The Book of Muinuddin Chishti

by Mehru Jaffer

  Despite his passionate faith in Muhammad’s message of love, peace, unity and goodness, Muinuddin tried to understand why his own life was so tortured. The memory of his family being forced to flee every few years like fugitives from the wrath of people, the Arabs, Persians, Turks, Afghans and even the Chinese, and forever at war with each other, cast a lasting shadow on his psyche. He continued to shed tears at the thought of what Muslims were doing today to prove their love for Muhammad. ‘Ghori too is a Muhammad, but only in name,’ he lamented.

  Many of the lessons he had learnt in the classrooms and magnificent libraries of Bukhara, Samarkand, Baghdad, Multan and Lahore, along with perceptions picked up during his constant travels for almost half a century, came back to him now. He tried to sieve the essence of every experience and written word that had taught him about life and concluded that folly is not worth the fear it has the power to arouse in people. For folly is merely the absence of wisdom, just as bad is the absence of good and darkness the absence of light. He was convinced that in order to counter present-day cruelty what was needed more than ever before was for people to understand the importance of compassion and to actually exercise it.

  Muinuddin rested his head on one hand, his elbow digging into the sand as he turned on his side to listen again to what his fellow traveller was saying. ‘Prithviraj has been a good king, but a little more than goodness is needed. Community leaders have to be wise at this moment of gathering insecurities. I remember how we had hailed our young king after he defeated Ghori. We had praised and loved him even more. But now he is being foolish. He has become negligent of the dangers that Ajmer and its people face. He is too busy teasing and annoying Jayachand, his rival. Affairs of the heart have distracted our young king away from concerns of the state. Wisdom is to know when to listen to the heart, when to follow the mind, and when to appeal to both emotion and reason before deciding what to do,’ the man was saying, as if to himself, and Muinuddin listened to Prithviraj Chauhan’s story in rapt attention.

  ‘For more than a hundred years the people here have enjoyed relative peace. The Chauhan king Ajaya branched away from the ruling family around Lake Sambhar to build Ajmer as his capital. This was a century or so ago. By the middle of this century Ajaya’s descendants added Haryana and Delhi to a vast kingdom that touched the borders of Persia. People from other parts of the world are no strangers to this land. And we are not strangers to the world outside our own. Where did you say you come from?’

  Muinuddin said that he was born in the Persian kingdom of Khorasan to an Arab family originally from Mecca.

  ‘That is how it has been throughout the history of mankind. Born in one place and dead in another,’ the man said thoughtfully. ‘A human being is not a tree so he does not bother with roots. Human beings have legs and will use their feet to move and to meet other people. But their wandering also causes them to clash and when better sense prevails they accept each other. This love and hate for one another is as old as the human race itself.

  ‘Take the Chauhans as an example. This is a clan of warriors famous for its valour, but it is of unproven origin. When they were just warriors it did not matter but once they became powerful rulers the Chauhans claimed that they were born of fire. The clan traced its origin to a mythical forefather said to have emerged from a sacrificial fire lit on Mount Abu, west of Ajmer. This legend is important to these people, wherever their ancestors may have come from, to feel at home here and to be accepted by the people they rule.

  ‘Today there are countless kingdoms that keep changing in size and importance, and their relationship with each other also changes. In the midst of rivalries amongst different rulers we, the people, have learnt to enjoy life. Despite skirmishes between the many kingdoms and surprise attacks from rulers to the east and south, the lives of our elders were free of fear till the arrival of the heartless Mahmud Ghazni. Mahmud surprised the people of this land with his aggression. When he destroyed our places of worship it is not our god that Mahmud negated but beauty, history and the deep devotion of the artisans and masons to their art. What would you say about Mahmud’s hatred towards this land and his barbaric attack on our way of life? Do you think it is proper to impose your own way of life upon others? The religion Mahmud practised and the way he made war was alien to our people. But I have also heard that Mahmud was a fine administrator. What do you think?’

