by Mehru Jaffer
The Quran, the word of God, was revealed to Muhammad and contains many mystical verses. Because of the complexity of certain truths the Quran conveys them to man through parables. For instance, Verse 24 of the Holy Book, which refers to the Light, makes it clear that it is impossible to describe God in any human language and therefore focuses on the illumination experienced by the minds of those willing to be guided by the Creator.
God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of his light is, as it were, that of a niche containing a lamp; the lamp is (enclosed) in glass, the glass (shining) like a radiant star: (a lamp) lit from a blessed tree—an olive tree that is neither of the east nor of the west—the oil whereof (is so bright that it) would well-nigh give light (of itself) even though fire had not touched it: light upon light!3
Masters of the heart, like Muinuddin, are remembered for their radiant spirituality and as friends of God enjoying special powers that enable them to mediate in a loving manner between divine and the devotee. Muinuddin and his spiritual teachers spent their time contemplating the meaning of Muhammad’s life and trying to experience the divine. They tried to imagine the inner reality of Muhammad and guided younger devotees to do the same. They are respected because they first brought discipline into their own lives and became an example for others to emulate, encouraging the practice of different techniques of meditation that have now been formalized.
Many Muslims continue to oppose the intimate, mystical path preferred by the Sufi. Although, as Ramadan Tariq eloquently clarifies, ‘This opposition becomes meaningless as the intimate “mystical way” is at the heart (it is the heart) of the “path toward the spring”. Spirituality is the first requirement of faithfulness. There is no faithfulness without spirituality.’4
Muhammad lived by rules that he believed in and Sufis aspire to do the same. That is why Sufis are admired except perhaps by the orthodox, the worldly and the sceptic. None of these people care if mystics are persecuted and one of the main reasons for their resistance to accept Sufism is the Sufi claim of a direct experience of God without involving established authority and official religion. Today, Sufism continues to be a challenge for rigid legalists who dominate so much of Islamic life.
Muinuddin’s Legacy
The Chishtiya order as it exists today is perhaps nothing like the life led by Muinuddin. There is no record that Muinuddin even called himself a Sufi. But over time his teachings have led to a lifestyle followed by his spiritual descendants that is recognized today as the Chishtiya tariqa, or way of life. The Chishtis are loved for their practice of tolerance and affection for the poor in accordance with the teachings of Muinuddin. The highest form of devotion for the Chishtis is to redress the misery of those in distress, to fulfil the need of the helpless and to feed the hungry.
An important aspect of Muinuddin’s way of life was that he did not insist on converting non-Muslims to his religion and he did not have any stipulations on who could visit him. His was an open house where piety was encouraged and food and music attracted both the prince and the pauper. The etiquette practised by Muinuddin was emulated by members of his family and followers and was gradually formalized into a set path practised by all Chishtis. The Chishtis evoked the divine through zikr, the repetition of God’s name at a sama, the evening concert where a dynamic dialogue between the human lover and divine beloved is enacted as a spiritual exercise to inspire the heart to open itself to the eternal soul till all awareness of the self is extinguished in fana (obliteration of the self) and there is no memory of anything except love.
This is an exercise in conquering duality. Sufis believe that duality is the cause of all pain. For the Sufi, reality is very real. It is not an illusion or nothingness. It is pure love. There is just one reality, they hold, but its images, forms and names are many. The moment of moksha for the Sufi is the lifting of the veil that hides reality from the self. This is possible when all awareness of the self, that is, the ego, is obliterated and the secret of creation, of its source and unity, is revealed.
The Chishtis are pious but are known to love music and poetry. They consider the recitation of the Quran to be the most mellifluous sound in the world. Music and dance are forbidden in traditional Islam but have been inseparable from mystical forms of worship in the Indian subcontinent. In fact, it was music that was to a great extent responsible for the rapid spread of Sufism in India. Although musical concerts may not be essential to worship they remain an important tradition. Musical concerts are the means by which the Chishtis reached out to the world of the divine. At the same time, music helped to create an ambience for the hearts of devotees to open up far more readily than a serious sermon on spirituality ever would.
