State, Settlement, Texts

The consolidation of the Gujarat Sultanate went hand in hand with the flourishing of a number of old and new Muslim settlements in the central plains of eastern Gujarat where several migrant Sufis established their residences (khānqāhs). This chapter takes a close look at two texts that centred around the life and teachings of the Maghribi Sufi Aḥmad Khattū (d.1445), the Tuḥfat al-majālis and Mirqāt al-wusūl ila Allah wa al-Rasūl, compiled by his disciples in the suburbs of Ahmedabad in Sarkhej. Together, these texts comprised the first narrative moment in the long-term articulation of the Muslim past in Gujarat. They created historical memory around Aḥmad Khattū presenting him, through varied narrative strategies, as the pivot around which the Muslim community led by the Gujarat Sultans began to flourish.

Texts and Tombs

The consolidation of a texted past around Sufi migrants in fifteenth-century Gujarat was accompanied by the development of the tomb-shrines of Aḥmad Khattū and two members of the Suhrawardi spiritual fraternity, Burhān al-Dīn ‘Abdullāh (d. 1453) and Sirāj al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 1475). Texts and tombs represented conjoined processes that enabled ongoing community formation. The tomb shrines created regional networks of disciples and pilgrims focused on the burial sites of the Sufis just as texts increasingly cohered the history of the buried Sufis and their community into genealogies and overlapping personal connections. This chapter argues that the participation of the Gujarat Sultans in the creation of a sacral geography—through patronage, shrine veneration, and not least of all the building of palatial structures and royal tombs in close proximity—reflected the intertwined processes of state, community, and region formation in fifteenth-century Gujarat.

Conclusion

The Conclusion interprets the narrativization of the Muslim community’s past between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries as the triumph of the ‘historical’ moment. By the end of the seventeenth century, the consolidation of narrative pasts had successfully created a genealogical record of Muslim settlement in Gujarat connecting the history of the Muslim community under the Gujarat sultans to the period of the Mughal occupation of Gujarat. Apart from transcribing the history of migration and settlement, Sufi texts had been instrumental in the early modern conceptualization of the history of the state, the region, and finally the Mughal province.

Networks of Community Formation

By the time of Mughal presence in Gujarat, the textual inscription of the personal and social networks of Sufis and other learned men in texts like Miṣbāḥ al-‘Ālam and Ṣaḥā’if al-sādāt intersected with an identity that was clearly regional and specific to Gujarat. In the seventeenth century, these networks were organized in texts in overlapping and contrasting ways: long chains of spiritual initiation and practice (silsilahs); distinct familial genealogies (silsilat al-naṣab), families (khānwādas), and tribes (qabīlas). This chapter demonstrates that the textual organization of Suhrawardi networks, in particular, was influential in communicating that the joint enterprise of state, community and region formation had been pre-determined: the Suhrawardi Sufis were pre-ordained to inspire and sanctify the entire region of Gujarat with the message of Islam and Sufism. Such historiographical interventions, representing the second narrative moment, were in turn a testimony to the successful expansion of the Suhrawardi lineage in Gujarat.

Introduction

The Introduction establishes the historical and historiographical context for the production of Persian narrative texts in Gujarat in the fifteenth century. It emphasizes the role of Sufi texts as sites where an expanding Muslim community’s past in Gujarat was narrated and negotiated. At the same time, it places this development within a longer history of Muslim settlements and Sufi textual production in the subcontinent. The Introduction further discusses the importance of spatial contexts for the dissemination of texts, primarily Sufi residences and tomb-shrines, and in creating a regional identity and a history of the Muslim community that was unique to Gujarat.

Seventeenth-Century Historiographical Resolutions

The narrativization of the Muslim community’s past inevitably created claims of multiple Sufis as leaders of the regional community. In the textual production that spanned the rule of the Gujarat Sultans and the Mughals, Aḥmad Khattū had emerged a spiritual protector of the Gujarat Sultanate as much as his Suhrawardi contemporaries. Towards the end of the second narrative moment in the late seventeenth century, however, a descendant of Sirāj al-Dīn Muḥammad laid to rest any conflict that multiple claims to spiritual authority could generate in the minds of future generations. In his text the Ṣad Ḥikāyat, the descendant selectively drew upon earlier texts and re-ordered the sequence of events in order to construct a history of his ancestors’ association with Aḥmad Khattū; the authority of Shaykh Aḥmad Khattū was not necessarily diminished in this account but certainly subsumed within the superior claims of the Suhrawardi Sufis.

From Inscriptions to Texts

This chapter notes the value of the inscriptional record in revealing a comprehensive picture of Muslim settlements in pre-fifteenth century Gujarat, and in suggesting the importance of Sufis and other learned men among those settlements. However, the dominant inscriptional mode of historical recording in pre-fifteenth century Gujarat reflects the variegated ecologies within which Muslim communities developed with distinct historical and societal experiences. The narrative process of capturing the history of the region, and of the Muslim community within it, began in the fifteenth century at the conjuncture of two processes: the formation of a new state under the Gujarat Sultans and the sanctification of the sultanate territory by Sufi preceptors, particularly Aḥmad Khattū (d. 1445). These two developments, underpinned not so much by any ruptures at the turn of the fifteenth century than the confluence of long-term historical processes, together shaped the textual articulations of the history of the Muslim community in Gujarat.