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

THE HERMIT OF LAHORE
Bar āstān-i tū har kas rasīd mat.lab yāft
Rawā madār ki man nāumīd bar gardam.
Everyone who reached your threshold got his wish.
Do not let me return disappointed.
Because people supplicated Data Sahib for highly different reasons
he is most venerated in South Asia as a type of universal saint, not
connected with a particular social group or motivation of devotion
– a general saint, ‘for all seasons’ as it were. By virtue of the universality
of his baraka Data Sahib became the first and foremost patron
saint of Lahore. In this role he outshines other patron saints of this
town such as the wandering malāmatī poet Madho Lal Husain and
the already mentioned preceptor of the Mughal elite, Miyan Mir.
Over the years Data Sahib came to be regarded as a peculiar elder, a
doyen of the corps of saints.
Thus, Dara Shikoh writes that ‘he surpasses all the saints of India
and no new saint can set foot on this land without first obtaining
his spiritual permission’ (Dara Shikoh 1965: 149). To a certain extent
these words are true, for the path of numerous mystics, arriving in
India from Afghanistan and Central Asia, either started from Lahore
or passed through it. Moving along the road, connecting the old
capital Lahore with the new ones – Delhi and Agra, a pious person
simply could not avoid the tomb of the elder of the Indian saints.
The spiritual energy emanating from Dātā Darbār (this is what
traditionally the saint’s tomb is called) shaped the new generations
of awliyā. Here at different times Mu‘inuddin Chishti, Baba Farid
and Miyan Mir performed murāqaba; leading the life of a mendicant,
Madho Lal Husain actually lived in Dātā Darbār; mystics of
Punjab Sultan Bahu (1631–91) and Bullhe Shah (1680–1752)
mentioned him in their verses. Finally, contemporary tradition says
that the idea of a separate state for Muslims in the subcontinent
actually occurred to Muhammad Iqbal in Dātā Darbār (Goulding
1925: 2).
Iqbal, in spite of his somewhat snobbish dislike for pirism and
popular religion, has done justice in full measure to Data Sahib,
depicting in the poem ‘The Secrets of the Self’ (Asrār-i khūdī,
1915) his ‘possible meeting’ 16 with another eminent saint of the
subcontinent, Mu‘inuddin Chishti (Iqbal used his another title Pir-i
Sanjar). Despite the abstraction of reality and historical facts, typical
for the poetics of the genre of mathnawī, Iqbal quite comprehensively
answers the question of why al-Hujwiri was venerated as so
influential a South Asian saint:
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