The Dead Sultan, the Naked Fakir and the Voiceless Mute
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
The fitna, orchestrated by extremist ideologies from within and from without, threatens to overtake and destroy all that is good and beautiful in Islamic culture and history, indeed all that is good and beautiful in human culture and history.
“Travel through the earth”, admonishes the Qur’an, “ and witness what was the end of those who had no faith”. When I travel, my favorite destinations are the ruins of old forts, the remains of palaces with their bricks scattered around and old tombs, crumbled and flattened to the ground. These ruins speak to you with an eloquence that no orator can match. Where is the writer who can capture in words the tales of human triumph and tragedy inscribed in the dust of these ruins? They speak a different language, the language of parables, of signs, of allusion, of a surreal transcendence that defies description.
Many years ago, during my periodic visits to the city of Old Delhi, I took the time out to visit Lodhi gardens, a green patch of land containing tombs and trees, now surrounded by the megalith that is the concrete jungle of an expanding New Delhi. It was a hot, July day that afternoon. The city baked in the summer heat, with temperatures hovering around 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The air was still and there was an eerie silence in the gardens. Not a bird chirped and not a leaf rustled.
Wandering through the ancient tombs in the sweltering heat, I came upon one that was marked “Mohammed Shah, King of Delhi (1434-1445 CE)”. It was a mausoleum that had retained its beauty even after time had withered it for five hundred years. The canopy was partly intact, just enough to cover the tomb which protruded in a three layer conical frustum from an elevated platform. The top of the cone had been leveled with a marble slab cap.
I stepped onto the platform, partly to seek the shade of the crumbling canopy and escape the scorching heat of the sun and partly to take a closer look at the tomb of a king. After all, Mohammed Shah had ruled a kingdom extending from Dhaka to Peshawar and in the turbulent period in the post-Timurid world (1402-1496 CE) he was considered an important monarch on the world stage.
There on the tomb was a scene for the eye to behold. A fakir, naked except for the loin cloth covering his mid-section down, lay stretched out on the marble slab atop the tomb. His begging bowl lay next to him on one of the ledges of the three layered tomb. In the sweltering heat of mid-July, the cool of the marble was the best mattress anyone could find. The man was asleep, his eyes shuttered, his sun-baked face covered by a graying beard which heaved slightly as he inhaled and exhaled in deep slumber. I wondered, “Who is the king here and who is the mendicant, a king who is dead or a penniless fakir who breathes by God’s leave”.
The silence of a graveyard is a great teacher. He who does not reflect on death does not comprehend the meaning of life. Empires rise and fall. Sultans and sultanates pass over the earth like shadows from passing clouds beckoning you to reflect on your primal origin and your ultimate destiny. Inna lillahi wa inna ilahi rajewoon (Indeed, to Allah do we belong and towards Him is our return). All else is a footnote.
One visits a graveyard for Ibrah (Ibrat in Urdu). Ibrat is not just a lesson, as it is sometimes translated. It is an admonishment for the soul as it continues its perpetual struggle to ascend from Nafs e Ammara to Nafs e Mutmainna. The visit to the resting place of the dead is sanctioned by the Seerah of our Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) who frequented Jannatul Baqi after Asr prayers. Dua’s for the living and the dead are taught to us by the Qur’an.
Let us fast forward from Delhi in Hindustan to Timbaktu in West Africa. There is news that a certain group calling itself Ansar Dine has leveled the graveyards of Timbaktu. sparing not even the priceless doors of ancient mosques. How can we remain silent when the very signs that the Qur’an invites us to study to get close to Divine presence are obliterated before our eyes? This is happening around the Islamic world. It happened in Bosnia and Eastern Europe after the civil war. It happened in the Middle East. It happened in Afghanistan and Central Asia. When the Taliban blew up the statue of Buddha at Bamyan, they committed an atrocity on the collective conscience of humankind that even Genghis Khan shied away from. Students of history will recall that when Genghis Khan invaded Afghanistan in 1220 CE, it was at Bamyan that the valiant Jalaluddin mustered a force of Afghans and inflicted perhaps the only defeat of the war on the Mongols. The grandson of Genghis was killed in that battle. In revenge, Genghiz Khan advanced on Bamyan, slaughtering every man, woman and child who lived in the precincts. The Mongols referred to Bamyan as the City of Sorrow. But even a ruthless destroyer like Genghiz spared the historical monuments and let them stand. And there they stood until the Taliban smashed them with their artillery. If that is not a cultural tragedy, what is?
