THE AHRARI WAQF IN KABUL IN THE YEAR 1546 AND THE MUGHUL NAQSHBANDIYYAH.

• Author: Dale, Stephen F.

In recent years scholars of the Islamic world have increasingly exploited charitable endowment deeds or registers as historical sources. In doing so they have recognized that these documents are qualitatively different from narrative historical texts which are, in Marc Bloch's still useful phrase, "intentional sources" that have an obvious rhetorical purpose.(1) The waqfiyyah is a typical example of Bloch's "unintentional source," in this case a legal document that records property exempted from immediate state control and traditional inheritance laws, whose income could be dedicated either to charitable/public purposes or to maintain a family. Such deeds typically contain information that professional historians in the Muslim world rarely used or alluded to in ta rikh literature or that of other annalistic narratives. Depending on its purpose a waqfiyyah may contain data for architectural, economic, social, and religious history in its record of buildings, lands, economic arrangements and prices, and religious or charitable institutions. As waqfs were administratively sanctioned by qadis, other state-appointed officials who supervised endowments, or even rulers themselves, the documents might also reveal aspects of a government's economic and religious policies. The waqfiyyahs commissioned by or associated with the fifteenth-century Naqshbandi shaykh, Khwajah Ubayd Allah Ahrar (1402-90) are important examples of such documents. Five extant Ahrari waqfiyyahs have been published by the Soviet scholar O. D. Chekhovich in a larger collection of materials relating to Khwajah Ahrar, entitled the Samarqand Documents.(2) These records of Ahrari Naqshbandi endowments contain unusually rich data for the history of western Central Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and many scholars have exploited them since their publication.(3)

The Samarqand Documents contain five waqfiyyahs, all but one of which enumerate property that Khwajah Ahrar and, subsequently, his two sons and their descendants administered as waqf in and around Samarqand, Tashkent, and Bukhara. The thirteen other documents in the collection are related to Ahrar's property and that of his descendants in Mawarannahr; these include eight deeds of purchase, three court records and two royal decrees. The single exception to the Central Asian focus of these documents is provided by the second section of document seventeen. Part of a much longer waqfiyyah document, it lists Ahrar's endowments in Kabul and its environs, including a madrasah and mosque, as well as extensive holdings of agricultural and urban property. The text of the Kabul waqf is the least well annotated text in the Samarqand Documents, which may reflect the inaccessibility of Afghan sources for Soviet scholars. Yet apart from its general interest as a detailed account of an elaborate waqf and its particular significance for Afghan history, the Ahrari waqfiyyah of Kabul represents the single most important Ahrari document in this collection for studying the expansion of the Naqshbandi sufi order. The presence of extensive Ahrari waqf holdings in Kabul meant that when the Timurid claimant Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483-1530) used Kabul as a staging post to invade north India in 1526, Ahrari Naqshbandis possessed an economic and institutional base within Babur's new Timurid state, the Mughal empire. The Ahrari presence there helps to clarify how the order developed in Mughul India in the sixteenth century, the base for its subsequent reemergence in a new guise in the Middle East.

THE TEXT

Document seventeen is one of four texts in this collection incorporating original deeds that have not survived.(4) Written in a Persian that is stylistically the same throughout, this waqfiyyah is dated 953 A.H./1546 A.D. The first half of the text enumerates the properties in Mawarannahr dedicated to the maintenance of Khwajah Ahrar's gravesite; the second half appears to describe properties that Ahrar had evidently acquired in and around Kabul, which he had converted to waqf to support a madrasah and associated mosque and to provide income and housing for his descendants. However, as will be discussed below, it is not certain that Ahrar himself acquired all of the property listed in the Kabul section. Internal evidence suggests that the Kabul waqfiyyah itself is probably a composite text. In style and vocabulary document seventeen closely resembles document ten of the year 1489, another that represents a compilation from earlier materials. However, compared to the waqfiyyah of 1489 this 1546 text is incomplete in two respects. First, its crucial opening lines are missing. Second, the names of those who sold the property used to maintain Ahrar's tomb and for the Kabul waqf are not indicated, whereas these data are sometimes given in the earlier document. In consequence it is difficult to answer many questions about it, beginning with the original dates of the two separate waqfiyyahs that now are combined in this single text.

