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Macalester Islam Journal

Volume 1 Spring 2006
Article 3
Issue 2

10-11-2006

Reifying Religion While Lost in Translation: Mirza

Mazhar Jan-i-Janan (d.1781) on the Hindus
SherAli Tareen
Macalester College

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Recommended Citation
Tareen, SherAli (2006) "Reifying Religion While Lost in Translation: Mirza Mazhar Jan-i-Janan (d.1781) on the Hindus," Macalester
Islam Journal: Vol. 1: Iss. 2, Article 3.
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Reifying Religion While Lost in Translation:

Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan (d.1781) on the Hindus

SherAli Tareen ’05, Ph.D. candidate, Duke University

This paper examines the life and thought of one of the leading
Muslim revivalist thinkers in 18th century India, Mirza Mazhar
Jan-i-Janan (1699-1781) in an effort to understand the
relationship, if any, between the structures of knowledge that
informed colonial conceptions of India’s religious topography
and 18th century projects of intra-religious and cross-religious
interpretation (such as that conducted by Jan-i Janan)? In
addition, the project aims at informing the inquiry as to the
extent to which the process of reification that led to the
development of a unified notion of ‘Hinduism’ in the modern
era already was underway in the works of 18th century figures such
as Jan-i Janan?

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Reifying Religion While Lost in Translation:

Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan (d.1781) on the Hindus

SherAli Tareen ’05, Ph.D. candidate, Duke University

My paper is about the following question, how do we account

for the problematic of translation in medieval Muslim studies of
Hinduism? I approach this question by examining the life and
thought of one of the leading Muslim revivalist thinkers in 18th
century India, Mirza Mazhar Jan-i-Janan (1699-1781). More
specifically, I re-consider his ideas on Hinduism in an attempt to
identify ways in which he ‘reifies’ religion while making sense of a
tradition containing symbols and categories that were drastically
foreign and alien to him.
The central questions that I attempt to address are as follows:
How do we characterize Jan-i Janan’s superimposition of
distinctly Islamicate categories on Hindu ideas and concepts?
What typologies does he employ in ‘translating’ one mode of
religious symbols and discourses into another? And most
importantly, in what ways does Jan-i Janan’s attempt at
representing Indian religiosity help us think about the rules of
doing comparative religion in the context of South Asia? After
delineating the major aspects of Jan-i Janan’s ideas on Hindu
thought and practice, I conclude that although his reading of
Hinduism is highly sympathetic, he nonetheless conducts an
inter-religious interpretation that treats Hindu religious
categories in a highly reified and unitary fashion. Therefore, Jan-
i Janan’s reading of Hinduism represents an excellent example of
a cross-religious representation that is as the pun goes: ‘lost in
translation’.
Born in 1699, Mirza Mazhar Jan-i-Janan is a major figure in
late Naqshbandi Sufism in Northern India. Educated in both the
conventional and the religious sciences, Jan-i Janan received
extensive training in Qur’anic and Hadith studies from the most
prominent scholars of his time. He spent most of his career in
Delhi where he had established his own center of learning. In
addition to training scores of disciples, Jan-i Janan also wrote a
voluminous number of letters and treatises on various aspects of
Sufi psychology, metaphysics and practice. He is most well known

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though for his polemical writings against the Shiah. In 1781, he

was attacked and injured by a Shiah in Delhi and he died three
days later.
In writing about Hinduism, Jan-i Janan was participating in a
long-standing trend in Medieval Muslim thought to reflect on
the religions of India in a sympathetic and scholarly fashion. The
pioneer of this trend was the 11th century thinker Al-Biruni
(d.1030) whose monumental work The India still represents one
of the most informative, descriptive and detailed accounts of the
religions, cultures and traditions of pre-modern India. In
addition to its remarkable scope and breadth, Al-Biruni’s work is
also noteworthy on account of its treatment of Indian religion as
a unitary and monolithic entity. As Carl Ernst has argued, “al-
Biruni's perception of the "otherness" of Indian thought was not
just hermeneutical clarity with regard to a pre-existing division; it
was effectively the invention of the concept of a unitary Hindu
religion and philosophy.” Indeed, Al-Biruni’s conception of a
unified Indian religion is obvious from the very first paragraph of
his text. As he quite trenchantly states, “Before entering on our
exposition, we must form an adequate idea of that which renders
it so particularly difficult to penetrate the essential (italics and
emphasis mine) nature of any Indian subject. For the reader
must always bear in mind that the Hindus entirely differ from us
in every respect, many a subject appearing intricate and obscure
when would be perfectly clear if there were more connections
between us. The barriers which separate Muslims and Hindus rest
on different causes.”7 Al-Biruni’s essentialist treatment of the
Hindu ‘other’ seems remarkably similar to the colonial mentality
towards Indian religions that came to the forefront some nine
centuries later. I return to this point later on in this paper. Other
notable medieval Muslim writers who partook in this trend
include the Persian historian al-Gardizi who was a contemporary
of Al-Biruni, the 14th century court poet in Delhi Amir Khusraw
(d.1325) and the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s brother Dara
Shikoh (d. 1659) in the 17th century. This list of course is only a
small sample of the various medieval Muslim thinkers who
engaged in the problematic of translating Hindu religious
thought for their Muslim audiences. Although each of these

