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

THE HERMIT OF LAHORE
(jalāl) on the other. And further on in the same section of the poem
Iqbal puts in al-Hujwiri’s mouth his concept of an active, energetic
personality khūdī, the revelation of whose secrets is the main purpose
of his mathnawī.
Obviously Iqbal was impressed by the figure of al-Hujwiri as well
as by the type of sainthood personified by him, 17 since sukr (sobriety),
envisaging absolute self-control and moderation, obedience to
religious law, eulogized by the poet, and, what is still more important,
absence of ‘vedantic’ syncretism, which he rejected and to which he
attributed the excesses of ecstatic Sufism and the concept of wah˛dat
al-wujūd (unity of Being), were inherent in the convictions and world
view of the author of Kashf al- mah˛jūb.
Dātā Darbār has not changed much since the days Iqbal used to
visit it: in the second half of the twentieth century the dargāh was
repaired more than once but it was not reconstructed. In pictures
and coloured photographs the dome of the tomb is shown to be a rich
emerald colour. In reality, from a distance it seems to be a moving
and swaying white-grey mass with islets of green, since from the
spire up to the drum it is covered completely with a living carpet of
pigeons. When the courtyard of the tomb is not crowded one can
hear how the pigeons animatedly coo, as if holding a ‘conversation
of birds’ (manţiq aţ-ţair), which, by ‘Attar’s happy initiative, became
a metaphor of the mystics’ esoteric and ‘obscure’ language.
A multitude of pigeons is a characteristic sign of the most important
monuments of the Muslim world, for example, of Shaikh ‘Abdul
Qadir Jilani’s tomb in Baghdad and of the Afghan complex Mazar-i
Sharif. The prototypes of these birds, of course, are the kabūtarān-i
h˛aram (forbidden, i.e. sacred, pigeons) of Mecca, symbolizing the
prohibition of any violence against any living being in the sanctum
sanctorum of Islam. In accordance with the āyats, ‘And We made the
House (in Mecca) a resort for mankind and a sanctuary’ (2: 125) and
‘Have We not established for them a sure sanctuary?’, on the sacred
territory of Ka‘ba, particularly during H˛ajj, absolute safety is
guaranteed to the people, the animals and even to the plants. This
prohibition, and also the custom of breeding and feeding pigeons,
was in the course of time also extended to those places of pilgrimage
connected with the cult of the saints. And the pilgrims themselves,
dressed in white ih˛rām (the robe worn by pilgrims), were often
compared with the ‘prohibited pigeons’.
This connotation became so entrenched in the consciousness of
the Muslims that when in 1987 more than six hundred persons,
performing H˛ajj suffered in clashes with the Saudi forces of law
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