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

THE MENDICANT SAINTS
Qalandars did not recognize khilāfat-nāmas and walāyat – the
limits of a saints’ spiritual jurisdiction – which accounts for their
hostile onslaughts on khānqāhs. Shaikh Jalaluddin Tabrizi, notable
for his bellicose disposition, once tied up hand and foot and imprisoned
a wandering qalandar, who had taken it into his head to cure
people of diseases and work wonders in his walāyat in the region
of Lakhnauti. Complaints to the effect that juwāliqs lived by begging
and deceiving people in the regions around Delhi which were
‘under his rule’ are to be found even in Nasiruddin Chiragh-i Dihli’s
malfūz.āt. At the same time juwāliqs did acknowledge some authority,
if one may give credence to the story of how they prostrated themselves
before Shaikh Baha’uddin Zakariya on hearing Abu Hafs
‘Umar Suhrawardi’s name.
Baha’uddin Zakariya, being, in principle, an opponent of
wandering dervishes, could not deny that amongst them also one
could come across quite pious and mystically gifted people. Thus, he
came across a juwāliq who could in the course of two cycles of prayer
recite the entire Qur’an. However much the Spiritual Sovereign of
Multan wished to emulate this, he did not succeed and was compelled
to declare: ‘Now have I witnessed the truth of this axiom that in the
midst of every group of people there is indeed one of God’s elect!’
(Amir Hasan 1992: 85).
Not liking the qalandars as a particular social group, Baha’uddin
Zakariya nevertheless found his chosen ones amongst them. His
favourite disciple Fakhruddin ‘Iraqi lived the life of a typical malāmatī
and the shaikh of Multan initiated another of his favourites, Lal
Shahbaz Qalandar (1177–1267), into the Suhrawardiyya order and
gave him his own khirqa. May be Baha’ddin Zakariya’s contradictory
attitude towards qalandars is explained by the fact that amongst
them there were a number of gifted poets, and the head of the
Suhrawardiyya had always had a weakness for poetry.
The earliest qalandars found their way to the subcontinent from
Khurasan. Having pretty well got on the nerves of Baba Farid,
Baha’ddin Zakariya and the other saints of Punjab, they moved
towards Delhi and Bengal, perpetrating scandals in each khānqāh
which they came across on the way. From Gorakhattri, a small town
in the neighbourhood of Peshawar, where there was the ‘transshipping
point’ of wandering ascetics of various persuasions, they
used to make their way along the main highway of the subcontinent
extending over one and a half thousand miles, which connected
the north-western regions with the capital of the Sultanate. Under the
Mughals the highway was called the Imperial Road, whereas under
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