by Mehru Jaffer
Muinuddin then travelled to Lahore where he meditated for forty days at the shrine of Ali Hujwiri, the eleventh-century Islamic scholar who died in 1077. Hujwiri, was the author of Kashf ul-Mahjub, ‘The Unveiling of the Veiled’, one of the first formal texts on Sufism, where he said that he who knows real love feels no more difficulties and faces no doubts.
Man’s love towards God is a quality which manifests itself in the heart of the pious … so that the believer becomes impatient and restless in his desire for vision … Repose becomes unlawful and rest flees … he is cut off from all habits and associations, and renounces sensual passion and turns towards the court of love and submits to the law of love … It is impossible that man’s love of God should be similar in kind to the love of His creatures towards one another, for the former is desire to comprehend and attain the beloved object, while the latter is a property of bodies.3
Hujwiri lived and wrote at a time when attempts were made by Muslim scholars to bridge the gap between the word and spirit of Islam. From his studies in Central Asia Muinuddin was already familiar with the work of al-Ghazali, the Persian scholar who died in 1111. The principle thought in al-Ghazali’s Revival of Religious Sciences, is that Muslims should obey the will of God as expressed in the Quran if they do not wish to be lost in a world of speculation by mere mortals. However, rituals are not enough. Al-Ghazali also felt that he would never find what he needed in life through intellectual pursuit. Revival of Religious Sciences is al-Ghazali’s monumental attempt at illuminating the relationship between rituals, philosophy and the right spirit, which together provide meaning to life. Music had meant much to al-Ghazali too, just as it had to Hujwiri and the Sufi saints who followed. It aroused in the mystic philosophers a longing and passionate love for the divine and revealed God’s favours beyond description, evident only to the one experiencing ecstasy.
Muinuddin emerged from Hujwiri’s shrine exceptionally inspired and a song burst forth from his heart. He heard himself reciting in Persian: ‘Ganj Bakhsh-e-faiz-e-alam mazar-e-nur-e-khuda, Naaqisan ra pir-e-kamil kaamilaan ra naakhuda.’
Muinuddin praised Hujwiri and hailed him as ‘Data Ganj Baksh’, the perfect pir, because he continues even in death to shower beneficial treasures upon humanity. Hujwiri’s shrine is like light from heaven that illuminates the path of all who have lost their way. To them he is the teacher supreme and Hujwiri is famed among those with righteous souls.
Imagining the visit of Muinuddin Chishti to the shrine of Hujwiri, Muhammad Iqbal, the Indian Muslim poet and philosopher who died in 1938, wrote:
A young man, cypress-tall,
Came from the town of Merv to Lahore.
He went to see the venerable saint,
That the sun might dispel his darkness.
‘I am hemmed in,’ he said, ‘by foes;
I am as a glass in the midst of stones.
Do thou teach me, O sire of heavenly rank,
How to lead my life amongst enemies!’4
From Lahore Muinuddin continued his journey into the heartland. His destination was Ajmer, capital of the Chauhans whose chivalry was the talk of the world. Here Muinuddin hoped to conquer hostility and the heart of the most powerful ruler of the Indian subcontinent.
Muinuddin Arrives in India
Muinuddin was nearly fifty years old when he first set foot in the waste of the Great Indian Desert and eventually scaled a southern slope of the ancient Aravalli range to arrive at Ajaimeru, the invincible capital of the heroic child-king Prithviraj Chauhan.
He trekked wearily across the sea of sand and, a million or so mirages later, when the wandering scholar found himself face to face with an oasis, his brow stiff with much heat and dust unknotted into a mirror of joy. His glance danced along the Nagpathar, or Serpent Rock, which shields this paradise from ferocious dust storms and shifting sand dunes, and further north towards the golden city of the charismatic Chauhan dynasty of Rajput rulers from the seventh century. The waters of the lake before him were waking up to the whisper of the first ray of the sun and Muinuddin reached out to the cup of perfection, draining it until he was dizzy.
