The tomb exuded the same thick, hushed, candlelit air of extreme sanctity that hangs over venerated shrines all over the world: the atmosphere reminded me immediately of the tomb of Saint James in Compostela or the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The interior was narrow and claustrophobic. In the centre, under a painted dome, was a marble cot covered in a thick velvet canopy like an enormous four-poster bed; from its front beam hung suspended a pair of ostrich eggs. Between the canopy and the raised marble tomb-cover, pilgrims had piled a mountain of rose garlands on to a crimson drape, so that now the material lay almost invisible beneath the wind-fall of petals.
The pilgrims, all men — women were excluded from the interior shrine — slowly circled around the balustrade, heads bowed, hands cupped in invocation, stopping every so often to murmur prayers or recite mantras. Outside, through the latticed grilles, you could see the dark shapes of barren ladies clawing at the rear of the tomb. Some tied threads through the jali screen: each string a reminder to the Shaykh to provide the woman with the longed-for male heir.
Dr Jaffery murmured a prayer and we left the tomb behind an old blind guru who was being led slowly forward by a young disciple. The guru’s eyes were clouded blue almonds. As he walked, he tapped a dark teak walking stick held in his free hand.
Outside in the courtyard there was a sudden roll of drum beats. The qawwali singers had struck up a hymn: ‘Salaam!’ they sang, ‘Salaam Khwaja Nizamudeeeeenl’
There were six qawwals, all dressed in high-necked Peshwari waistcoats, all sitting cross-legged in a line in front of the tomb. Two had harmoniums; two had small tabla drums. Two had no instruments but instead clapped and sang. One of the singers was a toothless old man with a gravelly voice; he was dark and heavily-bearded and narrow-eyed like one of the Magi in Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb. He was accompanied by the quavering treble of his young grandson.
Within minutes, the crowd milling around the shrine had settled in a semi-circle around the musicians. Everyone was listening intently, overtaken by the music. The qawwals picked up momentum, singing faster and faster, louder and louder. As they reached the climax of each verse, the two singers raised their hands in the air and the stones in the old man’s rings glinted in the light. Then the hymn began to wind down, until just the boy was singing in his soft, high voice accompanied only by the barest of bass drones from the harmonium. The singing stopped. There was a fraction of a second of complete silence. Then with a great battering of tablas, the singers built up to the final verse. Over and over again they repeated the name of the saint: Nizam-ud-Din! NIZAM-UD-DIN! NIZAM-UD-DIN!
At the edge of the crowd, the two pankah-wallahs were slowly, hypnotically waving their fans in time to the chant. All around, the devotees began to sway with a distant look in their eyes as if they were on the verge of a trance. Seeing this the qawwals extended their song and attempted another climax. Their voices rose to new heights of passion, but the moment had been lost. There was no trance; the climax had somehow just been missed. The song ended, and a barely tangible shiver of disappointment passed through the crowd.
Later, sitting in a dhaba with Dr Jaffery, I remarked on how many of the devotees had been Hindus and Sikhs. Dr Jaffery shrugged his shoulders. ‘Hindus and Sikhs also have their dreams which they wish the saint to make reality,’ he said. ‘That is one level. Also you do not have to be a Muslim to beg the saint’s help in deeper matters. Many Hindus, like us, are impatient for the divine. They want to see in this life a glimpse of the face of God.’
‘But the face of God that they would glimpse would be very different from the face you would see, wouldn’t it?’
‘Naturally,’ said the doctor. ‘Who is to say what is the true face of the God?’ He swung his prayer beads around his index finger.
‘Jalal-ud-Din Rumi used to tell a story about a far distant country, somewhere to the north of Afghanistan. In this country there was a city inhabited entirely by the blind. One day the news came that an elephant was passing outside the walls of this city.
‘The citizens called a meeting and decided to send a delegation of three men outside the gates so that they could report back what an elephant was. In due course, the three men left the town and stumbled forwards until they eventually found the elephant. The three reached out, felt the animal with their hands, then they all headed back to the town as quickly as they could to report what they had felt.
