Book Review

Commingling of Two Oceans: Majma ul-Bahrain
By Prince Mohammad Dara Shikoh
Publisher: Hope India Publications, Gurgaon, India
(info@hopeindiapublications.com)
Number of pages: 176
Year of publication: 2006
Price: 250


Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, provides rich resources for developing theologies of inter-faith dialogue and solidarity, an urgent necessity in today’s world where talk of a global ‘clash of civilisations’ threatens to become a frightening reality. In this regard, the works of numerous Indian Sufis is particularly significant because they lived and wrote in a multi-religious context, addressing and attracting people of different faiths Muslims, Hindus and others. Some of them developed understandings of Islam and other faiths that went beyond narrowly constructed communal boundaries, defying the empty and soulless ritualism that served to divide communities from each other.


Of the various Indian Sufi treatises of this sort, perhaps the best-known work is the ‘Majma al-Bahrain’, or ‘The Commingling of the Two Oceans’, by Muhammad Dara Shikoh, eldest son of the great Mughal Emperor of India, Shah Jahan, and heir apparent to his throne. The ‘two oceans’ referred to in the title of the book denote Islamic Sufism, on the one hand, and the Vedantic thought as contained in the Upanishadic tests of the Hindu tradition.  As the title suggests, Dara sought to argue that, essentially, the two were the same thing, although bearing different names. In this way, he sought to craft an innovative approach to inter-faith relations, and one that can provide interesting ideas for similar efforts in our own time.  The English translation of this work has long been out of print, and Hope India Publications, an upcoming publisher based in Gurgaon, deserve our special thanks for bringing it out, and that, too, at a fairly affordable price.


The Majma al-Bahrain is best understood in the context of Dara’s own life. Like any other Mughal prince, Dara’s early education was entrusted to ulema of high calibre, who taught him the Holy Qur’an, Persian poetry and Sufi treatises. In his youth, Dara came into contact with numerous Muslim and Hindu mystics, some of whom exercised a profound influence on him. The most noted among these was Miyan Mir, a Qadri Sufi of Lahore whose disciple he later became, and who is best remembered for having laid the foundation-stone of the Golden Temple of the Sikhs at Amritsar.


Dara’s close and friendly relations with Muslim and Hindu mystics led him to seek to explore what both systems of mysticism had in common. Accordingly, he set about learning Sanskrit and, with the help of the Pandits of Benaras, made a Persian translation of the Upanishads, which was later followed by his Persian renderings of the Gita and the Yoga Vasishta. Throughout this endeavour, his fundamental concern was the quest for the discovery of the Unity of God, or tauhid as it is known in Islam.


Dara expresses this concern in his Persian translation of the Upanishads, the Sirr-i-Akbar (‘The Great Secret’) thus:


“And whereas I was impressed with a longing to behold the Gnostic doctrines of every sect and to hear their lofty expressions of monotheism and had cast my eyes upon many theological books and had been a follower thereof for many years, my passion for beholding the Unity [of God], which is a boundless ocean, increased every moment Thereafter, I began to ponder as to why the discussion of monotheism is so conspicuous in India and why the Indian mystics and theologians of ancient India do not disavow the Unity of God, nor do they find any fault with the Unitarians”.


Dara’s works are numerous, all in the Persian language, only some of which are readily available today. His writings fall into two broad categories. The first consists of books on Islamic Sufism and Muslim saints, and the other on the religious beliefs of the Hindus. Dara’s writings on Sufism show him to have been a devout, practicing Muslim, albeit opposed to the soulless ritualism of many of his contemporary ‘ulama.


The Majma-ul Bahrain is the most well-known of Dara’s several works on the religious sciences of the Hindus. Completed when he was forty two years old, this book is a pioneering attempt to build on the similarities between Islam and certain strands of Hindu monotheistic thought, and it is these two that the ‘two oceans’ in the book’s name refers to. He describes this treatise as ‘a collection of the truth and wisdom of two Truth-knowing groups’. It is, in terms of content, rather technical, focusing on Hindu terminology and their equivalents in Islamic Sufism, showing the close similarities between the two. The basic message that this book conveys is summed up in Dara’s own words thus: ‘Mysticism is equality’.  And that claim remains as meaningful today as when Dara enunciated it.

