Pramāṇa · Search · About · API

Muntakhab al-tawarikh 105: XXIII. Shaikh Abu-l-Fath of Gujarat.

Muntakhabu-t-tawārīkh (Ranking, Lowe, Haig) 105

Language
English

105

He was the son-in-law of the reverend Mir Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur (may God sanctify his honoured tomb!), but he never saw the Mir and his connection with him by marriage did not occur until after the Mir's death. He was a man of very high position and dignity, endowed with perfections. He was firm and unshaken in his adherence to the doctrines of the Mahdawi sect, holding to them resolutely, since, when he was in the honoured city of Makkah and in Gujarat, the closest bond of friendship existed between him and Shaikh Gada’i. In the time of Bairam Khan, the Khan-i-Khanan, he came to Agra in connection with some important business, but in a short time that terrible disaster occurred, and the Shaikh returned to Gujarat.
When I was a student I waited on the Shaikh for half a night in the quarter of Shaikh Baka’u-’d-din Mufti (may God have mercy on him !), on the far side of the river at Agra, on the introduction of Maulana ‘Abdu-’llah of Qandahar, the relative of Haji Mahdi of Lahor. He was sitting alone in a bare room, busily employed in reading this tradition of the prophet, (may God bless him and save him!):— “No number of people shall sit together to mention God but that angels shall surround them, and the mercy of God cover them, and tranquillity come upon them ; and God remembers them as men who are with Him.” He translated that saying and I received instruction in the ecstatic worship of the Sufis, and was employed for some time therein, and experienced a wonderful and strange accession of divine grace, and the (inner) meaning of the Qur'an was disclosed to me, and for some time my condition was such that I believed every sound and voice which fell upon my ears to be the mystic chanting of the Sufis. I saw some of the Shaikh's disciples who, to guard themselves from talking foolishly, had (literally) glued their lips together, some of them (for the same reason) had pebbles in their mouths.
The year of the Shaikh's death and where and when it occurred, are not known. (May God remember him to his good!)