HONORING WOMEN THROUGH SEXUAL ABSTINENCE: Lessons from the Spiritual Practice of aPre-Modern South Asian Sufi Master,

Shaykh Nizam ad-din Awliya Bruce B. Lawrence This essay explores the nexus between two tangents of South Asian Sufism seldom bracketed with one another: (1) the commitment of South Asian Sufi (hereafter SAS) masters to an asceticallifestyle despite the requirements of marriage incumbent on a11 adult Muslims (see Rahman 132 on the Our'anic passages discouraging celibacy) and (2) the appropriation of South Asian attitudes toward women into the outlook of these same SAS masters. My thesis, perhaps radical, at the least revisionist, is to suggest that the second issue has informed the first to a far greater degree than has ever been acknowledged. There is no uniform South Asian attitude toward women but rather a spectrum of historica11y conditioned reflexes that require continuous crossreferencing and adjustment in each discrete context. The only book that I have encountered dealing solely with SAS women is Patricia Jeffery's Frogs in a Welt A fmely tuned sociological field study, it examines the ideology of domestication among one group - upper dass (ashrafi) women - in the modern period in one loeale of Delhi (Hazrat Nizamuddin). Its conclusions, alas, are as confined as its subject, and a110w no extrapolation from the lives of these 'frogs' to the condition of other Muslim women whether their predecessors or their contemporaries. The best book known to me for understanding general SA attitudes toward women is Lynn McCormack Bennett, Dangerous Wives and Sacred Sisters. Though exploring social and symbolic roles of high-caste women in Nepal, it calls attention to the fact that Indian women are characteristically esteemed in the nubile state but fearedafterwards. Menstrual blood, in particular, is deemed to be polluting, for it symbolizes what are perceived to be women's boundless sexual appetites. In Nepalese Hindu society it is women who allegedly initiate and control acts of copulation, whether within or beyond the social conventions of marriage. Though neither the Nepalese nor others discuss the cause of women's sexual needs, the outcome of these needs is viewed as commonplace folk wisdom: in the words of one modern-day Indian health counselor, "sexual satisfaction is absolutely essential for a women's wellbeing, far more than it ever is for a man" (Kakar 52). My approach is neither to accept nor to challenge the social-psychological judgment implicit in categorizing a11 women as sexual predators and a11 men as witless victims or listless participants. Rather, accepting its prevalence as a form of cultural conditioning that has historically influenced large segments of South Asian society, I am interested in measuring its consequence for one group, SAS masters. In the pre-modern period, there were no anthropologists gathering raw data for ethnographie analyses of co11ective values and their consequence. One has no choiee but to extrapolage from literary sources what was the attitude of a given group toward male-female relations. In the case of major SAS masters, we are especially fortunate in the kind of literary evidence that was recorded and transmitted. Although most SAS masters were averse to writing discursive treatises, preferring instead Persian poetry and occasionalletters in both Persian and Arabic, some of them had committed to writing (largely through dictation to loyal disciple-scribes) informal table conversations known as malfuzat. The malfuzat reflect the teachings of SAS masters on the major areas of human experience, one being sexuality. The principal SAS master whose table talk I have scanned for evidenceof his explicit - or more often implicit - disposition toward women is Shaykh Nizam ad-din Awliya (hereafter SNDA). Bachelor recluse and lyrical exponent of musica11y induced ecstasy, SNDA was a regional scholar (from the Doab) turned urban saint. His extreme popularity among the courtiers of the Delhi slave sultans in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries CE was matched only by his strict avoidance of a11 contact with these same sultans (for further references, see Lawrence 1982). Numerous commentators have drawn attention to the paradox of a spiritualluminary challenging the authority of a secular ruler on the periphery of that ruler's capital city. Explanations for the cause and continuation of this mutual estrangement abound (see Digby 1986:67-19 for the most plausible), but in my view a paradox of equa11y mind-bending proportions is the attraction that a celibate saint holds for a community of connubial men and women, a11 of whom deemed marriage to be the scriptura11y enjoined and socia11y inevitable condition of adult life.

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Bruce B. Lawrence To gain access to SNDA's attitude toward sexuality as embedded in the Fawafid al-fu'ad (hereafter, MoraIs for the Heart) 1 narrative, I have found it necessary to draw on literary critical tools not usually applied to this material. They sort out as: sub-textuality, inner-textuality and inter-textuaIity. Each requires brief comment. Morals for the Heart is a document about SNDA. It draws its authority from the voice of the saint, which reverberates through its pages. Yet he is not the recorder of these conversations; it is his courtier-poet/disciple, Amir Hasan Sijzi, who often intrudes his own voice into the conversations, reminding us that he is not a mere recorder but also a persistent enquirer into the truths that SNDA is deemed uniquely to possess. He even reminds the reader that SNDA has approved both the recording of the conversations and the particular text of their recapitulation that Amir Hasan repeatedly submits to hirn for 'correction.' It might alm ost be said that, once the saint has been certified as speaker and reader of re cord for his own discourse, the scribe becomes the dominant voice, delivering, as he alone can, the canon of spiritual reference to all would-be enquirers.s Yet Amir Hasan is not the most famous poet of his time; that honor belongs to another courtier-poet, also a disciple of SNDA, Amir Khusrau Dehlawi. .Amir Khusrau isarguably the most renowned IndoPersian poet of all time. His association with SNDA extends to their tandem death within six months of each other and their consequent burial within the same quarter of Delhi that has ever since been known as 'Hasrat Nizamuddin.' Amir Khusrau was not, however, the spiritual successor to SNDA; that honor belonged to another Delhi disciple, one who was engaged full time in the ascetical-spiritual tradition of the Chishti order, Shaykh Nasir ad-din Chiragh-i Delhi. It is, therefore, anomalous on the surface that SNDA would have left his only authentically recorded set of conversations with a disciple who was neither his favorite 'worldly' follower nor his designated spiritual successor. The anomaly becomes a conundrum when we discover that Amir Khusrau is only mentioned once by indirection in Morals for the Heart, while the name of Shaykh Nasir ad-din is excluded altogether. Were nothing else at stake, it would be incumbent on the investigator to explore the gap between the prestige accorded Morals for the Heart and its selective portrayal of those attached to SNDA. In the introduction to my English translation of Morals for the Heart.I I press this issue further. The absence of purely historical information compels us to explain the shortfall in Amir Hasan's compilation by looking at the sub-textual features of his narrative. At several points in examining stories that relate SNDA's teaching about sexuality, we must extrapolate from what we know about his style and disposition a fuller analytical framework within which to consider the theme;: the plot, and the outcome of each pericope. In that heremeneutical endeavor we are assisted by two further literary critical tools: inner-textuality and inter-textuality. The first seems naively simple to compare parts of the same work with one another in order to grasp the intentionality of the whole. However, that task is complicated because the choice of which categories are central, which secondary, constantly shifts. SNDA, like any major spiritual figure, never aimed to leave a consistent record for those who sought him out for assistance. Those who were truly in need went away satisfied by their exchange with the saint; they did not need to have any record of conversations for future reference. Morals for the Heart was compiled in five parts, covering continuous but separate periods of the saint's life at the height of his career. Each was copied and recopied and sold in the bazaars of Delhi for the benefit of those who had not seen the saint, or who had seen hirn but not conversed with hirn directly or often enough and still wanted to profit from his instruction. The work is, therefore, .random in its topical organization, often repetitive on certain personalities (e.g., Qutb ad-din and Farid ad-din) and certain themes (e.g., spiritual awareness and leaving the world) and yet never identical in its recapitulation of stories. The stories which SNDA teIls become the literary and pedagogical epitome of Fawa'id al-fu'ad, and so in constructing inner-textual emphases of the saint's distinctive spiritual outlook, we occupy ourselves