It is impossible to know when the properties dedicated to Ahrar's tomb complex that are described in the waqfiyyah of 1546 were converted to waqf. Even if the name of every individual who is mentioned in the text as owning property adjacent to the many separate waqf holdings in Mawarannahr is identified, it may still be difficult to date the original endowment, unless the death dates of these people can also be determined. As to Khwajah Ahrar's Kabul waqf, Ahrar himself must have endowed at least some of the property during his lifetime, but not only is the exact date of the original unknown but this latter half of the waqfiyyah cannot simply be a copy of a single earlier text. First, it obviously has been updated with information from the sixteenth century. This is evident because, as will be indicated below, Babur's amirs and/or contemporaries are among a few individuals whose names can be positively identified in the waqfiyyah as persons whose property adjoined land or buildings comprising parts of the Ahrar's Kabul waqf. These men did not live in the city prior to 1504, the date when Babur occupied Kabul, for they had been fighting with him in Mawarannahr. Nor are they likely, as Turks native to the rich Ferghanah valley, to have purchased land in the impoverished Kabul region before they were forced out of their homelands. Some of them or their descendants still resided or owned property in the city in 1546. Second, the document's date also raises the possibility that some of the properties included in the Kabul endowment were added to it after Ahrar's death in 1490. The text is worded so that it seems that Ahrar was responsible for the acquisition of all the properties listed in it, but additional properties that originally represented discrete grants might have been included in this waqfiyyah, just as the names of adjacent property owners have been updated, without altering the text's original legal language describing Ahrar's act of endowment. As will be seen there are good reasons for believing that this occurred after Babur took control of the city.

The second and related question to be asked about this waqfiyyah is who was responsible for it being issued. There are several possible reasons why a new waqfiyyah might have been composed, and they are not mutually exclusive. All are worth considering, even as hypotheses, because they help to provide a more thorough context for interpreting the Kabul endowment. These possibilities include the legal stipulations of the text, interests of the state, and the personal or political interests of the mutawalli or custodian of the endowment.(5) First of all the waqfiyyah itself requires that the mutawalli should see that the text was "presented and delineated" at a majlis or council every ten years, at which time the qadi and, if possible, the governor in each separate location should authenticate the endowment as a hedge against future litigation. As described in the last paragraph this majlis was obviously intended to be a formal public reaffirmation of the waqf, for it encouraged the qadi to see that the document had the signatures of multiple witnesses as well as the governor's seal. It is conceivable that 1546 was simply the decennial date for both the Central Asian and Kabul properties, whose waqfiyyahs were combined together in one document in 1546. This waqfiyyah may also be the only extant copy of earlier separate texts. However, it is also quite likely that political leaders directly or indirectly encouraged the public reaffirmation of this document, for the principal contending powers in the region had reasons to cultivate the Ahrari Naqshbandis' favor.

In the 1540s there were two major powers in Mawarannahr and central Afghanistan, the Uzbek appanages of Mawarannahr and Balkh and the Timurids of central and eastern Afghanistan.(6) A third, the Safavids, controlled most of the Iranian plateau including Khurasan, but were not directly involved in Naqshbandi affairs, except as persecutors of the order in Iran.(7) In 1546 Uzbeks controlled Samarqand, the former capital of Timur and his descendants, Tashkent and Bukhara and the environs of these cities, and Balkh in northern Afghanistan. Timurids, Babur's sons Humayun and Kamran, had just concluded a phase of the struggle for central and eastern Afghanistan with Humayun's occupation of Kabul in November 1545. Humayun, Babur's eldest son and heir, had been expelled from north India by resurgent Afghan forces in 1540, and in 1546 he was in the midst of a fifteen-year campaign to reconquer northern India. Both Uzbek rulers and Timurids had reasons to encourage the issuance of this waqfiyyah.

At least the first half of this waqfiyyah might be connected with the Uzbek patronage of Ahrar's descendants. Shibani Khan (Uzbek) or his nobles apparently killed Ahrar's youngest son, Khwajah Yahya, and two of Yahya's three sons in 1500, probably because of their close...