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

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THE HERMIT OF LAHORE
Everywhere at the places where bare and barren desert was
interspersed with a spring, patch of land, a small or big oasis,
at that time there lived the hermits, some in total solitude,
others in small fraternities, they lived in poverty and in love
for the neighbour, devoted to a certain melancholic ars
moriendi, a certain art of dying, of withdrawal from
the world and one’s own self and transition to Him, to the
Saviour, to the radiant and eternal kingdom. Visited by
angels and demons, they composed hymns, drove away the
demons, healed, blessed, as if having made up their mind
to compensate for earthly delight, rudeness and carnality of
many bygone and many future epochs with the powerful
upsurge of enthusiasm and with the ecstatic action of
renunciation of the world.
(Hesse 1945, 1: 387–8)
These words of Hermann Hesse about Christian saints are equally
applicable to the South Asian awliyā.
One of the most intriguing questions, arising in the course of study
of the cult of saints, happens to be: who became a walī in the mass
consciousness of the faithful and why? The answers to these questions
are relatively clear in the case of hermits and ascetics, about whom
Hesse has written, and also in the case of heroes and martyrs, to
whom wonder-working powers can be easily ascribed. The lives
of characters from legend and folklore are by definition fabulous,
but it is far more difficult to discern any strict regularity in the
canonization of many historical people.
The Shaikh of the Naqshbandiyya fraternity, ‘the renovator of the
second millennium’, Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), for example,
possessed unique spiritual energy and had unprecedented influence
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