Abstract:

In his article “Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish the Religious and Secular?,” Rushain Abbasi convincingly demonstrates how pre-modern Muslim thinkers had made an array of meaningful distinctions between dīn (‘religion’) and dunyā (‘the world’) approximating the religious-secular dyad. This paper explores a fourth typology, a latent opposing attitude toward the dīn-dunyā binary, by expanding Abbasi’s analytical trajectory to include both a discursive and pragmatic framework – the former involving scrutiny of the content and substance of rationally thought-out arguments, the latter demanding a closer look at how ideas have informed and shaped practical forms of reasoning and their application in the real world. Therefore, beyond the conceptual and epistemological signification of the dīn-dunyā binary in Islamic thought as surveyed by Abbasi, an attempt will be made to show how Muslims have also reasoned in both theoretical and practical terms to bridge the tension between the two spheres. The overarching objective is to consider how the dīn-dunyā binary fares in the Islamic mystical tradition through a case study analysis of five prominent Naqshbandī shaykhs: Aḥmad Sirhindī, Khālid al-Shahrazūrī, Aḥmad Gümüşhānevī, Zahid Kotku, and Mahmud Esad Coşan. The dialectical method developed by Shmuel Eisenstadt, which supposes a basic tension between the transcendental and mundane orders, will be applied to examine how each individual shaykh experienced, interpreted, and bridged the opposition between dīn and dunyā in both their doctrinal teachings and life-practices. The study aims to show how the shaykhs applied certain ethico-mystical principles like khalwat dar anjuman (‘solitude within society’) in a way that saw them engaging in a constant and concerted effort at bridging the unbridgeable in their worldly and other-worldly pursuits.