7
Embree, Ainslee T. Alberuni’s India. P. 17.

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thinkers attended to different aspects of Hinduism, and although

the nature of their investigations vary considerably, we can
nonetheless identify certain common theoretical and doctrinal
challenges that each of these thinkers confronted while making
sense of Hindu traditions and patterns of religion.
The first and the most obvious challenge is that of casting
Hinduism as a monotheistic tradition that might be palatable to
the Muslim sensibilities of their readers. Second is the problem
posed by the question of whether Prophets were ever sent to
India and what status do these Prophets hold in the Islamic
tradition? And third and perhaps the trickiest task that awaits a
Muslim reading of Hindu religion is that of explaining the
practice of idol worship among Hindus within the bounds of
Muslim norms of discursivity.
Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan tackles these challenges in a very
positive albeit somewhat inaccurate sketch of Hindu thought and
practice. His ideas on Hinduism are contained in a few letters (all
in Persian) that he wrote to his disciples while answering their
queries on the subject. Jan-i Janan declares that after much
investigation and research, what one finds out from the ancient
books of the natives of India is that at the birth of the human
species (noo-i-insaani), God had sent a holy book by the name of
(bai’d)8 for the correction (islah) of their world (dunya) through
an angel called Brahma, who is an instrument of the creation of
the world. This book is comprised of four sections and it contains
injunctions on the differentiation of right from wrong (Amr-wa-
nahi) and information about the past and the future. They have
divided the ancient history of the world into four parts and each
part has been given the name “jug”, and for every jug the correct
method of practice (tariqa-i-aml) has been derived from each of
the four branches of their holy scripture. Here, by casting
Brahma as God, Jan-i Janan takes an important step in
representing Hinduism as a monotheistic tradition. He goes on
to unreservedly declare that all Hindu sects believe in the unity of
God as the transcendent creator who creates out of nothing
(Tawhid-i-Bari-i-Ta’ala). And they believe that the world is
created. They affirm and believe in the annihilation (fana) of the
world, in rewards and punishments for good and bad deeds, and

8
Persian for Vedas.

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in resurrection (hashar) and accountability (hissab) in the

hereafter. In perhaps his most generous moments of writing, Jan-
i Janan renders a sweeping approval of Indic systems of
knowledge by declaring that these people (the Hindus) have a
commanding grasp (yad-i-tau’la) over the rational and
traditional sciences (uloom-i aqa’li wa naqa’li), ascetic practices
(riyazat), spiritual practices (mujahidat), and unveilings
(mukashifat). The rules and regulations of this religion were
entirely harmonious and coherent.
Jan-i Janan’s imposition of his Muslim frame of reference is
most apparent when he describes the Hindu ‘schools of law’.
According to Jan-i Janan, their (the Hindus’) master-jurists
(mujtahidaun9) have derived from this book six different schools
of law (mazahib) and based on them their principles of belief
(usul-i-Aqai’d). They have given this system the name ‘dharma-
shastra’ meaning the ‘art of the object of faith’ (fan-i-eemaniyaat)
which is the same as dialectical theology (ilm-i-kalam) in Islam.
They have divided the human species into four different castes
(firqaun)10 and they have derived four different orders (maslak)
from this system. Each caste has been assigned a particular order
and the foundation for applied duties (Faroi-aamal) is based on
this system. To this system they have given the name Karma-
Shastra meaning the art of the object of practices (fan-i-amliyaat)
which we call juridical knowledge (ilm-i-fiqh).
In an obvious reference to Manu’s Varnasramadharma system,
Jan-i- Janan goes on to explain that their sages have divided
human life into four different stages. The first for the acquisition
of knowledge, second for the attainment of wealth, third for
devotion and the correction of the soul and the fourth for
complete renunciation from the world which is the most extreme
form of human perfection (Insaani- Kamal). The state of Nijaat-
i-Kubra (ultimate salvation) which they call Maha-Mukti is based
on this stage. Here, it is useful to observe that Jan-i Janan’s
representation of the Hindu caste system not only demonstrates
his awareness of the phenomenon but it also shows that during
the pre-modern era, it was not uncommon or awkward for a
Muslim thinker to talk about the legitimacy of the Hindu castes in