  Although Mahmud had died more than a hundred years before Muinuddin was born, Muinuddin was familiar with stories of the Turkic warrior. He also remembered reading the works of Alberuni, the court historian chosen by Mahmud to accompany him to India. Muinuddin felt that Mahmud refused to appreciate the way of life of the people of this land because that was how he could justify his hate for it. And he had to hate it first in order to fight it, to destroy it, before he could loot. Mahmud had probably realized that the wealth he was after would never be his if he did not take it by force. He had chosen war because he was a man in a hurry, impatient for instant power and wealth. The warrior had no time to waste in understanding the culture of the people he was conquering or studying the complicated rules of warfare practised by the Rajputs. He wanted the treasury of the wealthy Rajputs to be his in order to build an empire that would include Kashmir, the Punjab and parts of Persia, with Ghazni as the capital. Although he was vicious towards those who he thought stood in his way, Mahmud’s subjects praised him for being just and respected him for attracting renowned poets and scholars to his court. Muinuddin shared everything he knew about Mahmud with the stranger, adding that the Turk had been blind in his practice of Islam and did not want to see any good in other religions.

  ‘This world is indeed a garden where flowers will always be found along with thorns and weed in the midst of good grass,’ his companion commented. ‘What worries me about Prithviraj is that he does not take the threat posed by Muhammad Ghori seriously. I wish he would. This is not the time to have picked a quarrel with Jayachand, the king of Kannauj. Now the two most powerful kings of northwest India are at war with each other and the enemy waits for the weakest moment to punch us all.’

  As it happened, Jayachand, the mighty king of Kannauj and Benaras, was envious of the popularity and chivalry of Prithviraj who was in love with Samyukta, Jayachand’s daughter. The king wasted no time in inviting all the eligible suitors from far and near to his court, except Prithviraj, of course, so the princess could choose her desired spouse from among them. To further insult his political rival, Jayachand placed a statue of Prithviraj at the doorstep of his court. The august assembly held its breath as Samyukta appeared from the inner chamber of the palace to her father’s court, garland in hand, and walked past all the princes, straight to Prithviraj’s statue. Once she had garlanded the statue, Prithviraj appeared from his place of hiding and swept the princess off her feet and on to his horse and galloped away into the sunset.

  ‘This incident hurt Jayachand’s pride more than anything else. Ajmer is now buzzing with rumours that anger has made Jayachand blind as he plans to befriend Ghori and encourage the Turk to attack Prithviraj’s twin capitals of Ajmer and Delhi.’

  What troubled the elderly man was Jayachand’s lack of wisdom in doing so. Ghori was after booty alone and he coveted the affluence of Kannauj and Benaras as much as that of Ajmer. Once he had defeated Prithviraj would Jayachand not be his next victim?

  Bibi

  Muinuddin had hardly shut his eyes for a few hours of rest after bidding his companion goodbye when Ajmer was attacked.

  He awoke to find the blanket of stars that had covered him the previous night cruelly pulled away. He groaned and cried as he felt countless camels, elephants and horses trample past him. Shafts of numerous spears and arrows seemed to poke him back into the earth that no longer resembled gold or silver. Every part of his body hurt, yet he thrashed around in the dirt, rolling violently on the ground, rattling his body to its root and tearing at his clothes caked in the sweat and blood of humans and animals. Through the pain he saw crim
son trickling down sand dunes and the thought that now he had become death, the destroyer of worlds, made him lose consciousness.

  His prolonged state of unconsciousness brought on a continuous flash of images of flesh fighting bones, water poisoning blood and bodies buried under mountains of ash. He saw vast stretches of thickets, lush after rains, dotted with solitary clearings where countless men sat unaware of each other, silent and contemplative, wearing the wind as girdle and possessing powers denied to ordinary mortals, their naked bodies inured to pain and waiting for the moment of immeasurable joy. He saw ascetics witness the past, present and future, destroy enemies with a glare and wave away famine with mutters, then fly into the heavens and greet divinities in their abodes. He heard voices explain to him that in India people do not negate life but through the thirst of holy men for greater wisdom gain knowledge not found so far in existing scriptures, holy books and philosophies.

