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

THE OLD MAN OF AJMER
His means of subsistence was a village in the suburbs of Ajmer,
which was owned by him by the right of ih˝yā. This was the name in
Muslim agrarian law for abandoned wasteland in almost inaccessible
and infertile regions, the ownership right of which was given to
anyone who undertook to cultivate it. Hence the name of the form
of land-ownership, which comes from the Arabic word ih˝yā, meaning
the act of restoration to life or resurrection. The local muqţa‘, 8
entertaining an attitude of animosity towards the saint, insisted that
he should produce the Sultan’s farmān (decree) for ownership of this
village, and in the beginning of 1220s the Khwaja, at his family’s
request, had to go to Delhi for the second time.
In the capital he stayed in Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki’s house,
where, as we may recall, people were fed only with stale bread. The
host and the guest had got acquainted with each other much earlier,
in Baghdad, where Qutbuddin had become the Khwaja’s disciple
and then he had set off to India in his footsteps. Wishing to render a
service to his murshid, Qutbuddin solicited for an audience with
Sultan Iltutmish. Since Chishtis, generally speaking, did not humour
the high and mighty of this world by their visits, and Qutbuddin in
particular persistently avoided Iltutmish’s favours, his arrival in the
palace as a suppliant made a strong impression on the Sultan. The
sought-for farmān was immediately issued and the high-handed
muqţa‘ was punished for the trouble given to the saint. The respect
shown by the Sultan to Mu‘inuddin in his absence had its effect even
on the attitude of the ‘ulamā of the capital towards him; in any case
shaikh ul-Islām Najmuddin Sughra, who had treated the Khwaja
quite negligently during his first sojourn in Delhi, this time gave him
an enthusiastic welcome.
However, the Khwaja did not yield to shaikh ul-Islām’s kindness
since he used to maltreat his khalīfa Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki and
threatened to take the latter along with him to Ajmer. The inhabitants
of the city with Iltutmish at their head came out to see off the saint
and his disciple, picking up dust from under their feet as an invaluable
relic. Touched by such a manifestation of mass veneration the Khwaja
relented and allowed Qutbuddin to remain in Delhi.
As we see, in this biography there is nothing supernatural, and this
is how it differs strikingly from Mu‘inuddin Chishti’s legendary life,
the sources of which were the motifs of Indo-Muslim fantastic folklore.
Contrary to historical facts, the tradition of Chishtis, including
Nizamuddin Awliya, asserted that when the Khwaja arrived in Ajmer,
Pithaura Ra’i was still the ruler there and he supposedly fiercely
resisted the saint’s presence in the town. Going by Jawāhir-i farīdī,
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