lSee Bruce B. Lawrence, trans., Nizam ad-din Awliya: Morals for the Heart (New York: Paulist Press, 1992). 21 am indebted to Gordon Newby for this artful reworking of the evidence in a preliminary draft of the present paper which he was kind enough to read for me. He has often pushed me to drawing conclusions from my research, especially on the role of the scribe, that I at first did not see or was unwilling to accept. For such friendship, an end note citation is paltry but essential signpost of gratitude. 3See Morals for the Heart 61-77.

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Honoring Women through Sexual Abstinence with the analysis of stories. It often happens that some aspect of the analysis of stories echoes another story or a similar theme that can be traced to the vast Sufi material produced in Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and North Africa prior to the time of SNDA. Locating those references, citing them, and comparing them to Morals for the Heart data falls in the domain of inter-textuality. Where such material helps to elucidate the direction of SNDA's own fertile imagination, they are brought into our analysis of this outlook on sexuality. Women are the topical focus for expressing attitudes on sexuality, not only in SNDA's case but also in the case of other SAS masters. There is at once delight in woman's beauty and fear of her power, yet there is no sense of enjoyment in the physical dalliance or consummation of the love relationship. For the SAS masters, and for South Asian society as a whole, we find scant evidence of the pleasure principle applying to or deriving from sexual experience. Sexuality therefore means something other than coitus in our evidence. It would be more apt to say that sexuality becomes the achievement of express social goals through gender interaction, while asceticism is at once the recognition of the role of sexuality in society as a whole and its partial curtailment, or in certain cases its outright rejection, on the part of holy minded individuals. SNDA was the first in his spirituallineage of SAS masters to embrace celibacy as the answer to the peculiar dilemma which asceticism and sexuality posed for all Sufi aspirants. To those familiar with the long history of asceticism in South Asia it may seem obvious that SNDA was simply 'going Indian,' modeling his own pattern of spirituallife after the example of his Hindu yogin contemporaries. That explanation falters, however, once one considers the deep-seated, long-standing Islamic difference from Indian, specifically Hindu, models of spiritual charisma. Not only SNDA's contemporaries but also his saintly forebears - Mu'in ad-din Sanjari (Ajmeri), Qutb ad-din Bakhtiyar Kaki, Farid ad-din Ganj-i Shakar - all had married, fathered children, raised families. They, like almost every Sufi master in every region of Dar al-Islam, followed thepractice of Muhammad and the earliest political religious leaders of the Islamic community. By marrying they reminded their co-religionists that it was incumbent on all Muslims to honor marriage. Scripture reinforced practice for, despite the Our'anic praise of Christian priests and monks as those closest to Islamic believers (Our'un 4:85), there was also a Our''anic passage criticizing monasticism (Our'an 57:27), reinforced by a well-known tradition or saying of the Prophet Muhammad which declares that "there is no monkery in Islam."4 The double result of practice and scripture, therefore, has been to reinforce the interdiction against celibacy in Islam, even for those dedicated to ascetical ideals and a religious vocation. One major Sufi master has even gone to the extent ofinterpreting the alleged impurity, tyranny and infidelity of Muslim wives as a subtle, divinelygiven pretext for the cultivation of saintly virtue. In his own table talk dictated some fifty years prior to SNDA's and transcribed within decades of SNDA's death (ca. 1350 CE, SNDA having died in 1325 CE), the Mawlana of Whirling Dervish farne, Jalal ad-din Rumi, instructs his disciples to learn the Muhammadan Way through the tribulations of marriage, not in their avoidance, which he characterizes as 'the Way of Jesus.' Night and day you struggle seeking to refine the character of woman and to purify her impurity (he teIls Baha'ud-din, his recorder). It would be better for you to purify yourself in her than to purify her in you. Refine yourself through her. Go to her and submit to whatever she says, even though what she says may seem absurd to you. Abandon jealousy, even if it is a manly attribute, because through this good attribute bad ones enter you. For this reason the Prophet said, "No monkery in Islam." The way of monks was solitude, to dweIl off in mountains, not to take women and to abandon the world. God showed the Prophet a narrow and obscure way, which was to marry women in order to endure their tyranny and listen to their absurdities and to let them ride roughshod over hirn and (thereby) refine hirnself. "You are of a noble disposition" (Our'an 68:4). To suffer and endure the tyranny of others is to cleanse away one's own impurity through them. Your character becomes good through forbearance, and theirs becomes bad through domineering and aggressiveness. When you realize this, purity yourself ....

