A Sufi listening to Hindi religious poetry: Mir Abdul Wahid Bilgrami's Haqayaq-i Hindi.

Abstract

The Haqayaq-i Hindi is a 16th Century polemical work that defends the use of Hindu (in fact Krishna bhakti) poetry in sama' sessions of Sufis. It does so by explaining the meaning of fragments of this poetry against an Islamic mystic background. It is thus very interesting to study Hindu-Muslim interaction in the sixteenth century. The work is often seen as an example of ‘syncretism’, but a closer study reveals that such is not unproblematically the case.