UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the emergence of Arabo-Islamic philosophy (ḥikma, falsafa) in seventeenth-century India as a case study in the Islamic republic of letters. Moving beyond the narrative of decline, it challenges the view that Muslim rationalism was under threat from orthodox theologians, ossified by scholastic commentary, or deprived of vitality after Akbar’s reign (r. 1556-1605). I contend that philosophical inquiry, in fact, flourished precisely through commentarial practices cultivated by the religio-intellectual elite (ʿulamāʾ), particularly a class of scholars regarded as “the verifiers” (muḥaqqiqūn). Key to this process was the ideal of verification, or taḥqīq, a discipline-centric orientation that privileged set norms of deep reading and debate and, by extension, maintained philosophy as an autonomous science, not conflating it with scriptural or mystical knowledge nor necessarily pitting it against them. Perceived as exceptionally intense, the pursuit of taḥqīq consisted of not only an epistemic or discursive discipline but also an ethical ideal. The muḥaqqiq at once ensured the autonomy of philosophical inquiry as well as embodied an elite mode of spiritual self-formation. Philosophy thrived through a particular ethic that structured scholarly preservation, communication, and disputation primarily around qualified persons, not books.To illuminate these dynamics, this study focuses on the world and works of three notable verifiers: ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm Siyālkūtī (d. 1656), Mīr Zāhid Harawī (d. 1689), and Maḥmūd Jawnpūrī (d. 1651). These figures observed “the method of the philosophers” across fields like metaphysics, physics, and logic, transforming them in the process. Treating earlier authorities as living interlocutors, they generated commentaries on curricular texts that were often more disruptive than exegetical. That is, curricular, or “canonical,” texts functioned as sites of inquiry rather than repositories of settled doctrine. While the content of these works originated as scholia and oral dialogue within teaching circles, they later circulated more widely, preserving scholarly exchange and sociability in ways that schematic treatises could not. To explain this commentarial culture, I show that central to its functioning was a particular notion of intellectual “habitus” (malaka) which combined retention and application across fields in ways that could undermine textual fixity. This idea was distinctly associated with the verifiers’ understanding of knowledge (ʿilm) proper.The study situates these ideas and practices within a transregional network of learning extending from Iran and central Asia to India. Overall, I propose that the consolidation of a north Indian province within the Islamic republic of letters—at a moment when the Mughal empire was itself consolidating—can be understood through the interplay of community, conservation, and code cultivated by the ʿulamāʾ. These scholars, in effect, maintained a social and discursive order through shared habits of thought and sustained intellectual continuity across localities and generations. As the seventeenth century came to a close, an erstwhile “foreign” or “received” body of knowledge was naturalized and recast as a major component of Indo-Muslim intellectualism, i.e., a distinctly South Asian articulation of the broader Arabo-Islamic philosophical heritage.Part I, “The Verifiers’ Party,” consists of three chapters and examines the community and customs of Mughal-era verifiers whereby philosophy was sustained. Chapter 1 situates the Province of Lahore within a trans-Asiatic network of learning, centering on the verifiers as a class of sought-after experts. I reconstruct the convergence of both emigré and local intellectuals, thereby outlining the broader contours of a republic of letters through shifting regional anchors of transmission between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Practices of companionship (ṣuḥba), apprenticeship (mulāzama), and patronage shaped a self-conscious scholarly sphere while enabling these regional turns, fostering new commentarial traditions and extending existing infrastructures of exchange. The chapter posits how community, conservation, and code bolstered a distinct scholarly province in north India as part of a wider, autonomous Islamic republic.Chapter 2 offers a close view of the conception and cultivation of mastery in this world. I argue that the master, more than the text, served as the primary repository of knowledge. Mastery—or what the verifiers considered a scholar’s “retentive habitus” (malakat al-istiḥḍār) in any given moment—was best enacted in circles of trustworthy ṣuḥba and mulāzama. These intimate spaces in turn allowed apprentices to cultivate mnemonic and interpretive capacities to preserve, recover, and validate prevailing knowledge. Cultivated this way, advanced reading and commentary, driven by the protocols of inquiry and debate, could turn canonical or curricular texts into heuristic instruments, serving not as sealed-off caches but gateways to wider discursive arenas. Avicennan psychology contributed to this formation, which shows how social, ethical, and philosophical factors were, ideally, inseparable in the culture of verification. Chapter 3 examines how the verifier’s conception of scholarly habitus shaped legal culture. I focus on Mughal understanding of “applicative habitus” (malakat al-istiḥṣāl) as the capacity to navigate evidences, principles, and plausible judgment (ẓann ghālib) in the absence of apodictic proof. Using the reception of Islamic legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) in Indian pedagogy, the chapter shows how a common episteme informed juridical reasoning and structured discussions over executive discretion, which I recover through the lens of a major constitutional-political crisis from Akbar’s court in 1579.In Part II, “The Path of Verification,” I turn to the practice of verification within philosophy. Whereas the preceding chapters emphasize the social and cultural foundations of malaka-driven mastery, the last two chapters bring to light its actual enactment. Chapter 4 uses brief case studies—from metaphysics, physics, and logic—to consider verification with respect to the object of philosophy, i.e., the conditions of reality. It also addresses why, and in what ways, the human mind and imagination were deemed critical to determining the correspondence of philosophical theories with reality. Chapter 5 shifts to the encoded text as an object of scrutiny by the verifying philosophers. It reveals verification as in fact a dynamic practice of commentary. Driven by deep reading, cross-examination, and certain forms of constructionism, the commentators’ taḥqīq laid the basis for a new philosophical canon in the region, organized more around evolving commentarial bases than fixed treatises.All in all, the chapters reconstruct the perceived ideal of taḥqīq and its actualization all the while a particular intellectual order unfolded in South Asia. The study allows philosophy’s “formation” to be understood both as a historical development of ideas and a unique social-ethical formation, in ways that help explain why rationalist inquiry persisted well beyond the so-called Mughal high period. By exploring the resilience of Arabic philosophy and its entanglements with Persianate society, religion, and empire, this dissertation rethinks what intellectual continuity or change really meant in early modern Islam. It also takes Mughal historical studies beyond the court and the khanaqa.