9
Plural of mujtahid.
10
Plural of Firq.

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an open and uninhibited manner. This factor further demerits

the already well-refuted conception that Islam played a decisively
democratic role in India by relieving the native Hindus from the
shackles of the caste system. As Jan-i Janan’s discourse on the
caste-system suggests, this idea of democracy is quite ill-founded
and unreliable. Next, Jan-i Janan confronts the contentious issue
of whether Prophets were ever sent to India.
Here, Jan-i Janan adopts a particularly bold stance by
unequivocally declaring that prior to the birth of Islam, God had
indeed sent Prophets to India and that their activities have been
recorded in the holy books of the Indians. And from their
remains (aasar) it also seems that they had attained the stages of
perfection and completion and that the general mercy of God
(rahmat-i-aama) did not forget the humanity of this vast
landmass. Later it was known that this was a religion that had
pleased God but which has now been abrogated. According to
Jan-i Janan, it is famous that prior to the arrival of Muhammad,
all nations in the world were sent Prophets and each nation was
only obliged to follow the message of its particular Prophet and
not that of any other nation. However, after the arrival of Prophet
Muhammad in the 6th century, the situation changed
fundamentally. After Muhammad’s emergence, all Eastern and
Western religions have been abrogated and until the world is
extant, no one may refrain from embracing Islam.
Jan-i Janan goes on to assert that the Muslim tradition has no
mention of the abrogation of any religion except those of the
Jews and the Christians although there were many religions other
than these that were abrogated and that took birth and then later
died out. Since the arrival of the Prophet until now, 1180 years
have elapsed. In this time period, whoever did not accept the
message of the Prophet is an infidel but the people who pre-date
the arrival of Islam are not so. On the question of the identity of
the Prophets that were sent to India, Jan-i Janan quite deftly
argues that the tradition is silent about the existence of most
Prophets. Therefore, with respect to the Prophets of India, it is
also best to remain silent. We need not believe that they were
infidels and neither is it incumbent upon us to believe that they
had attained salvation. In these matters, it is best to maintain a
‘positive outlook’ (hasn-i-zann) so that no hostility (taa’sub) is
produced. Jan-i Janan further extends his argument to include

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regions other than India. Even in the case of the natives of Persia
or for that matter in regards to every nation that pre-dates the
arrival of Prophet Muhammad and that receives no mention in
the tradition, it is best to believe that their laws and traditions are
consistent with the way of moderation (maslak-i-mua’tadil). In
the absence of a definitive proof, one should never be flippant
and light-hearted about the practice of charging someone with
unbelief.
Next, Jan-i Janan takes on the arduous task of clarifying and
defending the practice of idol worship among the Hindus. He
argues that the truth about their idol worship is that above all it
represents a form of meditation. This process of meditation is
directed towards: 1) certain angels that exist in this world of
corruption because of God’s command or 2) the spirits of certain
perfect individuals who exist in this world even after having
abandoned their bodily forms or 3) certain living men whom the
Hindus perceive as immortal like the figure of Khizr in the
Muslim tradition. By concentrating their thought on these
representations, they create a spiritual connection with the
entities represented by them and they thus attain their material
and spiritual needs. This practice is reminiscent to the practice of
the Muslim Sufis who meditate upon the image of their masters
(pirs) for purposes of spiritual healing; the only difference being
that Muslims do not make a concrete representation out of their
masters. But the idol-worship of the Hindus bears no
resemblance to the belief systems of pre-Islamic pagans because
they used to regard their idols as independent agents, effective by
themselves and not as instruments of divine power. Thus, they
failed to comprehend the absoluteness of God’s divinity by
believing that these idols are the gods of earth and that Allah is
the God of heaven. According to the rules of divinity (uhuliyyat),
this constitutes infidelity. This exposition represents an
excellent demonstration of Jan-i Janan’s sensitivity towards
confronting the challenge of dissociating the religious practices
of pre-Islamic pagans from the rituals and customs of the natives
of India. In a similar light, Jan-i- Janan also casts a sympathetic
light on the Hindu custom of prostrating before idols. He
defends this popular Hindu practice by arguing that the
prostration of the Hindus is one of respect and not that of
idolatry, because in their religion, parents, masters and teachers

