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

THE INDIAN TOMB
constantly lost in the profane because of an inevitable mixing-up
of ritual with everyday life. Profanation increased in the practice of
pilgrimage: thus, memorial services for saints during their ‘urs were
marked by tumultuous fairs and were accompanied by unrestrained
public revelry, performances by vagrant buffoons and songstresses
of easy virtue, wrestling bouts and cockfights. It was understandable
that the rulers of the Delhi Sultanate, Firoz Shah Tugluq or Sikandar
Lodi, zealous for a purity of faith, endeavoured to bring ziyārat under
control and, in particular, prohibit female Muslims from attending
‘urs.
However, their pious efforts were in vain, because with the passage
of time the institution of pilgrimage only gained in strength. This was
facilitated not only by purely religious factors (a cessation of the
policy of forced Islamization, the relaxation of ideological control on
the part of the state, the attractiveness of conversion to Islam for the
indigent strata of the urban population and the resultant sharp growth
of the Muslim community), but also by socio-political changes, in
particular, the unification of the country under the powerful authority
of the Great Mughals. Unification brought with it improvements in
the means of communication between various regions of the country
and relative safety of movement for pilgrims which further enhanced
the opportunities for pilgrimage. Already during Akbar’s reign, in the
second half of the sixteenth century, such eminent representatives of
the Muslim community as historian Bada’uni and theologian Shaikh
Ahmad Sirhindi declared that the cult of saints had lost touch with
the fundamentals of Islam, had gone out of control and had become
a threat to the ideological unity of Indian Muslims.
Of course, in the numerous examples of the fusion of the sacred and
the profane and the gradual secularization of faith, the naive lack of
fastidiousness and ignorant enthusiasm of superficially converted
neophytes can be discerned in the cult of saints, the new faith, rather
then intentional blasphemy and a lack of piety. Only a society wholly
imbued with religious spirit and perceiving faith as something which
goes without saying, is capable of such excesses. At the same time the
very people who were unconsciously accustomed to the ‘barren
symbolism’ of degenerative and emasculated rituals were endowed
with receptivity of a high order for the most subtle expressions of
spiritual feeling and instantly became inflamed by the preaching of a
vagrant qalandar or the obscure rhetoric of an ecstatic majdhūb.
J. Burckhardt in his Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen accurately
formulated this peculiarity of the development of popular, but at the
same time superficial, piety:
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