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

THE SPIRITUAL SOVEREIGN OF MULTAN
Notwithstanding the temporal qualities of a diplomat and
politician, Baha’uddin Zakariya was undoubtedly endowed with the
vocation of a mystic and the talent of a spiritual preceptor, which
was admitted even by his opponents. Fawā’id al-Fu’ād ascribes to
him the ability to recite the entire Qur’an in one cycle of prayer:
‘Shaykh Baha ad-din Zakariya then stepped forward. In one cycle of
prayer he recited the entire Qur’an plus four additional sections; then
in the second cycle he recited the Surat al-Ikhlas (Q. 112) and finished
his prayer’ (Amir Hasan 1992: 86).
In addition, the Shaikh had the rare gift, called nafs-i-gīrā, which
is the ability to fully control the spiritual state and consciousness of
his murīds and to bend them to his will. Following the precepts of the
founder of the Suhrawardiyya order, Baha’uddin Zakariya considered
that a sālik, travelling on the mystic Path, should not change his leader
in the course of the entire spiritual journey: ‘You should not tarry at
every door and entrance’, he used to say, ‘Hold onto one door and
hold onto it firmly’ (Amir Hasan 1992: 112).
Apparently, that is why many of his murīds lived in the cloister in
Multan for decades, as, for example, the poet Fakhruddin Ibrahim
‘Iraqi, 14 who spent twenty-five long years in the saint’s magnetic field.
One could come across similar ‘old-timers’ even in Chishti jamā‘atkhānas
(let us recall, for example, Badruddin Ishaq and the Kirmani
family), but on the whole the period of novicehood and the process
of granting of khilāfat-nāma amongst them was considerably shorter.
The South Asian Suhrawardis in general somehow very reluctantly
parted with their baraka: Baha’uddin Zakariya and Jalaluddin
Surkhposh Bukhari nominated khalīfas in the main from amongst
their own sons, and Jalaluddin Tabrizi and Qadi Hamiduddin Nagori
restricted the number of disciples considerably.
It has already been mentioned that Baha’uddin Zakariya did
not countenance musical auditions. At the same time most of all he
liked to listen to how Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi recited his ghazals. As it was
even for the Chishtis, poetry was for him the most adequate means
of expression of mystic experience. It is mentioned in Fawā’id alfu’ād
that he would stand in the doorway of his room, continually
repeating the bait:
O beauty, cast a glance once more on me,
For I’ve strayed not – may God my witness be!
‘What could he have been thinking?’ Nizamuddin Awliya comments
upon this episode, ‘Nobody knows what the verse connoted for
147