‘The first man said: “An elephant is a marvellous creature! It is like a vast snake, but it can stand vertically upright in the air!” The second man was indignant at hearing this: “What nonsense!” he said. “This man is misleading you. I felt the elephant and what it most resembles is a pillar. It is firm and solid and however hard you push against it you could never knock it over.” The third man shook his head and said: “Both these men are liars! I felt the elephant and it resembles a broad pankah. It is wide and flat and leathery and when you shake it it wobbles around like the sail of a dhow.” All three men stuck by their stories and for the rest of their lives they refused to speak to each other. Each professed that they and only they knew the whole truth.
‘Now of course all three of the blind men had a measure of insight. The first man felt the trunk of the elephant, the second the leg, the third the ear. All had part of the truth, but not one of them had even begun to grasp the totality or the greatness of the beast they had encountered. If only they had listened to one another and meditated on the different facets of the elephant, they might have realized the true nature of the beast. But they were too proud and instead they preferred to keep to their own half-truths.
‘So it is with us. We see Allah one way, the Hindus have a different conception, and the Christians have a third. To us, all our different visions seem incompatible and irreconcilable. But what we forget is that before God we are like blind men stumbling around in total blackness ...’
While the doctor was telling his story, the waiters had brought us our shami kebabs. Now, while we ate, I questioned the doctor on Sufism and the teachings of Nizam-ud-Din and Jalal-ud-Din Rumi. Pushing his plate to one side, Dr Jaffery slowly explained to me all I wanted to know.
During the early centuries of the Christian era from the outskirts of Antioch to the wastes of the Sinai, hermits and ascetics could be found all over the deserts of the Levant, sitting in caves or on dung heaps, isolated on top of pillars or scavenging the wastelands for locusts and honey. Punishing the flesh, they sought salvation in the desert.
When this area was conquered by the armies of Islam in the early seventh century, many of the hermits converted to the new religion and helped inspire a more elusive and mystical strand in Islam, a reaction to the severe and orthodox certainties then being crystallized in the Quran. Impatient for Paradise, these Muslim mystics - known as Sufis, dervishes or fakirs - turned their backs on the world in the hope of achieving some tangible, mystical experience of God.
As orthodox Islam spread, through Persia, into the Himalayas and out through the Hindu Kush to Sind and India, Sufism spread alongside it, reacting with local mystical beliefs so as to take in elements of Hinduism, Tantrism and the wild shaman-cults of the Eastern Himalayas. In an attempt to induce illumination, Indian Sufis suspended themselves upside down in wells for periods of forty days, eating nothing. Others lived on a diet of snakes and scorpions, smoking hashish, and carrying maces in order to inflict wounds upon themselves. Some rubbed ashes over their bodies and went about naked, even in the Himalayan snows. One sect, influenced by Hindu sadhus, used to pierce their genitalia with lead bars attached to huge rings, a physical guarantee of their vows of celibacy.
Others, less extreme, followed purer, more philosophical paths in search of union with the Divine. They retired to Sufi monasteries and spent their lives performing spiritual exercises. These more respectable Sufi sects managed to achieve considerable influence: ‘It is well known,’ wrote the fourteenth-century Delhi poet Isami,
‘that it is only through that fakir’s blessin
g that a King or an Emir can come to power ... When a Sufi leaves a country, that country suffers untold miseries. This is a proven fact.’
Stories of their powers multiplied, and the boundary between truth and fiction, never strong in India, lost its clarity. Who did not know of Shah Jalal who made a daily flight from eastern India to Mecca on a flying camel in order to say his morning namaz (the camel, it was said, always brought him back in time for an early breakfast). Or of Shah Madar of Jaunpur, the patron saint of jugglers, who liked to wing his way around the subcontinent on a piece of wall; he never ate and his curses could cover a man with blisters.
In recent years, with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the unorthodox Sufis have been persecuted and banned in many Muslim countries. Only in India and Pakistan do their numbers increase and their cults grow ever more popular and elaborate.