Intoxicated as he was with his first drink of water in many days, he was yet able to steady his course and called on himself to be sober. The wind whistled tunes so tantalizing that it made his head spin but he was careful not to get carried away. Moments later he stood still, drenched in a curious kind of contentment. He uncoiled his pale brown headgear made of many lengths of transparent muslin cloth and tugged thorns out off his ankle-length robe. Dusting away the grit still clinging to his clothes of coarse cotton, he inhaled sharply, taking in the flawlessness of the scene spread before him.
‘Friend, I am home!’ he exhaled as he slipped under the generous shade of a large tree to rest his bones tired from endless travel.
Soon he drifted into a deep but troubled sleep that brought forth strange visions. Yet, whenever moments of extreme ecstasy, or agony, threatened to overwhelm him, the memory of his mother, Mahnoor, always returned to soothe him.1 One dominant feature found in nearly every medieval Sufi saint which must be stressed is the role of the mother in the formative years of education. Mahnoor’s smiling eyes caressed his cares away and assured him that all was well.
He saw himself buried in her bosom. He saw her pleading with him to eat just one more morsel of food. He saw her end yet another conversation by encouraging him to share his clothes, meals and toys with children who had less than him. He remembered her voice, narrating tales from far and near as he sat on her lap or rested his head on her arm. When he listened to his mother, he hardly blinked.
‘Ma, what is behind the door?’ he asked.
‘Your father sitting by the window with a book,’ said Mahnoor, tickling the palm of his hand.
‘What is behind the window?’
‘The orchards full of fruits.’
‘And behind the orchards?’
‘The village walls.’
‘Behind the walls?’
‘The mountains.’
‘Beyond the mountains …?’
‘Beyond the mysterious Hindu Kush mountains is the home of the Kushan kings. That is where the sun rises and you must know that without the sun life is nothing,’ she said, pointing eastwards from their home in Sistan.
She told him tales that continued late into the night and often sneaked into his dreams. Sometimes she quoted from Somadeva’s The Sea of Stories and often from Megasthenes, or from Alberuni’s accounts of his travels to the magical land of India. Some tales from the Panchantantra were a favourite, especially of Gumption, who survived three of his better educated friends because he remembered to use common sense when it was needed most.
He loved it when Mahnoor repeated the moral of Gumption’s story, which she did as often as he wished.
Book learning people rightly cherish,
But gumption’s best of all to me.
Bereft of gumption you shall perish,
Like to the Lion-makers three.
He also remembered Mahnoor reciting the verses of al-Maarri, her favourite Arab poet, who died in 1057.
Al-Maarri refused to flatter the rulers of the day in his verse. Almost blind since infancy he found himself a cave instead, far away from the illusions of grandeur celebrated at the royal court. He was an ascetic but one who believed in this life. His religion was reduced to practicing what he preached and composing meditations on life in rational, enlightened language.2
Mahnoor taught before she began the recitation in a voice that to Muinuddin’s ears was the sweetest in the world.
Age after age entirely dark hath run
Nor any dawn led up a rising sun.
Things change and pass, the world unshaken stands
With all its western, all its eastern lands.
The pen flowed and the fiat was fulfilled,
The ink dried on the parchment as fate willed.
Could Chosroes his satraps around him save,
Or Caesar his patric
ians from the grave?3
And,
Humanity, in whom the best
Of this world’s features are expressed,
The chiefs set over them to reign
Are but as moons that wax and wane.
If you unto your sons would prove
By act how dearly them you love,
Then every voice of wisdom joins
To bid you leave them in your loins.4
The sun smiled upon the slumbering pir but despite its increasing warmth he sensed cool hostility approach him. Muinuddin opened his eyes to look into a man’s face staring at him with suspicion. The man was a soldier, a sword fastened to his waistband. Muinuddin stood up to face him, smiling sweetly. Then he bowed in salutation, his right hand touching lightly the left side of his chest.
‘Sulhe kul,’ he said in Arabic, explaining that he came in peace.
