Nizam al-Din Awliya – Abdal Hakim Murad: Paradigms of Leadership

time flies and i thought that rather than doing my usual slightly bookish thing i do something a little more gentle and focus on reading and hopefully getting some blessings from the pages of uh certainly a leader from a time uh long gone by uh focusing in particular on this leader's reflections on ramadan taraweeh hunger detachment service charity those virtues which we try to cultivate in this blizzard time uh i thought initially it might be interesting to focus on if i'm looking at a spiritual figure rather than an alim or a political leader to look at the life of shahidullah died in 1978 so we've just passed the 40th anniversary of his death and perhaps particularly because he was english began as john gilbert leonard might be particularly relevant uh perhaps an inspiration to those who think that if you're born in this uh wind blasted northern isle uh you're unlikely ever to join the caravan of the saints but you were certainly revered as as a saint and somebody whose aurus is actually coming up it's in ramadan he has a big mazar in karachi and it's interesting to see how he was able to uphold the highest traditions of asceticism sanctity in an age which had set its face against it his father was a very wealthy millionaire paper manufacturer who was quite horrified by the fact that both of his sons not just john but william from this uh very elite family had gone east and had become dervishes in the trishti tariqa and in fact if you go to the mausoleum of uh which is like the spiritual hub of lahore which was sadly in the the press recently you'll find that amongst the lesser there there's the mausoleum of farooq who died in 1945 the twilight of british rule in india who was actually william leonard and convert who became so revered as a man of god that he achieved the honor of being interred in that very special place but his brother shahid allah ended up after partition with his own dergah in where he attracted thousands of disciples you can still meet some of them and was particularly known for two things that i want to focus on which was the chishti tariyaka's famous hospitality feeding the poor it's even though there's lots of stories about shahidullah once and he went back to england and his father took him to oxford street shopping trying to get him to look a bit smarter and had a famous uh argument with him in in selfridges to the amazement of the shop girls he didn't want this coat but he didn't want that coat i didn't want the other coat which did he want he didn't want a coat at all he'd already bought some kind of tatty thing with him from india and that was fine uh a clash of two worlds uh but very much in the chishti zahid tradition they have resurrected this ancient original meaning of sorf what is this word tasawaf which we hear banded about usually by the ignorant on all sides well it originates with the custom of the holy prophet to where and very often if you look at the cases where that's specifically mentioned in the seerah and the hadith you find that it's associated with his his target dunya with his abandonment of worldly comforts and pleasure because in a desert climate wool is a lot cheaper than cotton or linen but it's kind of hot and uncomfortable and uh but this was what he wore and so to wear bolodan min sorf as the holy prophet did alice has been the bad if you like of the mystic but it's a rather vague and perhaps unhelpful word but of the the one who sets his face against worldly things um and that is the real meaning of the soul of and the sophie the one who is associated with dunya and this is perhaps nowadays the least popular aspect of the sunnah with everybody rushing after material goods or the radical example of the holy prophet ali who didn't just piously urge feeding the poor but was poor himself binding that flat stone across his stomach because of the pangs of hunger without a coin spending the night in his house these are neglected let's face it but part of an axiomatic part of his life giving not taking making sure that nothing remains with you um at the end of the day if there's a coin if there's food you go out and find somebody to give it to radical that's the sunnah of wearing soft which is not terribly popular nowadays which of us seriously does it let's be honest but in the month of ramadan when we are hungry and the stomach starts to hurt and we are amongst the hungry rather than just moralizing about them we perhaps get some kind of tiny taste of what it is actually to practice what we preach and to experience that uh radical reliance on divine providence which was the the most challenging aspect of the seerah of the chosen one sallallahu alaihi wasallam so i thought about doing shahidullah faridi for so many reasons and he's feeding the poor still regularly at his lungar in karachi the poor fed but also the fact that most of his disciples turned out to be women even though he had no connection with anything that we might nowadays understand as feminism there's a particular tradition amongst the chishiya for being particularly appealing to female disciples so what i want to do instead of looking at shahidullah faridy who's really never talked about his life it was totally amazing and if you meet surviving disciples as i've done you hear most incredible anecdotes a very saintly miracle-working uh self-giving fakir a man who just lived in a single room and just gave all the time uh that because there's a little information about him i'd like to turn to one of his spiritual forebears very much in the same tradition of fasting of hunger of asceticism of dunya and that's the great uh saint of delhi nizamuddin olya it's just more information about him largely because his uh one of his uh disciples amir hassan sijazi wrote a book it all foreign the benefits of the heart which relates a kind of diary after each medalist of the sheikh siddhi would write down what the sheikh has said in that particular match list and so we have that and it's even in english bruce lawrence did a perfectly serviceable translation translated as morals for the heart which is fine fatty is kind of the benefit the moral benefit of a particular discourse and it only covers a few hundred out of the thousands and thousands of discourses that he gave during his life but it gives a good uh quite uh granular explanation of what it was actually like to sit at the feet of a great zahid a great wali um so i'm going to be doing some readings from that text rather than just boring you with historiographic details and reflecting on ways in which this can help us to contextualize our experience of renouncing the world during this fasting month of ramadan so his medieval delhi and if you've been to delhi or even if you haven't been you'll know that his mazar is kind of the in many ways the spiritual hub of the city there is the hindu shrine that really competes with it in terms of the gigantic press of people who go there every wednesday and sunday they have the langar with the zika and the free food for everybody and very often a majority of people who go actually hindus or people from other religions because of the famous shall we say pre-bjp pre-ideological indian love of holiness wherever or whatever it might be manifested in so somebody who still dispenses blessings and benefits and hospitality to a vast number of people irrespective of creed it's a an extraordinary place they have a website now so someone who after seven centuries is still exerting uh an influence and uh somebody who uh invites us to reflect on what islam did in india in hindustan read a formal history and it sounds like just a bunch of sultans fighting each other and fighting for conquest and often not very edifying even though the sultans brought in many ways many benefits in a kind of imperial way so the main sultan in the time of nizamuddin even though he lived through many many reigns was not just famous for endlessly conquering places from rival sultans and bringing the booty back to delhi and building new wonders but also for public works delhi was one of the biggest cities in the world and because of the seasonal nature of the monsoon needed a reliable supply of water so the great reservoirs around delhi the house the greatest of them is the hausei alaihi which he built he said in order to build something bigger than his predecessor which is the housing shamsi they were always vying with each other but vying in good works and the population benefited the presence of a police force the presence of city walls night watchmen a postal system decent roads these were something that were new in the indian experience the