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15 One Initiation into the Sufi Path By the time of his death in 784/1384, Makhdūm-i jahāniyān Sayyid Jalāl al-dīn Bukhārī1 was a widely respected Sufi shaykh and a recognized authority on Islamic religious practice and the Islamic intellectual traditions. Bukhārī’s later status was largely a product of his learning and Sufi affiliations. However, such acquired qualifications worked in concert with his inherited social status and group identity. Birth was insufficient to determine the ultimate place of an individual in society, but it was an important factor. As Roy Mottahedeh points out in his discussion of Iraqi society in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries, an individual’s pedigree included both “biological ancestry” and the noble deeds of his ancestors. “The great majority of men took a man’s genealogy, and the stockpile of honorable deeds that he inherited, into consideration both in estimating that man’s capacities, and in assigning him a station in society .”2 Besides such an inherited social status, however, this principle also influenced an individual’s choices in life, since he might feel compelled to live up to the nobility of his ancestors. Bukhārī’s life can be seen as an example of this process. Family Background Genealogy Jalāl ad-dīn Bukhārī was born in 707/1308 to a family with a definite social identity and status: sayyids (that is, descendants of the Prophet Muh ˙ ammad), originating in Bukhara, settled in the town of Uch, and affiliated with the Suhrawardī Sufi order. Bukhārī’s grandfather, also named Sayyid Jalāl al-dīn H ˙ usayn and known as Shēr Shāh Jalāl Surkh (or Surkh-pōsh), had emigrated to India from Bukhara sometime in the early thirteenth century. Unfortunately we have little reliable information about Jalāl Surkh and must depend upon somewhat contradictory sources from several centuries after his death. Furthermore, the identical names of grandfather and grandson have understandably caused some confusion in popular legend, such that tales told of one figure have become attached to the other. To the best of our knowledge, Jalāl Surkh was born in 595/1198 in Bukhara to a family that traced its descent to ‘Alī al-Hādī, the tenth imam of the Twelver (Imāmī) Shi‘a.3 This family lineage also served as the chain 16 The Education of a Sufi Shaykh of transmission for the khirqa (Sufi robe) with which Jalāl Surkh was initiated into the Sufi path by his own father, ‘Alī Abū al-Mu’ayyad. The family’s descent from the Shi‘a imams and their use of the name H ˙ usayn have lead to the suggestion that they were, in fact, Shi‘a.4 Today, some branches of the Bukhārī family, including the one in control of the family tombs in Uch, identify as Imāmī (Twelver) Shi‘a, while others are Sunni. Support for the suggestion that Jalāl Surkh was Shi‘a can be found in Maz ˙ har-i Jalālī, a putative collection of his teachings and one that refers to him by the very Shi‘a title of H ˙ aydar-i s ˉ ānī (the second ‘Alī).5 In contrast, his grandson Jalāl al-dīn Bukhārī Makhdūm-i jahāniyān presents himself as very definitely Sunni in his malfūz ˙ āt; while his teachings contain a great veneration for the family of the Prophet and especially for the twelve Imams, it was the Sunni H ˙ anafī creed that he taught and practiced. When asked by members of the sayyid community in Medina about his maz ˉ hab, he answered, “the maz ˉ hab of Abū H ˙ anīfa, along with all my forefathers in Bukhara,”6 thus asserting not only his own identification with H ˙ anafism but also that of his whole lineage. Bukhārī’s remarks on the Shi‘a identity of most of the sayyids that he met in Mecca and Medina, especially his use of the derogatory term rawāfiż (turncoats), assume that Shi‘ism is foreign to himself and his audience.7 Furthermore, Bukhārī was extravagantly praised by the historian Żiyā’ al-dīn Baranī, a strident anti-Shi‘a bigot, and patronized by Sultan Fīrōz Shāh Tughluq, who boasted of suppressing and humiliating his Shi‘a subjects.8 Could the Bukhārī sayyids have been secretly Shi‘a, practicing taqīya...

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