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

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THE OLD MAN OF AJMER
A pious erudition, gentle contemplative quietude, a concentrated and
secluded spiritual life, typical of so many Sufis, was not necessarily
the only ideal image of a saint during his lifetime, in the eyes of
ordinary people. Undertaking a journey into himself (since the
Path to the Absolute in the end turns out to be a journey to the very
depth of one’s own ego), ‘polishing the mirror of his heart’, a mysticintrovert
could become a cult figure of popular Islam. This could
only occur where there could be some sort of easy transformation
into an accessible ideal, for example, the transformation of the
scholar–theoretician al-Hujwiri into the people’s benefactor, Data
Ganjbakhsh.
Later in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, the superficial
religiosity of the newly converted social environment, while still
clinging to a quite deep-rooted faith, with its extremes, fears and
ecstasies, called into being the most common type of saint: energetic
intercessor and extrovert, accessible to a great number of people. In
other words, it was the ideal of a saint–social worker. Subsequent
centuries of Indian history introduced hardly anything new into
this romance of sainthood, since the types of saints, as the saints
themselves, reside outside the limits of time and are translated from
generation to generation.
To be more exact, mass consciousness of the faithful made quite
contradictory demands in respect of the image of a saint: on the one
hand, manāqib depict saints as zāhids (ascetics), who had renounced
all worldly things and had done away with all worldly bonds (inkār
al-kasb), on the other hand they portray them in the very midst
of people’s lives, actively intervening in the course of historical
events and responding to the worldly passions (shahawāt) of ordinary
people. That is why most of the South Asian awliyā combine in their
person both types of saints: being hermits withdrawn from present-
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