The Chishtis are most respected for their gentle manners and frugal life style. Hamiduddin, a student of Muinuddin and later father-in-law of Bibi Hafiza Jamal, Muinuddin’s only daughter, renounced the world. He was a vegetarian, practised breath control like the yogis of the land, lived amongst peasants and greatly Indianized the Chishti Sufi order. Hafiza too was spiritual and lived in a mud hut with her husband, who was a farmer.
Some scholars question the ‘cloudy’ beginning of Muinuddin Chishti’s Indian venture. Revered as the founder of the most humane and peaceful of all Indian Sufi orders, Muinuddin Chishti may even have started as a mystic who championed faith, placing the task of propagation of Islam above everything else, intolerant of followers of other faiths and merciless to opponents.
The portrait of the saint, quick to anger or to retaliate painted by hagiographic legends differs considerably from the textbook image of Muinuddin Chishti as the ‘ocean of charity’ and the ‘sun of compassion’, of a man who corresponds to the very name of the saint (Muin, one who gives help, renders assistance). Generally speaking … the individuality of the founder of the Chishti order escapes the modern researcher, being wholly levelled by legends … The literature ascribed to him are entirely inauthentic, and reference to him in chronicles goes back to the end of the fourteenth century when he had already started being venerated as a most eminent saint in India. He has not left any doctrinal works and verses, which, in spite of all the unreliability of Sufi poetry as a historical source, could at least clarify aspects of his personality.1
It is quite possible that over time Muinuddin Chishti’s image was softened by followers who did not tire of repeating stories of the Sufi’s boundless charity and selfless love for all human beings. It is likely that the way we know Muinuddin Chishti today is an image that flowered posthumously after his death in 1236.
The death anniversary of Muinuddin Chishti, celebrated as the saint’s urs, or union of the soul with God, is the biggest Sufi festival in the Indian subcontinent. It is held annually at the pir’s tomb (Ajmer Sharif) in Ajmer in accordance with the Muslim lunar calendar. Pilgrims representing all of humanity, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, assemble at Ajmer peacefully out of love and reverence for Muinuddin, making his dream of humanity being unified by love come true.
According to Ibn Arabi in The Mecca Openings, pilgrims travel to the site where a saint is buried in search of ecstasy and a feeling of oneness with the divine. In his treatise he writes,
One of the conditions of the witnessing knower, the master of hidden stations and places of witnessing, is that he knows that places have an influence upon subtle hearts … The finding of our hearts in some places is greater than in others … At all the places where the pious perished in this world, and in the places where their influences lingered, subtle hearts are affected. Thus we come back to the differing excellence of places of worship in the finding of the heart.2
Following the collapse of the Delhi Sultanate in the early fifteenth century, Muinuddin’s shrine was abandoned and his ancestors dispersed to different corners of the country. It was Sultan Hushang of Malwa who safeguarded Muinuddin’s resting place in the fifteenth century. The complex was further enlarged and embellished by Akbar in the sixteenth century after his prayers for an heir were answered.
Much of the ritual architecture of Ajmer Sharif has been built in fulfilment of the vows made to the saint by Mughal kings and military leaders in exchange for victory over Rajput rulers. During the days of the Delhi Sultanate the journey to Ajmer was treacherous. The town was not on the major caravan routes and was subject to attacks by Rajput soldiers and armed thugs. But after Emperor Akbar travelled to Ajmer, the journey became less dangerous, turning Ajmer Sharif into a place of mass pilgrimage.
According to historians Akbar first learnt of Muinuddin Chishti after he heard a qawwali sung in praise of the saint in Agra. Akbar performed his first pilgrimage to Ajmer in 1562, after which he ordered a road from Fatehpur Sikri to Ajmer, marking every three kilometres with a small tower that stands to this day. Now that the emperor was a devotee of Muinuddin Chishti it did not take long for the people to follow.
On his return from the battle over Chittor, Akbar visited Ajmer for a second time in 1568. He prayed at the shrine and was thankful for his victory. He left a huge cauldron in the premises for use by the open kitchen where numerous pilgrims and the homeless continue to be fed.