4Despite its sectarian bias in some passages, the Muhammad Ali 1963 translation/commentary of the Our'an brings out clearly the rejection of monkery/monasticism in both the Our''an and hadith. See 1034; fn.2457. 151


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Bruce B. Lawrence The story is told that the Prophet, returning with his companions from an expedition, said, "Let the drums be beat. Tonight we will stay by the city gate and enter tomorrow." "0 Apostle of God," theyasked, "what is the good of that?" "Because you might fmd your wives with other men and be pained. And sedition might arise thereby," he answered. One of the Companions, however, did not pay attention and, entering the town, found his wife with another man. Now, it is the way of the Prophet that one should endure pain by warding off jealousy and indignation and by enduring the pain of one's expenditures on women - and a hundred thousand untold agonies - in order for the Muhammadan World to appear. The Way of Jesus is to struggle in solitude and not to indulge one's passions; the Muhammadan Way is to endure the tyranny of women over men, and the grief caused by relationships with them. If you cannot go the Muhammadan Way, then take the Way of Jesus lest you be deprive altogether.I SNDA chose the Way of Jesus, and in his table talk he displays the ingeniousness with which he resolved the contradictions it posed for him. At first glance, one is struck by the large number and the wide range of his references to women, both contemporary women he knew and those prototypical women about whom he hear through stories. Yet one must avoid the temptation to inflate the claims of Morals for the Heart, SNDA's only bona fide compilation of table talk, on the topic of sexuality. SNDA, for instance, only once refers to his own mother, never to his sisters or to other female relatives. Nor does he use the theme of sexuality to illustrate by inversion, as does Jalal ad-din Rumi, his attitude toward core spiritual values or mystical practices. While we will examine at close range SNDA's attitude toward sexuality, we need to make clear at the outset that the basic human need to which the saint bendshis own conversations on nearly every occasion is not sex but food. If South Asians in general have an interest in food bordering on obsession, then saints - both Hindu and Muslim - are no exception to the rule. 6 SNDA fmds bis strongest analogy for the discipline of sainthood in food, specifically meat. Consider how he defines 'leaving the world,' a crucial topos in his asceticalregimen. He offers agraphie analogy, not as his own, however, but, as is often the case, through the interlocution - fictive or real - of another saint: The master told the following story about a certain chaste saint. Many times he used to say that prayers, fasting, invocation and saying the rosary - all such virtuous deeds are a cauldron, but the staple in the cauldron is meat: without meat you do not experience any of these virtuous deeds. Finally they asked that pir, 'Many times you have used that analogy but now explain it.' 'Meat,' replied the saint, 'is renouncing worldliness while prayer, fasting, invocation as wen as saying the rosary - all such virtuous deeds presuppose that the one who does them has left the world and is no longer attached to any worldly thing. Whether he observes or does not observe prayer, invocations and other such practices, there is no cause for fear, but if friendship with the world lingers in his heart, he derives no benefit from supplications, invocations and the like.' After that the master observed that, if one puts ghee, pepper, garlic and onion into a cauldron and adds only water, the end result is known as pseudo-stew. The basic staple for stew - whatever the other ingredients - is meat, just as the basis for spiritual progress - whatever the other virtuous practices - is renouncing worldliness. (Morals for the Heart 88) This narrative works at many levels. By using the analogy of meat, SNDA underscores the spiritual topos of 'renouncing worldliness as indispensable.' Yet he also heightens the appeal of this topos by an inversion of the normal values that inform reader/listener expectation: just as meat is the most delectable of an foods to be consumed in sustaining life.? so 'renouncing worldliness' is of equal nutrient value in

5The true sense of this passage is made clear from the remarkable but unpublished translation of Wheeler Thackston; it is less evident in A. J. Arberry's quaintly alliterative rendition of Rumi's earthy and blunt farsi prose; see Arberry 98-99. 6See, however, Juergensmeyer 197 about the ambiguities of Gandhi's stringent diet. 7See Gelber 16f., where the entire analysis turns of St. Francis' harsh self-condemnation for having consumed meat during aperiod of illness.

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Honoring Women through Sexual Abstinence sustaining the ascesis of a would-be saint. The meat = renouncing worldliness analogy probably also resonated for SNDA's Muslim listeners because meat was so rare and difficult to obtain during the Delhi sultanate period. Its consumption, even by the wealthy, would have been irregular at best, while for the majority, it could have been expected only on a rare occasion, such as the major festival of the Muslim ritual calendar, "id al-saghir, when the end of Ramadan fasting is marked by collective prayer, public celebration and feasting on goat's meat. At the functional level, of course, eating meat and leaving the world are not equivalent. While the former is a physical act, the latter is a psychological rather than a physical injunction. SNDA hirnself provides closure to the above discourse on meat with the following injunction: "Renouncing worldliness does not mean becoming naked, wearing only a loin cloth and sitting (in solitude). Renouncing worldliness means instead, to wear clothes and to take food while at the same time keeping in continuous use whatever comes to hand, feeling no inclination to hoard and not attachment to material objects. That (disposition alone) is tantamount to renouncing worldliness" (Morals for the Heart 89). SNDA's list of deceptive renunciations could be extended. For SNDA there are many appearances of renouncing worldliness - not only seclusion from the company of others but also isolation from the polis, the center of worldly power, not only the minimization for food, clothing and shelter, but also the avoidance of sex. For SNDA all such hardships are irrelevant if they are not accompanied by what is known in the Hindu tradition as vairagya, detachment from all desire to possess. Because that is an inner quality it cannot have any equivalent external correlate: the true saint should be as detached in the midst of temptations as he is when removed from all temptations. There are, therefore, two options for evaluating women, in the Islamic mystical tradition at large and also in the outlook of SNDA as a particular SAS master. One valuation is to typologize women as the weaker sex, prone to volatile emotion rather than controlled by 'cool' reason. (In the technicallanguage of Islamic mystical theory this argument is most often broached by speaking of women as prey to nafs or the lower self, that is, women are reduced to an identified with theirprocreative function, while men are deemed to be in possession of high quality, "aql, that allows them to control their nafs, most often expressed as their need to satisfy by accommodating the nafs of women.j'' That view stresses not only the factious moods of women, as in Rumi's story of berating wives, but also their possession of a polluting fluid, the menstrual blood, that renders them ritually impure in the Islamic as in the Hindu tradition. Yet there is an alternate valuation of women that upholds them not as temptresses or polluters but as indispensable vehicles through whom wayward lusts are transformed into a consuming passion for God. In other words, without being lovers of women Muslim saints could not be lovers of God. In this view, it is not woman's lower self (her nafs) that is stressed but her evocative power. Indo-Persian poets have often alluded to this quality by distinguishing between "ishq-e majazi and "ishq-e haqiqi, that is, between metaphoricalor human passion, which has woman as its object, and true passion, which can only be directed to the Eternal Beloved. Three stories from Morals for the Heart illustrate the extent to which SNDA pursues the second rather than the first valuation of women, accepting their role as positive, though invariably secondary, in support of men who are struggling to be saints. The very first mention of women in Morals for the Heart occurs in the context of proving a saint's single-minded preoccupation with God. Again, SNDA enhances the didactic force of the story by attributing it to another saint, in this case one of the major exemplars of institutional Sufism, Abu Sa'id ibn Abi'l-Khayr. SNDA told the following story about hirn: "No thought goes through my mind," Abu Sa'id once confided, "but that I am suspected of having implemented it, even if I, in fact, have never acted on that thought." Once a wholly upright dervish came to his khanaqah. Shaykh Abu Sa'id recognized his perfection and knew what sort of man he was. At the time of iftar (i.e., breaking of the fast), Shaykh Abu Sa'id ibn Abi'l-Khayr asked his daughter to bring the saint a bottle of water. She was his youngest daughter, yet with perfeet courtesy and extreme respect she offered water to the saint. Shaykh Abu Sa'id was delighted at his

