adding that Muhammad Ashiq should provide his own interpretation (tarjuma) of it. He gave further instructions about including letters that he (Wali Allah) had written, as well as a treatise by his uncle Shah Abu al-Riza and (a now-lost) treatise of his father, Māʾasir-i rahīmiyya. In the same letter, Shah Wali Allah also instructed Muhammad Ashiq to finish his incomplete commentary on al-Khayr al-kathīr and told him that, if he did not finish it, he should include the major points in his own book, Dirāyāt.¹⁰⁵ Even when face-to-face meetings were not possible, Shah Wali Allah was thus able to remotely guide the literary production of his leading disciple.

As mentioned earlier, it was not uncommon in these circles to send books of all genres by post. This included collections of hadith. We know, for example, that Muhammad Muin of Thatta sent Shah Wali Allah instalments of Abu Bakr b. Abi Shayba's (d. 849) voluminous hadith collection, Musannaf, over the course of several years.¹⁰⁶ Wali Allah had only met Muhammad Muin once in 1730 as he made his way, via Sindh, to the Hijaz and the two men developed a close relationship, exchanging ijāzas before Wali Allah's departure.¹⁰⁷ Despite meeting only once, and despite their increasingly divergent views on a number of crucial issues, they continued a regular exchange of extremely affectionate letters for some 17 years until the older man's death in 1747.¹⁰⁸ This remote hadith transmission was not a one off: we also have a letter in which Wali Allah mentions that he has sent a book of musalsalāt hadith to Muhammad Ashiq.¹⁰⁹ Although hadith transmission is often viewed as paradigmatic for the practice of oral transmission, we see here how the model of spiritual friendship developed in this network meant that the remote transmission of hadith also took place.

We also have evidence that somewhat obscure Sufis, perhaps aspiring to become better known through a connection to important figures, would send their books to these celebrated individuals for them to read and perhaps publicise within their own networks. We have, for example, a letter in which Wali Allah responds to the missive of a now-obscure figure from Muzaffarnagar called Shah-i Awliya Muzaffarnagari. The original letter had arrived with a book (kitābī) that Wali Allah describes as ‘containing secrets and full of subtle points’.¹¹⁰ Although Wali Allah expresses a desire to meet his correspondent (shawq-i mulāqāt ba-ham rasīd) at some point in the future, his review of the book was politely withering.

Books of poetry were sent by post as well, on one occasion serving as the medium for the transport of the letter itself: in a letter written by Shah Abd al-Aziz, Shah Wali Allah's son, to his father-in-law Nur Allah Budhanwi, probably written in the early 1760s, he mentions that Nur Allah had sent him a copy of the dīwān of the contemporary Persian poet Muhammad Ali Hazin (d. 1776):

I read your graceful letter, which you had addressed to Khwajah Muhammad Amīn and inserted into the covering (ghilāf) of the Dīwān-i Hazīn [that you sent us]. I studied the various topics [discussed] in [the letter]… As for the Dīwān al-Hazīn, I read some of it from the morning until now and I have sent it back with the one carrying this letter.¹¹¹

In the same letter, Abd al-Aziz told Nur Allah that he was unable to send him the various books, written by the then-deceased Shah Wali Allah, that he had requested because the family was being forced to flee from Delhi in the face of an impending attack (presumably by the Marathas). He informed Nur Allah that the family had packed the contents of their library into sacks so they could bring them safely out of the city. The requested books included Shah Wali Allah's Maktūb al-Madanī, written for Afandi Ismail al-Rumi, which settled the difference between wahdat al-wujūd and wahdat al-shuhūd, and his book on the Sunni caliphate, Izālat al-khafāʾ: ‘As for [your] request for the written books, the decision is that I sealed them in bags that it is not possible to extract them at the moment. I will send them, God willing, after settling in a place.’¹¹² There is no sense in the letter that sending these books would be anything out of the ordinary.

The contents of this letter also reveal that it was not only finished books that were being circulated within these networks of trusted individuals. Although scholars have argued that the fear of textual corruption required strict protocols of oral transmission, we see that the bonds of trust among members of eighteenth-century Naqhsbandī circles meant that they were very willing to send unfinished drafts that still contained editorial amendments and other corrections. One of Shah Wali Allah's books that Nur Allah had requested—almost certainly al-Musaffāʾ—was still in draft form at the time (it was completed posthumously in 1765) and Abd al-Aziz told him that he would only send the manuscript if Nur Allah agreed to ‘not go beyond the limits [appropriate for] a draft’, because ‘in much of what is in it and in its notations—both omissions and lines written over it [for corrections]—the text is not suitable that anything be transcribed from it’.¹¹³ This last comment suggests that a clear distinction was made between formally ‘published’ texts (mubayyaz) and drafts (taswīd/musawwada). Both were circulated remotely among trusted networks of students and disciples, but only the published manuscripts were used as the basis of citation and/or the production of further copies. We know that Abd al-Aziz did eventually send the manuscript of Musaffāʾ to Nur Allah, because in another letter he reported that the manuscript of the text had arrived safely back in Delhi.¹¹⁴

As lithographic printing took off in Bengal in the early nineteenth century, it seems that members of this circle began to engage in long-distance projects aimed at printing Wali Allah's work. In the 1820s, in the final decade of his life, Abd al-Aziz, Wali Allah's son, agreed to commission and send a copy of Hujjat Allāh al-bāligha to two contacts in Calcutta who had requested it so that they might produce the first lithographed edition. As Nur al-Hasan Rashid Kandhlawi has shown, the scholars Munshi Amin al-Din and his brother Munshi Naim al-Din, perhaps disciples of Abd al-Aziz's father, wrote in late 1821 asking for a copy of the text for publication. Abd al-Aziz willingly agreed to the request and asked only that they send Rs 13 for copying costs.¹¹⁵ Although this early nineteenth-century lithographic project did not come to fruition, it is notable that Abd al-Aziz, who (as noted above) was already sending uncollated manuscript copies of Hujjat to contacts in distant cities in the late eighteenth century, seemed to register no particular concern about the implications of this new technology or the threat it posed to face-to-face transmission.

Conclusion

By focusing closely on the practices of a small group of scholars, albeit a highly important and influential one, we are able to see that older models of textual transmission that rely on a simple binary between oral and written cultures do not capture the complex particularities of knowledge circulation among Muslim intellectuals of pre-colonial eighteenth-century India. This article has shown that a prominent circle of eighteenth-century Naqshbandis was perfectly willing to engage in modes of textual transmission that seem to diverge from classical protocols of face-to-face oral transmission. The psychological and spiritual theoretical framework in which members of this circle operated explains their willingness to engage in these practices. Because spirits could commune across physical time and space, the need for face-to-face transmission became obsolete in certain cases.

We cannot, however, conflate the remote transmission of texts within these networks with the anonymity of print culture. The idea of person-to-person transmission remained important, and texts were circulated within close-knit networks of trust based on intellectual and spiritual attainment. In order to understand what changed in the transition to print cultures of the nineteenth century, it is crucial to recognise both the continuities and ruptures that this transition produced within the various and contextually specific manuscript cultures that flourished in Islamicate early modernity.