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

THE PEACEMAKER OF DELHI
the Mussalmans of this country took an inclination to
mysticism, prayers and aloofness from the world and came
to have a faith in the Shaikh. This faith was shared by ‘Alau’d-din
and his family. The hearts of men having become
virtuous by good deeds, the very name of wine, gambling
and other forbidden things never came to any one’s lips .. .
Out of regard for one another the Mussalmans refrained
from open usury and regrating (ih˝tikār), while the shopkeepers,
from fear, gave up speaking lies, using false weights
and deceiving the ignorant ... In short God had created the
Shaikh as a peer of Shaikh Junaid and Shaikh Bayazid in
these later days and adorned him with that divine love which
cannot be understood by human wisdom. The virtues of a
Shaikh – and the art of leading men (in the mystic path)
found their fulfilment and their final consummation in him.
Z-īn fan matalab nāmī
Kān khatm shodast bar-i Niz.āmī
Do not try to obtain eminence in this art
For it has come to an end with Nizami.
(Nizami 1955: 75–7)
Even making allowance for exaggeration, characteristic of medieval
historians, it is obvious that Nizamuddin Awliya played a unique
role in Delhi around the end of thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth
centuries. Thus, when in the year 1299 the army of Mongols
under Qutlug Khoja’s command came up to the wall of the capital,
its inhabitants rushed to Ghiyathpur to seek protection in Shaikh
Nizamuddin’s khānqāh, so great was their faith in the saint’s omnipotence.
Following the doctrine of his order, Nizamuddin Awliya
spent his entire life in intentional and voluntary poverty. However,
the situation in Ghiyathpur, located close to the capital, was very
different to the conditions in out-of-the-way Ajodhan: although Baba
Farid’s murīds were short of money even for salt, futūh˝(unasked
offerings) came in an endless stream to the cloisters of the saint of
Delhi, and was used by Shaikh Nizamuddin wholly on the establishment
of schools and hospitals for the poor and on assistance to
those who had lost all their possessions in a fire or to peasants affected
by drought.
The Shaikh explained his philanthropic activities purely on
religious grounds:
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