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

THE HERMIT OF LAHORE
almost every chapter. However, heightened anxiety for the protection
of his authorship did not at all mean that al-Hujwiri was vainglorious.
Rather, on the contrary, the text of Kashf al- mah˛jūb reveals the
author to be an open-hearted person, devoid of unbridled pretensions,
which are peculiar to ecstatic mystics, a person full of gentle quietism
and having a propensity for mukāshafa (meditative knowledge). He
narrates about himself with restraint and in a self-deprecating tone,
in every way possible emphasizing his own imperfection against a
background of the spiritual merits of his mentors and interlocutors.
But al-Hujwiri’s sincere desire not to attract excessive attention to
his own personality and problems is perceptible through the selfdisparagement
traditional for every Muslim author. The exhortation
of Thomas à Kempis (1379–1471) Ama nesciri (‘Be fond of abiding
in obscurity’), reiterated over and over by Christian mystics, suits
him perfectly well.
The episode of the death of his spiritual mentor Abul Fazl al-
Khuttali 6 can serve as a typical example of the contextual device by
which al-Hujwiri tells us about himself as if in parentheses:
While he lay on death-bed, his head resting on my bosom
(and at that time I was feeling hurt, as men often do, by the
behaviour of a friend of mine), he said to me: ‘O my son, I
will tell thee one article of belief which, if thou holdest it
firmly, will deliver thee from all troubles. Whatever good or
evil God creates, do not in any place or circumstance quarrel
with His action or be aggrieved in thy heart.’ He gave no
further injunctions, but yielded up his soul.
(al-Hujwiri 1992: 167)
Like many Sufis before and after him, al-Hujwiri travelled all over the
Muslim world in search of knowledge and for intercourse with
the spiritual fraternity. Maveraunnahr, Azerbaijan, Khurasan,
Nishapur, Bistam, Tus, Damascus, Baghdad, Khuzistan, Fars,
Farghana, Mayhana, Merv, Bukhara, Turkestan and, finally, Lahore
are part of the geography of his wanderings. As a matter of fact al-
Hujwiri’s autobiography in which there was room for quite ordinary
human foibles, is made up exactly of whatever happened in the course
of these wanderings. For example, during the years of his sojourn in
Iraq the future saint got up to the neck in debt:
Once, in the territories of ‘Iraq, I was restlessly occupied in
seeking wealth and squandering it, and I had run largely into
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