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

THE WARRIOR SAINTS
request, I appointed the Faquir Kurimmuddien my Vakeel in
the court of the holy saint Huzrut Syed Buddiudien Kotbal
Muddar ... At these fairs all the rascals in India are
assembled; we therefore expected some attempt might be
made to rob us, but the night passed off quietly.
(Valentia 1811: 161–2)
In spite of all the ill fame and notoriety of the Madariyya sect, the
outstanding spiritual services of its eponym were acknowledged both
by contemporaries and posterity. Judging from malfūz.āt Laţā’if-i
Ashrafī (Stories of the Nobles) of Ashraf Jahangir Simnani, who
was not only a saint, but also a serious Sufi author and theologian,
he often journeyed all over the world in Shah Madar’s company.
However, the reference is most likely to a spiritual journey, which
Sufis used to perform in the mystical state of ţair. The authors of
different collections, ţabaqāt al-awliyā, write about Shah Madar with
equal respect, particularly Shaikh ‘Abdur Rahman Chishti in the
monumental compendium Mir’āt al-asrār (Mirror of Secrets), to say
nothing of Mir’āt-i Madārī, devoted specially to the saint. A curious
fact of the recognition of Shah Madar’s baraka was the visit to his
tomb by the orthodox Emperor Aurangzeb, who was by no means
favourably disposed to the cult of saints.
This chapter has considered four saints, who in their lifetime were
warriors of Islam or carried out jihād against followers of other
religions – and yet how little of their historical image and biographical
circumstances has survived in their posthumous cult! In practice it
turned out that the cult of the shahīds in India, as in the rest of Islamic
world, was mainly confined to the Shi‘a community, whereas the cult
of awliyā, as is generally known, grew basically on Sunni soil, generously
fertilized by Sufism. Violent or unnatural death could impart a
halo of sainthood to a warrior killed in battle, an executed mutineer,
or to a heroine of popular legend who died of love, but it does not
mean that they were later venerated as martyrs. Death in tragic
or mysterious circumstances was one of the many constituents of
baraka, and there is no scarcity of various saints who peacefully died
of old age in their beds, and yet became objects of such a passionate
and fervent veneration, of which martyrs had not even dreamt.
I would say that between martyrdom and the cult of the saint in
South Asia there exists an inverse relationship: the longer a saint
lived, the more he was held in respect and revered by disciples and
devotees during his lifetime, the more blissful and serene was his
disposition on the one hand, the more actively he was venerated after
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