i've recently been looking at ian allman's new book i can't remember if i've already mentioned him he works a bit on islam and german romanticism and has some interesting things to say about nietzsche's interesting relationship to islam and his new book is on nirad chaudhary who is one of india's great 20th century authors he died back in the 90s i think he's buried in oxford and a very cross-grained but brilliant person who knew just about every language you could imagine a very europeanized bengali intellectual uh it tends to be from bengal the calcutta area that the real thinkers of india have come from in the 19th 20th century even before mohan roy and that movement the first indigenous indian stirrings of a kind of literary and philosophical renaissance in the face of the fact of british imperial rule um somebody like rabindranath tagore would be from that world narayan the short story uh novelist other custodians of the indic conscience uh usually hindu and niraj chaudhary was also from a hindu background but really an independent thinker and he had some interesting things to say about the muslim presence he kind of has the beginnings of a hindu resentment complex here and there but he does say some interesting things about the the monotheistic ethic and what that did for india he's generally quite contemptuous of hinduism because he sees rightly or wrongly hinduism as a tradition that because of the idea of samsara and reincarnation doesn't really have a sense that human suffering is real rather than deserved if my child gets sick that's because it's the reincarnation of some other being that did something bad and this is karmic suffering it's just right and proper in the nature of existence and this is often a charge that say christian polemicists will lay at the door of buddhism as well it can't really deal with the shocking fact of of suffering and therefore good works charity and so forth tend not to exist instead you have an immensely stratified vision of society and because of this moral reluctance according to chowdhury at any rate islam reinvigorated the civilizational life of the subcontinent so he writes things like this the conquest foregrounded the muslim over the hindu as a triumph of virility over effeminacy of courage over cowardice of the lust and desire for life over the fear and resentment of it and then alman goes on this sentiment becomes so focused it makes even the non-hindu reader uncomfortable when chaudhary writes quote how amply the hindus of the 12th century deserved to go down before the virile and living muslims um so there is a certain sense in which there was a a kind of injection of testosterone and of adrenaline in the very static uh and hierarchical world of caste hinduism and that islam prophetically turned things upside down with necessarily considerable disruption but the introduction of a new spiritual principle the sage who can sit with people from any social background was something that necessarily introduced a new alchemy into the enormously profound spiritual life of the subcontinent and i had a colleague who was very a great sanskritist and studied with a with a pandit in india but they said this is an american guy you know i had to sit at the guy's garden gate with my hair wet because if a hair from my head fell into the land of the brahmin it would have to be ritually cleansed and this was a huge inconvenience because i'm just a westerner i'm unclean i'm below the untouchables he still liked the pundits and uh admired the literature that he was studying but that is how things were and in some places in india still are so the introduction of the monotheistic principle remember the holy prophet ali he has ethiopians and persians and everybody in his entourage and it doesn't make a difference is overcoming the tribal system of the ancient arabs represented an extraordinary breath of oxygen into that static world and a new spiritual type emerged and certainly nizamuddin awliya is an example of how the greatness of indian indic spirituality is reinforced but also massively reinvigorated by a new sense of human unity and very frequently we find him adverting to the fact that all human beings are from adam who have that idea despite certain stratifications that you find amongst muslims of subcontinental origin remains the sharia principle so the muslims arrive in india and this spiritual tradition arrives as well and uh in the case of nizamuddin awliya already this is in the 7th century of islam so there's been a presence for for some time but it's it's through these these zahids these ascetics that islam actually starts to spread in the populace the original conquest and it goes back to umayyad times at least in sindh in the far west of the subcontinent didn't really produce much by way of islamization because the soldiers and the olimar just kept to themselves in cantonments rather like the british in india didn't mix with the natives very much the olimar were speaking their own languages and engaging with muslim issues but once you have particularly tariqahs like those khalifas become masters of indigenous languages and to develop forms of tawa that reach out to the very poorest people and of the poorest people rather than stuck in the nice house of the mufti or the the governor's palace but of the population then you find islam really spreading and not just as is conventionally understood amongst the untouchables and the shudras and the people at the bottom of the the social food chain but um some elite people as well and they are attracted by the the new spiritual principle that is at work so uh the uh information that we have about museum nizamuddin awliya represents kind of the maturation of islamic spirituality in india largely comes in modern times from the work of an indian historian ahmed nizami whose book only zombie auliya naturally we have in the cmc library upstairs he was a very uh significant historian of mid late 20th century uh india who also has a book on baba fareed and on the 12th century administrative system of the muslim subcontinent so what i'll be doing for the rest of this morning is basically tracing the narrative that he outlines and benefiting from his scholarship muhammadin aliyah is from ahlil bait he is descended from the imam ali anaki one of the twelve imams that we usually identify as the shi'i imams even though they're venerated by the uh sunnis as well and ali naki had two famous sons one was hasan al-asgari who went on to become the next imam and the other was jafari sani jaafaro ii who is the ancestor of the the of nizamuddin auliya and they settle in central asia in bukhara in the second and third centuries of islam and then as so often happens they become refugees asylum seekers they have that experience of disruption which often turns out to be spiritually very uh very bracing so it's the same mongol invasion of central asia that drives bahadin walad with the little boy who becomes to the west to anatolia and they essentially in kanye that drives the family of the descendants of imam ali and naki south to the subcontinent escaping the scourge of the mongols and they get out of buhari just in time and maybe 35 000 40 000 people are immediately put to the sword and the remainder particularly people who have professions leather workers and calligraphers and so forth are carted off in servile captivity to the mongol capital of karakoram and the city of bukhara is deserted having been one of the great metropolis of islam central asia in many ways never really recovers from the mongol invasions because everybody is dead everybody is dead there's just crows and landis there's still parts of uzbekistan that hadn't been properly repopulated following the mongol catastrophe eight centuries ago so the family moved to uh at a town in india called badawan usually b-a-d-a-o-n sometimes b-a-d-a-u-n and this was at the time about the second most distinguished center for islamic scholarship in hindustan and it was absolutely full of madrasas hospices bridges it was a wonder of early islamic india and a home of very many saints so both of uh nizamuddin awliya's grandfathers settled that's to this little town which is called islam it's not huge but it has so many scholars islam the dome of islam it's near the river ganges and it's still a mainly muslim town uh maybe 60 percent muslim but a little bit forlorn because amongst the many catastrophes of the partition was that the muslims who could afford to leave the middle classes and the elites left leaving the ordinary guys and women behind to survive as best they could so even though it's a mainly muslim town the kind of amazing spiritual and institutional