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

THE HERMIT OF LAHORE
These examples, in my view, confirm that neither religious services,
socially significant work, a heroic death nor martyrdom by themselves
ensure a man sainthood. A person, possessing great spiritual
energy, acquired the fame of a saint only if his deeds were imbued
with the radiance of the supernatural. The romance of sainthood was
nourished mainly by mythologems and Wanderlegenden, invariably
impinging upon the collective imagination. In other words, an ideal
saint is not at all an active hero of his time, a person in the public eye
like Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, but rather his modest, and therefore
more mysterious, contemporary, who remains in the shadows like,
for example, Miyan Mir (1550–1635), one of the guardian saints of
Lahore to whom Dara Shikoh has dedicated the hagiographic work
Sakīnāt al-awliyā (‘The Calmness of the Saints’). 3
The causes of the transformation of an actually existing person
into a saint is closely bound up with how the historical biography
correlates with the hagiographic. Usually only the latter, compiled
posthumously, is available to us. Even in those rare instances, when
historical chronicles or the saint’s own compositions have preserved
for us the authentic facts of his life (most often these are travels,
pilgrimages to tombs, meetings with other mystics), it is practically
impossible to single out that decisive episode, that abrupt upsurge (or
downswing) of his life story, on which the edifice of sainthood was
subsequently erected. Biographies of many Indian saints, had they
been authentic, would have seemed to have been inadequate in their
lack of significant events: early and prolonged discipleship, initiation
into the fraternity, monotonous years of life in the khānqāh, instruction
of murīds (disciples), occasional journeys and, crowning it all,
death on the threshold of sainthood. It is clear that the real destinies
of these people were settled not in public, but exclusively in the sphere
of spiritual search. The manāqib, presenting these destinies adorned
with the garland of striking, wonderful, at times adventurous events,
only metaphorically actualize the path of the mystic, full of ordeals
and spiritual enlightenment, leading to the cognition of God. For
this very reason biographies of the most outstanding awliyā, like
Data Ganjbaksh, Mu‘inuddin Chishti, Baba Farid, Nizamuddin
Awliya, Nasiruddin Chiragh-i Dihli, and Shah ‘Abdul Latif Bhitai,
written by contemporary scholars, come under the category of mixed
biographical-hagiographic genre, where scanty facts of history are
generously adorned with picturesque material of hagiographic
literature.
About one thing there is no doubt, the question of sainthood
was finally decided only by death, by union with the Divine Beloved;
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