81 am indebted to several persons, among them Gale Minault, Joanne Waghorne, Tony Stewart and Avinash Maheshwary, for an evening colloquium of the Triangle Park South Asia Faculty in which discussion of an earlier version of this paper provoked this and several related points.

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Bruce B. Lawrence daughter's conduct. The thought crossed bis mind: "Who will be the fortunate fellow to catch this daughter in his snare?" After this thought had crossed his mind, he asked Hasan Mu'azz, his' attendant in the khanaqah, to go to the bazaar. "Go, find out what is the talk of the town!" he instructed the servant. Hasan went to the bazaar and returned. Approaching Shaykh Abu Sa'id ibn Abi'l-Khayr, he said, "Today in the bazaar I heard talk that no ear can bear to hear." "Speak!" ordered the Shaykh. "How can I tell you what I heard?" pleaded Hasan. "You must say what you heard!" commanded the Shaykh. "In the bazaar," replied Hasan, "one man was saying to another, 'Shaykh Abu Sa'id ibn Abi'l-Khayr wishes to ensnare his own daughter!'" The Shaykh laughed and said, "And so they would call me to account even for that thought of mine?!" (Morals for the Heart 100). Despite the droll humor, which must have caused SNDA's listeners in bis own khanaqah to smile if not laugh as he reached the punch line, the didactic point of the narrative is clear, Detached from worldliness, saints seek to experience a persistent, limitless absorption in God. So fully alive do they become to the Divine Presence that their inner thoughts, like God's, are communicated as words, even actions to others. Yet the story of this saint's adhesion to the Almighty only becomes compelling because it is focused on a nubile member of Abu Sa'id's household. The desirability of the saint's daughter becomes the occasion for proving here father's unwitting skill at projecting bis thoughts telepatbically to others. It also proves much more.? In any but a saintly context the undertone of the story borders on the incestuous. The saint thought of bis daughter, through her perfect display of hospitality to a guest, as a marriage partner for some perfect male Muslim, like his visitor. But because he had that thought, the people in the bazaar could only imagine one candidate so holy, so perfect that he was qualified to ensnare such a wellmannered woman: the Shaykh himself became, in the eyes of others, the sole suitor whose holiness qualified him to ensnare bis own pure daughter. The 'minor' miracle which makes the story possible, i.e., the saint's success at group telepathy, is less notable than the 'major' point about detachment/reward: The saint's suppressed desire for bis own daughter was transformed into divine confirmation of his high standing, bigher even 'than that of a fellow saint whom he had deemed to be 'perfect.' Two other stories from Morals for the Heart show how women, through their exercise of feminine charm, expedite rather than merely confirm saintly aspirations. Both also inject an unusual note of dass status markings. The point of both is announced at the outset of the conversation: "In the path of God whatever clothes one wears on entering, it is hoped that in the end one will become a sincere devotee." Once there was a dervish whose glance fell on a king's daughter sent a message to the dervish: Since you are a man in the dervish way, it is difficult for me to find a means of meeting you (i.e., making love with you). But there is one option: if you follow it, there is hope that I may visit you. Here is the option: you take up the life of a devotee and dweIl in a mosque. Busy yourself in obedience and worship so that your fame will spread far and wide. When your asceticism and saintliness have become renowned, I will ask my father permission to come to see you in order to be blessed by you. That dervish followed her instructions. He took up residence in a mosque. He immersed himself in obedience and seclusion, But when he acquired the taste of obedience in solitude, it engulfed his he art. Mention of him flowed from everyone's lips. The king's daughter then asked her father's consent to visit him. He consented. On her arrival, the dervish was the same, her beauty the same, yet this royal damsel saw no movement of attraction in him toward her. At last she said, "Was it not I

91n" what follows I am particularly indebted to Paul Courtright who read an earlier version of this paper and was alert to the parallel themes between the tale of Abu Sa'id's daughter and the stories of Brahma's desires for his daughter as weIl as Daksa's lust for bis daughter, Sati. Although Abu Sa'id's story was originally told in a Khorasanian (Iranian) context, it nonetheless may have been selected by SNDA because it appealed to the expectations of his Indian audience, many of whom would have been familiar with the recurrent paradox about sexuality and asceticism, most often linked with the god Siva: the more you renounce sexuality the more qualify for it, as demonstrated by W. D. O'Flaherty in her study, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic.

