Husayn Va'iz Kashifi

Husayn Va'iz Kashifi was a preacher, scholar and prose writer of Timurid Khorasan whose full name was Kamal al-Din Husayn ibn Ali. Kashifi (“the Unveiler”) was his pen name, and Va'iz (“the preacher”) his profession: unlike the khatib, who delivered the set Friday sermon, a va'iz was a free preacher who expounded the Qur’an and the Traditions at his own gatherings. His contemporaries called him Mawlana Va'iz Kashifi or simply Mulla Husayn. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, he was born around 840 AH (1436–1437) in Sabzavar, the chief town of the Bayhaq district of Khorasan (now in Iran); Uzbek sources also give 1440 or the 1440s. Almost nothing is known of his family and youth.

Kashifi first preached in his home town and then moved to Nishapur and on to Mashhad. According to tradition, in 1456 the recently deceased Naqshbandi master Sa’d al-Din Kashghari appeared to him in a dream and summoned him to Herat. There he came under the influence of Kashghari’s successor, the poet and Sufi Abd al-Rahman Jami, and entered the Naqshbandi order. He later returned to Sabzavar, where the Timurid ruler of Khorasan, Abu Sa’id (1458–1469), appointed him chief qadi of the Bayhaq district.

After Husayn Bayqara came to power, Kashifi settled in Herat around 1470, possibly at the sultan’s invitation, and lived there for the rest of his life. He enjoyed the patronage of the sultan and his court, above all of Alisher Navoi, to whom he dedicated several of his works. Husayn Bayqara built a Sufi lodge for him, the Dar al-Siyada, in the Chorsu, Herat’s central market, and made him its shaykh. Kashifi preached there on Friday mornings, at the congregational mosque built by Navoi after the Friday prayer, at the sultan’s madrasa and lodge on Tuesdays and at the shrine of Abu’l-Walid Ahmad on Wednesdays. Contemporaries wrote that crowds came to hear him for his fine voice, his eloquence and his gift for explaining the verses of the Qur’an and the Traditions in plain words.

In his anthology of poets, the “Majalis al-nafa’is”, Navoi describes Kashifi as a man versed in many sciences, noted especially for preaching, epistolary composition and astrology, who had by then lived in Herat for almost twenty years. The historian Khwandamir also praised his skill in astrology and letter-writing and wrote that as a commentator on the Qur’an he had no equal in the Khorasan of his day. Kashifi wrote about forty works, nearly all in Persian, on Qur’anic exegesis and hadith, ethics and statecraft, rhetoric and letter-writing, poetics, Sufism and futuwwa (spiritual chivalry), astrology, the science of letters and magic. Modern scholars see him as an encyclopaedic author who gathered the learning of late fifteenth-century Khorasan and made it accessible to a wide readership.

For Navoi he wrote two commentaries on the Qur’an: the “Javahir al-tafsir”, whose first volume was finished in 1485 but which was never completed, and the full but more concise “Mavahib-i aliyya” (1491–1494), also known as the “Tafsir-i Husayni”, which was widely read in Afghanistan and India for centuries. At the request of the amir Nizam al-Din Shaykh Ahmad Suhayli he produced the “Anvar-i Suhayli” (“The Lights of Canopus”), a new Persian prose version of the fables of “Kalila and Dimna” in fourteen chapters. His book on ethics and statecraft in forty chapters, the “Akhlaq-i Muhsini” (“The Morals of the Beneficent”, 1501–1502), was dedicated to Husayn Bayqara and written for his son Abu’l-Muhsin Mirza. He also wrote the “Futuvvat-nama-yi sultani”, the letter-writing manual “Makhzan al-insha” (1501–1502), the treatise on Hatim al-Ta’i “Risala-yi Hatimiyya” (1486), the “Lubb-i lubab-i Masnavi” (1470–1471), a selection from Rumi’s “Masnavi”, and the treatise on poetic figures “Bada’i al-afkar”.

The “Rawzat al-shuhada” (“The Garden of the Martyrs”), written in 1502–1503, is devoted to Imam Husayn and the tragedy of Karbala. The Safavids later made it the principal text of the Muharram mourning rites: in Iran the recitation of the Karbala story is still called rawza-khwani after its title, and Fuzuli rendered it into Turkic as the “Hadiqat al-su’ada”. Because of this work Kashifi was often taken for a Shi’ite, but modern scholarship, including the Encyclopaedia Iranica, stresses that he was a Sunni and a member of the Naqshbandi order, and that his veneration of the Prophet’s family was typical of Sunnis in pre-Safavid Khorasan.

Kashifi died in Herat in 910 AH (1504–1505) and was buried in the Idgah cemetery near the graves of Jami and Sa’d al-Din Kashghari. His son Fakhr al-Din Ali Safi (d. 1532–1533) also preached at the congregational mosque of Herat and is known for his book on the Naqshbandi masters, the “Rashahat-i ayn al-hayat”. Kashifi’s works were translated into Turkish, Uzbek and European languages: in the sixteenth century Ali Chalabi turned the “Anvar-i Suhayli” into Turkish as the “Humayun-nama”, and it appeared in English in 1854 and 1877; in the nineteenth century Muhammad Rizo Ogahiy translated the “Akhlaq-i Muhsini” into Uzbek. The Institute of Oriental Studies of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences holds 197 manuscripts and 75 lithographed copies of 45 of his works, and the “Futuvvat-nama-yi sultani” was published in Uzbek in 1994.