Bījāpūr — in English Bijapur — is the capital of the ʿĀdilshāhī sultanate of the Deccan in India, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries one of the principal centres of Arabic and Persian scholarship in India. It is the city where Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān — the shaikh of Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī and of Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar in the Rifāʿiyya — lived for most of his life, under the protection of the ruler Muḥammad ʿĀdilshāh.
The ʿĀdilshāhī court
The ʿĀdilshāhī sultanate of Bījāpūr — ruled by the ʿĀdilshāhī dynasty from 1490 to 1686 — was one of the principal Muslim states of the Deccan. Its capital, Bījāpūr, was in this period one of the principal centres of Arabic and Persian scholarship in India, attracting scholars and Sufis from the wider Indian Ocean world, including the Ḥadramī diaspora. The court of Muḥammad ʿĀdilshāh — the ruler under whose protection Bā Shaybān lived — was a major patron of religious scholarship and Sufi literature.
Bā Shaybān at Bījāpūr
Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān — of Ḥadrami descent but born in India, the shaikh of Raniri and of Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar in the Rifāʿiyya — lived chiefly at Bījāpūr, where he enjoyed the protection of Muḥammad ʿĀdilshāh. The protection that Bā Shaybān enjoyed at Bījāpūr is a measure of his standing as a scholar and a Sufi, and is the immediate context of his role in the transmission of the Rifāʿiyya to the Malay-Indonesian world. He died in 1656 at Bilgrām.
Significance
Bījāpūr is the city where Sayyid ʿUmar Bā Shaybān — the shaikh of Raniri and of Shaikh Yūsuf al-Makassar — lived for most of his life, under the protection of the ʿĀdilshāhī court. The ʿĀdilshāhī patronage of Arabic and Persian scholarship at Bījāpūr is the immediate context of the formation of the Gujarati-Ḥadramī Sufi network from which the orthodox reaction of Acheh drew its principal Malay-Indonesian agents, and Bā Shaybān’s residence at Bījāpūr is the immediate link between the ʿĀdilshāhī court and the religious controversy of Acheh.
See Also
- Ahmad Rifa’i
- Bilgram
- Gudjarat
- Muhammad al-Addars
- Raniri
- Rifa’iyah order
- Sajjid Abu Hafs Umar Ba Sjaiban
- Yusuf Makasar
Source
Twee Maleise geschriften van Nūruddīn ar-Rānīrī: in facsimile uitgegeven met aantekeningen door P. Voorhoeve. Uitgaven van de Stichting De Goeje, No. 16. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1955. Inleiding §1 (“De auteur”), pp. 5–6.
Al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athār III, p. 214 ff., cited by Voorhoeve for Bā Shaybān.