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are greeted not with the Muslim greeting of ‘salaam’ but with a
prostration that they call dand’vat. Here, it is useful to highlight
that Jan-i Janan’s defense of the practice of prostration among
Hindus, namely that it represents ‘a prostration of respect and
not that of idolatry’ is identical to the popular line of defense that
modern-day Sufis employ while justifying the Sufi practice of
bowing before the grave of a saint while paying homage at his
shrine. Finally, on the Hindu belief in transmigration or
metempsychosis, Jan-i Janan remains glaringly evasive by simply
stating that a belief in transmigration (tanasukh) is not a
necessary condition for one to be charged with unbelief and
infidelity (shirk). Apart from this assertion, he says nothing else
on this vital and conflicting issue.11
There are several noteworthy details that emerge from Jan-i
Janan’s exposition of Indian religious thought. First, it is useful to
take note of the generally sympathetic attitude that Jan-i- Janan
adopts towards Hinduism because it radically departs from the
extremely hostile position of his Naqshbandi predecessors,
especially Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi in the 16th century. In this
context, the key point in Jan-i- Janan’s reading of Hinduism is
the distinction that he makes between the Hindus who lived prior
to the mission of Prophet Muhammad and those of the Islamic
era. This distinction cautions us from exaggerating the sense of
religious inclusiveness that we find in Jan-i- Janan’s discourse. As
Yohanan Friedmann has reminded us, “Mirza Mazhar’s views
cannot be considered as a breakthrough in the historical
relationship between Islam and Hinduism. Certainly it cannot be
stated without qualification that he considered the Hindus as
monotheists or that he refused to declare them infidels, if this is
meant to imply that their religion may legitimately co-exist with
Islam and that they are therefore exempt from the obligation to
embrace the only true faith.”12 Moreover, “Jan-i- Janan’s
admission that India, like any other country, had its Prophets in
times of old, does not extenuate the guilt of those Indians who
have not followed the Prophet Muhammad during the centuries

11
Jan-i Janan, Mirza Mazhar. Maqamat-i-Mazhari (Persian). Lahore:
Urdu Science Board: 1981.
12
Friedmann, Yohanan. “Muslim Views of Indian Religions” Journal of
the American Oriental Society, Volume 95, April-June 1975., P. 221.

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that came after his call.”13 The conciliatory tone of Jan-i Janan’s
discourse, his employment of inoffensive language and his
generally amiable attitude towards the ancient Indians and their
scriptures are noteworthy details in their own right. However,
here, I want to take a slightly different line of inquiry by
highlighting the ‘reification’ of religion that is inherent in Jan-i
Janan’s explanatory apparatus.
Jan-i Janan’s exposition follows a constant trend of super-
imposing Islamicate categories on Hindu concepts and ideas that
are quite foreign to a Muslim frame of reference. As a result, his
reading of Hinduism produces a highly reified understanding of
the tradition. For instance, by translating relatively flexible and
fluid Hindu concepts such as dharma-shastra and karma shastra
into more structured and concrete Islamic ideas such as ilm-i-
kalam (dialectical theology) and ilm-i fiqh (juridical knowledge),
Jan-i Janan conducts a cross-cultural reading that
comprehensively fails to communicate the modalities under
which these concepts operate in their respective religious
domains. In effect, by ignoring the mode through which a
religious concept is rendered meaningful, his method of
translation falls short of conveying the modalities of these
concepts in Hindu and Islamicate vocabularies. Central to this
process of reification is the problematic of translation. As Walter
Benjamin reminds us, “translation is ought to be celebrated as an
act of transcendence that establishes a kinship between languages
of thought and production. Translation attains its full meaning in
the realization that every evolved language (with the exception of
the word of God) can be considered as a translation of all the
others. Translation passes through continua of transformation,
not abstract areas of identity and similarity’. 14 When evaluated
under Benjamin’s model, Jan-i Janan’s translation of Hinduism
fares quite poorly because it does not represent an act of
transcendence but an exercise in regulating religion into easily
identifiable and ossified categories. His is not a harmonious
translation, it is a violent translation. In an exact sense, we can
assert that Jan-i Janan’s representation of Hinduism is
symptomatic of a regulatory mechanism that can best be

