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

THE HERMIT OF LAHORE
a ‘golden age’. In turn, for the Sufis inhabiting the empire of the Great
Mughals, the ‘golden age’ was much more prolonged, because it
even included the epoch of al-Hujwiri and several centuries of the
Delhi Sultanate. This fluctuating image of the ‘golden age’, the image
of the bygone glory, reaches its apogee in the second half of the last
century, when the entire preceding history of Islam in India is painted
in idealized nostalgic colours and gives a powerful impulse to the
development of Muslim revivalism.
Al-Hujwiri’s autobiography convinces the reader that his impression
of the impoverishment of Sufism was characterized more by
conventionality rather than by objectivity. And indeed where does the
question of impoverishment arise, if in Khurasan alone he met three
hundred shaikhs ‘who had such mystical endowments that a single
man of them would have been enough for the whole world. This is
due to the fact that the sun of love and the fortune of the Sufi Path is
in the ascendant in Khurasan’ (al-Hujwiri 1992: 174).
The author of Kashf al-mah˛jūb indefatigably moves from place
to place throughout the Muslim world, in which the shaikhs and
dervishes have already assimilated each nook and corner. In the
bustling towns of Iraq and Syria, in the almost inaccessible mountain
villages of Jabal al-Buttam and Bait al-Jinn, in the steppes of
Turkistan and on the shores of the Caspian, everywhere he meets
other members of his fraternity, at times celebrated, now and then
nameless, but equal masters of the much trumpeted ars moriendi,
which, for sure, did not seem to be as ‘melancholic’ to them as it did
to Hermann Hesse.
The reasons which brought al-Hujwiri to Lahore (which he calls
Lahawur 13 ) are not known to us. We only know the main circumstances
which compelled him to settle down there. In his book the
author drops a hint that he found himself in Lahore not on his own
accord: ‘I could not possibly set down more than this, my books
having been left at Ghazna 14 – may God guard it! – while I myself had
become a captive among uncongenial folk (darmiyān-i nā-jinsān
giriftār mānde) in the district of Lahawur, which is a dependency of
Multan’ (al-Hujwiri 1926: 21). On the other hand why should a
native of Ghazna not try his luck in such a town, which in 1031
became the capital of the empire of the Ghaznavides? Sultan Mahmud
Ghaznavi (died 1030), who had annexed Lahore to his own empire,
never lived in it and was not at all interested in this godforsaken small
town in Punjab. He entrusted its government to his favourite Malik
Ayaz, who, as the local tradition says, erected the rampart around
the city in just one night. During the reign of Mahmud’s descendants,
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