‘Who are you? What do you want? And what are you doing here?’ roared the man, one hand on his sword.
‘A mortal called Muinuddin am I, and my wish is to pause a while in this heavenly abode,’ came the reply in the local tongue.
‘Where you stand without permission is the resting place of the royal camels. The animals will return at the end of the day. Mlechcha, you are obviously not of this land and you must immediately be gone …’
‘One day, I shall be gone,’ Muinuddin replied. ‘But first, tell me, are you one of those whose generosity is reputed in the four corners of the world to be as deep as the ocean, affection as warm as the sun and hospitality as vast as the earth?’
The soldier was speechless. He stamped his feet impatiently, turned on his heel and was gone in a hurry. Muinuddin watched the man disappear. He did not hold the simple soldier responsible for his rude reception. After all, guards are paid to put fear into the hearts of foreigners—and he was a stranger in the kingdom of the Rajputs.
Muinuddin had been drawn to this land by his readings of ancient Indian texts during his education in Nishapur, the centre of much intelligent discussion and one of the most luxurious cities of the time. The lessons that he learnt made him curious about a people who were known to perform five sacrifices every day. The rituals began with a sacrifice in honour of Brahma, the creator, preserver and destroyer of the world. Then offerings were made to the celestials, followed by the ancestors and all living creatures, and finally human beings were honoured by lavishing hospitality upon all. Besides, he had been told that Prithviraj, the young ruler of most of northern India, had sprinkled his court with men of courage and wisdom. Muinuddin could hardly wait to experience all this for himself.
India at this time had accumulated a vast amount of knowledge, and enjoyed the best food and clothing in the world, which they produced on their own. All those who sought a better standard of living envied its prosperity and were keen to obtain a share of its cotton, rice and sugar. The country was also home to perhaps the most important scientists of all time, like the mathematicians who invented the system of counting with nine digits and a zero. It intrigued Muinuddin that despite its worldly success Hinduism insisted that the only knowledge really worth having was one that eliminated desire and showed what a mass of illusions the world really is; it believed that knowledge alone would not be able to abolish suffering.
At the time that Muinuddin arrived at Ajmer, life had become very difficult for its people. Ajmer, which shared the seat of power with Delhi, was the envy of all those who wanted a piece of India’s wealth, and this included the wild tribes of Central Asia. The nomads had periodically spilled over the naked steppes from their homes tucked away high in the mountains in search of better grazing lands, but now they wanted much more than fresh pastures to graze on. They galloped down in large hordes slaying each other and anyone else who dared to stand between them and their loot.
Prithviraj, the twenty-three-year old king, had just chased away the marauding menace Muhammad Ghori. Countless Turkic-speaking Afghan warriors like Muhammad Ghori, descendant from the Turkoman Ghor tribe, had emerged out of relative obscurity from the mountains southeast of Herat in central Afghanistan to defeat rival Ughuz tribesmen, the Ghuzz, at Ghazni. The glittering capital of Ghazni, situated between Kabul and Kandahar in modern-day Afghanistan, was sacked and captured by Ghori, who was impatient to proceed to the lush plains which housed the mostly divided kingdoms of India. The Ghuzz had returned from India loaded with riches; no wonder Ghori was banging relentlessly on the northern gates of Prithviraj’s kingdom.
A war between Ghori and Indian rulers over a fortress in Bhatinda in the Punjab had already been fought near the watershed of the Sutlej and Yamuna rivers. Ghori had been defeated and taken captive by Prithviraj but released by the king when he pleaded for mercy in accordance with the chivalrous but somewhat rigid rules of fair play that Rajputs adhered to.
War for ancient Indian rulers was elevated to a gigantic tournament with numerous regulations that their enemies often did not know of or simply did not follow. According to the ideal each conquest followed a sacred law which dictated that war should be waged for glory alone rather than lower aims of wealth and power. A battle that was fought for any other reason was dismissed as a ‘satanic conquest’. The ghastly sadism of rulers elsewhere in the world, who were often rumoured to flay captives and massacre non-combatants, was unknown in a land where the most striking feature of the civilization remained its humanity.
