The Book of Muinuddin Chishti Read online

  MEHRU JAFFER

  The Book of Muinuddin Chishti

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Foreword by Muzaffar Ali

  Preface

  The Early Life of Muinuddin Chishti

  Muinuddin Arrives in India

  In Search of Peace

  Bibi

  Gharib Nawaz, a Friend of the Poor

  Sufi Thought

  Muinuddin’s Legacy

  Royalty, Clergy and Sufis

  Scholars on Sufism

  Footnotes

  The Early Life of Muinuddin Chishti

  Muinuddin Arrives in India

  Bibi

  Gharib Nawaz, a Friend of the Poor

  Sufi Thought

  Muinuddin’s Legacy

  Royalty, Clergy and the Sufis

  Scholars on Sufism

  Conclusion

  Bibliography

  Copyright Page

  For Jaffar and Ali

  who have taught me love

  Other books in the series

  The Book of Buddha

  The Book of Devi

  The Book of Durga

  The Book of Ganesha

  The Book of Hanuman

  The Book of Kali

  The Book of Krishna

  The Book of Muhammad

  The Book of Nanak

  The Book of Ram

  The Book of Shiva

  The Book of Vishnu

  Foreword

  The memory of Muinuddin Chishti, the Sufi saint of Ajmer is much mired in mythology. It is therefore often frustrating to sift fact from fiction. Lovable as the legends are, they naturally insist that Chishti was great and many may want to know why he was considered to be so.

  A man born in an Arab family on Persian soil, Chishti was almost fifty years old when he decided to make India his home at the beginning of the thirteenth century. What was it that made Chishti choose this path? Why did Chishti prefer to live and to die in India?

  In The Book of Muinuddin Chishti the author opens wide the window of her imagination and travels back nearly a millennium to answer some of these questions. Through her words Chishti’s life unfolds against the historical and social realities of his time. The author writes about Chishti as if the sage himself recites his story to her.

  Chishti spent his entire life making sure that he remained humane when times were most hostile. He made himself so at home in his adopted land that when he died he was most mourned by those who did not belong to his creed. In The Book of Muinuddin Chishti, Chishti is portrayed as a man who stood up to the diverse challenges of the day but without offending the people he chose to live with. Here history revolves around a human being who was able to perfect the art of love in the midst of hate. The spirit of Chishti soars beyond the single-dimensional image of him as a man of one religion. He emerges as a major cultural broker, a person whose only politics was that of love. He comes alive as a beloved human being, far removed in time from the reader, but a dear, intimate friend nonetheless.

  Above all, his story is an invitation to ordinary people that it is possible to balance the material with the spiritual here in this life.

  New Delhi

  May 2008

  Muzaffar Ali

  Preface

  I discovered Sufism at a time in my life when my entire world was falling apart.

  ‘So, what is new?’ a Sufi would ask when faced with a similar situation, for according to mystics worlds exist in order to fall apart. What is important is to explore the alternatives to rage, revenge and militancy as responses to life when it seems to be less kind.

  To understand Sufi philosophy is therefore a privilege and one of the most inspiring among the Sufi masters is Muinuddin Chishti. This book is an attempt to appreciate his story, as also the story of the beginnings of the Chishtiya tariqa in India, with some analysis of the time in which he lived.

  The Chishti Sufi order was originally founded in Central Asia and Muinuddin was the first one to introduce the Chishtiya way of life in India, where he lived for over four decades. His disciples, Qutubuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, Baba Farid Ganj Shakr, Mubarak Hamiduddin Nagauri, Nizamuddin Awliya and Khwaja Nasiruddin Chiragh later fanned out into different parts of the Indian subcontinent and spent their lives trying to match their deeds to their words.

  Very little is known of Muinuddin’s personal life. Moreover, although the literature on Sufi saints is massive, the powerful evocation of the virtuous and ideal life approaches hagiography in most texts. In this biography I have tried to balance the records of the historical origins and actual occurrence of Chishti Sufism with the ideal vision of a new idea. This is particularly essential since existing hagiographic literature pays little heed to history. It is the spiritual victory of Chishti over Ajmer that interests me most.

