Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid June 6, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Thursday Suhbat Khwaja Baqi Billah (ra) Aspects of His History and His Teachings Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm. Khwaja Baqi Billah (ra), whose tomb I have sat for many, many, many months in Delhi, was born in middle of the 16th century Christian era. I will tell you a little about his background. He was born the son of a qadi, Abdu Salaam Khilgi, Samarkandi Qureyshi, and he was born in Kabul, sometime in 971 after the Hijra. His father was an alim and a Sufi. His mother was a descendant of Khwaja ‘Ubaydullāh Ahrār (ra), whose name I hope you recognize. He was a very meditative child. Somewhere around six or eight years of age, a teacher and a poet from Samarkand arrived in Kabul from Mecca and Medina, the Mawlana Saadi Kaleb Halawi. He stayed there at the request of the younger brother, Akbar, who was Mirza Mohammed Hakim, who was the viceroy of Kabul at the time. And Mohammed Baqi Billah became his first murīd. He allowed him to accompany him on his journeys, which was to Transaxania. To the regret of some of the scholars there, he gave up his study of being an ‘alim, because he turned his heart and mind towards Tasawwuf. He made tawba under a lot of Naqsbandi awliya-Llāh from Transoxania—first, Abdul Khwaja Ubayed, who was a murīd of Khwaja Maulana Lutfi Allah, and in the presence of Khwaja Iktifar, Shaykh of Samarkand. Initially, the second shaykh was very reluctant to become a Pir of his, but saw how sincere he was and he accepted him. His next spiritual influences was Amir Abdullah Balkhi, who was a very famous Sufi. He spent two years performing meditation and dhikr with him, but still wasn’t spiritually balanced. He left Kabul for India looking for something more. 1 Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid June 6, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Thursday Suhbat He contacted his family, his relations who were there who were prominent in the government of the ruler there. They attempted to persuade him in the service of the Mogul emperors, but he remained separate from that because he did not want to become an alim or he didn’t want to become a military person, and he attached himself again to Sufism. He went to Lahore and he fell in love with someone. No one knows who it was. When the two were separated, he became an ecstatic, a majdhub kind of an individual. He spent his nights reading love poetry and his days sort of wandering the streets of Lahore and sitting in the graveyards. Finally, Khwaja Mohammed Baqi heard of a majdhub, found him but was rejected by him. He was driven away by being having stones thrown at him. His mother had accompanied him on some of these. She was upset by her son’s mental and spiritual state and she prayed for him. After some time, the majdhub relented and allowed him to be with him, or blessed him I guess you would say, because he was not really teaching him. There was some mystical text he studied under him that gave him the illumination he was looking for at that time. He then he went to Delhi, where I met him. He was in the grave and I was on top of the grave. From there he went as far as Sambal in Western UP and he kept searching for a guide. He returned to Lahore and then he went to Kashmir. Such was the seeking of a person who was really interested in finding Tasawwuf. I hope this resonates with some of you who have travelled the world over only to wind up in Bedford, or who never went further than one place. In Kashmir, he made contact with Babu Wali. Babu Wali was a famous Naqshbandi saint who initiated him into the Naqshbandi Tariqah. When Baba Wali died, by that time Khwaja Mohammed Baqi felt the inner feelings of the Naqsbandi Khwajas, who had predicted that he would become an eminent teacher. [Those feelings] started to flow through him. He traveled through Balk and Baharkshan, and there he consulted the local Sufis near Samarkand. He was received by Maulana Khwaja Amkharnadi, whose name you 2 Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid June 6, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Thursday Suhbat recite every Saturday. And the Khwaja Ankhanibi, who was a descendant of Khwaja Nasrudin ‘Ubaydullāh Ahrār (ra), completed the circle back to his own family. As things are, his mother was a relative of his. So he was very quickly initiated into the Naqshbandi Order in three days—completely. His quick ascendance was similar to the one that happened to Shah’abuddīn Suh’rawardi (ra) by Bahā’uddīn Zakariya. Maulana Khwaja advised Khwaja Mohammed Baqi Billah to go back to India. He prophesized at that time that the success of the Naqshbandi Silsila on the subcontinent would happen through his teachings. The senior disciples of Mawlana were jealous of the treatment he got, but he was silenced by the remark that before he had arrived in Amkhina, the Khwaja had already become a perfect Sufi. What the Mawlana did was merely stabilize his state by his company, by his suhbat, by his munasabat. He wasn’t required to start from the very beginning. He just finished his journey with him, which had been going down. So he left Samarkand and went back to Lahore at a time when there was a lot of famine happening. A lot of people were dying in the street of Lahore and, in sympathy, he refused all food, giving his portion to be rationed out to the starving people. After a few weeks, he set out on the road to Delhi and gathered up those who were too weak to walk, put them on his own horse. Outside of every town, he got back on his horse, so that people would not see how charitable he was. He did not want to be seen to be a special person. After his arrival in Delhi, he lived in Feruzibad, where I met him. People don’t know what happened with his mother – whether she stayed in Lahore or she came to Kashmir – but she did migrate with him to Delhi where she worked for him during a time when he was sick. He died on the 25th of Jumada in 1603. He could not have lived there more than four years. He must have arrived in 1599 or 3 Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid June 6, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Thursday Suhbat 1600. He took two wives, and was survived by two young sons. He continued to teach the Naqshbandi Ubadaiyya Uhrar’s teachings. I would like to talk about his teachings. Remember that Ahmad Farūqī Sirhindī (ra) has not come to him at this point. He invited people to follow teachings of ‘Ubaydullāh Ahrār (ra) and you remember that ‘Ubaydullāh Ahrār (ra) was a very, very wealthy man. He had much, much land in Central Asia. A lot of Uzbekistan and Samarkand was owned by him, and he was a very compassionate land owner. At one point, he was such a threat to the ruler, that he, himself, was once imprisoned. But the essence of the Ahrāri teachings, which permeates our teachings to a certain degree (because truly I had never let go of the teachings of the Khwaja Khwajagan) was the attainment or striving for baqa, or the re-integration of a person’s being with the Divine essence. At the same time, [one is] striving to follow the laws of the Shar’īah, developing deeper and deeper love for the Prophet Mohammed (sal), who we talked about recently. The Tariqah at that time was based on wahadat wujud. For those of you who have taken the time or had the interest, were curious and studied the difference between wahadat wujud and wahadat shuhud, the shuduli teachings that came later from Ahmad Farūqī Sirhindī (ra). The teachings of wahadat wujud of Ibn al Araby were based on the concept of fana/extinction. He reminded them that fana was really annihilation of lower human qualities, and the death of the nafs. When Allah (swt) would send His tajalli (illumination, lucid manifestation) into the heart of a seeker from a small particle of His own Divine theophany, His own Essence, that person’s consciousness was changed, transmuted. That person acquired the real state of fana, which was the extinction of the human qualities that held them to this world, as opposed to some kind of ecstatic state. But in that state of fana, the name of that person and the individuality of that person disappeared. Whatever was attributed to 4 Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid June 6, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Thursday Suhbat the seeker was in fact attributed to the Essence, to Allah. That state was called baqa bi’llah, Eternity in Allah. So, you see, this shaykh became known as Baqi Billah. That transformation into fana, in a way, was like a barrier to the re-appearance of the lower or human attributes in a Sufi. Although outwardly, the Sufi kept the physical appearance, the physical existence and operations in the amr al-khalq, the barrier was built. The lower nature and the typical human qualities, though they were apparent to others, were not active in that individual. So the ‘Ubaydullāh Ahrāri school was one where the Pir or Murshid guides the disciples or the murīds towards that mystical stage of fana or baqa.