A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

38 A history of Inner Asia
(d.1166).The other three were founded in Central Asia by Central
Asians – the Yasaviya in Turkestan (which here means territories populated
by Turkic tribes north of the Syr Darya) by the aforementioned
Ahmad Yasavi, a Turk from Sayram (d.1166, thus a contemporary of
Abd al-Qadir Gilani), the Kubraviya in Khwarazm by Najm al-Din
Kubra, a Khwarazmian from Khiva (d.1220), and the Naqshbandiya in
Bukhara by Baha al-Din Naqshband, a Tajik from the nearby village of
Qasr-i Arifan (d.1390).The tombs of these three founders of Sufi orders
subsequently developed into famous shrines and objects of veneration
and pilgrimage of the Muslim faithful spanning the entire spectrum of
society, from rulers and those powerful and wealthy to the common folk,
all bound by similar human craving for a more immediate and recognizable
intercessor.This role ultimately overshadowed their identity as Sufi
mystics and the importance of Sufi tariqas they had founded or inspired
their followers to found.Moreover, these shrines were only the most prestigious
or best known among the myriad other places of pilgrimage and
worship, usually tombs of real or mythical saints whose history often
reached to pre-Islamic times but who all responded to the same psychological
need.The identification of these personages as “saints,” common
in Western perception, needs some qualification.The concept of the
canonical “saint” is absent in orthodox Islam, and is only obliquely
admitted by its heterodox denominations; thus none of the three core
Islamic languages, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, has a lexical counterpart
to the Christian “saint” applicable to a Muslim.Furthermore, we
repeatedly encounter statements in mainstream Muslim theological literature
that the sharia, Islamic law, does not allow any veneration of holy
men, and that even the men thus revered preached against it.The fact
that such veneration did occur and proliferate only confirms the abovementioned
dictates of human nature, and all orthodox Islam could do
was to prevent the phenomenon from being recognized on the formal
and lexical level.There was no canonization process, but Muslim saints
were admitted – or believed by the masses – to perform karamat, a concept
half-way between miracle and blessing bestowed by God; and in the
absence of a canonical counterpart to the Christian saint, there were
words like wali (Arabic for wali Allah, “he who is close to God”), khwaja,
ishon, baba, ata,orawliya (plural of wali often used in Turkic as a singular)
which assumed that function.In their lifetime, these saints played often
catalytic roles in spreading or affirming Islam in all directions; these roles
acquired a new and special lease of life after the saints’ deaths, when their
tombs became the centers of shrines or mazars. Mazar, derived from the