13
Ibid.
14
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, P. 325.

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described as the “religionization of religion”. Here, it is useful to

remember that this condition is not limited to medieval Muslim
studies of Hinduism.
In fact, this reifying process is very similar to the ways in which
the South Asian encounter with colonialism a century later
produced categories of practice and belief that were quite distant
from their original modalities but quite consistent with modern
religious sensibilities. For instance, scholars of Hinduism often
point towards how a relatively fluid concept such as dharma,
loosely meaning correct action and practice in the medieval era
overtime became reified into meaning ‘religion’ in the modern
sense of the term. However, as Jan-i Janan’s ossified
representation of Indian religions demonstrates, this process of
reification is not a colonial construct. Moreover, though one can
never set aside the factor of politics, this tendency towards
reifying religion can perhaps most accurately be described as an
undesired possibility stemming from the broader and indeed
more serious problematic of translation across cultures, time and
space.
Here, I am not arguing that the reifying mechanism present in
Jan-i Janan’s exposition and the unifying mode of inquiry
contained in colonial understandings of Indian religion are
entirely identical to each other. Certainly, with regards to these
two situations, not only the politics underlying the translation but
also the immediate historical context are quite different from
each other. Moreover, whereas European notions of Indian
religion are derived from a particular stream of post-
enlightenment thinking, Jan-i Janan’s conceptions of the Hindu
‘other’ are as mentioned before a product of Islamic legal and
theological categories. However, nonetheless, what these two
approaches do hold in common is a movement towards a unified
and monolithic understanding of Hindu thought and religion
that does not account for the internal diversity or the inherent
contestation over normative authority that characterizes any
religious tradition. In other words, both of these interpretive
paradigms work towards further congealing rather than blurring
the Hindu-Muslim binary in the context of pre-modern India.
Let me end with a few words on the relevance of the questions
raised in this paper to broader issues of comparative studies in
South Asian religions.

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On the subject of medieval Muslim studies of Hinduism, Carl

Ernst has argued that “there is a significant difference between
medieval Islamicate and modern European approaches to Indian
religion and culture…Although many Muslims over the centuries
engaged in detailed study of particular aspects of Indian culture,
which may appear in a modern perspective as religious, there was
for the most part no compelling interest among Muslims in
constructing a concept of a single Indian religion, which would
correspond to the modern concept of Hinduism”. For Ernst, the
major exception to this rule is contained in the work of al-Biruni
about whom he argues that:
al-Biruni's concept of a unified Indian religion, as a polar
opposite to Islam, lay forgotten until it was resurrected in an even
more radical form by European scholarship a century ago; the
growth of the Muslim concept of Hindu religion took place
largely without reference to al-Biruni. al-Biruni's rationalistic
and reifying approach to religion, which had practically no
impact on medieval Islamic thought, is much more palatable to
the modern taste, and this explains his popularity today.15

The larger intellectual project that this paper is a part of is

inspired by this dual set of arguments put forth by Ernst. In this
context, I am most interested in achieving some clarity around
the inter-relationship between the taxonomies of knowledge that
governed colonial understandings of Indian religion and those
that were prevalent among both Hindu and Muslim thinkers
during the 18th century. In other words, the broadest question
that this project revolves around is the following: what is the
relationship, if any, between the structures of knowledge that
informed colonial conceptions of India’s religious topography
and 18th century projects of intra-religious and cross-religious
interpretation (such as that conducted by Jan-i Janan)? And
moreover, to what extent was the process of reification that led to
the development of a unified notion of ‘Hinduism’ in the
modern era already underway in the works of 18th century figures
such as Jan-i Janan? These questions are above the scope of this
individual paper as to answer them conclusively would require an
extensive analysis of a wide variety of Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit

15
Ernst, Carl.

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chronicles, treatises and other sources that address these issues.

However, nonetheless, Jan-i Janan’s translation of Hindu
thought provides us with an important part of this broader
puzzle. The thrust of his translation project lies in the
examination of Hindu religion from a strict prism of juridical and
theological Islamicate categories. His is at once an essentialist and
a legalistic translation based on a very selective and self-serving
reading of Hindu ideas and thought.
It is a problem that is as applicable to contemporary studies in
comparative religion as it was to Jan-i Janan’s reading of Hindu
thought and practice. It is a problem that is unavoidable while
making sense of the ‘other’, the past or the ‘unfamiliar. In this
context, Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan’s engagement with Hindu
ideas and thought provides us with an excellent reminder that
although translation is very important for doing religion, it is also
very very tricky.

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Bibliography:

Primary Source:
Jan-i Janan, Mirza Mazhar. Maqamat-i-Mazhari (Persian).
Lahore: Urdu Science Board: 1981.

Secondary Sources:
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books 1968.
Friedmann, Yohanan. “Muslim Views of Indian Religions” Journal
of the American Oriental Society, Volume 95, April-June 1975.

Laine, James. Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. Oxford: Oxford

University Press 2003.

Lawrence, Bruce and Gilmartin, David. Beyond Turk and Hindu:

Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida 2000.

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