Akbar singled out the descendants of Muinuddin Chishti and gave them gifts—but above all he gave them respect. To commemorate the rights returned to them, the saint’s descendants continue to perform the ritual dege Chittor kusha, the cauldron of victory over Chittor. Every year the custodians of Ajmer Sharif put up a show of force as they symbolically quarrel with each other over the rice in the cauldron.
There are two cauldrons in the first courtyard of Ajmer Sharif. In the second courtyard is the saint’s mausoleum. The engraved silver panelled doors lead to a fretted cubical structure inlaid with mother of pearl, inside which is the tomb covered in green brocade.
Akbar rebuilt the main shrine with a gilded dome in 1579 and had the following inscribed in gold on three sides of its cylindrical base:
Master of masters, Muinuddin,
Noblest of saints on the face of the earth,
The sun on the celestial sphere of the universe
The monarch on the throne of the realm of faith.
What to say about his beauty and perfection?
They are obvious from impregnable fortress.
O, your door is like Kaaba for the faithful,
Sun and moon rub their foreheads on your threshold.
At your shrine similarly prostrate
Hundreds of thousands of kings like the sovereign of China.
Your door attendants are guardians of heaven,
Since in its sanctity your tomb is like paradise.
The particle of its dust has the quality of perfumes,
The drop of its moisture is like transparent water.
O Allah, till the sun and the moon last,
Let the lamp of the Chishtis shine brightly.3
Akbar was a devotee of Salim Chishti, a revered Sufi. The emperor believed that the divine intervention of the saint was responsible for the birth of his son and heir. Akbar called his son Salim, who later became Jahangir, the fourth Mughal ruler. Emperor Jahangir was born in Ajmer and lived there for three years. Like his father, Jahangir donated a cauldron in 1614 in which it is possible to cook food for five thousand pilgrims at a time. Jahangir wrote: ‘I gave to faqirs and attendants money with my own hands, altogether 6,000 rupees in cash, hundred robes, seventy rosaries of pearl, coral and amber …’4 He framed the cenotaph with a fence made of pure gold (later replaced by Aurangzeb with a silver fence). It is in Ajmer that Jahangir accepted the credentials of the first British ambassador Thomas Roe who was sent in 1615 to the Mughal court by James I.
Jahangir’s son Shahjahan too believed that Dara Shikoh, his first child, was born in answer to his prayers at Ajmer Sharif. In 1637 he built a mosque with eleven arches of white marble and the Shahjahani gate. This structure is flanked on both sides with spacious halls for ritual gatherings and the adjoining open area is dotted with tombs of the saint’s disciples and descendants, nobles and military leaders. Dara grew up to be a man endowed with an attractive mystical aura. He was a philosopher and writer and nursed a special relationship with Ajmer. Aurangzeb, Dara’s younger brother, was less attracted to the spirit of Islam and more to Islamic law. Aurangzeb visited Ajmer too but, sadly, after he had made sure that his orders to execute Dara had been carried out. However, on another visit to Ajmer, Aurangzeb was so moved by the qawwali he heard at the shrine that he left lots of gold for the musicians. He also lifted the ban imposed by him on the performance of music at the shrine.
Jahanara, Aurangzeb’s sister, was mystically inclined like Dara Shikoh and regarded Muinuddin Chisti as the supreme Sufi saint of India. She visited the shrine often and describes her pilgrimage to Ajmer coinciding with the death anniversary of the saint.
I went to the holy sanctuary and rubbed my pale face on the dust of the threshold. From the doorway to the blessed tomb I went barefoot, kissing the ground. Having entered the dome, I went around the light-filled tomb of my master seven times, sweeping it with my eyelashes, and making the sweet smelling dust of that place the mascara of my eyes.5
Bibi Hafiz Jamal, Muinuddin Chishti’s Sufi daughter, is buried in an exclusive women’s corner called Begum Dalan surrounded by the graves of Mughal princesses. The third courtyard is crossed through the chhatri or awning gate leading to the solitary cells used by Sufis for meditation. In a corner is a well cut out of the rock with steep steps moist with history. The waters of this well are considered as holy as the waters of the abe zamzam in Mecca.