infrastructure that was once characteristic of the city is kind of all cobwebby and broken down now it's a melancholy kind of place and that's the story of much of the subcontinent of course because of the right idea somebody had that the best thing for the future of india's muslims would be to divide them into three well maybe it's worked out maybe it hasn't but for places like badawan it's a kind of shadow of its former self but in those times and in as the city in which nizamuddin aliyah spent the first 20 years of his life it was astounding saints and scholars on every street corner it also tended to be known as a place where you'd go if you really didn't want to be too close to the government in this chishti tradition and in the sufi tradition generally you run away from the sultan you don't have anything to do with political power firstly you don't need the money and what else do they have to offer and secondly they're involved in all kinds of illicit acts luxury is only the least of their sins but illicit taxation and oppression and unnecessary wars etc etc it's not where the good muslim wants to be so uh the the pious and the devout the fastidious tended to leave delhi in the direction of uh this town badawan which made it an even more kind of spiritual reclusive aesthetical but uh glittering jewel in the the muslim crown um certainly nizamuddin awliya always regards his roots as being there even though the age of 19 he leaves with his mother the delhi and he never goes back he's always asking about the town and when uh sigisi is the one who wrote this for it for ad mentions i've been traveling from bengal and we went through badawan and i visited the tombs and i visited the tombs of your your father and your grandfathers and nizamuddin aliyah is said to have wept copiously with a kind of nostalgia for the for the city and was also very proud of his identity in a way that we need to remember as muslims islam the universal religion but being proud of your roots and where you are from is also really important the holy prophet's yearning for makkah was not just a strategic desire but because that was his homeland that's where he was from as the poet says who says however far in the world your heart may travel your true love is the place where you began however many places in the earth a man may settle his yearning is always for the first of those places this idea of nostalgia for where you originated um not done to excess of course is a natural human faculty so he certainly has this and one of his interesting uh discourses he says it's such a fantastic place that the dialect of that place is the language i used when i said yes i bear witness at the day of allah when i was initially pledging my allegiance to my lord when all the nations were assembled this is the great verse in the quran and everybody bed would bore witness to their own nature and the divine nature in that first primordial covenant he said yes i testify in the dialect of that town so the universalism of islam also relates to people's particular patriotism if you like love of place which is certainly a fitry human impulse and something which the saints can manifest so two grandfathers um and the arab gives his daughter bibi zwalekha to the other ahmed and uh the father is born the father dies we're told when horizon is still young or a baby or perhaps yet unborn sources don't really give us a sense of it we know he was basically half an orphan rather like you know the holy prophet and is brought up by his mother for a while she is from this obviously noble family prophetic family uh very aristocratic in her bearing hospitable very devout but absolutely penurious after the father dies in the absence of anything like a social support system for people who are still refugees they don't have larger family in the neighborhood she subsists on almost nothing and is america's being accustomed to real poverty and hunger is something that comes from the necessities of his childhood um she hopes for great things for her son and sends him to the great scholars of the city of badawan one of them is called shady mokhri who was originally the slave of a wealthy hindu who bought purchased his own freedom and was a quran specialist he knew the seventh and as often happens with people who dedicate their lives to the quran all kinds of interesting miracles are attributed to him the kind of the fiery radiance of the divine writ within one produces interesting manifestations so it was believed in badawan that if you sent your son to study your kind of gaida your basic reading quran to shari mukheret that one day somehow or other that child would certainly end up as a hafiz and actually nizamuddin awliya becomes a half his decades later in his life but he always attributes it to that initial kind of tasting of the quranic ocean at the hands of this shadi mukhri and the other is a mullah allah addin osoli who is a scholar who again was really impoverished and it's recorded sometimes he was so hungry that he could hardly speak during his uh during his lessons but it's he who teaches him the basics of hanavi phil he studies the hidayah of course and there is a basic graduation ceremony which has to be really austere graduation ceremony in those days was quite a magnificent affair there was a special turban which was wound by the sheikh and placed on your head and it had a line of silk in it and it was a big deal they had a very simplified version of this but he becomes a scholar when he's still really just a child but he wants to move on to delhi to study with the greater scholars there so he uh asks his mother's permission and uh even though they don't know anybody there she agrees and they go together she's kind of in her 40s by this time they travel to the city of delhi and they experience also great poverty they have to move house several times in some of the poorest slum quarters of the the great city on some days there would be nothing to eat at all just nothing and on those days uh she she would tell the son nizamuddin today we are we are god's guests and do you feel a special blessing coming from that it was reliant upon the creator and he would relate that uh sometimes when several days when they had had something to eat went by uh he would kind of miss those days when there was a special blessing of just nothing in the house at all um she becomes sick it's possible that extreme hunger malnutrition contributes to this but she makes a great dua for him before her death she has no family members to entrust her son to but she makes a door saying oh allah entrust him to your care and he always felt that the subsequent protection that he'd received from the divine presence in his life came from his mother's prayer and you find this quite often with the mothers of the the the awliya and uh as we'll see shortly uh his own teacher the one who came to be his teacher who was uh farida dean ganji shakar of uh regarded his own mother as having been his principal uh instructor in the spiritual way this is this is quite common but a kind of veiled phenomenon given the nature of muslim society you know we don't seek for a public profile we don't seek for prestige or status and the traditional uh charism of the woman is to serve and to make sacrifices for the sake of god um behind closed doors and that's how she she transcends ego and that's her path to sainthood but recording that most of it it's not recorded and they didn't care because they were doing it for god rather than to be included in some spiffy 21st century biography of indian saints that was not their concern they were masturbating in all sense veiled ones so in delhi he used to go and sit by the river jamuna which has a big role in the symbolic role and the development of north indian sufism and that's where he goes in order to complete his hefts of the quran walks up and down inside the river memorizing with a strong inclination to seclusion he doesn't feel at home really in this great strange city and he really wants to be the kind of anchorite who just lives alone a solitary dervish and then as he was memorizing uh this is a famous story a very beautifully dressed young man comes up to him tells telling him are you not afraid that you will be ashamed before the holy prophet on the day of judgment when so many people are flocking to him for help do you want to be alone and not follow his way be focused on god through loving his creatures and this was the moment of his tulbo and he realized that his way would not be the way of the the hermit but the way of one who serves others and exists in the crowd that andrew amongst the masses and then he makes a symbolic gift