Looking Through Taḥqīq Glasses: Early Modern Imagination and the Unveiling of Nature in Mīrzā Bīdil’s The Sinai of Knowledge

In this article I trace the contours of the notion of taḥqīq in the Ṭūr-i maʿrifat (“The Sinai of Knowledge”, ca. 1688), a poetic exploration of natural phenomena by the most important Indo-Persian poet-philosopher of the Mughal times, Mīrzā ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdil (‘Azimabad 1644 - Delhi, 1720). As a preliminary excavation, I limit myself to collecting and briefly analysing all the textual loci where the term taḥqīq occurs in Bīdil’s masnavī, showing how “verification/realisation” is a key concept to make sense of Bīdil’s method of observation, via imagination, of the phenomenic unfolding of physis. In a connected perspective, I also conjure the several surprising points of contact between Bīdil’s poetic conceptualization of nature and some aspects of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Italian naturalistic thought.