For some the Sufi path is still a method for achieving pure union with God. In Old Delhi there are still several khanqahs where groups of Sufis follow simple, monastic lives: eating little, owning no possessions, depriving themselves of sleep, living only to pray and repeat over and over again the ninety-nine names of Allah: ‘I try to say His name 24,000 times each day,’ claimed one very elderly Sufi I was taken to see by Dr Jaffery. ‘I feel very comfortable when I am reciting. I sit quiet and meditate with my eyes closed and mouth shut ... sometimes, when I am lucky, I suddenly feel as if my heart is filled with light.’
More commonly, modern Sufis hold spiritual surgeries, giving out charms, amulets and herbal medicines mainly to simple villagers, whom they charge for their services. Most seem to have little grasp either of homoeopathic medicine or the basics of Sufi philosophy; many are transparent frauds. In Delhi today there may be as many as a hundred such dervishes. Pir Syed Mohammed Sarmadi is one of the most notorious. A hugely fat Sufi with a mountainous turban, an elephantine girth and a great ruff of double chins, he operates one of the most profitable faith-healing businesses in India. One of Sarmadi’s forebears was beheaded by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb after he wandered into the Imperial presence stark naked, shrieking out Sufi poetry. Sarmadi launched his healing business, in a lean-to attached to his ancestor’s tomb, after claiming to have received a vision of his martyred great-grandfather wandering the Delhi streets, head in hand.
Every day he sits cross-legged in his surgery between ten and five, with a short break for a kebab at lunch. It is a small room, and Sarmadi fills a great deal of it. Its walls are lined with powders and sacred texts, framed monograms of Arabic calligraphy and pictures of the Ka‘ba at Mecca. There is a continuous queue of folk waiting to see him, and Sarmadi keeps the queue moving. Each petitioner gets about two minutes of his time. The pilgrim will come in, sit down, and explain his problem. Sarmadi will listen, breaking his concentration only to clean his fingernails or to gob into his golden spittoon. When the supplicant has said his piece, Sarmadi will wave his peacock fan and blow over the petitioner, recite a bit of the Quran, write out a charm or a sacred number, and place it in an amulet. He will then dismiss the supplicant, having first received his fee of fifty rupees, a week’s wage for an Indian labourer.
Finally, before leaving, the petitioner will hand another twenty rupees to an elderly eunuch who stands outside the surgery with a goatskin full of water. On receipt of the money, the eunuch will pour the water into a drain which runs under the beheaded Sufi’s grave. This, the supplicant is told, has the same merit as personally washing and anointing the dead man’s body. On a good day, Sarmadi may have as many as two hundred supplicants.
I once complained to Dr Jaffery that so many of the Sufis in Old Delhi appeared to be blatant fakes. The doctor said he agreed with me, although he added: ‘But William, my friend, you must remember one thing. Fake Sufis are like any other kind of counterfeit. Forgeries only exist because real gold is so incredibly valuable ...’
That summer, after the inferno heat of the day had given way to the gentler warmth of the evening, Olivia and I often used to walk to Nizamuddin. There we would listen to the qawwalis and talk to the pilgrims.
It did not take long to realize that the great majority of the pilgrims to the shrine regarded Nizam-ud-Din not as a long dead saint, but as a living Shaykh, whose help and advice could still be readily consulted. Once, sitting listening to gawwalis, I asked Dr Jaffery whether this was a general view.
‘The saints do not die,’ he said. ‘Your body — my body — it will decompose. But this does not happen to the saints. They merely disappear behind a veil.’
‘But how can you know this?’ I asked.
‘Just use your eyes! Look around you,’ said Dr Jaffery. ‘In this enclosure there lies the tomb of one Emperor - Muhammed Shah Rangila — and one Princess - Jahanara. Over the road lies the mausoleum of another Emperor-Humayun. These tombs are more magnificent than the tomb of Nizam-ud-Din, but who goes to see them? Only tourists in charabancs. They laugh and eat ice creams and when they come to the tomb chamber they never think to remove their shoes.
‘But this place is different. No one is called to Nizam-ud-Din’s tomb. It is the cenotaph of a poor man who died penniless. Yet every day thousands come, and they bring with them their tears and their innermost desires. There must be something which keeps them coming, six hundred years after Nizam-ud-Din left his body. Everyone who comes here instinctively feels the presence of the saint.’