of all the food he has on him to the young man who then leaves so it's a kind of symbolic event but it indicates something of the particular temper of nizamuddin awliya's spirituality so he doesn't want to live in the city of delhi itself because like just about everybody of a past disposition he's afraid that he'll just get caught up in the entanglements of this sort of all-powerful imperial state and be uh dragooned into the bureaucracy so he settles in a village near delhi called ryaspor which is on the banks of the river which was then kind of just a few poor people few fishermen living there not much going on and the extreme hunger continues his mother is now dead and he sustains himself as a scholar just by leaving a bowl outside his door hoping that by the end of the day somebody would have put some food in it uh he continues to learn we tend to think zombies he's the great sheikh with the horse everybody goes to visit in delhi but actually he was an alim of a very considerable degree and his teacher baba farid insisted that you should only authorize somebody to carry on the path of sufism you can only become a mukaddam or a khalifa if you've really got your ijaza in the key islamic sciences never authorize anybody into some wolf who doesn't have that exoteric armature and and he continues studies with a number of significant scholars including kamaladina zahid who's the best named muhaddith or hadith scholar of delhi and then the terrible time comes when he gets a message from the sultan he's been noticed the last thing he wanted and uh the sultan has been busy confiscating things at random confiscating land confiscating property of rich merchants in order to continue his campaigns and his lifestyle if you've been to the palaces of india you'll see if you go to the uh palace in in lahore which i've visited they've got all kinds of interesting features like spiral stickies for elephants the indian sultans really knew how to live uh so the sultan's grabbing the the wealth of the poor and of the scholars and so the sheikh sends back a message to him saying you've taken everything away everything else from me do you want to take my prayer from me as well is that all that i have left and you're going to take that so uh he continues to study for a long time we have ijazas that he is awarded from commanding zahid anwar famous hadith collection which is memorized when he's still in his for when he's already in his forties so it's not the standard image of you throw away the books and start clapping your hands and be a mystical sufina it's just the sufi path is a way of deepening your understanding of exoteric scholarship and indeed disciplining yourself so that you have more time and capacity for memorization and he becomes uh particularly known in the sciences of phil and hadith and you see that a lot in his discourses um questions about some of the ramadan discourses are just about issues in moon sighting taraweeh rules and so forth a lot of his classes are about those things he also becomes really well known as a debater of course in the persian language which is the language of the muslim scholars in north india at the time um so he was known as nizamuddin he's got so many titles but means breaker of gatherings when he was in a gathering where the scholars were disputing he could immediately shatter everybody with a well-chosen or a hadith expressed in a particularly elegant and persuasive way however the sufi tradition and the trishti tradition in particular oppose this and regard it as problematical so you find that in his in his majalis as recorded by sigisee you don't get scenes of a lot of argumentation he's always looking for something positive to say about others and this comes up as we'll see in his relations with non-muslims as well so he's sitting in his modulus one day and his disciples are saying look at that look out the window there's an idol worshiper look at him going up and down this crude statue and his response is we can all learn something not from his beliefs but from the sincerity of his devotions that's very characteristic you don't make concessions but you look for what is best in every situation in order not to feel proud that you benefit rather than just end up feeling superior so he moves away from the world of kind of formal rhetorical debating society um dispute amongst the olympia and towards uh more characteristically irenic approach which he becomes well known for he still hasn't found his his sage his guide when he was still in the town of badon he had heard of the repute of baba farida deen in pakistan but one night when in delhi he heard a more as in in the middle of the night reciting the famous verse has not the time come for those who believe that their hearts should submit to the remembrance of god and to the truth that has been revealed so without any preparation he just goes out of his house and walks off and goes to ajudan which is hundreds of miles away to the west and he comes into the presence of the sheikh who is now around about 90 years old the great baba fareed and khalid nizami also has a good book about baba fareed which is also worth and some of you if you're from pakistan you may have traveled around punjab you may even have been to the place it's quite quite phenomenal and so he comes into the presence of the sheikh and the sheikh recites a poem the flame of being separated from you has been burning our hearts the tempest of yearning to meet you has ravaged our lives so the sheikh knows that this particular disciple is on his way it's as if this is the star pupil that he's been waiting for all his life this kind of tatty guy who comes from delhi uh and he's really nervous in the presence of the sheikh and of course there are tests first test is um you will spend the night with us uh and you will sleep in one of these beds in one of these cots and he sees a lot of the dervishes are just sleeping on the ground and that the the are for the sort of the scholars and the senior people the guests and but in the nick of time he suppresses any hint of protest and recognizes that uh to accept a spiritual guide means that you accept the instructions of that guide so he then asks baba fareed i'm at a crossroads should i give up my studies of alma and become a dervish or should i continue mother fury replies characteristically in the chishti lineage i've never asked anybody to give up the pursuit of sacred knowledge of continue as a scholar and as a dervish and in the fullness of time one of those qualities will prevail in you over the other he visits him every year in the month of ramadan this is his ramadan practice he leaves behind everything in delhi and walks to adridan and sleeps in the chanukah of the sheikh who is teaching him to overcome the residues of pride in his heart and to cultivate the love of others overcome pride love others and at the age of only 23 when the shaykh is 93 he becomes his chief khalifa and his deputy but this only comes after some sharp lessons baba farid's principal practice in his formal majalis was to read and teach from a book called the aware film of sriharbit in surawarty which is one of the great classical texts of normative sufism and he had a rather defective manuscript from which he was reading and on one occasion the young disciple said oh master i could get you a better copy and this is taken to be an objection and baba freed says can this poor dervish not correct a bad copy by himself uh zombies horrified throws himself down in apology and then kind of runs out and goes into the the forest india is still full of wilderness areas at the time in absolute despair and finally a friend goes from him to ask for baba farid's forgiveness and baba farid says what i do i do to perfect you a peer the spiritual guide is just a dresser of brides it's an interesting expression in other words you're to be presented to the lord in submission to the lord of creation i'm just the one who gets you ready for that role and that that experience so india 664 on the 13th of ramadan he formally gives him the khilafat to the amazement of people who have been in his darker all his life and he says you will be a tree a tree under whose cool shade all humanity will find a cure will find healing this idea of the sage as a tree and in hot countries in particular trees are pretty welcome refugees from the burning of the sun it's often used of the sultan so famously the dream of osman the founder of the ottoman dynasty is that he saw his shaykh touching his chest as he was sleeping at a tree comes out and animals and human beings of different kinds come to take a shelter under that tree and that's his image of what