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

THE MENDICANT SAINTS
with the reception accorded to him in the Delhi khānqāh of the
Chishtis, inflicted with a dagger thirty wounds on the great Shaikh
Nasiruddin Chiragh-i Dihli. 4 Earlier in the year 1290 a qalandar of
the Hyderi sect 5 played a fatal role in the case of the conspirator Sidi
Maula: when he appeared for trial in the court of Sultan Jalaluddin
Khalji, of an attempt on whose life he was accused, a Hyderi present
in the courtroom slashed Sidi Maula’s throat with a razor, which,
as we will recall, qalandars always kept handy. At the same time
Sidi Maula himself belonged to the sect of muwallihs related to the
qalandars. Elephants trampled the dervish, who had been fatally
wounded by a member of his own brotherhood.
A contemporary researcher of South Asian Sufism, Simon Digby,
has called qalandars and similar sects of wandering dervishes with
other self-appellations, deviants, that is groups deviating from social
and religious conduct (Digby 1984). Moderate ‘sober’ mystics, let
alone ‘ulamā, regarded qalandars and similar groups of dervishes as
zindīqs. The testimony of Muhammad Gesudaraz in this respect is
interesting:
People keep on saying that h˝aqīqat is the divine secret, but
I, Muhammad Husaini, say that sharī‘at is the divine secret,
because I have also heard talk of h˝aqīqat from the mouths
of muwallihs, Haidaris, Qalandars, mulh˝ids and zindīqs
(heretics of sorts); nay, I have even heard it from the mouths
of Yogis, of Brahmans and of Gurus. But talk of the sharī‘at
I have not heard from the mouth of anyone other than the
people of true faith and belief, i.e. Sunni Muslims. Thus it is
evident that the sharī‘at is the divine secret.
(Schimmel 1980: 53)
This quotation proves that, first, such an authoritative Sufi as
Gesudaraz did not differentiate between qalandars, muwallihs,
Hydaris and other sects of wandering dervishes and, second, equated
their irresponsible utterances with the words of kāfirs (Yogis and
Brahmans). Gesudaraz’s stand is all the more understandable, since
the ‘calculated deviation’ of qalandars and their like was in the
first place directed against the authority of the shaikhs of the main
silsilas and against the deep-rooted methods of transmission of
baraka.
The qalandars rejected both the basic forms and methods of Sufi
practice and the established relations between pīr and murīd, which
presupposed movement on the Path only under the leadership of a
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