Pilgrimage to the shrine by members of the royal family made Ajmer so popular that the rich and powerful soon crowded the town with more mosques, covered courts and countless guesthouses. Maya Bai, the wet nurse of princess Zebunnisa, Aurangzeb’s daughter, built a red sandstone mosque and Bai Tilokdi, the daughter of Tansen, the court musician of Akbar, built another. Rajput clans and Marathas gave their due as well. In 1756 Santoji, the Maratha leader, laid out a big park called Chishti Chaman near the Madar gate.
The shrine of a Sufi is symbolic of the spot where heaven and earth meet. It is a spiritual map used by pilgrims to pay respect to good human beings who have lived and meditated here and to begin their own pilgrimage towards the source, the first cause of all life.
The Shambala Guide to Sufism points out that a pilgrimage to tombs increases one’s spiritual focus through contact with the earthly remains of a saint. Visitors to the tomb consider the saint to be eternally alive. They make offerings in the form of a vow before asking for a wish to be fulfilled. If the wish comes true the pilgrim pays respect to the saint by paying for repairs to the tomb or with gifts for the caretaker of the shrine.
Legend has it that Muinuddin Chishti actually came to India in search of Pushkar. After all, he did not stay too long in Multan, Lahore or Delhi and hurried to Ajmer, eleven kilometres from Pushkar, a far more pious city. It is here Muinuddin Chishti, the scholar, hoped to continue metaphysical discourses with learned Hindu pandits. In memory of that unrealized journey flowers are routinely brought even today from the Brahma temple in Pushkar as gifts to Ajmer Sharif. Over time, rituals in the shrine have fallen into an interesting fusion of the sacred and the profane, combining colourful Hindu and Muslim rituals. Purists have often tried to control some ‘lowly’ superstitions practised here, and the unrestrained revelry and rituals performed in memory of the saint are frowned upon, particularly during the urs which includes fairs and performances by qawwals, local buffoons and nightingales of easy virtue, cockfights and wrestling matches.
The root of the qawwali performances at the shrine of Sufi saints may be traced back to Muinuddin Chishti’s passionate attachment to music. Muinuddin Chishti had requested Hamiduddin Nagori to compile Risalai-sama, a treatise on the art of listening to music. The theory formulated by Nagori on three stages of ecstasy during a sama included ecstasy evoked by psychotechnics, the proper state of ecstasy, and the state beyond ecstasy. Excessive enthusiasm of the Chishtis for sama later pushed th
e sobriety of the original practice of allowing music to lead one to communion with the divine to feelings of a more temporal joy. The popular qawwali practised by the Chishtis is indigenous to the Indian subcontinent and an important aid in evoking ecstasy. However, the principles of a qawwali as we know them today are a gift to the world from Amir Khusro, the poet disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya who died more than a century after Muinuddin Chishti. Beginning with Muinuddin Chishti, the defence of music as meditation is the cause of the rift and ongoing debate between the Chishtis, competing Sufi orders like the Suhrawardiyya and strict scholars of Islamic law.
Royalty, Clergy and the Sufis
Sufism, particularly in India, is closely linked to the social and the political forces that have been in power in different stages of history.
As long as Muhammad Ghori lived, there was little peace in India. As soon as he had the territory he fought for, he would launch yet another campaign to conquer more. Resistance to Ghori by Rajputs also continued and it was not until Ghori’s murder in 1206 by a Khokhar tribesman on the banks of the Indus river in modern-day Punjab that relative calm returned to Ajmer.
Since Ghori had no sons, he treated thousands of slaves employed by him like his sons. Ghori had a good eye for spotting talent in a human being and filled his presence with slaves superior to those of his rivals. He educated these slaves like children of royalty. After Ghori’s passing, Qutubuddin Aibak, his favourite slave, took his place as head of the Indian conquests with Delhi as his capital. Although some struggle for power and anarchy followed the succession of Ghori, Aibak earned peace through alliances with influential rival chiefs. He married the daughter of the governor of Kirman and his sister became wife of the governor of Sind, while Iltutmush, his favourite slave, received Aibak’s daughter as a bride.
