Muslim Saints of South Asia: The eleventh to ... - blog blog blog

THE ASCETIC OF PAKPATTAN
his predecessors and his successors in the fraternity, became apparent.
The Chishtis were ‘moderate’ mystics and in excessive passion for
asceticism they saw temptation and arrogance, so incompatible with
their propagation of humble and selfless service to God and His
creatures. Encouraging the self-restraint which is obligatory for a
mystic, they nevertheless did not allow it to exceed the limits of the
rational; from their point of view extreme asceticism ran counter
to divine Providence and human nature, hampered fulfilment of
religious law and simply attracted idle curiosity to itself. Besides that,
asceticism in the form of self-torture was associated in the eyes of
Muslims with wandering ascetics (sādhū) and members of an esoteric
sect of Naths whom Sufi literature calls by the collective term jogī.
The system of asceticism (tapas) practised by them, including the
famous ‘standing between five fires’ (i.e. between four bonfires and
under the parching midday sun), evoked a persistently negative
response from Sufi authors, suspecting in Hindu tapas a means of
acquiring supernatural power, in other words an endeavour to
compete with God.
Having become an ascetic (zāhid), Farid to some extent violated
the principles of his silsila. The albeit apocryphal and fabricated
malfūz.āt which describe not so much his spiritual perfection as his
physical self-tortures mean that those Sufis were right who considered
that asceticism attracts the unnecessary attention of the ‘simple folk’
to the feats of the body to the detriment of spiritual feats. Thus,
Gulzār-i abrār and Jawāhir-i farīdī are full of stories about what
exactly Shaikh Farid fed on, because in the course of many years he
ate practically nothing. One of the main relics of the dargāh in
Pakpattan was the wooden pancake (qurș-i chobīn), a flat round
board with gnawed edges which, according to the tradition, the saint
used to nibble when torments of hunger became intolerable. Indirect
confirmation of the fact that this relic is not a latter-day invention is
to be found in Farid’s own poetry:
pharīdā rot’ī merī kāt’ha kī, lāvañu merī bhukkha
jinnhāņ khādhī copa´rī, ghañe sahanhige dukkha
My bread is made of wood, and hunger is my salt,
Those eating buttered bread will suffer pain’s assault.
(Shackle 1993: 270)
For the famous nickname Ganj-i shakar (Treasury of sugar) the saint
is also indebted to the peculiarities of his ‘diet’. In order to alleviate
hunger during prolonged fasts, he used to stuff his mouth with
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