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

THE HERMIT OF LAHORE
debt. Everyone who wanted anything turned to me, and I
was troubled and at a loss to know how I could accomplish
their desires.
(al-Hujwiri 1992: 345)
Al-Hujwiri makes a still more shocking confession in connection with
his views regarding women and matrimony:
After God had preserved me for eleven years from the
dangers of matrimony, it was my destiny to fall in love with
the description of a woman whom I had never seen, and
during a whole year my passion so absorbed me that my
religion was near being ruined, until at last God in His
bounty gave protection to my wretched heart and mercifully
delivered me.
(al-Hujwiri 1992: 364)
Confessions of such a type did not adorn a mystic who as a youth had
taken to the Path, and true humility and courage were required in
order to make a public declaration of them.
Apart from meetings and conversations with numerous shaikhs, al-
Hujwiri visited tombs of famous saints for the general purpose of
murāqaba as well as on the occasions when ziyārat was dictated by
practical necessity.
Once I, ‘Ali b. ‘Uthman al-Jullabi, found myself in a
difficulty. After many devotional exercises undertaken in the
hope of clearing it away, I repaired – as I had done with
success on a former occasion – to the tomb of Abu Yazid, and
stayed beside it for a space of three months, performing every
day three ablutions and thirty purifications in the hope that
my difficulty might be removed. It was not, however; so I
departed and journeyed towards Khurasan.
(al-Hujwiri 1992: 68–9)
Here the reference is, of course, not to worldly difficulties, but to one
of the endless spiritual obstacles which the mystic came across in his
Path. However, it is symptomatic that al-Hujwiri, who was himself
a follower of Junaid’s school of ‘sobriety’, sought the way out of the
difficult situation in the tomb of the progenitor of the school of
‘intoxication’. This once again proves that in the eleventh century
there still did not exist any rigorism, selectivity and tendentiousness
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