  Muinuddin wanted to breathe, but often it was a battle for him. Then out of the confusion order appeared one day. When he opened his eyes he saw a woman kneeling beside him, washing his wounds with water from the river. He could hear voices around him describing how Muhammad Ghori had stormed into Ajmer despite having agreed on a truce with Prithviraj. Relieved at the earlier gesture of goodwill, Prithviraj had relaxed his guard and ordered his soldiers to rest, and while the Rajput army slept, Ghori had forced himself upon Ajmer in the still, dark hours of the morning. In the midst of the bloodshed and cries of chaos that followed Ghori rejoiced that the gates of all of northern India had at last been unlocked for him.

  There were rumours that Ghori had killed Prithviraj. Some others said that the Rajput king had been hounded and caught and taken prisoner by Ghori on his way back to Kabul, leaving the conquered territory in the plains of India to Qutbuddin Aibak whom Ghori had groomed in warfare. Aibak had occupied Delhi and attacked Kannauj, slaying Jayachand and carrying away loot on 1400 camels. Soon Gwalior fell, and then Gujarat, while Ajmer itself was sacked, occupied and garrisoned. Prithviraj Chauhan, Jayachand and Paramardev Candella, the three most powerful kings of northern India, had been defeated for perpetually being at war with one another.

  Now, along with Muinuddin, the entire desert seemed to mourn the outbreak of battle. Troubled winds blasted away the last speck of cloud, banishing moisture from the atmosphere and leaving the land to singe in the naked rays of the sun. Dust storms beat their breasts, making sand sheets ripple and sand dunes collapse, ferociously scattering fine-grained material that glistened in the unbearable heat like countless teardrops. And every windblown particle of silt swirling madly around the region took upon itself the task of scribbling one out of the numerous feats that had made Prithviraj so heroic, praising his mastery in every walk of royal life, from combat to literature to politics. Soon stories like the one about the day when Prithviraj had gallantly wrestled and killed a lion with bare hands to protect his companions were visiting every little hamlet in the desert. Praises were also penned about his knowledge of the rare art of targeting arrows by concentrating on sounds without even looking at the mark. Because of his daring deeds Delhi too had come under the domain of the king of Ajmer. But now it was Aibak who was to make Delhi his capital city.

  Defeated as he was in spirit, Muinuddin recovered sufficiently to be able to speak and walk under the care of the lady. From their sporadic conversations he discovered that she belonged to an aristocratic Rajput family. During the murder and mayhem that had prevailed the family had discovered a secure, secret location where they had brought Muinuddin when they had found him lying among nettles, hardly able to breathe and struggling to remain alive. The ache of physical ruin was still there but slight sensations in his soul curiously calmed him. He seemed to draw strength from within a pool whirling in a vast ocean of light that led him to appreciate creation and deal with destruction. He knew now that he would spend the rest of his life quenching this spiritual thirst, going deeper yet from darkness to light until he became part of the light. Muinuddin voiced his intentions to the lady who had been attending to him untiringly. When he described reality to her as both virtue and vice, she nodded, and when he doubted that only goodness existed, she agreed. He said that the purpose of his life was to find out where he stood in the midst of black and white, and she offered to join him on this journey.

  As she caressed away his pain, she too discovered her heart become hungry for love and she made up her mind to spend the rest of her life with Muinuddin after she had nursed him back to health. Now that he could see her, now that he could talk to her, would he like to marry her as well, she wanted to know.

  Muinuddin blushed at life’s infinite willingness to give, again and again. Weighed down by gratitude, his eyelids lowered as he accepted her proposal. Moments later he forced himself to take a deep breath and open wide the window of his soul to gaze into her eyes, to sneak into her spirit before asking her if he could call her Bibi Ummatullah, the Lady of the Muslim community.

  ‘What is in a name? I am what I am,’ she exclaimed. The thunder in his mind and lightning in his soul made his body shake less, and he healed a little more as she assured him that his love alone was her ultimate salvation, that it was entirely up to him to describe her in whatever way he saw her.

