The fault line between the doctrines of waḥdat al- wujūd (oneness of being) and waḥdat al-shuhūd (oneness of witnessing) has often been described as the most pressing theological and philosophical debate among Indian Sufi intellectuals after the sixteenth century (Khan 1964; Ali 1973; Qureshi 1962). With a view to reconstructing other theological and philosophical debates that occupied South Asian scholars, the paper focuses on the 18th-century Indian scholar ‘Abd al- ʿAlī al-Lakhnawī’s treatise Risāla-i-wahdat al-wujūd wa shuhūd al- ḥaqq fī kull mawjūd (Treatise on the Oneness of Being and the Witness of the Truth in Everything That Exists). In addition to excavating the theological debates of the late 18th and early 19th century in South Asia, I will demonstrate that Lakhnawī’s defence of waḥdat al-wujūd shows intimate familiarity with the objections raised by Ash‘arī theologians in general and the 14th century Timurid theologian Sa‘d al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 793/1390) in particular. I contend that his defense of waḥdat al-wujūd reveals a closer involvement with al-Taftāzānī’s twin objections against Akbarian doctrine: identifying God with absolute existence and grounding religious doctrine in subjective mystical experiences. Through a close reading of Lakhnawī’s treatise, the paper will explore how he employs the Persian mystical poetry tradition to create greater epistemological space for mystical forms of knowing, such as kashf (mystical unveiling), by establishing it as an arbiter in theological debates and undercutting reason as an reliable source of knowledge.
My analysis of the treatise will reveal that Lakhnawī’s terse but instructive formulation of wujūd intervenes in existing debates and Being in post-Avicennian philosophy. The discussions on wujūd, responses to Ash‘arite objections against Akbarian metaphysics, and the conspicuous absence of any engagement with the doctrine and partisans of waḥdat al-shuhūd makes the text amenable for not only interrogating long-held narratives of the wujūd-shuhūd debate as the single most significant debate in South Asian Islam, but also for reconstructing the Islamic intellectual history of 18th and 19th century South Asia. The paper argues that his responses to objections of theologians against waḥdat al-wujūd present a more complex picture of philosophical and theological currents that cannot be reduced to the mere wujūd-shūhūd polemic.
The paper engages with three fields in historiography: studies on al-Lakhnawī’s intellectual output; Ibn ‘Arabī studies, with a focus on the engagement of his corpus and the wujūd-shuhūd polemic in South Asia; and history of Islamic philosophy and theology in India. I will briefly touch on the paper’s contribution to each of these fields. In the past four decades, Lakhnawī has been the subject of a handful of studies in the academy (Ansari 1983; Molla 1993). While previous studies have provided a detailed account of his biography and his scholarly output, they have not subjected any of his works to any meaningful analysis, with the recent works by Asad Q. Ahmed as a glaring exception (Ahmed 2019 & 2022). In his study on the reception of Ibn ‘Arabī in South Asia, William Chittick (1992, 241) draws attention to Lakhnawī’s Risāla-i-wahdat al-wujūd wa shuhūd al- ḥaqq fī kull mawjūd for the author’s “precision and a careful reading” of the Akbrian school. Thomas Danhnhardt’s article (2012) remains the only sustained engagement with the text in the academy. In his article, Dahnhardt offers a complete translation of the treatise from the Urdu translation of the text, not from the original Persian. While his article offers a thorough account of Lakhnawī’s biography and intellectual genealogy, he does not offer an analysis of the treatise. The present study thus seeks to begin providing a remedy for lack of attention on al-Lakhnawī’s mystical writings by investigating his discussions of wujūd and the most controversial of Sufi doctrines, namely “waḥdat al-wujūd,” as discussed in his treatise Risāla fi bayān waḥdat al-wujūd.
My intervention in this paper builds on earlier scholarship on the engagement of Ibn ‘Arabī and the wujūd-shuhūd debate in South Asia (Chittck 1992 & 2012; Faruque 2016; Khodamoradi 2019; Nair 2017 & 2021). Setting Lakhnawī’s treatise against debates in post-classical Islamic philosophy and theology, the paper will demonstrate that his defence of wahdat al-wujūd is in close conversation with the objections raised by theologians. The paper will show that that a proper reading of Lakhnawi’s treatise requires a thorough acquaintance with the philosophical contributions of the scions of Islamic philosophical and theological tradition, including but not limited to Ibn Sīnā (d.1037), Sa‘d al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 1390), ‘Adūd al-Din Ījī (d.1355), Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 1414), and Mulla Maḥmūd Jawnpūrī (d.1652). As Robinson (2005) demonstrates, al-Lakhnawī’s training in the Dars-i-Nizāmī curriculum included deep engagement with the theological, philosophical, and legal-theoretical works of the aforementioned scholarsIn adddition to analyzing al-Lakhnawī’s defence of wahdat al-wujūd , the objective of this paper is to present a provisional account of the debates in Islamic theology and philosophy in 18th-century South Asia by excavating the various philosophical and theological positions he engages in the treatise.
The paper analyses ‘Abd al-ʿAlī al-Lakhnawī’s (d.1810) defence of waḥdat al- wujūd (oneness of being) in his Risāla-i-wahdat al-wujūd wa shuhūd al- ḥaqq fī kull mawjūd (Treatise on the Oneness of Being and the Witness of the Truth in Everything That Exists). The fault line between the doctrines of waḥdat al- wujūd (oneness of being) and waḥdat al-shuhūd (oneness of witnessing) has often been described as the most pressing theological and philosophical debate among Indian Sufi intellectuals after the sixteenth century. My paper challenges this long-standing narrative by making three interventions: a) demonstrates that Lakhnawī’s primary interlocutors were not partisans of waḥdat al-shuhūd, but Ashari theologians; b) argues that Lakhnawī defense of waḥdat al- wujūd is in close conversation with the criticisms advanced of the doctrine by al-Taftāzānī (d. 793/1390); c) reconstructs philosophical and theological currents in 18th-century South Asia that cannot be explained by the wujūd-shūhūd polemic.