PhD defence Fatemeh Naghshvarian: Feyżī’s poetry at the sixteenth-century Mughal Court

On Monday 13 July, Fatemeh Naghshvarian will defend her dissertation ‘Feyżī’s Poetry at the Mughal Court: Qalandars in Divine Religion’. In this thesis, she analyses the poetry of Feyżī (1547-1595), court poet of the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great. By examining his work, she demonstrates how a religious poet contributed to ideas about religion, tolerance and spiritual truth in the sixteenth-century Mughal Empire.

Paradoxes and contradictions

Feyżī wrote during a period in which Emperor Akbar the Great promoted a vision of peaceful coexistence between people of different religious backgrounds, known as ṣulḥ-i kull (‘universal peace’). This vision was closely associated with dīn-i ilāhī (‘divine religion’), a spiritual and ethical order developed by Akbar that drew on elements from different religious traditions. 

Naghshvarian demonstrates how Feyżī built upon a rich tradition of Persian mystical poetry that challenged religious conventions. Within this tradition, he questioned established contrasts between belief and unbelief, or between the wine house and the mosque. Against this background, the dissertation explores how his poetry engaged with broader debates about religious diversity and spiritual truth.

In his poems, Feyżī uses themes such as doubt, love, wine and even blasphemy to reflect on spiritual experience and the search for mystical truth. Rather than providing simple answers, he embraced paradoxes and difficult questions as ways of understanding the divine.

More than art

By placing Feyżī’s poetry within its historical and intellectual context, Naghshvarian demonstrates how literature played a significant role in discussions about religion, knowledge and diversity in the Mughal world.

Naghshvarian  concludes that poetry was not merely an art form, but also a means of philosophical reflection, theoretical contemplation, and the exploration of different ways of spirituality and of human existence.