3: Shāh Walī Allāh and Applied Cosmology at the Court of ʿĀlamgīr II

Shāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762) is widely known as an “orthodox” critic of the immorality and aristocratic excesses of the fragmenting Mughal state. Central to this reputation is a letter that he wrote to the Afghan ruler, Aḥmad Shāh Abdālī, in which he “invited” him to invade Delhi in 1756 in order to restore Muslim rule in the face of Maratha and Jat incursions. Such readings of Shāh Walī Allāh’s political activity, central to current scholarly narratives of Islamic revival in South Asia, are, however, based on a number of crucial misapprehensions that have persisted since K. A. Nizami published the Siyāsī Maktūbāt nearly seventy years ago.

This paper revisits Shāh Walī Allāh’s letters from this period, reading them alongside contemporary chronicles, to demonstrate that far from being an implacable critic of the Mughal Empire as Nizami and others have claimed, he developed close links to ʿĀlamgīr II (r. 1754-1759) and his wazīr, ʿImād al-Mulk. The paper argues that because the applied cosmological services that Shāh Walī Allāh offered to the Mughal court – the provision of prognostications about political events and methods for dream incubation – are understood as belonging to the domain of the mystical they have been widely occluded from scholarly narratives of eighteenth-century politics. By restoring these practices to the repertoire of eighteenth-century kingship, it becomes clear that we must reassess our current narratives of Shāh Walī Allāh’s role in the politics of the period and, indeed, broader notions of a process of “disenchanted” Islamic revival.