his role as a ruler is going to be but for the scholar as well the tree which is just indifferent in who it shades animals human beings different denominations different genders a tree is a generous generous uh phenomenon which is one reason why we use the image of the tree for designing the new cambridge mosque of course so it's time for him to return to delhi uh baba farid knows that he's got no money he's just wearing a kind of rag and he doesn't even have additional cloth in order to add patches to his rag this is extreme destitution middle ages that wasn't so unusual uh baba free gives him a silver coin for his journey nizamuddin knows that this is the last coin that baba fareed possesses and so he goes to him at iftar time there's no food and so he gives him back the coin he places the coin at the master's feet and baba fareed prays that allah will give him some share of the dunya because he's so ready to renounce this coin that he needs for his journey the prayer is that he will not experience want and nizamuddin says i fear that that would damage my heart baba farid says do not fear what you possess will not involve you in any attachment or misfortune um and nizamuddin says this before departing by appointing me as your khalifa you have done me a very great honour and have given me a treasure however i'm a student i'm averse to dunya attachments the calling is high beyond my ability all i want from you is not to feel effort but just your good opinion and your kindness but baba freed reassures him says he's got his full confidence and hazrat nizamuddin unwilling to disobey his master accepts the role so he takes from him the symbolic prayer rug and the staff and he gives him two pieces of advice as he's leaving if you must incur debt try to repay it quickly secondly always try to please your enemies this is parting words and shortly afterwards better three passes on to the abode of eternity nizamuddin is back in delhi this enormous world city full of need destitution religions confusion the terror of the palace and sets to work very difficult to do anything without engaging somehow with the imperial bureaucracy but he still manages to set up a vast network this is one of the achievements of the chishtia in particular he sets up a network of hundreds of centers and branches as it were of his movement all over india muslim india and beyond the boundaries his disciples are sent out literally everywhere um he is back in riyadh which is now where he's buried and is the hazard in his armadine which is a bustling district of delhi there's even a hazard in his armed railway station it's just another city quarter and lots of people are flooding in in order to benefit from his teachings he is a a well-known ascetic zaheer who enjoys everyone's confidence um the pattern of his life life is shaped by the five daily prayers he eats very little at soho time uh once one of his friends heard him say there are many poor who sleep in the corners of the mosques and patios of shops who have nothing to eat how could any more food go down my throat so here the kind of asceticism is linked to a sense of social responsibility most of the day was spent uh just receiving visitors high and low they'd come to see him except after zohar he would have his hadith class this is a kind of formal darcy islam and at iftar he would eat a piece of bread and some vegetables and the rest he would distribute and then he would go back to where he lived which was basically just a wooden kind of shack on the roof of the dargah the retreat center which he built by the river i mentioned that he has this strong aversion to associating with rulers and this becomes part of his teachings do not approach the doors of kings he says seek no recompense from them if a letter came from the sultan he would just leave it unopened you'd never open it the sultan worried about this hugely popular phenomenon down the road and yes poor would send spies to try and check him out is this political as this one of the sultan sultan jalal dino khalji made him a gift of some villages but he refuses then the sultan tries to get him to come to the palace but without success and his ahmadine awliya says my house has two doors if he comes in through one i run out to the other but a number of government disciples still become government officials still become his disciples and this is how he exercises his influence on society not through having some kind of political or economic control of it but just through transforming individual souls and they say that the city of delhi acquired a different more devout and more compassionate temper as a result of his apolitical lifestyle one of his teachings there's three kinds of dervishes there's the salic those who renounce the world and devote themselves entirely to thicker and ascetical practice that's the salic there's the people who have a certain balance between service in the world and service to god and the rajya'i the hopa the vain hopper is those who've achieved some progress in their spiritual lives but then become complacent or lose interest and just hope that god will somehow make things better for them or forgive them many of the people who are coming for blessings are women and i mentioned this in connection with um faridi and i've been in touch with some of his people who knew him the old ladies now and majority of them are women there's some interesting teachings not a feminist by modern standards upholder of a traditional vision of society and dimorphism but somebody who thought that the upliftment of society should come through respect we've seen the importance of his mother and of his teacher's mother so he always taught that women were equally able spiritually as men and he once said if a tiger comes at you from its lair do you bother to check whether it's male or female in other words what counts is the creature itself and in the case of humanity and the adam these gender differentials are not the significant thing so yeah very many uh women are are coming to see him um we know a little bit about where he's staying his jamaat khanna which is a large hall for the sama ceremonies the dicker to be held with lots of little rooms small rooms where his disciples would stay opening onto it and visitors would come all day he never refused to see a visitor and he never refused anybody bail anybody who wanted to be his disciple and would not be turned away and he had disciples from all religions not just muslims and this is a famous aspect of many of the chishti sheikhs that you don't have to be muslim in order to benefit somehow from the sage although clearly his way is the muhammadan way so uh these individuals are coming uh and a lot of gifts are coming what they call the futoh in the tariq which is gifts of food because of his mission of sacred hospitality which is the way of muai nadine christie of ajmer himself much of the sheikh's effulgence is passed out not just through words of wisdom but through practical gifts and particularly gifts of food so wealthy people people hoping for the sheikhs blessings prayers forgiveness whatever act of tulba something to do before hajj or before you die would give a lot of food to the dergah which would then be organized by officials who are appointed there and uh distributed to the poor so uh enormous kitchens they said the kitchens of his dharaga are bigger than the royal kitchens in delhi and the rule of his hanka was that no gift could remain for more than a week so one of the practices that he would adopt before going for jumwa prayer before leaving his hanukkah would be to go to the storeroom to make sure that there was nothing left and everything had been meticulously swept and cleaned so uh this langar uh fed a huge number of the poor of delhi and he liked to make it good food as well he would a point appoint good cooks well just give people kind of the cheapest rubbishy stuff some of the food that was donated was of good quality so it was known to be uh good food and also uh when he noticed people coming regularly who would make inquiries and would allocate a stipend for those people once their circumstances had been acknowledged so once he was walking by the river and he found a woman who was dug a well was drawing water from the well rather than from the river and he says why didn't you get your water from the river we all drink from the river and she says ah the river water tastes so good that it gives me and my children an appetite for food we don't have any food but this water it doesn't give us any kind of hunger so hearing that he adds her to the list of those who receive a regular stipend from the lunga and it's still the case