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Honoring Women through Sexual Abstinence who you taught this -ploy? Why do you pay no heed of me?" The more she spoke in this vein the more the dervish replied: "Who are you? How do I know you? How am I supposed to recognize you?" And so he turned away from her and busied himself with God. When the master reached this point (in the story), bis eyes welled up with tears and he commented, "Someone who has once found this taste (for God), how can he then show affection for any other?" In the same vein he remarked that Shaykh 'Abdallah Mubarak in the days of his youth fell in love with a woman. One evening he came close to the wall of her house and that woman also leaned out of the window (to talk with him). The two lost themselves in conversation. From the beginning till the end of the evening they did not cease talking with one another. When the call to morning prayer came, 'Abdallah thought he had heard the call to evening prayer! Looking around carefully, he realized that morning had dawned. At that moment a voice from the Unseen proclaimed: "Oh, 'Abdallah, for love of a woman you have been awake from the beginning till the end of the evening. Have you ever passed such an evening for the sake of God?" 'Abdallah, when he heard these words, repented of bis affair, and gave himself totally over to God. This (episode) became the cause of his repentance. [In the meantime they brought food, and SNDA was reminded of a story about etiquette in eating food. He described how the spiritual master of Shaykh Abu Sa'id Abi'l-Khayr ate food even after distinguished visitors had arrived (normally an affront). Because his intention was to eat that food only to keep body and soul together and to sustain his devotion to God, food eaten in such a manner becomes itself an act of devotion, not to be interrupted for any cause.] (Morals for the Heart 235-236) The purpose of these two stories concerning youthfullove is transparent. The women involved, instead of become accessories to the crime, are stepping stones to sainthood for the two men, one anonymous, the other.apparently well known to SNDA and bis audience. Both women are depicted as prisoners of the lower self (nafs), but in each case they are upper-class (ashrafi) women, one a king's daughter, the other a lady of high standing as is clear from the size and privacy of her house, surrounded as it is by a wall. And so the undertone of this narrative, going beyond the principal message, is that, when saints are tempted by women, they are women of good breeding, those whose etiquette resembles the polished manner of Shaykh Abu Sa'id's daughter in the previous anecdote. It is also significant that once again sexual temptation is related to replenishment. In the 'temptation' of Abu Safid, it was the sight of his daughter serving water to a guest that excited his imagination, and now in the aftermath of two conversions from human lust to love of God, SNDA tells an anecdote about food, this time related to the spiritual master of Shaykh Abu Sa'id, The association of sex and food as two staples of life were closely related in the saint's outlook: inseparable from the human experience, they both possessed the means of access to true devotion. Not all stories involving women in Morals for the Heart are seemingly transparent in their literary analysis. One of the pivotal stories for determining SNDA's attitude toward the women whom he personally knew is also one of the most ambiguous because of the form in which it has been preserved. In this passage SNDA heaps lavish praise on saintly women. It is an extraordinary paean to the virtues of women, one without precedent in SAS writings and with few parallels in Sufi literature outside South Asia. The subtext here is clearly more than the written text. The incidents which informed the saint's telling and his disciple's recording are much broader and more complex than the sparse narrative left us in Morals for the Heart. What we have is a pithy version of what must have been a lengthy and wide-ranging discourse. It began innocently enough with talk about patience in the face of death. SNDA gave two examples: Hippocrates and Majnun. Hippocrates' mien never changed when he was told that a collapsing roof had killed all twenty of his sons, while Majnun, the doomed lover, when told that his beloved Layla had died, exclaimed: 'Woe is Me, why did I take as a friend someone who was to die?' (Morals for the Heart 103).10 10Whiie Hippocrates is almost never mentioned in SAS literature, the ill-fated love of Majnun and Layla is a fixture of classical Persian literature. Majnun is the aggrieved lover from whose viewpoint the protracted tale of woe is spun out. At an early age he fell in love with Layla. Tribai rivalry prevented their marriage. He wandered for years in the desert singing lyrics to his mental construct of Layla. The spell is 155

Bruce B. Lawrence Reflection on Layla then causes the saint to think of women in general and the next day a (Muslim) woman (from Delhi) came to present herself to SNDA. Though she professed allegiance to him, we never learn her name or whether she went on to become a full disciple.U The saint uses her presence, and also her profession of faith in him, as the occasion to recount the numerous benefits that accrue from the virtues of women. Suddenly the narrative becomes very specific: The master (we are told) then called to mind a particular woman from Indraprasta named Fatima. She had been such a model of chastity and virtue that Shaykh al-Islam Farid ad-din (the master of Nizam ad-din) used to say repeatedly of her: 'That woman is a man whom the Creator has sent to earth in the bodily form of a woman!' The master then declared that dervishes who ask saintly women and saintly men to intercede on their behalf invoke saintly women first because they are so rare. "When a wild lion comes into an inhabited area from the forest," he explains, "no one asks: 'Is it male or female?' Similarly, the sons of Adam, whether they be men or women, must devote themselves to obedience and piety." After discussing the virtues of the pious and telling more stories about them, he concluded with these two lines of poetry: If good I'm judged, as one of them I'm reckoned; Ifbad I be, through them I am forgiven. (Morals for the Heart 103-104) The suggestiveness of this text is beguiling. A woman, not just an anonymous disciple, but a specific woman known to men in his audience, is cited for her saintly behavior. Yet nothing more is said about her in this passage. The remark by Farid ad-din seems to parallel the observation that his namesake, the poetsaint Farid ad-dinAttar, oncemade about Rabi'a al-Adawiya: "When a woman becomes a 'man' in the path of God, she is a man and one cannot any more call her a women" (Attar: 40). Similarly, the reference to a wild lion is reminiscent of the story that J alal ad-din Rumi told in his Discourses about a fierce lion who "only grew angry at those who were afraid of him," for in reality, he was trying to test the true faith of those who approached him. The lion was, in effect, a metaphor for God in his jalali or horrific aspect, and SNDA is here implying that saints can sometimes function like wild lions, male or female: they call men and women to obedience and piety through fear. (Indeed, the Arabic-Persian technical term for piety,taqwa, also means fear.) The finalline of poetry provides closure to the several didactic points of the preceding discourse: contrite men can expect to be saved wither as co-believers with pious women or through the latter's intervention on their behalf. . This passage would be valuable but far from compelling if we has only inter-textual paralleIs or antecedents to draw upon. Yet is also introduces a new person, the woman saint, Bibi Fatima, whose name and exploits recur elsewhere in Morals for the Heart, It is, therefore, the inner-textuality of this passage rather than its inter-textuallocation that opens up a new vista on SNDA's view of sexuality and asceticism. At one point in Morals for the Heart, almost as an aside, SNDA informs Amir Hasan, .his recorder, that he, too, had taken down conversations from his master, Shaykh Farid ad-din. Even though they were never collected and published, as have been his own table talk remembrances, we can deduce that one entry concerned this woman Fatima. Extensive detail is provided about here later in Morals for the Heart. It was she who intuited the need of a fellow saint (Najib ad-din Mutawakkil, the younger brother of Farid

broken only when he hears of her death, the moment to which SNDA refers in the above narrative. Majnun, of course, dies almost immediately afterward. llDespite their infrequent mention in the preserved authentie literature of SAS, we do know that women could be admitted as disciples, probably 'outer' disciples, of the major saints. Again, the model seems to derive from Shaykh Abu Sa'id b. Abi'l-Khayr; it was he who invested a woman disciple, Isi Nili Nishapuri, with the cloak (khirqa) emblematic of spiritual proficiency, though he did not do so directly but through his wife. See Bwering 1983: 378.

