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

THE WARRIOR SAINTS
Further on Ibn Battuta narrates a story quite in the spirit of manāqib,
confirming Shah Jalal’s miraculous gift of clairvoyance. At the
traveller’s request, at his departure the saint gave him a mantle of
goat’s hair. At the same time the Saint foretold that this mantle would
be taken away from him by a certain ‘infidel sultan’, who in turn
would make a present of it to Burhan ad-Din of Sagharji, for whom
the mantle had been made. In reply Ibn Battuta vowed that he would
never appear wearing his mantle in the presence of any ruler, whether
Muslim or infidel. After a long time, while travelling through China,
Ibn Battuta found himself in Khansa [Hang-chow-fu], where his
mantle caught the local ruler’s fancy, and the traveller was obliged to
give it away in exchange for generous gifts. The same year Ibn Battuta
found himself in Peking, where the Muslim mystic and missionary
Burhan ad-Din Sagharji was preaching.
To Ibn Battuta’s inconceivable astonishment he found Burhan
ad-Din in his cell wearing the same wonderful mantle which had
been taken away from him by the ruler of Hang-chow. Shah Jalal’s
prediction had come true. ‘This mantle’, explained Burhan ad-Din,
‘was made specially for me by my brother Jalal ad-Din, who wrote
to me saying “The mantle will reach you by the hand of so-and-so”’
(Ibn Battuta 1929: 270). Ibn Battuta was astounded by the perfect
foreknowledge of the saint of Bengal, and the Chinese missionary’s
response no doubt added to his fervour:
‘My brother Jalal ad-Din can do much more than all this, he
has the powers of creation at his disposal, but he has now
passed to the mercy of God. I have been told’ he added, ‘that
he prayed the dawn-prayer every day in Mecca, and that he
made the pilgrimage every year, for he used to disappear
from sight on the days of ‘Arafa and the festival, and no one
knew where he went.’
(Ibn Battuta 1929: 270)
Unfortunately Ibn Battuta mistook Shah Jalal for his more famous
predecessor, Jalaluddin Tabrizi Suhrawardi, already mentioned
more than once in this book, but, first, the latter died in 1244 and
could not have met Ibn Battuta one hundred years later and, second,
he had nothing to do with Sylhet; his khānqāh was situated in
Lakhnauti (Abdar Rahim 1960: 43). Ibn Battuta’s mistake began to
be accepted in one hagiographic work after another, then filtered
into the scientific literature, and in the very recent past Annemarie
Schimmel has referred to Jalaluddin Tabrizi’s sanctuary in Sylhet
(Schimmel 1980: 48).
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