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

THE INDIAN TOMB
A powerful religion reveals itself, penetrating in all the
circumstances of life, and imbues each and every impulse
of the spirit, each and every element of culture. Of course,
in due course these very circumstances in their turn have
their repercussions on the religion, and its very core can then
be stifled by the succession of ideas and images, which once
upon a time it had inducted in its sphere. ‘Consecration of
all relationships of life’ has its fatal side.
(Burckhardt 1969: 99)
Since the cult of saints was precisely such a ‘consecration of all
relationships of life’ its destabilizing effect on the ‘core’ of Islam was
going to be inevitable.
It is obvious that veneration of saints created a certain borderland
of faith – comfortable, less burdensome and, above all, easy of access
to one and all – somewhere in between the many strict and imposing
restrictions imperative of the Sharī‘at and the transcendental and
abstruse revelations of the Sufis. One could say that the cult of saints
was a reaction to the intellectual philosophy of mysticism as well as
to the formal rationalism of Islam, manifesting itself in law and
systematized theology. The cult of saints coalesced to such an extent
with the everyday and economic activities of ordinary Muslims, and
responded to their fundamental requirements, that with all its fantastic
nature and orientation towards miracle, it objectively introduced
a sobering and materialistic note into the spiritual labyrinth of the
Indian medieval period.
The cult of saints in general and pilgrimage in particular rarely
had the sacrament of obtaining bliss and transcendent communion
with the saint (murāqaba) 13 as their goal. The purpose of ziyārat
became quite utilitarian and temporal: getting cured of a disease,
getting rid of bewitchment by the evil eye, giving birth to a son,
marrying off a daughter, winning a protracted lawsuit, or mending
one’s financial position, for example. The diversity of the pilgrims’
individual wishes and aims extraordinarily widened the spectrum
of rites, the sacramentalia, because in accordance with the laws of
occult thinking each request by a pilgrim called for special, strictly
defined rites and ritual action on his part with respect to a specific
saint.
Theoretically ziyārat envisaged the following activities: ritual
circumambulation (t¸awāf) of the tomb, touching the threshold, lattice
or fence of the mazār, sweeping its floor with a special brush, recitation
from the Qur’ān, in the first instance, of Fātih˛a, adornment of
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