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

THE HERMIT OF LAHORE
have composed a work on the permissibility of audition.’ I
replied: ‘It is a great calamity to religion that the Imam
should have made lawful an amusement which is the root of
all immorality’. ‘If you do not hold it to be lawful’, he said,
‘why do you practice it?’ I answered: ‘Its lawfulness depends
on circumstances and cannot be asserted absolutely: if
audition produces a lawful effect on the mind, then it is
lawful; it is unlawful if the effect is unlawful, and permissible
if the effect is permissible’.
(al-Hujwiri 1992: 401–2)
It is obvious that the interlocutor, having caught al-Hujwiri in
hypocrisy, had put him in an awkward situation, and he simply tried
to get out of it with the help of scholastic casuistry. The episode is,
however, highly significant: many Sufis of later times, who had publicly
condemned samā‘, even the puritanically disposed Naqshbandiyya,
used to secretly arrange devotional music sessions in their khānqāhs
or private houses. In general, in the world of the mystics and the awliyā
the conservatism of verbal and written public declarations did not
rule out ecstatic behaviour, nor, for that matter, even the opposite: a
mystic, depicting himself in his verses and discourses as intoxicated
and almost feigning to be a majdhūb, could at the same time lead quite
a respectable life full of strict piety.
Al-Hujwiri’s attitude towards Husain ibn Mansur al-Hallaj was
also no less contradictory than his position regarding the issue of
samā‘. As you will recall, the object of his innermost wishes was to
secure for himself the manuscripts of Hallaj’s munājāt. In the chapter
devoted to this personified symbol of ecstatic Sufism, the author of
Kashf al-mah˛jūb endeavours to vindicate him from the common
accusations of magic, zandaqa (heresy) and kufr (infidelity):
Husayn, as long as he lived, wore the garb of piety, consisting
of prayer and praise of God and continual fasts and fine
sayings on the subject of Unification. If his actions were
magic, all this could not possibly have proceeded from him.
Consequently, they must have been miracles, and miracles
are vouchsafed only to a true saint.
(al-Hujwiri 1992: 152)
And there and then, as if scared of his own liberalism, al-Hujwiri
takes up the point of view about Hallaj common to the moderate
mystics of the Junaidiyya school: ‘Although he is dear to my heart,
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