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

THE INDIAN TOMB
Mazhar Janjanan, held similar views. The first of them called saints
and ministers of their cult ‘merchants, selling miracles’ and the second
contended that pilgrims to the tombs of saints were lower than
dogs, because they licked thousand-year-old bones whereas all the
true knowledge, ‘ilm, is in the āyats of Qur’ān and the traditions
of the Prophet. Such a negation of the cult of saints was peculiar to
a part of the Muslim elite from the end of the seventeenth century
to the middle of the eighteenth, when the Mughal policy of religious,
including ideological, collaboration was subjected to drastic revision
(historians sometimes call this period ‘Naqshbandiyya reaction’).
The wider the ideas of the Wahhabis spread in India with their
preaching of purification of Islam from external influences, from
syncretism and also local rites and superstitions, the louder rang the
words of censure directed against the cult of saints and popular
religion. If in the medieval age neither the Sultan of Delhi nor the
Great Mughals, nor for that matter the representatives of spiritual
and court aristocracy, were squeamish about pilgrimage to the tombs
of saints, then beginning in the nineteenth century the Muslim elite
began to persistently refuse to have anything to do with the beliefs
and rites of ignorant common people, and its most authoritative
leaders – Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Iqbal – saw in the cult
of saints one of the reasons for the general decline of Indian Islam and
the degeneration of faith.
Of course, a certain role in the hardening of the Indian reformers’
attitude towards the cult of saints was played even by the position of
the Englishmen, who saw in the veneration of pīrs and their tombs
one of the manifestations of native ‘barbarity’. If the Englishmen
displayed a certain respect, even if merely formal, for the institutions
of normative Islam, popular religion evoked staunch hostility on their
part. The Sufi shaikhs and pīrs were associated by them with Roman
Catholic monasticism – to be frank an incorrect analogy – and that
is why in the heat of puritan indignation they stigmatized them as
‘parasites’ and ‘deceivers of the people’. 17
In this connection the observations of Captain Postans, who served
in the last century in Sind, are typical:
The Pirs, Seyueds and other characters of pretended Moslem
sanctity who infest Sindh, occupy a most important position
amongst its inhabitants. From the Amirs, downwards, all
Mohammedans being profoundly ignorant of any but the
common forms of their religion, place implicit faith in
the holiness of spiritual pastors and the efficacy of their
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