thursdays and sundays you get free food from the dergah of nizamuddin awliya in delhi so the poor the barefoot ragged sick masses are coming but also people from the elites they're also interested in sanctity and salvation one of them is amir khosrau who is maybe the best known poet in india at the time tortilla hind the songbird of india who is really even those of turkic origin like a lot of these migrants from central asia uh really one of the maybe four or five greatest ever persian poets with his famous hamsa which is a huge volume with five extended poems on various secular and religious subjects um writes a lot of court poetry he has this iran one of the great monuments of persian literature which is basically all about the splendor of the court and the wonder of the sultan it's kind of royal panajarik is in that in that zone um educated in that not only did he know persian but he could write in arabic and sanskrit as well [Music] and he writes a book about nizamuddin olia which has also survived which is very flowery and baroque and difficult really to extract concrete information from but he seems to have been his closest friend it's interesting though even though nizamuddin awliya is living this ragged existence distributing food to the poor uh the guy who comes and spends evenings with him and sometimes they talk leaked into the night is this very kind of fancy elite poet from the royal court they just somehow hit it off um yep so this is how he spends his time and uh if you go there today you'll see a lot of muslims non-muslims hindus buddhists christians everybody goes there just to get something usually people from the lowest orders of society but hindus used to come as well and there's some enigmatic stories so for instance once he noticed that there were six yogis hindu ascetics standing outside the door of the chanukah and the disciples said they've come to seek your blessings and then the end of the day they finish their meditation and they're about to leave and they're asked why did you come and they said we tried to understand the spiritual place of the shaykh but we couldn't understand what that means who knows but there's some kind of interreligious deep exchange going on despite the fact that he is from the islam he is axiomatically embedded in his own islamic tradition but it is through these shishi saints that so many millions really have come into islam across the subcontinent and the age of conquests and merchants gave way to the age of mass conversions and many of his disciples in remote areas would spread islam specifically amongst the hindu populations through not adopting a kind of very elite foreign discourse unfortunately this is not it has to be said the way in which tariqas function in the modern west where they tend to be bastions of ethnic difference if you go to a chishti place in luton now it's not going to be engaging much with the non-muslim population and bringing in everybody and speaking english it will be a very mono-ethnic a kind of bunker of somebody else's culture so they're profoundly malfunctioning here now but in their heyday in india these are the ones who provided the stepping stones to islam for countless millions which is why islam is a religion of 30 percent of the population of the subcontinent if not more compare that to christianity which came to india long before islam and had all of the advantage of british rule for centuries christians are only about one percent of the population of india so it's these people who live with the poor rather than the kind of english sergeant major or the missionary in his top hat these people who get into the culture live with the culture and experience the sufferings of the masses who win the hearts of the population um and so it was so in 1325 he dies one of the last things he says is that when he dies he wants there to be nothing left in his house or in the lunga so ev the food has to be distributed and everything swept and cleaned and he designates iraq as his disciple telling him that he has to stay in delhi and suffer the hardships of life there and the historians recall that when news of his death were was known every house in delhi went into mourning uh hindu and muslim alike and it's janazah led by the grandson of the great um zakaria of maltan malta mr city of saints in pakistan and amazing ancient place and zakaria's shrine is biggest edifice there and so it was that family that had this particular honour so let's now move to what i really wanted to do which is to hear the the words of the tradition directly and i wanted to start with advice from his own teacher baba fareed of pak patan now you'll notice with this tradition that this is certainly not the highly intellectual philosophical gnostic sufism of the ibn arabi school that also is coming into india at this time the people like muhammad poury and so forth which becomes an enormously brilliant and sophisticated tradition which of course has its intrinsic legitimacy this is more grassroots working with the masses compassion feed the poor it sees itself as being uh closer to the original sunnah of south of um selfless asceticism and wool wearing so these are not complex sentiments they are straight from the heart so from baba fareed busy yourself ceaselessly with active discipline or jahada struggling against the ego laziness is the devil's workshop in our way of life fasting achieves 50 percent of success educate yourself and your dependence avoid all sinful actions always rectify your own faults before seeking to rectify others what you hear from me commit it to memory and spread it widely if you have to go into ertkf uh seclude yourself for a period do so in a mosque where the prayer the namaz is conducted in congregation deactivate your ego your nafs make your nafs idle consider the world as being something far from you and as insubstantial renounce my silliness and all the desires of the world when in privacy or seclusion busy yourself with the worship of god if in such seclusion you grow tired of large acts of worship then try smaller ones should you be troubled by your ego then gratify it with a little rest or some sleep shower your blessings and favors upon whoever may visit you so these are the basic of the tariq there's nothing hugely intricate about this but it is through these teachings that india so substantively became muslim and it said that but for partition which more or less stopped the conversion process in india within 300 years india would have a strong muslim majority but of course that that tradition with the segregation of communities uh has come to an end so reading from the uh one of foreign disciples and who writes down what happened in some of the sheikh's informal conversations i've just chosen a few of these some of which are ramadan related this is friday the 5th of ramadan the year 707 what is the preeminent form of optional prayer he asked then he explained that according to the decree of mawlana zahered in hafiz may allah grant him peace it was the taraweeh prayer every evening recall the master he would also urge me to read three sections of the quran so that after ten consecutive evenings i might complete the whole of the quran and obtain the benefit of performing this task at his command after the congregational prayer i would retire to observe the taraweeh prayers good he would explain to me that is a commendable thing for you to do the master once told the following story about a certain chaste saint many times he used to say that all virtuous deeds such as prayers fasting invocations and saying the tespi prayer beads are a cauldron but the basic staple in the cauldron is meat without meat you do not experience any of these virtuous deeds so finally after hearing this many times they ask that peer many times you've used that analogy please explain it meet replied the saint is renouncing worldliness while prayer fasting invocation as well as repetition of vietespie 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 practices there is no cause for fear if these things are not obligatory 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 if one puts oil pepper garlic and onion into a cauldron and adds only water the end result is known as pseudo stew that isn't persia version but the basic staple for stew is meat there may or may not be other ingredients similarly the basis for spiritual progress is leaving the world there may or may not be other virtuous practices so what he's saying is that our our forms of worship and our other car and our sessions are just kind of ingredients but the essence of the thing has to be turning away from our attachments to the world at and