Muslim Saints of South Asia

MUSLIM SAINTS OF SOUTH ASIA This book studies the veneration practices and rituals of the Muslim saints. It outlines the principle trends of the main Sufi orders in India, the profiles and teachings of the famous and less well-known saints, and the development of pilgrimage to their tombs in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. A detailed discussion of the interaction of the Hindu mystic tradition and Sufism shows the polarity between the rigidity of the orthodox and the flexibility of the popular Islam in South Asia. Treating the cult of saints as a universal and all pervading phenomenon embracing the life of the region in all its aspects, the analysis includes politics, social and family life, interpersonal relations, gender problems and national psyche. The author uses a multidimen- sional approach to the subject: a historical, religious and literary analysis of sources is combined with an anthropological study of the rites and rituals of the veneration of the shrines and the description of the architecture of the tombs. Anna Suvorova is Head of Department of Asian Literatures at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. A recognized scholar in the field of Indo-Islamic culture and literature, she frequently lectures at universities all over the world. She is the author of several books in Russian and English including The Poetics of Urdu Dastaan; The Sources of the New Indian Drama; The Quest for Theatre: the twentieth century drama in India and Pakistan; Nostalgia for Lucknow and Masnawi: a study of Urdu romance. She has also translated several books on pre-modern Urdu prose into Russian. ROUTLEDGECURZON SUFI SERIES Series Editor: Ian Richard Netton Professor of Arabic Studies University of Leeds The RoutledgeCurzon Sufi Series provides short introductions to a variety of facets of the subject, which are accessible both to the general reader and the student and scholar in the field. Each book will be either a synthesis of existing knowledge or a distinct contribution to, and extension of, knowledge of the particular topic. The two major underlying principles of the series are sound scholarship and readability. BEYOND FAITH AND SUFIS AND ANTI-SUFIS INFIDELITY The defence, rethinking and The Sufi poetry and teaching of rejection of Sufism in the modern Mahmud Shabistari world Leonard Lewisham Elizabeth Sirriyeh AL-HALLAJ REVELATION, Herbert W. Mason INTELLECTUAL INTUITION AND REASON IN THE RUZBIHAN BAQLI PHILOSOPHY OF MULLA Mysticism and the rhetoric of SADRA sainthood in Persian Sufism An analysis of the al-hikmah Carl W. Ernst al-’arshiyyah Zailan Moris ABDULLAH ANSARI OF HERAT DIVINE LOVE IN ISLAMIC An early Sufi Master MYSTICISM A. G. Ravan Farhadi The teachings of al-Ghazali and al-Dabbagh THE CONCEPT OF Binyamin Abrahamov SAINTHOOD IN EARLY STRIVING FOR DIVINE ISLAMIC MYSTICISM UNION Bernd Radtke and John O’Kane Spiritual exercises for Suhrawardi SUHRAWARDI AND THE Sufis SCHOOL OF ILLUMINATION Qamar-ul Huda Mehdi Amin Razavi A PSYCHOLOGY OF EARLY SUFI SAMA PERSIAN SUFI POETRY Listening and altered states An introduction to the mystical use Kenneth S. Avery of classical poems J. T. P. de Bruijn MUSLIM SAINTS OF SOUTH ASIA AZIZ NASAFI The eleventh to fifteenth centuries Lloyd Ridgeon Anna Suvorova MUSLIM SAINTS OF SOUTH ASIA The eleventh to fifteenth centuries Anna Suvorova First published 1999 by Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow This edition published 2004 by RoutledgeCurzon 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005 “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2004 Anna Suvorova; English translation M. Osama Faruqi All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-59271-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-34445-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–31764–9 (Print Edition) IN CHERISHED MEMORY OF MY FATHER, AND NOW OF MY MOTHER TOO CONTENTS Foreword ix Acknowledgements xii 1 The Indian tomb 1 2 The hermit of Lahore 35 3 The old man of Ajmer 59 4 The ascetic of Pakpattan 81 5 The peacemaker of Delhi 105 6 The spiritual sovereign of Multan 132 7 The warrior saints 155 8 The mendicant saints 178 Epilogue 199 Notes 204 Glossary 222 Bibliography 230 Index 237 vii FOREWORD Christopher Shackle In many ways the new millennium is indeed a New Age for humanity, a time in which we are all inexorably becoming ever more closely linked with one another. Human nature being what it is, however, the multiplication of increasingly close economic ties and mechanical social connections is a process which too often outruns our capacity to understand and to appreciate the