Mulla Shah Badakhshi

Mulla Shah Badakhshi (1582–1661), also known as Shah Muhammad, was a Qadiri Sufi from Badakhshan, a disciple and successor of Mian Mir of Lahore, and the spiritual mentor of the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh and his sister Jahanara. The Encyclopaedia Iranica describes him as a mystic and writer of the Qadiri order, "given both to the rigorous practice of asceticism and to the ecstatic proclamation of theopathic sentiment." ^{1 2}

He was born in 990/1582 to a qadi in the village of Araksa in the Rostaq area of Badakhshan, received his initial religious training in Balkh, spent three years in Kashmir, and wandered as far as Agra before coming to Lahore to join the following of Mian Mir, himself a Qadiri saint. ¹ The Urdu article adds that he went to Balkh at twenty-one to study the rational and transmitted sciences, and that he took the bay'a from Mian Mir at Lahore. ³ At first Mian Mir rebuffed him; tradition relates that he won acceptance by feats of great self-denial, after which his progress was swift and his master in time pronounced his training complete. ¹

Rather than remain at Lahore, Mulla Shah returned to Kashmir to escape its heat and spent most of the rest of his life there, generally shunning company and living enclosed in a narrow cell, yet attracting a large following and training disciples. ¹ Among his adepts were two children of the emperor Shah Jahan: Dara Shikoh, whose Sakinat al-awliya devotes a chapter to him, and Jahanara, who described her discipleship in the Risala-yi Sahibiya. ^{1 2} Dara Shikoh had wished to be initiated into the Qadiri order at the hands of Mian Mir himself; after Mian Mir's death his search for a murshid led him to Mulla Shah in Kashmir. ²

Mulla Shah proclaimed the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud (the oneness of being) in Hallajian terms — one of his verses runs, "When the intelligent one comes to know himself, he becomes God, O friend!" — and this aroused the hostility of exoteric critics. ¹ It is said that only Dara Shikoh's intervention with Shah Jahan saved him from execution by the governor of Kashmir, and that after Aurangzeb came to the throne in 1658 Jahanara likewise had to intercede for her master. Three years later, in 1661, he died at Lahore and was buried next to Mian Mir in a shrine constructed by Jahanara. ¹ His chief successor was a certain Wali Ram, from whom an initiatic line marked by extreme emphasis on wahdat al-wujud descended in the Punjab. ¹

His literary fame rests chiefly on his Persian poetry — quatrains and several mathnawis — and on technical treatises of Sufism: the Risala-yi shahiya, an exposition of wahdat al-wujud written for Dara Shikoh and Jahanara, and a commentary (Tafsir-i Shah) on the first, second, third and twelfth suras of the Qur'an. ¹