Alberuni’s travelogue quotes from a letter written by Anandpal, ruler of most of northwest India to Mahmud Ghazni who raided India seventeen times. ‘I have heard that Turks are rebelling against you. If you want I can send you much of the army with my son. Please do not take a wrong signal from this. Although you have conquered me, I do not want you to be conquered by someone else.’5
In the same spirit of fair play and with a more idealistic attitude towards war, Prithviraj had allowed Ghori to return to Ghazni and the air was thick with anticipation as to what he would do next. Throughout his journey from the northwest, through Multan, Lahore and Samana to Ajmer, Muinuddin had heard travellers express doubt and fear over Prithviraj’s decision to let Ghori go instead of finishing him off politically.
Muinuddin shuddered at the thought of more war. He recalled his childhood in Khorasan, once the cultural capital of Persia, which had subsequently collapsed into chaos after tribesmen driven by vendetta turned his hometown, mostly populated by Arab, Chinese, Persian, Indian and Turkic scholars and traders, into a battlefield. Muinuddin’s Arab ancestors had fled war for generations. Carefully avoiding the bloody intrigues in capital cities like Damascus and Baghdad, they married into Persian homes and chose a life of learning instead of horse trading. They preferred to cultivate land for a living in the relative peace of the wetlands between Iran and southwestern Afghanistan. This was a prosperous region in medieval times gifted as it was with two lakes, fed each spring by the waters of the Helmand river gushing down the Hindu Kush mountains and crisscrossing its way southwest through the desert to empty into the marshes of Sistan.
Muinuddin had not forgetten the day the Ghuzz dynasty was defeated and Ghazni was torched. Predicting further acts of revenge Giyasuddin, his father, had decided to leave the southern lands of Khorasan to seek refuge further north, in Nishapur, the domain of the brave Seljuk ruler Ahmad Sanjar. However, Muinuddin’s Persian-speaking Shia Muslim family waited for the dust kicked up by warring horsemen to settle, the sky to emerge from its billowing cover of dark smoke and the shrieks of women and children to subside before taking to the road. For the unfortunate city of Ghazna had burnt for seven days and nights, during which the plunder, devastation and slaughter did not stop. Every man who was found was slain and all the women and children were taken prisoner. All the palaces and edifices of the Ghuzz dynasty that till recently had no parallel in the world were destroyed, except for the tombs of Mahmud Ghazni, the greatest of the Ghuzz, and two of his relatives. Now, having reached the land which he had set out for in search of spiritual and intellectual riches, Muinuddin coul
d not bear the thought of more death and destruction.
Hard on the harsh heels of the soldier followed strains of music that made Muinuddin forget his musings. Happiness stirred in him once again. He recognized the strums of the single string of an ektara approaching him. But he had never heard such lyrical renderings before, performed to the springtime melody of the Basant Raga.
When the breeze blows from the southern
mountains,
And brings the love-god with it,
When masses of flowers burst forth
To rend the hearts of parted lovers,
Krishna is grieved at separation from Radha …6
‘This is the magic of Jayadeva Goswami,’ Muinuddin muttered to himself.
The music continued on its path, tugging Muinuddin with it. He happily followed, humming languorously along with the singer, his feet aching to pirouette.
When the poet Jayadeva sings,
Through his pious description
Of the deeds of the parted lover,
May love arise in hearts full of zeal …7
The erotic verses composed by Jayadeva in the kingdom of the Cholaganga rulers had been picked up by scores of minstrels who meandered all over the land singing praises of the Hindu deity Krishna and his consort Radha, as though the lovers were not two beings but one; as though one was the creation of the other, both waiting to experience the oneness that all worshippers crave for with the one they worship. Jayadeva’s compositions perhaps echoed people’s innermost desires and he was therefore being claimed by everyone as their own—from the devotees of the mother goddess to Brahmins, Buddhists and monotheists.
