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

THE PEACEMAKER OF DELHI
who have retired (from the world) to hills or forests, are free
of such anxieties.
(Hamid Qalandar 1959: 105)
Indeed, constantly having to deal with human misfortune,
Nizamuddin at times felt extremely depressed. Since the aching nerve
of compassion never calmed down in his heart, he continued to
subject himself to privations and restrictions even during the years
when his khānqāh was flourishing (as it was in the reign of ‘Ala’uddin
Khalji) and was able to feed the whole neighbourhood. He explained
his refusal to eat and the sleepless nights by pointing out that so many
starving people slept in nooks and corners of mosques or completely
in the open that the mere thought of these poor creatures made him
lose appetite and sleep.
Feeding of the hungry was given paramount importance and,
indeed, ritual significance by the Shaikh. The Shaikh used to say:
‘Dervishhood consists of this: every visitor should first be greeted
with “Peace!” (salām), then he should be served food, and then and
only then should one engage in story telling and conversation’ (Amir
Hasan 1992: 169). He considered one dirham, spent for special
purpose, i.e. on food for the poor, more valuable than twenty dirhams,
given as alms (sadaqa), prescribed by Shariat. For that matter, even
the great mystics of Europe thought similarly: Meister Eckhart
himself considered that giving a tureen of soup to a beggar was more
important than sharing the apostle Paul’s ecstasy (Ruh 1985: 154).
In accordance with these tasks langar in the Shaikh’s cloister was
organized on a large scale: in the communal refectory food was
cooked for several thousand people at a time. The Shaikh’s favourite
servant Iqbal (commonly known as Lalla) was in charge of the
kitchen, and Burhanuddin Gharib looked after the distribution of
food. Shaikh Nizamuddin’s langar has survived to this day: in the
Delhi dargāh, in an enclosed territory of fifty square metres, food
is cooked in four cauldrons, which, if one has to judge by their
appearance, have not been scrubbed since the times of the Delhi
Sultanate.
Since the laws of the khānqāh forbade the storing of supplies for
any length of time, and because provisions piled up in abundance, the
Shaikh ordered that all the granaries should be emptied every week,
and that the remainder of grain and lentil should be distributed among
the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. In the reign of ‘Ala’uddin
Khalji, who had adopted a policy of economy of waqf expenditure
and had established control over philanthropic institutions, the
122