SavioursOfIslamicSpirit-Volume3 ... - WordPress.com

ISLAMIC WORLD IN THE TENTH CENTURY 37for being spent on the poor and the needy. All of his sonsabstained from sins and profanity and cruelty. He hadwritten several books in Arabic, Persian^ Hindi and Pashtu.One of his works entitled Khair-ul-Baym was in all the fourlanguages and was, as he believed, a sacred scripturecontaining direct divine revelations to him.”1Events reported by the contemporary historians show thatShaikh Ba Yazld had collected a considerable force of* theAfghans and operating from his centre in the Sulaiman hills,he had captured the Khaibar Pass. He also started raidingthe surrounding country. Akbar despatched an expedition tocrush the rebellion but it did not succeed in achieving its objective.After Ba Yazid’s death, his sons continued to pose danger to theMughal empire. Raja Man Singh, Birbal and Zain Khan, allfailed to humble the Roshna’iyahs and Birbal was even killed inan encounter with them. Man Singh, too, failed to crush theRoshna’iyahs in an offensive launched by him in 995/1587. Theinsurgence of the sect was finally suppressed during the reign ofShah Jahan in 1058/1648.MahdawisAt this period the greatest unrest was caused by the Mahdawlmovement whose founder, Saiyid Muhammad b. Yusuf of Jaunpur ;(born in 847/1443), had died in the beginning of the tenth century(910/1504) but its aftereffects were visible until the close of thatcentury. A dispassionate study of the history of this movementis sure to convince any one that no religious movement of the timehad shaken the Musiim society of the Indian sub-continent,including Afghanistan, so deeply and comprehensively as didthe Mahdawl thought for two or three hundred years after itsinception. Contemporaneous writings and accounts left by thewriters and historians of the later times, both for and against1. Cited by Mulls Muhsin Khlni, HilnSmak Mi Yasld Dar Musisn-i-Mtuikib, pp. 306— 309