  He found her spellbound by the Vaishnavism cult that had started far away in the southern kingdoms of the country but had gradually submerged the entire subcontinent.1

  She sat at his feet and recited from the glorious Vedic hymn of creation, said to be one of the oldest surviving records of philosophical doubt in the history of the world about chaos, so mysterious, and the primeval void, so deep:

  There was no nonexistent; and there was no existent at that time. There was neither the mid-space nor the heaven beyond. What stirred? And in whose control? Was there water? The abyss was deep.

  Neither death nor deathlessness was there then. There was no sign of night or day. That One breathed without wind through its independent power. There was nothing other than it.

  Darkness there was, hidden by darkness, in the beginning. A signless ocean was everything here. The potential that was hidden by emptiness—that One was born by the power of heat.

  Desire evolved then in the beginning, which was the first seed of thought. Searching in their hearts through inspired thought, sages found the connection of the existent in the nonexistent.

  Their cord was stretched cross-wise. Was there something above? Something below? Were there powers of insemination and powers of expansion? Was independence below, offering above?

  Who really knows? Who shall here proclaim it? Whence things came to be, whence this creation. The gods are on this side, along with the creation of this world. So then who does know whence it came to be?

  This creation, whence it came to be, whether was made or not—he who is its overseer in the highest heaven, he surely knows. Or even he does not know …?2

  On the day of his wedding, Muinuddin was filled with immense joy at the thought of sharing his life with Bibi, a companion with whom he could share his life’s passions and longings.

  Gharib Nawaz, a Friend of the Poor

  Muinuddin and Bibi returned hand in hand to Ajmer to find that the heart of the city was still bleeding. Clouds of stench rising from the pyres of those who had lit their own funeral pyres to escape humiliation and death at the hands of the victorious army of conquerors tried to cover the bruises afflicted on the city by the recent battle. But the blisters were beginning to fester, to bubble and to boil. Those who had survived the carnage now foraged in the debris of their torched homes for any sign that would help them to start living again.

  Bibi wanted to lead Muinuddin to the relative safety and comfort of her aristocratic father’s palace but Muinuddin decided to build a mud hut instead as their home. She offered to give him at least a pillow for comfort but all he asked for was her arm to rest on. Muinuddin quoted for her the example of the Prince of Balk from the eighth century who was humbled by a stranger walkin
g in the middle of the night on the roof of his palatial bedroom, making it impossible for the prince to sleep. After he was caught and questioned as to what he was doing on the royal rooftop, the stranger replied that he was in search of his camel. When the prince rebuked him saying that the rooftop was certainly no place to look for a lost animal, the stranger agreed, but added that indeed the luxury of a king’s bed was no place either to seek the divine. This uncanny conversation with a total stranger in his own home prompted the prince to renounce the palace and step out into the real world to explore the meaning of life.

  The story of the Prince of Balk brought to Bibi’s mind poet-saints like Basavanna, a Hindu reformer from Karnataka, who inspired wandering minstrels in search of the divine to leave their permanent homes and stay away from the prescriptions of interfering priests.

  Basavanna was a passionate devotee of Shiva, whom he has referred to as the Lord of the Meeting Rivers in numerous poems. He was against orthodoxy and the rigid rules that suppress spontaneity and divide people into hierarchical groups.

  ‘Those who have riches build temples for Shiva, the Lord of the Meeting Rivers. What shall I build? I am poor. My legs are the pillars; this body of mine is the temple.’1

  A new order was struggling to be born in India at this time forcing previously mighty heroes and kings to give up their glorious way of life. It was a time to bury old, corrupted way of worship, create new ones and identify fresh ways of reaching the divine. Personal worship of a deity of an individual’s choice was noticed for the first time around the eighth century in the hymns of certain communities in southern India. Now poets in the north were inspiring people to dismiss religious rituals and professing real religion as being a total surrender to the divine dwelling in individual hearts. In the south, devotion was focussed on the cult of both Shiva and Vishnu as the source of infinite bliss and in the north Rama and Krishna, both incarnations of Vishnu, were the favoured deities.