  The most important dynamics in the understanding of a phenomenon like Sufism is the tension between the outsider’s point of view and the insider’s vision. This book is an attempt by an outsider to imagine the internal vision of Muinuddin and to view both the man and his vision against the background of global events.

  Muinuddin’s story is essentially about a human being who became a saint because his personal endeavour at all times was to surmount the unforeseen circumstances that life brought his way—a valuable and significant lesson for any person, believer or not.

  The Early Life of Muinuddin Chishti

  India has attracted all sorts of visitors for various reasons from times unknown. In contrast to territorial conquerors like Muhammad Bin Qasim, Mahmud Ghazni and Muhammad Ghori, who coveted the country’s material wealth, Muinuddin came to India to fulfil a spiritual quest.

  Having turned away from constant battles fought between different Turkic tribes of Central Asia, Arabs and Persians in Sistan, his birthplace in medieval Iran’s Greater Khorasan province, Muinuddin wandered into India in search of the elusive mystery of the self because he had heard that Hindu philosophy encouraged meditation on the nature of the cosmos and creation. He had also been told that India is perhaps the source of the idea of tolerance towards different ways of worshipping the mysterious.

  Muinuddin was born to Syed Giyasuddin Hassan and Bibi Mahnoor around AD 1141 against the background of the terrifying threat of Yelu Dashi’s soldiers who frequently invaded Persian territory. A warrior lord from Inner Mongolia, Yelu Dashi belonged to the royal Liao dynasty of northwest China. He eventually defeated and destroyed the Seljuk state of Persia, making Sultan Sanjari, its ruler, flee west of the sprawling Khorasan province. Yelu Dashi first conquered the Ferghana valley, and then Samarkand. Although he practiced a blend of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and Shamanism, and allowed the worship of all religions including Christianity and Islam in his kingdom, Muinuddin’s family soon left southern Sistan for the comparative safe haven of Nishapur in northern Khorasan only to find this part of the Seljuk kingdom in a state of internal rebellion as well.

  By 1144 Yelu Dashi was dead. But the Nestorian Christians of Khorasan, with whom he had enjoyed a special friendship, immortalized him by spreading legends about Prestor John, a mythical king who was destined to conquer Islam, all over Europe. Portrayed as a descendant of one of the three wise men who travelled from the Orient to Bethlehem to celebrate the birth of Christ, Prestor John was believed to have ruled over a pristine Christian kingdom surrounded by a sea of Muslims and pagans somewhere in the East. These stories inspired Christian kingdoms to continue with greater gusto their bloody crusade against Muslim Turkic dynasties advancing on the continent. Despite Yelu Dashi’s glorious reputation in Europe, brutal acts of revenge and counter revenge between his armies, those of the Seljuk sultan and random warlords of the region made life
for ordinary people a living hell, forcing populations to frequently abandon their homes and disperse to unknown destinations.

  Muinuddin was fourteen years old when he was orphaned. He made ends meet by working in an orchard he had inherited from his father in Nishapur. One day an elderly man came by the orchard. The stranger had travelled far and wide and met numerous people during his long life but in Muinuddin he perceived something that he was only able to feel but unable to define. Muinuddin seemed to him like a beautiful but troubled river, unaware of the calm awaiting it once it is reunited with the ocean.

  Muinuddin welcomed the stranger and made him feel at home. As the weary traveller rested, he watched the boy tend to different parts of the garden as if he were performing an act of worship. At the end of the day Muinuddin offered the guest a basketful of grapes and some dry bread that he had soaked in water. The stranger too dug out pieces of sesame cake from his pouch, and both of them ate from the food that each had served to the other.

  As they ate, Muinuddin asked the stranger if there was anything else to life apart from loneliness, death and destruction. Could the visitor enlighten him, a little, about the cause of cruelty, he wondered.

