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

THE MENDICANT SAINTS
and bite its head with their teeth until they bite it clean
through.
(The Travels of Ibn Battuta 1962, 2: 274)
Ibn Battuta’s last phrase reminds one of the customs of the Jalaliyya
fraternity, whose members, as we remember, also swallowed snakes
and scorpions.
The most widely known of the South Asian Hyderis was Shaikh
Abu Bakr Tusi Qalandari, who in the middle of the thirteenth century
founded a khānqāh on the banks of the Jamna in the suburb of Delhi.
Even from his name it is clear that in India Hyderis were finally
absorbed in the qalandarī trend. According to Amir Khurd, Abu Bakr
Tusi was held in respect by the Delhi mystics and used to visit Sultan
Balban’s court. Samā‘ were often held in his cloister, which were at
times attended by Nizamuddin Awliya and Jamaluddin Hansawi.
The latter gave Abu Bakr Tusi the nickname Bāz-i Safīd (White
Falcon), as if by contrast with the Red Falcon, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.
It turns out that the great Shaikhs of both the main fraternities had
their own chosen ‘falcons’ amongst the deviant dervishes.
However, warm relationships with meek Chishti shaikhs did not
exert an ennobling influence upon Abu Bakr Tusi: his relations with
other contemporaries were not so cordial. He was rather harsh
with his neighbour Nuruddin Malik Yar Parran who planned to build
a khānqāh near Abu Bakr’s; he took an active part in the conflict
between the sons of Jalaluddin Khalji, supporting one royal prince
Arkali Khan against his rival Khan-i Khanan. But those who really
disgraced Abu Bakr Tusi were his disciples, rioters and troublemakers
representing the most aggressive detachment of wandering
dervishes, with an extremist frame of mind. It was one of Abu Bakr
Tusi’s murīds, and that too on his instigation, who attacked Sidi
Maula with a razor before sentence had been passed upon him. 8
In the khānqāh of the Hyderiyya refuge was given to thieves and
murderers hiding from punishment; bringing this to an end was the
official reason for the persecution of the sect and its leader during
the reign of the stickler for law ‘Ala’uddin Khalji.
After Abu Bakr Tusi’s death Hyderi dervishes no longer had a
centralized leadership or their own cloister. Sultan Firoz Shah Tughluq,
favourably disposed only to the ‘ulamā and moderate ‘sober’ Sufis
who had facilitated his accession to power, banished deviant groups
of dervishes from the capital, and wandering mystics had to find refuge
in the Sharqi Sultanate and in Muslim Bengal, where the traditions of
religious syncretism and programmatic tolerance were deep-rooted.
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