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

THE ASCETIC OF PAKPATTAN
pebbles, which immediately turned into lumps of roasted sugar. At
first Farid considered this miracle to be Satan’s trick, but Qutbuddin
reassured him, quoting a verse from Sana’i:
Sang dar dast-i tu gohar garda
Zehr dar kām-i tu shakar garda
A stone turns into a pearl in your hand,
The poison becomes sugar in your mouth.
(Amir Khurd 1978: 67)
For that matter, even Qutbuddin, we may recall, is indebted for his
nickname to a miracle connected with food-stuffs or rather with their
absence. ‘Stale bread’ (kāk) and ‘sugar’ (shakar), which brought fame
respectively to him and his disciple, are miracles of the same origin:
these are the gustatory hallucinations of a starving man. Once the
conversation has turned on Shaikh Farid’s ration it should be noted
that hagiographic literature has recorded it for us in full: the saint
lived mainly on a soup made of the wild fruits of thorny bushes called
delah, which his disciples used to gather for him. When Nizamuddin
Awliya happened to be on duty in the kitchen he endeavoured to
flavour this broth with a pinch of salt borrowed from others, which,
as with incurring any other debts, was strictly forbidden to the
murīds. 9 But the harmless deception could not escape the notice of
the omniscient saint, and the soup flavoured with the ‘iniquitous’ salt
was thrown away.
Farid used to subject himself to the most difficult form of fast,
șaum-i Dā’ūdī, taking food one day and fasting the next day. On
meat days in the evenings, at the time of ifţār, he permitted himself
to drink a cup of sherbet and eat a piece of oat bun with clarified
butter (g’hī), ignoring his own prediction about the troubles which
await those who eat bread with butter. Going by rural yardsticks,
these tasty delicacies were taken from the zanbīl, the container made
from a dried hollow gourd which the murīds used to take from
house to house in the neighbourhood, asking for alms. Shaikh Farid
preferred donations in kind instead of money and apparently this is
why in the khānqāh the difficulties involving salt occurred because
salt had to be bought for money.
Still more difficult than șaum-i Dā’ūdī was the chillah, a forty-day
fast in complete seclusion. Farid requested his murshid to bless
him for this asceticism a number of times, but was refused. Later,
apparently, having decided to teach his stubborn disciple a lesson,
Qutbuddin suggested that he should perform chillah-i ma‘kūs, i.e.
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