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

THE INDIAN TOMB
Some of the saints (in particular, the famous mystic of the Deccan,
Muhammad Gesudaraz) had during their lifetime declared to their
followers that a visit to their tombs could substitute for a pilgrimage
to Mecca at those times when performance of H˛ajj was hampered
by some serious circumstance. To a certain extent, conferring high
spiritual status to the saints’ tombs was brought about for practical
and often quite prosaic reasons: in addition to the problem of living
in a distant part of the Muslim world, the rite of H˛ajj was also
inaccessible to the poor. The ‘ulamā consistently opposed the participation
of the poor in H˛ajj, as, setting out on the long journey ‘at the
will of Allah’, they lived by begging throughout the journey to Mecca.
This is exactly why authorities, both temporal and religious, did not
consider it necessary to resist the establishment of an institution
which at least compensated for the inability of a greater part of the
population to perform the most important rite of Islam.
At the same time it was precisely in India with its ancient institution
of pilgrimage that the practice of ziyārat gave rise to the ‘wild growth’
that I mentioned earlier. In the atmosphere of sanctity surrounding
each and every inch of the land the institution of pilgrimage grew
with frightening speed and acted like a mechanism: crowds of
pilgrims throughout the year migrated from one tomb to another,
since the maulūd or ‘urs of one or another of an innumerable multitude
of saints fell on each day of the calendar. Certain social groups,
in particular the indigent from towns and cities, often turned into
professional pilgrims, spending the greater part of their life in ziyārat.
And it is of no wonder, because life in the premises of a dargāh guaranteed
shelter, food, medical aid and generous alms (sadaqa) to a
poor man for some period of time.
Ziyārat could be both individual and collective. 12 Recourse was
taken to the latter in order to get rid of natural calamities and
epidemics. In hagiographic literature, among the descriptions of other
virtues of a saint one quite often comes across the expression: ‘people
pray at his grave for rain’. Quoting Nizamuddin Awliya, his disciple
and biographer Amir Khurd recounts details about a collective pilgrimage
by the people of Delhi to the tomb of Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar
Kaki during a plague epidemic. In a comparatively later period social
cataclysms also became a cause of mass ziyārat: thus, during the
uprising of 1857–59 when Awadh became one of centres of anti-
British struggle, sepoys prayed for victory at the grave of Ghazi
Miyan, the warrior for faith (Gazetteer of Oudh 1985: 234).
The excessiveness of the cult of saints threatened to eradicate the
distance between the temporal and the spiritual. The sacred was
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