diverse religious and cultural traditions with which we now find ourselves in such immediate contact. To use the fashionable image, the Other against which we once were safely able to define ourselves at such a comfortable distance is now a much more immediate presence. Given the instincts all too successfully instilled by the early evolution of mankind, the instant reaction to this situation is to sense the threat of strangers getting too close rather than to perceive the opportunity of getting to know some different new friends and something of from where they come. Openness is certainly the basic requirement for this process of mutual understanding to take place, and is sorely needed if we are properly to move together into the new world of global co-existence into which we have all so rapidly been thrust. But understanding requires not just openness but also knowledge, as is nowhere more apparent today than in the lethal fog of misunderstandings too often born of closed minds and ignorance which prevents so many from a proper appreciation of the world of Islam. The events of recent years have shown, as never before, the urgent need for informed and sympathetic accounts of the kind which alone can hope to help open hearts as well as minds. It is just such a window of understanding which is opened through this book by Professor Anna Suvorova, herself a distinguished Russian scholar of Urdu literature and South Asian Muslim culture. In its original version, it was deservedly very well received in Russia, which has its own clear needs for studies of this kind. It now appears ix FOREWORD in a somewhat revised version which should do equally well with English readers. Indeed, it might be said with some justification that it now comes before an audience for which it is even more appropriate, given the historic ties between Britain and South Asia and the huge significance of the South Asian Muslim diasporas in Britain and other Western countries today. Her subject is one of absolutely major cultural, religious and historical significance. Collectively, the populations of Pakistan and Bangladesh, with their overwhelming Muslim majorities, and the very large Muslim minority of India constitute the largest sub- group of Muslims in the world today. Although divided by the modern national boundaries established in the twentieth century, they share a common heritage going back to the substantive foundations of Islam in the Indian subcontinent from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards. At the centre of that common patrimony stand the figures of the great Sufi saints, who played so large a role in bringing Islam to South Asia and in crossing the fundamental religious divides of their day in such a way as to appeal also to the Hindu population, and who through the devotion inspired by their poetry and by their tombs have continued to play so large and inspiring a role in the imaginative world of South Asian Islam down to the present day. It is for this reason that, long after the names of so many famous rulers, out- standing poets and learned theologians who flourished in the centuries of Muslim rule in India have been almost completely forgotten, the titles of Sufi masters like Baba Farid Shakarganj or his disciple Nizamuddin Awliya immediately evoke a living presence. While there is no shortage of material on the great Sufis of early South Asian Islam, much of it is not always very easily accessible even to those who have a good idea of what they are looking for. One of the many things that Anna Suvorova has done so well in this book is to bring together so much that cannot easily be found together elsewhere. The sheer number of saints, from many different centuries and widely different geographical areas, is itself impressive as is the clarity with which each is characterized. In compiling her fascinating account, Suvorova naturally draws particularly on the best twentieth-century scholarship, as exemplified in the work of Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Bruce Lawrence, or the late Annemarie Schimmel, all helpfully listed here in the bibliography for those inspired to take their reading further. Useful as this bringing together of the work of others is in itself, the book offers much more. As befitting an author whose own x FOREWORD keen literary sensibility is evident from her passing references to a wide range of authors from Thomas Aquinas to Borges, she makes wonderful use of the large body of poetry and prose associated with the great Sufis, whether as the works of their own pen or the productions of their followers.

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