repenting and going towards the abode of eternity monday the twenty-fifth of jumma del ola year 708 conversation turned to the virtue of giving food to others on the blessed tongue of the master came these words there is no merit attached to providing food just for your own people then he began to talk of hwaja ali the son of quran the venerable christian saint may allah bless both of them he was taken captive during the onslaught of the unbelieving mongols they brought him toward before chingishan at the time one of the disciples of that noble dynasty of saints was present not only present but in a position of authority at the mongol court when he saw that ali had been taken prison he was dumbfounded to himself he thought how can i procure his release in what way should i mention his name before genji's khan if i say that he comes from a noble family and is himself a saint what will genji's khan care and if i mention his obedience and devotion to god that too will have no effect after pondering a long time he went before genji's khan and announced the father of this man was a saint who gave food to people he ought to be set free did he give food to his own people ask genji israel or to people who are strangers everyone provides food for his own people replied the courtier but the father of this man gave food to strangers genji was very pleased with this reply a true saint he noted is someone who gives food to god's people and immediately he ordered them to sit harja ali free he also gave the saint's son a cloak and apologized for having detained him in every religion concluded the master giving food to others is a commendable action thursday the thirteenth of jumper thirty seven oh eight you have to remember that quadri zamadin is not just fasting in ramadan but fasting the white days the three moonlit nights of the middle of each lunar month and also very frequently at other times as well observing the fast of daward which is fasting alternatively alternate days so this assembly is a long discussion of fasting with detailed reference to prophetic precedents and their interpretations if someone fast continuously explained the master the pain of fasting becomes easy for him the reward is greater however for the person on whose soul the act of fasting weighs more heavily hence the fast of david is this one day you fast the next day you break the fast thursday 27th of dramatic 3708 when evening came and it was friday evening a woman presented herself to the master and professed allegiance to him she took her bail he then began to comment on the numerous benefits that accrue from the virtue of women and here you have his uh famous image the master then declared that dervishes who ask saintly women and saintly men to pray on their behalf invoke saintly women first when a wild lion comes into an inhabited area from the forest he explained 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 thursday the 25th of xiaoban year 708. he then began to tell the story of a certain grocer who fasted for 25 years he informed nobody about his practice even the members of his own household did not know that he was fasting if he was at home he would lead people to believe that he'd eaten his shop and if he was at his shop he would lead people to believe that he had eaten at home the basis for spiritual endeavors must be a sound intention observe the master because while people note what you do god almighty takes note of what you intend to do when your intention is fixed on god then a little amount of work will be greatly rewarded in this connection he told a story about the friday mosque in damascus it had a large waffle endowment the administrator of that place was such a powerful person that he was almost equivalent to a second emperor indeed if the emperor had a monetary need he would take out a loan from the endowment administrator now it happened that a dervish who hankered after those endowment funds began to practice obedience and devotion in the congregational mosque of damascus in the hope that he might gain fame and be offered that religious trust for some time he visit himself with acts of worship and yet no one mentioned his name then one evening the power of his worship caused him to repent of his hypocrisy he made a pact with god almighty i will worship you for your sake alone i am not making this pact in order to obtain control of that trust he continued to visit himself with acts of worship emitting no detail and performing everything with sound intention before long some people approached him to take the job of administering the mosque endowment no he told him i've left that for a long time i've been very desirous of such a position and it's only because i've left it that they now offer it to me in short he continued to busy himself with god almighty and did not become tainted by engaging in the occupation of administering the walk monday the second of suffer 713 one of those present remarks some persons when speaking about you it's about raj and his ahmadine have ascended certain pulpits in the city and have gone to certain places and proceeded to say such unseemly things that we cannot repeat them here the master allah bless him replied i pardon them all what sort of place would it be were men to be constantly engaged in hatred and slander of others everyone who speaks ill of me i pardon him you also must pardon slanderers and not harbor any enmity towards them after that he spoke about a certain chajo of indrapats continuously you would speak ill of me and wish me ill speaking ill of others is one thing wishing them ill is something else still worse in short the third day after he died i went to his grave and offered prayers on his behalf o allah i prayed whatever bad thing he said about me or bad thought he harbored of me i forgive him would you please not punish him on my account in this connection he said if there be trouble between two persons one of them should seize the initiative and cleanse himself of ill thoughts towards the other when his inner self is emptied of enmity inevitably that trouble between him and the other will lessen wednesday the seventh of rajab 715 he began to speak about repentance repentance is of three kinds past present and future he explained repentance of the present means repenting and feeling regret for whatever wrong one has done repentance of the past means being reconciled with one's enemies if someone for instance takes ten dirhams from another and then says i'm sorry i'm sorry that is not genuine repentance genuine repentance consists of giving back the ten dirhams and admitting that one has done a wrong that is real repentance and if someone speaks ill of another he should go offer apologies ask pardon of that person and be reconciled with him and if that person who has spoken ill of died before reconciliation was possible what to do one should act as if he was still alive and had been spoken ill of in other words one should say such good things about him even after his death that he will be well remembered and what to do if one kills a person who dies without an heir one should free a slave that is to say you cannot bring the dead to life and so instead you should free a slave in freeing a slave it is as if one has brought a dead person back to life and what to do if one commits adultery with another man's wife there is no provision in sharia that one should go and apologize to the husband what to do then go and seek forgiveness from god in the same vein he spoke about a wine drinker who decides to repent what should he do he should give soft drinks and cool water to the people of god for every act of penance should be consonant with the sin that was committed the second kind of repentance he continued pertains to past sins that is what has just been described as for the third kind of repentance that pertains to the future one makes the resolve never to sin again never again to commit such sins as one previously committed on this point he told a story about the time when he professed allegiance to sheikhal islam foreign and also repented of his former misdeeds several times on his blessed lips came the remark one should be reconciled with one's enemies and he kept stressing that one must make restitution to those who have a claim on you then i recall that i owed 20 gitels to a certain hindu and also that i had borrowed a book from another and had lost it as the great sheikh may god illumine his grave continued to speak about reconciliation with one's enemies i realized that he was indeed the channel for disclosing the world of secrets so he was talking about me i resolved to return to delhi in order to settle my accounts with these