By
Arshad Alam, New Age Islam
9 October
2021
The Epic
Needs To Widely Read In These Times of Religious Antagonism
Main
Points
1. Syed Sultan
introduced Islam to a largely non-Muslim audience through his epic Nabivamsha.
2. It was one
of the first texts in Bengal to introduce the Islamic theory of cosmology in
vernacular Bengali.
3. Syed Sultan
argues that Muhammad was created from a part of God Himself, thus negating the
separation between the creator and the created.
------
Islamic
rule came to Bengal with the Afghan expansion in the 14th century, although
Muslims had a much older presence there due to trade and commerce. While the
geographies of Delhi Sultanate fluctuated with time, Muslim kingdoms in Bengal
more or less continued without too many glitches. Flanked by Hindu kingdoms and
the Buddhist Arakan state, Muslims in Bengal sought to make sense of multiple
religious cosmologies which they inhabited. In the process, they also
introduced Islam to a largely non-Muslim audience in very creative and
imaginative ways. One such attempt was by Syed Sultan, probably a native of
Chittagong, who lived in the late 16th-early 17th century. It is important to
note that the region during his time was governed by the Therevada Buddhist
kings of Arakan, which is in present day Myanmar.
In the
early 17th century, Syed Sultan composed the Nabivamsha (Lineage of the
Prophet), an epic of 17,396 couplets that narrates the life of Muhammad, the
prophet of Islam. By this time, the Islamic presence in this region was already
four centuries old. The epic is one of the first texts in the region to
introduce the Islamic theory of cosmology in vernacular Bengali. The important
question for Syed Sultan was to how to make the Prophet of Islam intelligible
to people of different faith traditions as well as to those Muslims who were
new converts. Nabivamsha therefore attempts to introduce Islam and Muhammad to
these people from within a Hindu worldview. Scholars who have written on the
presence and expansion of Islam in Bengal like Asim Roy have explained this
exercise as an example of ‘syncretism’ but as we shall see later, it was more
complicated.
Having taken the form of Muhammad--- his own
Avatara---
Niranjana manifests his own portion (Amsa) to
propagate himself.
From time’s beginning to its end, the Creator
Shall create messengers (Paighambar) to rightly
guide all peoples.
In the
above stanza, Syed Sultan refers to God as Niranjana, which is the same word by
which He is addressed in many Hindu texts, particularly of the Vaishnavites.
For Sultan, the first creation of this God is Muhammad and therefore predates
all other prophets sent by Him. But that’s not all. Sultan seems to be arguing
that Muhammad is not just a prophet but the very manifestation of God Himself
which is similar to the Hindu notion of re-incarnation. Two related ideas flow
from such a characterization of Muhammad. First, he is said to be the ‘first
cause’ in the sense that God created this light (Nur) from his own self (Amsa).
Thus, everything else was created after the Nur e Muhammad. In this sense, Syed
Sultan was able to argue that Muhammad is the first and the last of the
prophets as he was sent again later by God to perfect the message. All other
prophets came after him, and all of them essentially carried the same message.
Sultan argues that Krishna, Rama, etc. were all prophets sent by the same Niranjana
but they all came after Muhammad who was the first of the creation. One can
certainly draw the conclusion that Syed Sultan was trying some kind of a
religious ecumenism by underlining that Hinduism and Islam come from the same
divine source. But there can be another reading also: Since Muhammad is the
first and last of the prophets, it follows that all other religions and their
followers should now return to this original religion.
Many Muslims
are sure to have deep anxieties over such a characterization of the prophet.
After all, re-incarnation is a purely Hindu concept. What is more, Sultan is
arguing that Muhammad was created from a part of God Himself thus negating the
separation between the creator and the created. Some Muslims might argue that
such characterization compromises the fundamental principle of monotheism (Tawheed)
in Islam. But this anxiety over the Prophet being indistinguishable from the
Creator Herself is just one of the many forms of Islamic articulation. Medieval
Muslim scholars have made use of such tropes for long without being labelled
un-Islamic. In order to better appreciate the epistemological lineage of Syed
Sultan, we need to dwell on the concept of Nur e Muhammad, one of the central
ideas in his epic.
Nur e
Muhammad has been used as an epithet by many early Muslims to denote the
pre-existent essence of the Prophet. This pre-existent light of Muhammad passes
from Adam through the line of prophets down to the historical Muhammad. Thus,
the motif of light has been widely associated with the figure of Muhammad by
early Islamic scholars. The eight-century theologian, Muqatil,
interpreted the Quranic Surat al Nur as referring to the Prophet. This belief
in the pre-existence of the light of Muhammad can also be found in the writings
of al-Tustari, Hallaj and later elaborated by Ibn Arabi. For Ibn Arabi, the Nur
e Muhammad was an intermediary principle of light and love that mediates
between the formless one (Nirankara) and the world of form, between the
uncreated one and the created world. In Ibn Arabi, Muhammad become the Barzakh,
the ‘isthmus between the necessary and contingent existence.’
The
relevance of Syed Sultan’s Nabivamsha in contemporary India cannot be
underestimated. Today, we have a situation where to be a Muslim is to
differentiate ourselves from other faith traditions. This produces an
ethnocentric worldview wherein Islam becomes a call for religious exclusivism
and supremacy. Moreover, the dominant Islamic view postulates a radical
separation between the creator and the created. However, in drawing upon early
Islamic writings of Wahdat al Wujud (unity of being), Muslims like Syed Sultan
prove that there are multiple interpretive traditions within Islam, wherein the
world and its inhabitants become the reflection of the only essence there is:
that of the supreme creator. It is time to recover such writings and present
them to a wider Muslim audience so that pluralism can become one of the
cherished principles in Islam.
-----
Arshad
Alam is a NewAgeIslam.com columnist.
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/muhammad-nabivamsha-sultan/d/125542