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

NOTES
in his creative writings. After Baha’uddin Zakariya’s death he left the
subcontinent and lived the life of a wandering dervish: preached in
Konya, was the head of a khānqāh in Tuqat, subsequently lived in Egypt
and Syria. ‘Iraqi was buried by the side of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s tomb in
Damascus.
15 This statue, often mentioned in historical and geographical literature,
had made Multan a centre of pilgrimage in pre-Islamic epoch. It was
broken by Mahmud Ghaznavi’s soldiers in the eleventh century and
finally destroyed in the course of the capture of Multan by Aurangzeb’s
troops in the seventeenth century.
7 THE WARRIOR SAINTS
1 Guru Nanak’s pilgrimage to Mecca, described in the hagiographic
works of the Sikh janamsākhīs can, in particular, serve as a proof of
this statement. Since access to the sacred city was forbidden for the
followers of other religions, and Guru Nanak could hardly be expected
to disguise himself as a Muslim, it is obvious that he was taken to be a
mu’ah˝h˝id on the basis of his appearance and conduct. After Mecca,
Nanak set off to Baghdad in order to visit ‘Abdul Qadir Jilani’s dargāh.
Here the Caliph supposedly presented him with a cloak, embroidered
with verses of the Qur’an (it has been preserved up to the present day,
together with other relics in the gurdwārā Janamsthān, at Nanak’s
birthplace, in the small town of Nankana Sahib). On returning to
Punjab, Nanak visited Ajodhan and Multan, where he met Baba Farid’s
and Baha’uddin Zakariya’s descendants (although janamsākhīs assert
that these were the great saints themselves, in spite of the fact that they
had actually died several hundred years back) – all this points to the
closeness of his interests to Sufism.
2 Sipāh Sālār – military leader, commander, a customary title for
Ghaznavids military vicegerents.
3 The first independent ruler of the Muslim Bengal, Sultan Ilyas Shah,
who was suffering from leprosy, moved from Pandua to Bahraich in
order to be cured in Salar Mas‘ud’s tomb. His contemporaries considered
the ‘medical’ motivation of the trip to be a pretext, concealing
political ambitions, and apprehended him on the grounds that for the
same reason Ilyas Shah would have wished to visit the still more
curative mausoleum of Nizamuddin Awliya in Delhi.
4 Even the great saint of the sixteenth century, the founder of Qadiriyya
fraternity in Punjab, Muhammad Ghawth, whose tomb is in Ucch, was
known by the nickname Bālā Pīr. In Qannauj (Uttar Pradesh) there is
the tomb of yet another Bālā Pīr, in which a saint of the sixteenth
century, Shaikh Kabir, is buried. These duplicate tombs are an example
of the fact that different saints are venerated under the same name or
nickname.
5 Magh is a tribe of Burmese origin, inhabiting the hill district of
Chittagong. The Bengalis and the English called them robbers or
pirates as in the Middle Ages they often attacked the Indian ships in the
Bay of Bengal and on the territory of Bengal.
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