History is a Sign from the Heavens. The Divine voice declares in the Qur’an, “I will show you My Signs on the horizon and within your own soul until you have certainty of faith”. But if history itself is obliterated, then where are the Signs? Are we to stare at concrete towers raised on sand dunes in the name of progress? One is not engaging in polemics here about the merits of graves and the excesses that are committed by mujawars. One is discussing the import of history as a Sign to the development of human culture and human spirituality.
Perched at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, around the bend of the Niger River (“The Great River”), Timbaktu is a city that resonates like a symphony with the vibrations of history. Shrouded in mystery, celebrated in literature as a fabled land of gold and ivory, the city grew into an important center of commerce during the Mali and Songhay empires. Sijilmasa, Timbaktu, Djenne, Gao, Jenne, Agadez, Kanem Borno were names as familiar to the caravans that plied the vast stretches of the Sahara in search of salt and gold as were Herat, Samarqand, and Kashgar to the caravans on the silk road in Asia.
Islam entered West Africa as early as the eighth century through merchants from the North and spread during the tenth and eleventh centuries through the work of Mu'llims. Patronized by mighty emperors like Mansa Musa of Mali and Askiya Muhammed of Songhay, Timbaktu became a center of learning. Beautiful mosques like the Sankore Mosque were built, scholars flocked to the city, madrasas sprang up and the city became the home of a thousand libraries. A large number of scholars, shaikhs and awliya were buried in the blessed city.
In 1588, a Moroccan army under Ahmed al Mansur, lured by the prospects of gold, invaded and occupied the Songhay Empire. The destruction of the Songhay Empire was a precursor to the onset of the Atlantic slave trade and the calamity that was to befall the continent of Africa in the succeeding centuries. Timbaktu, like other West African cities, went into decline.
More important perhaps than political decline is the gradual but inexorable creep of the Sahara desert which extends its sway to the south by two to three miles every century. The Niger River which grazed the city outskirts in the fifteenth century now runs more than ten miles south of the town so that Timbaktu looks more than an outpost in the desert than a city on the banks of a great river.
In the nineteenth century, a great many shaikhs of the Tajani and Qadariya sufi orders migrated south and were instrumental in the spread of Islam in the Niger river basin. The most celebrated of these sufi shaikhs was Uthman Dan Fuduye who established the Sokoto Khilafat that extended across northern Nigeria and Niger. The tombs of these shaikhs, or Mu’llims as they are called in local languages, dot the landscape all across the stretch of the Niger River.
In the 1890s, the region became a colony of the French. Islam as well as Islamic scholarship felt the stress of colonization. In 1960, Niger became independent but internal tribal tensions remained.
And now the Ansar Dine. In their misguided zeal to avoid bida' (innovation) they destroy tombs, historical monuments, even mosques. That they are misguided is for all to see. Wasn’t the mosque of the Prophet in Medina built around the tomb of the Prophet? The honor (Izzah) of a city is due to the honor of its occupants. Isn’t Medina called the City of Light because it is the city of the Prophet and is home to his mosque and his resting place?
The tomb of the Prophet has been built, rebuilt and guarded by god-fearing sultans and people of faith for over fourteen hundred years. Chronicles record that when sultan Abdel Malik (d 705 CE) renovated the structures around the tomb of the Prophet, the excavations unwittingly revealed a piece of cloth from a shroud. The sultan was petrified lest it be the shroud of the Prophet. The ulema gathered and determined that it was from the tomb of Omar (r). It is said that even after such reassurance, the sultan never slept a good night’s sleep for the rest of his life. Such was the veneration of the Salaf for the tombs of the Suhaba. So, where do these youth take their misguided cues from?Aren’t they the ones engaged in bida’, invented an ideology that is alien to Islam and fostering it by force on hapless people? What would these extremists do if they ever got hold of the Taj Mahal? After all, the Taj, that most beautiful monument to love, is a mausoleum? God’s earth would be less beautiful were it not adorned by the Taj. Is the Islamic world so mute that it cannot utter a word against an atrocity? Extremism is against the commandments of God. As the Qur’an says, “Verily, Allah does not love the extremists.”
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