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

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THE MENDICANT SAINTS<br />

In every hair <strong>of</strong> mine;<br />

So intimate is He,<br />

With this condition fine.<br />

(Fakhar Zaman 1995: 91)<br />

<strong>The</strong> ambivalent image <strong>of</strong> the wandering saint, that <strong>of</strong> an impudent<br />

ragamuffin and an enigmatic handsome man, a bē-shar‘ scandalizing<br />

society and an ecstatic visionary, is one <strong>of</strong> the least studied in the<br />

corpus <strong>of</strong> <strong>South</strong> <strong>Asia</strong>n awliyā.<strong>The</strong> qalandars and related groups <strong>of</strong><br />

dervishes are personages <strong>of</strong> popular religion <strong>of</strong> the lower strata <strong>of</strong> the<br />

society and that is why their veneration is rooted in popular magical<br />

cults, which have undergone only superficial Islamization. Possibly,<br />

in the conflicts <strong>of</strong> qalandars with ‘settled’ saints, upon which the<br />

hagiographic literature is never tired <strong>of</strong> dilating, one can discern the<br />

echo <strong>of</strong> the resistance <strong>of</strong>fered by the essentially syncretic popular<br />

religion <strong>to</strong> the expansion <strong>of</strong> ‘pure’ normative Islam.<br />

198

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