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

THE INDIAN TOMB
verging on dishonest, activities were persecuted by the authorities,
earned their living by this kind of ‘miracle’.
Karāmāt was required to be performed in secret. Therefore, many
hagiographic subjects have a particular feature: a miracle ceases the
moment people in the vicinity come to know of it. Thus, for example,
the previously mentioned saint of Delhi, Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar,
nicknamed Kaki (from the Persian kāk – ‘stale bread’), got his nickname
thanks to a miracle connected with this word. Like the majority
of the shaikhs of the Chishtiyya order, Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar lived
in voluntary penury and could not provide for his large family. Stale
bread, only God knows where from, appeared under the saint’s
prayer rug every day, and constituted all the sustenance of his household.
When the saint’s talkative wife spread this news among the
neighbours, the ‘miracle’ immediately ceased.
It is paradoxical, but a living saint, performing karāmāt, was as a
rule supposed to be inferior in significance to a dead saint, because
in India, as also in contemporary Pakistan and Bangladesh, the main
object of veneration and even worship was and remains the saint’s
tomb – mazār, dargāh or maqbara. In fact the cult of saints in the
countries of South Asia is the cult of their tombs. The actual and
metaphorical role of the saint’s tomb, in the course of so many
centuries serving the ritual, cultural, social and even economical
purposes of a vast social environment, is extremely important. The
spiritual content of the concepts surrounding the Muslim tomb, it
seems, did not leave even the crusaders indifferent: some contemporary
scholars trace the origin of such a sacramental concept as
macabre (as in la danse macabre, or dance of death), without which
the Christian image of death is not possible, to the word maqbara
(Huizinga 1995: 212).
According to the precepts of Islam a grave should not serve as a
place for prayers, therefore various religious authorities disapproved
of adorning saints’ tombs with monumental structures crowned with
domes: by resembling mosques because of their architecture and
décor, such tombs were fraught with the danger of being turned into
prayer houses. There are quite a number of hagiographic legends of
how, out of humility, exceedingly pious saints themselves dismantled
their splendid tombs: thus the domes of the mausoleums of Ahmad
ibn-Hanbal in Baghdad, Baha’uddin Naqshband in Bukhara, Lal
Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan fell to the ground supposedly on their
own.
By the end of its existence the Delhi Sultanate mazār (literally ‘a
place which is visited’) had grown from a modest structure of cubic
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