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

THE INDIAN TOMB
and other rites. Under the category of sacred places, tirtha (‘river
crossing’, ‘ford’), came reservoirs but also temples, mountains, caves,
stones, forests and even entire sacred towns. Numerous gatherings
of pilgrims were accompanied by regular fairs (melā) and popular
festivals, of which the most well-known is Kumbhkāmelā, held
once in twelve years in each of the four towns: Hardwar, Prayag,
Nasik and Ujjain, on which, according to Hindu tradition, god
Indra’s son Jayanta had sprinkled drops of the nectar of immortality
amr¸ita.
With such an abundance of sacred objects and places of pilgrimage
their Islamization took place easily, extensively, but to a great extent
superficially. Often from the ruins of a temple, even from its architectural
components, a mosque was built; at the place where once
upon a time there had been the cell of a Hindu hermit, a Sufi shaikh
erected a khānqāh; alongside a sacred reservoir a dargāh sprang up,
but no single object of veneration could do away with or expunge
the old sacred object from collective memory. Nowadays, in an age
of aggravated inter-religious relations, such a fusion of the objects of
pilgrimage time and again has led to serious communal clashes, a
recent example being the bitter conflict around Babri Masjid, Babur’s
mosque in Ayodhya, located supposedly at the Rāmajanamsthān, i.e.
the birth-place of the god and epic hero Rama.
Many such ‘cultural strata’, where the practice of ziyārat was
superimposed on pre-Islamic layers, have survived in the northwestern
regions of the subcontinent. Thus, for example, the wellknown
dargāh of saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar was built on the ruins
of a Shiva temple and the cavernous cell and dargāh of saint Bari
Imam in Nurpur (contemporary Islamabad) have sprung up at the
place of a Buddhist monastery of the Gandhara period. The dargāh
of saint Ghazi Miyan in Bahraich (Uttar Pradesh) was erected near a
sacred reservoir, on the ruins of a sun god temple.
One should not think that ziyārat was typical exclusively for South
Asian Muslims. Already in the course of the first centuries of the
development of Islam, visiting the grave of Prophet Mohammed in
Madina and pilgrimages to the tomb of caliph ‘Ali in Najaf and
that of Imam Husain in Karbala had become customary for the
faithful. Tombs of celebrated mystics, the mausoleum of ‘Abdul
Qadir Jilani in Baghdad, the mazār of Jalaluddin Rumi in Konya, the
tomb of Baha’uddin Naqshband in Bukhara and the grave of Ahmad
al-Badavi in Tanta, had gained the prestige of sacred places. The pious
result of such ziyārat was sometimes equated with the rite of ‘umra,
or small pilgrimage to Mecca.
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