156

Honoring Women through Sexual Abstinence ad-din) and provided both him and his family with bread for breaking their fast. So taken in was SNDA with this woman, whose fuller name is given as Bibi Fatima Sam, that he discloses through a conversation with her the most intimate details of his own motivation for embraeing celibacy. As a moment of confessional candor about the private dispositions of a major saint, his revelation to Bibi Fatima has few parallels in Sufi literature of any period or region. Once I was in the presence of this Bibi Fatima (SNDA remarks to Amir Hasan). She turned toward me and said, "There is a man who has a daughter. If you want to marry that daughter, it would be a good match." The master said: "I replied to her as follows. Once I was with Shaykh Farid ad-din and a yogin was also present at that time. Discussion focussed on the fact that some children were born without any inclination for the spirituallife due to the fact that men did not know the proper time for sexual intercourse. At that point the yogin began to comment that there are twenty-nine or thirty days in each month. Every day has its special quality. For example, if a man makes love the first day of the month, such-and-such a child will be born; if on the second day, the offspring will be such-and-such, and he continued in this vein until he had given his estimate for every day of the month," ''When the yogin had finished speaking," said the master, "I asked him (to repeat what he had said) about the influence of each day. As he detailed the qualities of each and every day, I memorized them, and then I said to the yogin, 'Listen carefully and note how well I have memorized what you said.' Shaykh Farid ad-din - may God sanctify his lofty secret - turned to me and said, 'Of these things about which you are enquiring there will never been an occasion for their use.'" The master continued: "When I had fmished telling this story to Bibi Fatima, she remarked, 'Now I know what is your condition (concerning marriage).' Then she added, 'Indeed, you are right not to seek marriage with that young woman. I also have spoken with you just to please her father' " (Morals for the Heart 354-355). The matter-of-factness with which this anecdote is interjected into the Morals for the Heart belies the enormous tensions, and still more enormous consequences, that it unfolds. Earlier in his table talks, SNDA had admitted to a near fatal act of arrogance before Shaykh Farid ad-din. It was also an act of exhibitionism, displaying his own quick mind at seeking formal, book knowledge without waiting upon the intuitive, oral insights of his pir, The ineident almost cost SNDA his privileged position in the inner eircle of Shaykh Farid ad-din's disciples. It was subsequent to this ineident that SNDA's mentor imposed on hirn by indirection the vow of celibacy. Almost unknown among major Muslim saints, the requirement of celibacy could have had but one goal: to curb SNDA's barely controlled desire for self-advancement, which is only one of the several expressions of remaining in the net of this world, instead of trying to leave or escape 'it, which, as SNDA himself reminds his followers, is the meat, the heart of Sufi diseipline. Committed to celibacy, SNDA was barred from experiencing the joys and travails of family life which nearly al1 his diseiples faced. It is to a woman, Bibi Fatima, that he discloses his condition, and she understands, even to the point of offering a contrived apology for her own attempt at being his marriage broker. Only by lingering on the inner-textuality of Morals for the Heart can we appreeiate the further significance of this disclosure. In rejecting marriage, is SNDA also devaluing women, or is he instead revaluing them in ways that his married disciples, inc1uding Amir Hasan, cannot readily appreciate? We would like to know more about SNDA's pronouncements and anecdotes independent of Amir Hasan's mediation of them. To reconstruct a set of perceptions for the Shaykh that do not mirror those of his diligent, designated recorder would be difficult in any case, but it is espeeially difficult when the collection of anecdotes surrounding the first mention of Bibi Fatima has been foreshortened. Would their fuller disclosure have revealed still further differences between SNDA and Amir Hasan? We cannot be certain because in its present form the pericope occludes rather than reveals SNDA's intent. Women are simultaneously exalted and debased. Perhaps the sequence of images discloses the saintly disposition behind the distorting license of the amanuensis. Consider the shift from the view point of women as subjects pursuing their own spiritual quest (models of chastity and virtue) to women as mediators for others' spiritual quest (though they are few, they are more effective preeisely because they are so rare). The latter emphasis, effectively reinforced by the lion/God metaphor, focuses all attention on the final couplet of poetry, It may seal the redolent ambiguity of this pericope or else reveal the voice of 157