  The stranger told him that there was much more to life than loneliness, death and destruction. He said that the opposite of everything, including cruelty, does exist; that this life is not such a great mystery. But each human being must make an effort to discover and to experience this truth for himself.

  What can be the opposite of cruelty, loneliness, death and destruction, and how was he to find it, Muinuddin wanted to know.

  The stranger did not have an answer for that. Muinuddin must look for it, he said. It would help him if he began by leading himself closer to his heart, where the answer burned brightly. This flame in the heart was one that did not need to be lit but had to be discovered. ‘The realization that this flame here, in the heart, is one’s best guide in the world brings a moment of supreme joy,’ the stranger smiled, caressing Muinuddin’s chest.

  Muinuddin tingled with excitement at the words he had just heard. He had not felt so elated in a long time. After he bid the stranger goodbye he decided to experience for himself the truth the stranger had talked about. He gifted his grinding stone to his neighbour, sold the orchard and walked out of Nishapur.

  Before long Muinuddin found himself at a crossroads; he had to decide whether to go to Baghdad, Samarkand or Bukhara, all centres of great learning at that time. He had heard travellers sing praises of Hisamuddin Bukhari, a man of books in the oasis city of Bukhara, so that is where he went. When he finished his studies in theology, grammar, philosophy, moral science and religion at Bukhara and Samarkand, Muinuddin was twenty years old and ready to take to the road once again.

  On his way to Baghdad he stopped in the Persian city of Harwan where he found audience with Usman Harwani, a revered dervish.

  Harwani wanted to know what Muinuddin saw when he looked above.

  ‘The heavens,’ said the young man.

  ‘And below you?’

  ‘The abyss.’

  Harwani showed him two of his fingers and asked, ‘What do you see through them?’

  ‘More worlds than can be counted.’

  That day Harwani accepted Muinuddin as a friend and spiritual follower, and Muinuddin finally felt he was living up to his name, chosen with such care for him by Mahnoor, his mother. She had told him never to forget that in Arabic to be a muin meant to be a helper.

  As a mark of acceptance the master trimmed the young man’s hair and placed a four-cornered cap on his head. Each corner of the cap, he said, represents a thought. The first is the consent to seek what is beyond the material, the second to seek what is beyond the self, the third to discover what lay beyond the absolute, and the last to concentrate on nothing except the divine.

  Harwani then requested Muinuddin to look under a brick that lay near by. There Muinuddin found a few gold coins which he immediately distributed among the poor. The master was very proud of his young disciple. He told Muinuddin never to forget to be charitable like the river, generous like the sun and hospitable like the earth. He had long been starved for a companion with whom he could talk and enjoy music. He was especially pleased when Muinuddin told him that he too was touched by sparks of the divine mystery in music.

  Muinuddin spent the next twenty years of his life with Harwani, travelling with him to places far and wide. He spent time with many spiritual luminaries, some of whom lived in total obscurity. One day they were in Basra, and another day resting by the roadside on their way to Kufa. They travelled to the cities of Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad and crossed the desert wastes of Arabia into Mecca and Medina. Wherever they went they met ascetics and philosophers who defiantly opposed the pretentiousness of affluent Muslims.

  These were times of immense insecurity in the midst of great social change. Old kingdoms were breaking up and lands and tribesmen were being absorbed into larger kingdoms. While many made breathtaking material gains, others simply craved for more spirituality. The ascetics did not forget that Islam was born at a time when the elite in Mecca, the Prophet’s place of birth, were preoccupied mostly with making money. Following the astonishing military conquests of the neighbouring kingdoms of Byzantium and Persia, the rulers had brought more riches to the Muslim populations. Their lives were engulfed in a flood of worldly preoccupations like complications of statecraft and the austere life of the desert was forgotten.

