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

THE HERMIT OF LAHORE
difference between the types, degree and, let us add, motivation of
sainthood of the elements constituting it. One candidate for sainthood
became a saint because he was a highly learned person and
possessed comprehensive knowledge; another, because he held all kind
of knowledge in contempt and was illiterate; 4 a third, for meekness
and charity; a fourth, for his stern and vindictive disposition; a fifth,
owing to his ascetic feats and strict piety; a sixth, because of his
deviant and eccentric conduct – the list of these mutually exclusive
‘reasons’ of sainthood, which hardly explain anything, can be continued
to any length.
The cult of awliyā grew on the soil of not intellectual but pragmatic
Sufism, which, with all the diversity of trends, fraternities and sects,
can be reduced to two main schools – sukr (intoxication) and sah˛w
(sobriety). The first school, also called Taifuriyya, is connected with
the name, already more than once referred to, of the Persian mystic
Bayazid (Abu Yazid) Taifur al-Bistami (died 875). The ecstatic rapture
and ‘intoxication’ with the love of God are typical of his teaching
in the first place. He was one of the first to describe the spiritual
sensation of complete dissolution of one’s own ego in God, a state
that he called fanā. Elaboration of the postulates of the second school,
Junaidiyya, can be traced back to the person of the Baghdad mystic
Abul Qasim Junaid (died 910). Whilst acknowledging the validity of
al-Bistami’s teaching of fanā, Junaid considered it to be an intermediate
stage, because ‘it is incumbent upon a perfect mystic to
proceed further, to the state of “sobriety”, in which his personal
cognition of God could make out of him a more perfect human being
with absolute self-control and composure’ (Islam 1991: 69). Junaid’s
teaching was considered to be moderate and was more acceptable to
the representatives of normative Islam than was the teaching of
Taifuriyya.
One of the earliest South Asian saints, with the long-winded
Muslim name Abul Hasan ‘Ali ibn Uthman al-Jullabi al-Hujwiri al-
Ghaznawi, whom the faithful call by the nickname Data Ganjbaksh,
was the guardian saint of Lahore and belonged to the Junaidiyya
school. The cause of the transformation of this scholar, historian
and propagator of Sufism into a well-loved popular saint turned out
to be his book Kashf al-mah˛jūb (Revelation of the Veiled), whose
authority I have already invoked more than once. 5
Al-Hujwiri (died between 1072–6) is the author of the first-ever
written work in Persian where the history, ideology and practice of
Sufism and also brief biographies of seventy-four of the most wellknown
Sufi shaikhs are systematically presented. The book exerted
39