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

THE WARRIOR SAINTS
asthāna, is the same hillock in Chittagong where his zāwiya (cell) was
situated, and where he used to meditate and pray during his lifetime.
Hindus and Buddhists of Arakan used to offer to the tomb the income
from their neighbouring villages, instituting a kind of waqf, and
thereby transformed it into a centre of pilgrimage. Pir Badr’s
popularity in the regions bordering on Burma made the English
travellers and scholars of the past century think that he was a Burmese
saint.
Although the South Asian saints from time to time actively
interfered in politics, in the Middle Ages their participation in the
expansion of Islam by force of arms was more limited than in other
Muslim countries. When in 1327 Muhammad bin Tughluq exhorted
Sufis to enter into a jihād against the Mongols, who had devastated
Punjab and districts around Delhi, most of them refused to
collaborate with the authorities, as their hostility to the Sultan was
more intense than their fear of Timur’s conquests. In India it is
difficult to find analogies with wandering Turkish dervishes – bābā,
who used to stiffen the fighting spirit of ghāzīs in Anatolia in the
thirteenth to fourteenth centuries.
It is no less complicated to detect a connection between Indian Sufi
fraternities and clandestine militarized organizations of artisans or
aristocracy futuwwa, a connection about which many researchers
of the Turkish and Near Eastern Sufism write as if about something
which goes without saying. For the Indian Sufis futuwwa was not
the aggregate of chivalrous and martial virtues but an ethical ideal,
in accordance with which others’ spiritual welfare had to be given
preference over one’s own. Besides this they interpreted the concept
of jihād itself in spiritual sense, as a mortification of the sinful soul
on the path of its purification, or mujāhada. Furthermore the South
Asian Sufis did not have to come forward in defence of Islam against
external enemies, Christians, as their brothers and contemporaries
did in the Near East: ‘Abdallah al-Yunini, nicknamed Asad ash-Sham
(Lion of Syria) who participated in Saladin’s campaigns; Ahmad al-
Badawi, whose preaching activity spread widely during the Crusade
of Louis IX; and al-Jazuli, who came out against the Portuguese
threat to the independence of the Muslim Maghrib. Only considerably
later, at the end of eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, did the
Indian Sufis and awliyā stand upon the front line of the Muslim
resistance to colonial expansion. The most widely known of them
attained martyrdom, like Ahmad Shahid (1786–1831) and Isma‘il
Shahid (1781–1831), founders of the mujāhidūn movement, and were
ranked among the saints.
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