  Historian Colin Turner elaborates on this:

  If ever the fabulous world of the 1001 Nights had a real-life simulacrum, then it was to be found in the opulence and splendour of court life under Harun, whose reign (786 CE–809 CE) is often seen as the pinnacle of Abbasid (rulers of Baghdad) prosperity and cultural brilliance. However, others, especially the more religious-minded of the Muslim historians, see this as a period more of excess than success, citing Harun’s open flaunting of Islamic mores as the first nail in the Abbasid coffin, and, as such, as a potent of the eventual decay of the caliphal edifice.1

  A.J. Arberry writes in the introduction to a 1966 translation of Memorial of the Saints by Farid al-Din Attar, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, that at the same time a school of mysticism of extraordinary vitality and influence came into being in the distant province of Khorasan, the bridge between the Middle East and the Far East.

  One day, while taking a break in Baghdad, Harwani patched together a robe for Muinuddin. Presenting the garb of succession to his disciple, the master said that he had taught him everything he could. He gave Muinuddin his personal staff, a pair of wooden sandals, a rosary and a prayer rug and declared that Muinuddin was now on his own. He also said that while he saw his own grave being eventually levelled away by time, Muinuddin’s was certain to survive long into the future.

  It was from Harwani that Muinuddin took the title of Chishti. Harwani belonged to the spiritual house of Abu Ishaq Shamsi, founder of the Chishti school of Sufism in the tenth century. Shamsi had fled the materialism of the Syrian court in Damascus to meditate in the solitude of Chisht, a hamlet nestled on a mountainside near Herat in Afghanistan. Shamsi found all egocentric rulers and the verbal squabbles and dry-as-dust arguments of legalists distracting. He kept his distance from all of this and spearheaded an alternative movement of extraordinary sensitivity among the simple people of the verdant valleys and mountains of Khorasan.

  The Chishtis had little in common with the clergymen who lived in cities and circled the Kaaba. The Sufis preferred to be in the midst of nature. Shamsi’s followers were ascetics at first, devoted to finding ways of exploring the self. But at some point in their lives they returned to civilization to practice amongst people the spiritual ideals they had learned and contemplated in seclusion.

  Well aware that mysticism often attracts the best minds in society, some Chishtis were against a total renunciation of the world. They were afraid of leaving important affairs of the state entirely to mediocre people and to the unthinking. But e
ven those who returned to ‘civilization’ shunned pleasures of the flesh like feasts and fanfare and wore simple clothes made from rough material. Members of the Chishti family often ate leaves and concentrated on nourishing the spirit. They believed that music illuminates the heart. They considered the musical soirées they regularly enjoyed as meditation of the most effective sort. To those who objected to music as being un-Islamic the Chishtis replied that lovers of music may seem to be strangers to the world but they are friends of the divine.

  There is no entry into the heart except through the antechamber of the ears. Musical tones, measured and pleasing, bring forth what is in the heart and make evident its beauties and defects … whenever the soul of the music and singing reaches the heart, then there stirs in the heart that which preponderates in it.2

  Harwani embraced Muinuddin and kissed him on the forehead. The thought of being permanently separated from his mentor made it impossible for Muinuddin to breathe. He was filled with sorrow and longing after he thanked Harwani and bade him goodbye. For a long time after this turning point in his life Muinuddin was unable to tolerate the company of other human beings and preferred to live amongst the dead instead, roaming the graveyards as a recluse.

  It was Qutubuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, an Afghan teenager with a twinkle in his eye, who lit up Muinuddin’s gloomy heart and dragged him back among the living. Muinuddin accepted Bakhtiar as a disciple and for several years they travelled together.

  In Balkh, the former Buddhist city of Bakhri, called Bactria by the Greeks, which lies northwest of Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan, Muinuddin paid homage to the saint Ibrahim Adham, the ‘Prince of Balkh’ of the eighth century, whose conversion to Sufism is similar to the legend of the Buddha. Ibrahim had given up a life of luxury in the palace in his quest for honest toil.

  Once he had crossed the Khyber Pass, Muinuddin lived in Multan for almost half a decade studying Sanskrit and talking to Hindu scholars. It was here that Muinuddin began to notice how different Islam and Hinduism are. According to Islam, life was like a straight line, starting at creation and ending on the day of judgement. Hinduism, on the other hand, propagated that life was a circle, without a beginning or an end.