Bruce B. Lawrence SNDA, depending on how one answers the question it implicitly poses: Is heaven two-tiered, or is it only the process of admission that is two-tiered, withall penitents - male and female - finally being assured of unconditional salvation? The likelihood is that SNDA held to the latter view: men and women enjoy an equality beyond this life denied them in their present stations, while Amir Hasan and most other IndoMuslims of the pre-modern period held to the former: women remain subordinate in the hereafter as in the here and now. For a saint as multifaceted and complex as SNDA, it does not seem impossible that he would tilt against the tide of bis time in bis perception, evaluation and commendation of women. Other anecdotes in Morals for the Heart reinforce the possibility that SNDA not only allowed but praised the spiritual force of women.P A maid-servant, for example, helped Imam Shafi'I's host to understand the real meaning of hospitality by obeying the guest and not the host (118-119,203-204; Morals for the Heart 217). The piety of Shaykh Farid ad-din's mother is said to have been such that even her bones disappeared soon after her death, implying that she experienced that immediate bodily resurrection in heaven that is reserved for martyrs and saint (121-122,209-210; Morals for the Heart 221-222). The daughter of Hatim Tai secures her father's release by praising him to the Prophet Muhammad (202, 307; Morals for the Heart 340). A female singer, who has repented of her ways, is lured back into service by a group of royal retainers, but through the pathos of her reluctant submission to their will she leads all her male admirers to repent of their sin. The moral seems dear: one chaste woman can and does save several wayward men (234, 398; Morals for the Heart 242-243). Even Amir Hasan's trusted servant, Malih, who figures often in the pages of Morals for the Heart, is commended by SNDA for having daughters, the Shaykh's conversation with bim becoming the pretext for commending the value of daughters for all Muslims (184,308; Morals for the Heart 287-288). Tbis reading of SNDA as a celibate male feminist of pre-Mughal Indian Islam, of course, partially offset by some stereotypical negative references to women that also occur in Morals for the Heart. Eve is the naive spousewho was repeatedly duped by Iblis into taking care of bis wily son, Khannas, with the result that Adam finally killed and ate hirn, as Iblis had hoped he would (72-73, 122-123; Morals for the Heart 164-165).13 Marriage, especially loud cbildren, interfered with the spiritual regimen of one of SNDA's Chishti predecessors, Qutb ad-din (61, 104-105; Morals for the Heart 152). A penitent is enthralled by a female travel companion, but the image of his Shaykh intervenes, giving him fortitude to resist in the face of temptation (219, 271; Morals for the Heart 326-327), and the much heralded Shaykh Abu Sa'id b. Abi'l-Khayr tells the tale of the handsome young man who wanted to become his disciple; the Shaykh tested his loyalty by ordering the novice to marry an old sweeper woman who had lusted after hirn (148-149, 251-252; Morals for the Heart 250-251). On balance, however, the didactic stories that SNDA repeatedly tells as the principal presentation of his distinctive ascesisfavor women, often in ways that do not become clear except through telling and retelling and also comparison with other versions of the same story. The most suggestive, alas, is also one of the longest. It concerns two anonymous saints and the teasing relationship they have with the wife of one. SNDA tells us the story as follows: There was an aged saint who lived on the bank of a river. One day he asked his wife to take food to a dervish residing on the other side of the river. His wife protested that crossing the river would be difficult. ''When you go to the bank of the river," replied the saint, "command the water to part and provide a way for you out of respect for your husband who never slept with his wife." The wife was perplexed at these words. "How many children have I borne this man?" she said to herself. "Yet I cannot protest since it is the order of my husband." Dutifully she took the food to the bank of

12References will be given to their occurrence respectively in the two best known Persian lithograph editions of Fawa'id al-fu'ad: Lucknow 1908 and Lahore 1966, respectively, and also in my English translation, Morals for the Heart. 13Thisis one the few 'standard' Sufi tales to appear in Fawa'id al-fu'ad, For an expanded version that indudes Adam cooking the slain Khannas and then sharing the resultant dish with Eve, see the anecdotes of Hakim al-Tirmidhi in Attar 248-249. 158

Honoring Women through Sexual Abstinence the river, spoke the message to the water, which parted so that she could pass through the middle. After reaching the other side, she set the food down before the dervish, and the dervish ate it in her presence. "How shall Irecross the river?" she asked him, "How did you come?" he asked. She repeated the words of her husband. On hearing this, the dervish said: "God to the bank of the river and tell it to provide a way for you out of respect for the dervish who never ate food for thirty years." The woman, bewildered, came to the water's edge, repeated the message, and the river then parted, allowing her to return to the side from which she came. Once home, the woman fell at the feet of her husband and implored hirn to tell her the meaning of the messages that had been conveyed to her by him and by the other dervish. "Look," said the saint, "I never slept with you to satisfy the passions of my lower seife I slept with you only to provide you with what was your due. In reality, I never slept with you. As to that other dervish, he, too, never ate food for thirty years to satisfy his appetite or for the pleasure of filling his stornach; he ate only to have the strength to obey God's will" (Morals for the Heart 151-152). It is a graphic story with a transparent motive: to demonstrate that the true man of God does not long for either physical nourishment or sexual pleasure as do most people. The frame elements in this story are derived from a deeply embedded scripturaljmythological tradition of mystical Islam. The parallel of the parting of the river to Moses crossing the Red Sea would have been evident to a11 SNDA's listeners, as would have been the importance of parting/joining waters to Khizr's assertion of his superiority over Moses in the Ourtan (Q. 18: Surat al-Kahf), If one traces the obedience structure of God/Moses to Illi:/wife, it becomes clear that the wife occupies a position of extraordinary authority as well as pervasive presence in the narrative. Along the way the story also transmits some other values and reflexes: (1) good wives always obey their husbands, even when they get confusing signals; (2) good wives remain with their husbands, attending to their daily needs, even when the saints reach that advanced stage in life that Hinduswould call vanaprastha or forest-dwe11ing; (3) people in trouble usually talk to themselves; and (4) saints respond to each other's thoughts, desires, needs even when they happen to live on opposite sides of the same river. Crucial to the effectiveness of the story is the role of the wife who, as suggested above, becomes immediately paralleled to Moses: like him she submits herself to a higher authority whose 'nonsensical commands' fmally carry the day. The entire .plot of this story is, in fact, dependent on the presence of the wife in aseries of dual roles, first as wife/ attendant, then as messenger/intermediary and finally as questioner/student. It is she who fmally hears her saintly husband's pronouncement about the meaning of the chores assigned her. In a real sense she performs the decisive function in this narrative: she becomes the equivalent and so the equal of a disciple serving a khanaqah dwelling master, for like hirn she also understand what is required of her as the servant of a divinely inspired emissary. Dur interpretation of the two-saints-and-a-wife-by-the-river anecdote is not exhausted by tracing the subtextual resonancesof this story. In an inner-textual perspective, it also carries to a new level of synthesis the several instructions that SNDA offers throughout Morals for the Heart about.the equivalence of sex and food as at once temptations and opportunities for aspiring Sufi adepts. The woman as wife/ messenger/ student is integral to the content of the message that she Is imparting to others. Her participation confrrms what SNDA has said repeatedly but less forcefully through Morals for the Heart: women as well as men were created for obedience and devotion. Though socially conditioned to serve, women as faithful servants become paragons and also intercessors for others equivalent to men. While it is unlikely that many Indian Muslims among the upper-class courtiers during the Delhi Sultanate shared SNDA's high estimate of women, it is possible to see how far from his persuasion were subsequent SAS masters. With no apparent awareness of SNDA's telling of the two-saints-and-a-wife-bythe-river parable, we find aversion of the same story in a contemporary source. It appears as part of Sudhir Kakar's recording of an interview he had with a twentieth-century SAS master, the pir of Patteshah Dargah in Delhi. There was once a pir who was married and possessed both the 'knowledge' and the 'force.' A young man came to him one day to become his disciple and asked hirn: 'Tell me, how may I serve you?' The pir said, 'Go and get lunch for one person from my home.' The man did so. The pir said, 159