two men on reaching delhi from adradan i first went to see the man to whom i owed 20 digitals he was a cloth merchant from whom i purchased a robe at no time did i manage to save 20 details that i might repay him it was difficult for me to make a living some days i would earn five gitels other days ten digitals as soon as i managed to save tenjitals i went to the house of that cloth merchant and called up to him he came out of his house to meet me i told him i owe you 20 jitels but i do not have the means to pay you the full amount at one time i brought you these ten getalls take them i will bring the other ten shortly if god almighty wills when it heard me out the man remarked fine you have come from a saint then taking the ten jutals he told me i forgive you the ten remaining jitels next i went to see the man whose book i had borrowed when i met him he did not recognize me who are you he asked oh sir i replied i am the person who took a book on loan from you and lost it now i will seek to make another copy of the book like the one you lent me and i will bring it to you when it heard my pledge this man replied fine you show the influence of the place from which you came i forgive you that book saturday tenth of ramadan 716 conversation turned to taraweeh prayers do you say these prayers at home or in the mosque he asked me at home i replied but the prayer leader of the mosque is a virtuous man yes noted the master once in the congregational mosque he completed a full recitation of the whole quran during taraweeh prayer every evening i added that prayer leader whose name is sharafiddin reports a jews of the quran the master may god remember him with favor remarked indeed he does one evening i said prayers behind him even though there had been heavy rains that evening and the streets were full of mud i still went to say my prayers with such care did that man recite the prayers that he seemed to pronounce each letter as correctly as it is possible to pronounce it in this connection the master began to talk about a scholar from sonam his name was mawlana dalatyar he too would recite prayer so eloquently that no one could succeed in reciting as he did the master then began to talk about raja aziz the chief police officer of badawan he was a fine man a disciple of dervishes himself attached to sheikh dia deen of badawon from time to time he would remember other dervishes and summoning them to an audience he would arrange a special event on their behalf there was in badawn a youth who'd recently converted to islam he related to the master the following incident one day i was proceeding towards the public gardens of badawan this noble officer was seated underneath a tree and had set up a table when he saw me from afar he shouted hello come here i was afraid i didn't want to disturb him yet i did approach him and he treated me with extreme deference seating me next to himself after eating some food i got up and left this is another traditional institution that one always treats with real deference people have recently converted to islam you don't patronize them you look up to them thursday the fourth of the blessed month of ramadan in the year of the hijra 717 a disciple of the masters arrived and brought a hindu friend with him he introduced him by saying this is my brother when he greeted both of them the master may god remember him with favor ask that disciple and does this brother of yours have any inclination towards islam it is does this end replied the disciple that i brought him to the master that by the blessing of your gaze he might become a muslim the master became teary-eyed you can talk to these people as much as you want he observed and no one's heart will be changed but if you find the company of a righteous person then it may be hoped that by the blessing of his company the other will become a muslim and then in connection with sincerity and honesty among muslims he told the following story there was a jew who lived in the neighborhood of raja bayazid bistami when he died they said to that jew why did you not become a muslim he replied if islam is what bayazid professed then i cannot attain it but if it is what you profess then of such an islam i would be ashamed sunday the 23rd of muharram 721 conversation turned to the morality of dervishes and their dealings with those who harbor ill will towards them there was a king named tarani recalled the master but they killed him in an uprising may god have mercy upon him had a great affection for this tarani after his death they made another man king that newly installed king appointed a certain astrologer in a position of favor and that astrologer harbored enmity towards sheikh seifer deen bachar when the astrologer had the opportunity to address the monarch he said the kingdom has been entrusted to you drive out sheikh safadeen for he is a master in toppling kingdoms the king accepted his advice go he commanded his astrologer and by whatever means you have at your disposal bring the shaykh here the astrologer left and when he called on the sheikh he showed obvious disrespect he took off his turban wrapped it around his waist and did other similarly impudent things in short when sheikh seyfadin came to the royal court he stared so intently at the king that the latter became embarrassed he immediately descended from his throne and uttering profuse apologies began to kiss the hands of the sheikh he offered a horse and other presence to the sheikh he implored his forgiveness saying i did not command that you be brought here in this manner the sheikh departed the royal court and returned home the next day the monarch sent that astrologer bound hand and foot to the sheikh with a message i have given the command for this astrologer to be killed now i'm sending him to you in whatever way suits you kill him as soon as he set eyes on that astrologer the sheikh once freed his hands and feet he made him put on the cloak that he the sheikh was wearing today join with me he said in remembering god that day was monday the sheikh went to the mosque to offer his customary remembrance of god he took the astrologer with him and ascending the pulpit he spoke the following couplet today to those who do me wrong i would if possible do only good after narrating this story the master observed every action that comes from man whether good or bad the creator of that is god almighty hence whatever is done is done ultimately by god why then should i be disturbed by someone no matter what he does tuesday the 17th of safar 722 conversation turned to the generous disposition of the dervishes and their beautiful conduct one evening he recalled a thief entered the house of shaykh may god grant him mercy and comfort and this sheikh ahmad was a weaver the thief searched the whole house and found nothing he was about to leave when sheikh ahmed cried out and made him promise that he would wait a minute then looked into his own workshop he took a bundle of yarn that he himself had made and from it spun several reams of yarn after separating these reams from the rest of the yarn he offered them to the thief take them he said the thief took them and left the next day that thief together with his mother and father returned touching their heads to the ground before sheikh ahmad they repented of their thievery so those are some uh drops from the ocean of that small proportion of the shaykh's gatherings which have been recorded by amir hassan sijizi and they give us perhaps in a way better than just an academic discourse could a sense of the perfume that attended those amazing transformative gatherings and what we find in them is an extraordinary embrace of humanity in its difference of the sinner and of the non-muslim and of disadvantaged classes of society of women they're all welcome on his carpet and this was the way in which the subcontinent traded up to islam not through the muftis and the ulama kiram and not through the sultans but through this kind of humble teaching simple loving effective so perhaps the moral of today's lesson is if we wish not just to survive in our western diaspora but to thrive and to expand perhaps we should humble ourselves have more respect for our neighbors fast less about islamophobes and try to melt hearts because that's the most important part of the human being so may allah bless us in this month of ramadan and send down his mercy upon us as we remember those of past ages who were such munificent distributors of his mercy insha'allah cambridge muslim college training the next generation of muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

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Published: Wed Apr 21 2021