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

THE HERMIT OF LAHORE
that I have suffered when travelling none was worse than
to be carried off time after time by ignorant servants and
impudent dervishes of this sort and conducted from the
house of such and such a Khwaja to the house of such and
such a Dihqan, while though apparently complaisant, I felt
a great dislike to go with them. I then vowed that, if ever I
became resident, I would not behave towards travellers with
this impropriety.
(al-Hujwiri 1992: 342–3)
This transient intonation of irritation and weariness tells more about
the emotional state of the author than tens of pages of his work.
Over the years al-Hujwiri obviously became tired, and began losing
his enthusiastic interest in everything, almost without exception. This
enthusiasm had been very characteristic of him in his youth, as had
his constantly optimistic appraisals of the people and social environment
in which he lived. In marked contrast these now became all the
more critical and ‘sober’. In the foreword to Kashf al-mah˛jūb he was
the first in the long line of mystics who followed him to express his
pessimism about the state of contemporary Sufism:
Know that in this our time the science of Sufism is obsolete,
especially in this country. The whole people is occupied
with following its lusts and has turned its back on the
path of quietism, while ‘ulama and those who pretend to
learning have formed a conception of Sufism which is quite
contrary to its fundamental principles ... Everyone makes
pretensions, none attain to reality. The disciples, neglecting
their ascetic practices, indulge in idle thoughts, which they
call ‘contemplation’.
(al-Hujwiri 1992: 7)
Each generation of mystics has regarded the state of Sufism
contemporary to it as decadent. Complaints about profanation or
emasculation of esoteric knowledge are the ‘commonplace’ of the
entire didactic and hagiographic literature. 12 This decadence is always
contrasted with a certain ‘golden age’ of Sufism, which is gradually
expanded to encompass further centuries and generations, depending
on which age the writer himself belongs to. Thus, for the spiritual
descendants of al-Hujwiri, in particular, for the Great Chishtiyya
shaikhs, living in the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth to fifteenth
centuries, he himself as well as his contemporaries belonged to such
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