The Rose of Heresy: The Life and Death of Sarmad Kashani

The human mind is accustomed to distinctions. We are used to classifying and organizing reality into categories, as if it were inventory on a shelf. Perhaps this tendency to divide the world into rules and shades of black and white is simply a result of cognitive laziness—the brain's inclination to seek shortcuts and cling to the familiar. This is certainly true of worldviews; we often find it difficult to accept an ideological complexity that draws from diverse sources or harbors apparent contradictions. This is particularly true of the monotheistic religions.

As exclusive faiths claiming to offer a comprehensive and binding doctrine, the Abrahamic religions tend—at least officially—to prohibit the blending of different belief systems.

Sarmad Kashani was born in Armenia (or perhaps Azerbaijan) at the end of the sixteenth century and was executed in Delhi in the mid-seventeenth. To this day, there is no absolute certainty as to whether Kashani was a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, all of them at once, or none of the above.

The sources regarding Sarmad’s life and work are varied. Yet even the documentation left by his contemporaries—opponents, supporters, and bystanders alike—along with his own surviving poems, fails to pin down his religious identity. Various sources claim he converted to Islam; some argue he remained a Jew until his final day; others contend he was an atheist.

Ultimately, the question may be meaningless.

According to what is known, Sarmad was born to a rabbinical family in the Caucasus that was also involved in trade. His status likely afforded him both financial comfort and a broad education.

His commercial travels eventually brought him to Mughal India—the sultanate that emerged from the storied loins of the Timurid Empire of Central Asia to become a magnet for artists, clerics, and poets.

The Mughal Empire in the mid-seventeenth century.

Fluent in Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic, and well-versed in the Jewish and Islamic literature of his day, Sarmad was apparently drawn to the culture of learning and religious debate he found in India. He chose to stay. After arriving at a gathering of poets, Kashani—an excellent poet in his own right—noticed a young Hindu man named Abhai Chand.

Sarmad fell desperately in love. The sources swear to the innocence and purity of this affection, but it is difficult to determine the exact nature of the relationship between the aging merchant and the youth.

In any event, Abhai became Sarmad’s disciple. Sarmad taught him Persian and Hebrew, to the point that the young man translated portions of the Bible into Persian. At some stage—for reasons the sources never quite explain—Sarmad stopped wearing clothes and allowed his hair and nails to grow wild.

Sarmad and his disciple wandered to Lahore and then to Hyderabad, where his growing reputation as a mystic attracted a following. Upon reaching Delhi, the capital of the sultanate, Sarmad’s name reached the Mughal court and the ears of Prince Dara Shikoh, the son of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal—the woman for whom the grieving Shah built the Taj Mahal.

Shah Jahan and his son Dara Shikoh at the prince's wedding.

The Taj Mahal. Sarmad likely did not meet the dress code for the building's dedication.

Prince Dara was so impressed by the virtues of the naked mystic that he became his disciple, opening his court to interfaith discussions. There, Muslim jurists, Sufis, and Hindu yogis gathered together.

One cannot help but compare the atmosphere in Dara’s court to that of his illustrious great-grandfather, Akbar the Great, a century earlier.

Akbar was a wise ruler; under his reign, military and administrative reforms stabilized the kingdom, and his attitude toward the Hindu majority was conciliatory. He abolished the poll tax (jizya), granted them the right to bear arms and conduct public worship, and integrated them into the government.

Religiously, Akbar went even further, creating a syncretic belief system known as Din-i Ilahi ("The Divine Religion"), a blend of Islam, Brahminism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and even Christianity. Akbar actively encouraged interfaith debate and established the Ibadat Khana ("House of Worship") for joint learning among all faiths.

Akbar's "Ibadat Khana." Jesuits are seen on the left.

Akbar’s pluralism and his divine pretensions aroused opposition among puritanical Islamic factions. Most famous is the sharp criticism leveled by the scholar Ahmad Sirhindi, a key figure in the Naqshbandi Sufi order, which was distinguished by its uncompromising adherence to Islamic law.

The story of Akbar is significant because it illustrates the tension between the Islamic capacity for flexibility and mutual enrichment, and the puritanical tendency that rejects any deviation from the "straight path"—a tendency we can still identify in modern societies, including a certain small state in Western Eurasia today.

Agha-Jan and his brother, two Jewish Sufi dervishes. Tehran, Iran, circa 1922. Is there a need for distinctions?

Back to Sarmad. Prince Dara’s involvement in interfaith dialogue and his devotion to the naked mystic drew the ire of his younger brother, Aurangzeb, a devout Sunni. Naturally, Aurangzeb’s resentment was rooted in the looming succession of their ailing father, Shah Jahan, but the religious question certainly didn't help the brothers' relationship.

With the death of the old Shah, the war of succession broke out.

Dara’s army, a coalition of Sunnis, Shias, Sikhs, and Hindus, battled Aurangzeb’s Sunni forces in a campaign that was as much about the character of the Mughal court as it was about power.

Dara was defeated.

During the purges that followed, a Sunni cleric was sent to interrogate Sarmad. His nakedness and alleged fondness for cannabis were anathema to the puritans, but his religious outlook was the primary target.

The interrogator demanded the old guru repeat the Muslim declaration of faith: "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet."

Sarmad began: "There is no god..."

And then he fell silent.

When the interrogator demanded he finish the sentence, he replied that he was still immersed in a state that did not allow him to testify further—hinting at the Sufi ideal of Fana, the mystical annihilation of the self in the Divine.

Another accusation was that Sarmad believed in Hindu gods. The new ruler might have tolerated a naked Jew or a naked Muslim, but a Muslim who believed in an Indian god was guilty of true heresy.

A legend tells that when the Shah left his palace, he encountered the mystic by the roadside and demanded he cover his nakedness. Sarmad asked the ruler to cover him with the blanket lying nearby. When Aurangzeb lifted it, he was horrified to find a pile of severed heads—the remains of his own slaughtered nephews. "Should I cover my nakedness," Sarmad asked, "or are these your crimes that I should cover?"

Sarmad was executed for heresy. It is said that when his head was struck off, it rolled to the entrance of the mosque reciting his poems. Today he is buried next to the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, revered as a Sufi saint. I am not sure he would have liked the idea.

The tomb of Sarmad Kashani, Delhi.

Sarmad’s poems are mostly written as quatrains (Rubaiyat). In the West, this style is known primarily through the work of Omar Khayyam.

In these verses, Sarmad expressed contempt for organized religion—specifically Islam, Judaism, and Brahminism. He presented himself as an equal to the Prophet, an idolater, a devotee of Rama, a Buddhist monk, a rabbi, and a heretic. His poems present a contradictory religious conception that, above all, illustrates how little connection there often is between religion, faith, and spirit.

"Indeed, an idolater am I,

I am not numbered among the community of believers,

To the mosque I go,

But I am no Muslim."

"O Sarmad, you have indeed won a name in the world,

You came to Islam, and distanced yourself from Judaism,

What fault did you find in the Prophet and God,

That you turned away from God and His Prophet,

And became a devotee of Rama and Lakshman?" "The lover and the beloved, the idol and the worshiper,

Which of them is full of deceit?

Darkness reigns in the Kaaba and the Temple,

Come to the valley of unity, where one color shall rule,

Think deeply: who is the lover, and who the beloved,

Who is the flower, and who is the thorn."