--Bruce B. Lawrence 'Now go and give this lunch to my colleague who is sitting at such and such a place.' The disciple asked, 'Guruji, there is a river on the way on which there is neither a bridge nor arrangements for a boat. How will I cross the river?' The guru replied, 'Tell the river that you have been sent by a man who has never been elose to a woman in his life and you will get your way.' The young man thought to himself that he was being made a fool of since the pir had both a wife and children. Anyway, he carried out bis instructions and on reaching the river repeated what bis teacher had told him. To his surprise the river parted and he walked across to the outer bank where the other pir was sitting. After the old man had eaten, the disciple collected the utensils for bis return trip but became worried as to how he would cross the river again. On inquiring the cause of bis apprehension and hearing the answer, the pir said, "This is really a small matter to get so upset about. Just tell the river that you have been sent by a man who has never eaten in bis life.' The young man of course doubted the pir's sanity! Here was a man who has just fmished bis lunch asserting that he had never eaten in his life! But let me test biswords too, the disciple said to bimself. On reaching the river he repeated the pir's message and the river parted once again to let him through. When he came back to his guru, the young man confessed bis bewilderment at the strange happenings and demanded an explanation. 'It is not the act but the spirit in which it is done,' the guru said. 'I cohabit with my wife not because of my needs but because of hers; the pir eats not because he wants to but because of others who wish to keep him alive.' This is our ideal of fakiri, or detachment, in which both Allah and worldliness walk arm in arm (Kakar 37-38). Apart from illustrating the fact that SNDA is a better storyteller than Kakar's informant, this story also communicates some disparate attitudes toward women on the part of the two Delhi saints. The woman, as we suggested above, had three roles in the first version of this tale, while in the later version she is reduced to one: wife/child-bearer. She is removed as a direct participant in the story, either to be an intermediaryfor effecting her husband's and the other saint's commands, or to be the student/disciple who profits from the spiritual message which is at the heart, though it appears at the end, of this narrative. Instead, sex is her food, just as meals, particularly lunches, are necessary food for human beings in general. The saints in question are not made more saintly by being removed still further from women, yet the women are made less human: they are collapsed into one role, a role that is not only marginal and negative but also stereotypically reductive.

We began with the notion of the misogynist ascetic. We presumed that all SAS masters, by being removed from women or coming to despise them because of the feminine instinct to distractment from the 'true' love. Which is love of God, grudgingly accepted the Islamic mandate to marry and sire cbildren. We discovered that SNDA, a late thirteenth- early fourteenth-century Delhi Sultanate SAS master, inherited a number of attitudes that demean women. Often these attitudes were communicated through winsome, evocative stories. But along side such deprecation or rejection of women he posited his own appreciation of the real women whom he knew, never once citing by name a woman whom he castigated, while at the same time lauding several women who were known to him, especially the elderly Bibi Fatima Sam. We consider inter-textual evidence that appears from contemporary Sufi authors, such as the Central Asian master, Jalal ad-din Rumi, or from modern legate es of Sufi lore, suchas the pir of Patteshah Dargah, also in Delhi, SNDA exhibits an extraordinary drive to exalt and multiply the benefits of women, while others repeat and reinforce negative images that allow for little individuality, creativity or spirituality on the part of Muslim women. To the extent that there is a recurrent series of responses to sexuality that characterizes each generation of SA Muslims, the norm is more closely mirrored in the discourse of the pir of Patteshah Dargah than in that of bis predecessor from the Delhi Sultanate, SNDA. A saint who truly never touched women was, it seems, deeply touched by them. If one may speak of pre-modern male feminists, defining them as men who accept the social construction of gender but try to elevate women to the highest rank of dignity and service within that construction, then SNDA's true predecessor as a Sufi male feminist was the Khorasanian master, Abu Sa'id b. Abi'l-Khayr, Regrettably neither of them had immediate successors who either appreciated or emulated their attitude toward women. In their own departure from the norm

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Honoring Women through Sexual Abstinence on this as on other issues, they have proven that the title so freely bestowed on many does indeed befit them: they are masters in the way of Truth.

References Arberry, A. J., trans. Discourses ofRumi London: John Murray, 1961. Attar, Farid ad-din. Tadhkirat al-awliya. A. J. Arberry trans. London: John Murray, 1966. Bwering, G. "Abu Sa'id b. Abi'l-Khayr," Encyclopedia Iranica (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983) vol. 1, fase. 4:377-380. Digby, S. "The Sufi Shaikh as a Source of Authority in Medieval India" in Purusrtha 9 (1986): 57-77. Gelber, H. G. "The Exemplary World of St. Francis of Assisi," in J. S. Hawley, ed., Saints and Vutues (Berkeley: University of California, 1987) 15-35. Juergensmeyer, M. "Saint Gandhi," in Hawley, op. cit., 187-204. Kakar, S.'Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and Its Hea1ing Traditions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Lawrence, B. "The Chistiya of Sultanate India: A Case Study of Biographical Complexities in South Asian ' Islam," in Michael A. Williams, ed., Charisma and Sacred Biography (Chico, California: American Academy ofReligion, 1982, JAAR Thematic Studies 48/3 and 4),47-67. Lawrence, Bruce B., trans. Nizam ad-din Awliya: Morals for the Heart. Classics of Western Spirituality Series. New York: Paulist Press, 1992. Rahman F. IslamrChicago: University of Chicago, 1979.

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JOURNAL OF TURKISH STUDIES TURKLUK nn.ctst ARASTIRMALARI

VOLUME 18
1994

Edited bv Yavinlayanlar

SiNASi TEKiN CONUL ALPAY TEKiN

ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL FESTSCHRIFT

Essays presented to

ANNEMARIE SCHIMMEL
on the occasion of her retirem.ent from Harvard University by her Colleagues, Students and Friends

Guest Editor

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Managing Editor

Carolyn 1. Cross

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Published at The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Harvard University 1994