Looking Through Tahqiq Glasses: Early Modern Imagination and the Unveiling of Nature in Mirz & aacute; Bidil's The Sinai of Knowledge

In this article I trace the contours of the notion of tahqiq in the Tar-i maMODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RINGrifat The Sinai of Knowledge, a late seventeenth-century poetic exploration of natural phenomena by the most important Indo-Persian poet-philosopher of the Mughal times, Mirza Abd al-Qadir Bidil (Azimabad, 1644 - Delhi, 1720). I collect and analyze all the textual loci where the term tahqiq occurs in Bidil's mathnawi, showing how verification/ realization is a key concept to make sense of Bidil's method of observation, via imagination, of the phenomenic unfolding of physis. I also explore several surprising points of contact between Bidil's poetic conceptualization of nature and some aspects of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Italian naturalistic thought.

Automated summary

This article discusses the notion of tahqiq in the poetic work "The Sinai of Knowledge" by Mirza Abd al-Qadir Bidil, an important Indo-Persian poet-philosopher of the late seventeenth century. It analyzes how the concept of verification/realization is central to Bidil's method of observing natural phenomena through imagination, and explores the connection between Bidil's poetic conceptualization of nature and Italian naturalistic thought during the Renaissance and post-Renaissance periods.