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

THE WARRIOR SAINTS
Generally identified with Ilyās (Elias) as ‘the servant of God’,
conductor and instructor of Moses ... al-Khad˝ir possesses
h˝ikma (wisdom) ... and al-ism al-a’z˝am (the greatest
Name), knowledge of which confers saintship and ability to
do supra-normal things. Hypostatized as a person he
represents in Sufi thought the inner light of wilāya, parallel
to, and contrasted with, the apostolic-legalistic aspects of
prophecy signified by Moses.
(Trimingham 1971: 158)
If for theorists of Sufism Khizr remained the mysterious spirit of
Muslim gnosis and an indispensable link in the chain of spiritual
succession (silsila al-baraka), in popular Islam he acquired the traits
of the spirit or even the deity of rivers, springs and wells. Khwaja
Khizr was invoked by sailors and boatmen, beseeching him to help
them cross over to the other shore (Ay Khwāja Khid˝r ber¸ā pār). Khizr
was also identified with prophet Ilyas (the Biblical Elijah), having a
stable connotation with water in all Semitic religions. It is interesting
that the festival in honour of Khizr, celebrated in the first half of the
month of Bhādoñ in North India and accompanied by the floating on
water of little paper boats with lighted earthen saucers, was called
‘Ilyās kī kishtī’ (Boat of Ilyas). 6
The saints of Bengal like Shah Jalal, Pir Badr and the Five Pīrs in
various aspects of their miracle-working activity play the role of
Khizr’s substitutes: they guard sources of water, they miraculously
move about in water, they come at the last moment to the aid of the
needy, mostly sailors, fishermen and those who are drowning. All
the rituals of their veneration in some way or other are performed in
water: bathing in sacred ponds, the feeding of sacred fish or tortoises,
the floating of lamps on a river, etc. The etiology of these cults is
typical for East Bengal, which is indeed a country of water, where
traffic travels mainly on waterways, and agriculture (the cultivation
of rice and jute) and other spheres of economy were closely connected
with rivers, lakes and canals. The theme of water permeates even
the folklore of East Bengalis, the poetry of bāuls, the sailors’ songs
bhāt’ijāli and bāromāsī (the songs of seamen’s wives, longing in
separation for their husbands).
Let us return to Pir Badr. At the end of his life he left Chittagong
and returned to the places of his youth, Bihar, and that is where he
was buried in a tomb, called Chhot’ī Dargāh (Little Dargāh). At the
same time dummy tombs of the saint were erected on the riverside in
Chittagong, Arakan and Tripura. The main centre of the saint’s cult,
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