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

THE ASCETIC OF PAKPATTAN
visited Ajodhan, offered some money and the ownership of four
villages to the saint, the latter said: ‘Give me the money. I will dispense
it to the dervishes. But as for those land deeds, keep them. There are
many who long for them. Give them away to such persons’ (Amir
Hasan 1992: 196). It turns out that the only source of subsistence for
the cloister were unasked-for donations or futūh˝, the regularity and
extent of which could not be foretold. Since Shaikh Farid forbade the
community to accumulate donations, keep them in reserve or lay
anything up for a rainy day, because this supposedly violated the
basic Sufi principle of setting one’s hopes solely on God (tawakkul),
all the offerings were instantly distributed among the poor. Once
Badruddin Ishaq did not manage till the setting in of night to give
away one gold coin as alms, which provoked a virtual fit of rage on
the part of the saint, who could not fall asleep till the coin was thrown
out of the bounds of the jamā‘at khāna.
Apart from concerns for the brethren and visitors, the saint’s
overgrown family also caused him a certain problem. From three
marriages Farid had many children, the majority of whom had died
in infancy because of malnutrition. Children were growing up in
conditions of extreme poverty, and from time to time one or the other
wives interrupted the saint’s meditation with the wail that her child
has just now died of starvation. It is paradoxical, but Farid, endowed
with universal responsiveness and ready to cry over the grief of
anybody and everybody, did not give evidence of similar compassion
for his own progeny. Amir Khurd narrates the saint’s shocking, by our
moral yardstick, reply to the mother of yet another child who was
about to die: ‘What can poor Mas‘ud do? If it is how fate has willed
it and he dies, tie his legs with a rope and throw him away, and then
come back’ (Amir Khurd 1978: 67). It is true that the hagiographer
himself was not at all shocked by this reply; for him it rather served
as an evidence of the fact that during divine service nothing temporal,
even the death of a member of his family, could move the saint.
For that matter, even in this Shaikh Farid was following his
murshid’s example: Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki also did not care too
much for his family, and when one of his sons passed away consoled
the sobbing wife by telling her that had he come to know of the child’s
illness earlier, he would have prayed for his health. But the great
shaikhs of the Chishtiyya fraternity did not burden themselves
much with the care of even the surviving and grown-up children.
Their education and upbringing was taken care of by tender-hearted
neighbours and devoted murīds: thus, it was Nizamuddin Awliya
who brought up and educated Shaikh Farid’s son and grandsons.
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