After I got to know the pirzadas who looked after the shrine - all of them direct male descendants of Nizam-ud-Din’s elder sister — they began to tell me stories of people who had seen their ancestor in different parts of his old monastery.
‘You can only see Nizam-ud-Din if you are pure in heart,’ explained Hassan Ali Shah Nizami, as we sat together one evening on the veranda of the tomb. ‘It depends on the intensity of your devotion. Some see him sitting on his tomb. Others see him walking around the shrine. To others he appears in dreams. There are no hard and fast rules. Since he left his earthly body he is not bound by our limitations.’
‘Have you ever seen him?’ I asked.
‘Not with my eyes,’ replied Nizami. ‘But sometimes when I am trying to cure someone or to exorcize an evil djinn and I call on his name I can feel his presence ... It is as if I am a flute: on my own I am nothing. But Nizam-ud-Din knows how to blow through me and - how do you say it? - to produce through me a pure note of healing.’
Nizami told me a story to illustrate how jealously Nizam-ud-Din still looks after his shrine. For centuries it has been a custom that only the pirzadas are allowed to clean the tomb of their forebear. One night the custodian on duty wanted to see a play that was being performed nearby, so he delegated the task of cleaning the tomb to a friend. When the pirzada returned he saw his friend lying flat on his face with the broom still in his hand. He called some of his colleagues and together they dragged the man out of the shrine, and revived him by pouring water over his face. Later, the man told how he had begun to sweep the shrine when a powerful beam of light emerged from the tomb and struck him down. He was terrified and could remember nothing. The other pirzadas immediately cleaned the shrine themselves then performed rituals to beg the forgiveness of their angry ancestor.
To the pirzadas and dervishes who gathered in Nizamuddin, the most extraordinary supernatural incidents were everyday, almost mundane: the dervishes would tell me - deadpan — that they had been granted the stigmata (‘mystical wounds from the Prophet’s fingers’) the previous week, or maybe that they had seen an army of heavily-armoured demons marching across the heavens the night before. The tone in which they related these visions was exactly the same as that in which they might have listed the bus schedule to Lucknow or the names of the films being shown at the Regal in Connaught Place.
One evening I spent several hours questioning the pirzadas and dervishes about the djinns. As we talked a large group collected around us and everyone added stories about their own experiences with the invisible spirits.
‘You can’t see the wind. In the same way you
can’t see a djinn,’ one dervish remarked. He was a heavily bearded Bengali; at his side he wore a long, curved scimitar.
‘The only people who can see the djinns are the great saints and the high Brahmins,’ agreed a second dervish, a Gujarati from Ahmedabad.
They can live anywhere: in somebody’s house or in the air.‘
‘And the female ones can take on the form of any living creature. They can be a donkey, a rat, a beautiful woman ...’
‘A snake.’
‘A goat.’
‘A jackal.’
‘A black dog or a water buffalo.’
‘The great djinns are said to ride around the world on eagle’s wings.’
‘The Caliph Haroun al-Rashid used to learn songs and airs from the poets among the djinns. They took an oath of fidelity to him and helped him build his great palace on the banks of the Euphrates ...’
One matter which caused a degree of controversy was the question of whether djinns were Muslim or not.
‘Djinns are a form of the devil. They cannot be Muslim,’ said one Sufi, a huge Afghan.
There were murmurs of disagreement. All the rest shook their heads. Some of the dervishes stroked their beards.
‘You are wrong,’ said the scimitar-wearing Bengali. ‘The djinns are capable of salvation. The Prophet was sent to them as well as to us. The Quran says that some of them will enter the great garden of Paradise.’
‘Some djinns are Muslim. Others are Hindus,’ added the Gujarati dervish.
‘It is true,’ agreed another. ‘And the Muslim djinns live in mosques.’
‘They give namaz and perform all the rituals of the faith,’ said a Pakistani from Hyderabad. ‘They have Allah written in their hearts. You will not find any pagan ones wherever the voice of the azan travels.’
‘The Hindu djinns live in jungles. Also they are liking ruins: old temples, cemeteries, cremation grounds, caravanserai ...’
City of Djinns Page 30