Feminism Beyond East and West - New Gender Talk and Practice in Global Islam
Author: Margot Badran
Publisher: Global Media Publications, New Delhi (www.gmpublications.com)
Pages: 180
Year: 2007
ISBN: 81-88869-24-4
Price: Rs. 495 (India), US $25 (Elsewhere)


The ‘status of women in Islam’ is a much-debated topic, one on which much has been written, both by critics as well as defenders of Islam. What is missing in most of these writings is the voice of believing Muslim women themselves who are committed to gender justice because they believe that Islam mandates this. It is this much-neglected but vital issue that Margot Badran focuses on in this book. She brings with her both a marked sensitivity to the Islamic tradition, lacking in the accounts of many fellow non-Muslims writing on the subject of Muslim women, as well as a passion to articulate the demand for gender justice as a universal principle, although capable of being expressed in different forms in different cultural settings.


This book draws on several years of the author’s travels and experiences among various Muslim communities. The author takes us to India, Nigeria, Turkey, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Egypt, Morocco and Sudan, as well as to several countries in the West, recounting her experiences with Muslim women activists in these countries, not all of who identify themselves as feminists but who are seeking to argue for gender justice using an Islamic, as opposed to a secular or Western, framework. This framework, she suggests, is cultural more attuned to the situations in which many Muslim women find themselves.


Badran provides us interesting instances of how these women are using Islamic arguments to

advance their cause. She looks at new women’s exegesis (tafasir) of the Qur’an and the corpus of Hadith to show how these women scholar-activists seek to critique patriarchy by evoking the Qur’anic insistence on the fundamental equality in God’s eyes of all human beings, men and women. To place the male as a virtual intermediary between women and God, a position that some patriarchal understandings of Islam indeed veer to, is, they argue, tantamount to what in Islam is the unforgivable sin of shirk or associating partners with God. They re-examine received interpretations of certain verses in the Qur’an or certain Hadith traditions, which defenders of patriarchy have taken to justify male supremacy, and provide alternate, gender-friendly interpretations through alternate linguistic analysis or contextualising these verses and traditions. Some of them engage in their own form of ijtihad or independent reasoning, making a distinction between the letter and what they see as the spirit or actual intention of the law, reviving, in this way, the tradition of the maqasid-e shariah or ‘aims of the shariah’, which, although now little stressed in the madrasas where the ulema are produced, is essential to understand and contextualise juridical rules, including those related to women. Some others resort to revisiting certain Hadith traditions that appear to militate against women, using the accepted method of carefully examining the authenticity or otherwise of these traditions.


Badran thus indicates the emergence of a growing breed of believing Muslim women scholar-activists in various countries today who envision Islam as a mandate for gender justice. She talks of how conferences, women’s magazines and, especially the Internet, are helping to fashion this ‘gender-talk’ within the Islamic paradigm as a new global discourse, connecting such women in different parts of the world. In a sense, she suggests, this is a revival of early Muslim precedent of the time of the Prophet Muhammad and immediately after him, when numerous women, including some of the Prophet’s wives, were considered to be leading religious authorities.


Obviously, Badran writes, the emergence of this generation of Muslim women scholar-activists will impact both on general Muslim and non-Muslims discourses about Muslim women as well as on the structure of religious authority in Muslim societies, undermining what is today almost wholly a male monopoly, and allowing for the female voice to be heard, which is what these women believe Islam precisely mandates. Badran also looks at the actual impact that these gender-friendly understandings of Islam have had in terms of reforms in personal laws in several Muslim countries, thus suggesting that this ‘gender-talk’ is no mere rhetoric.


However, Badran fails to engage fully with the critical question of how these positions on women in Islam have been received by the traditionalist ulema. She also remains silent on how those who articulate these voices deal with the vexed issue of the traditionalist notion of ijtihad being impossible on matters on which there already exists a broad consensus (ijma) among the ulema. Badran also ignores the fact that the multiplicity of identities of Muslim women class, sect, race and so on, in addition to gender make the struggle that she rightly endorses not just one of rights as women per se, but, going beyond this to include a whole gamut of other rights, economic, social and political. Surely, the struggle for gender justice cannot be divorced from the broader struggle for justice within the community, the nation-state and at the international level.


That said, this book is a very welcome contribution to the debate on Muslim women, confounding the claims of both hardened Islamophobes as well as arch-patriarchal conservative Muslims, both of who uncannily share the same broad position on the subject of Muslim women.