Nizamuddin Dhargah

The New York Times reports that quietly, even furtively, the American government has begun making what it calls "overtures" to the Moslem world. It seems to me that overtures are supposed to be at least audible to the naked ear, nevertheless it's about time we did something to recognize that it's Moslems that are the primary victims of Islamicist terror, not us.  
     I have been scanning and sorting through the photographs I took between 1966 and 1971, among them images of a complex of Moslem shrines in  New Delhi, India called Nizamuddin's Dhargah. When I lived in New Delhi, it was one of my regular destinations. With its walls and warrens and labyrinthian alleyways, the Medieval complex had been a refuge for New Delhi's Moslem population during the riots that attended the partitioning of the Subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and it remained a haven whenever communal tensions in the city approached the breaking point. Here lay the tombs not only of the 13th century saint Nizamuddin Auliya but the musician and poet Amir Khusrow; Jehanara, the sister of the Moghul Shah Jehan; and the great 19th century poet Ghalib.  

     It is said that as a young man Nizamuddin had to struggle hard to be humble because he had so little to be humble about. He was by all accounts brilliant, handsome, charismatic. Chased from Bokhara by Mongols, he and his parents did not find refuge until they reached the Doab, the fertile triangle that lies between the Jumna and the Ganga, where his father promptly passed away. He and his mother lived in abject poverty, but Nizamuddin was so brilliant that local sages gave him a “turban of scholarship” while he was still a child. By the time he made his way to Sultanate Delhi in the mid 13th century, his mother had died as well, and he was rescued from starvation by the greatest Moslem scholar of his day. 

     At first, Nizamuddin had entertained ambitions of becoming a magistrate, but as he immersed himself in the Koran, he resolved he would renounce the world and live the rest of his life as a penitent. His teacher, however, was a Chisti Sufi who persuaded his pupil that true humility lay not in abstruse scholarship and self abnegation but in defending the oppressed and doing good works. Refusing  to attach himself to the ruling nobles of his day, Nizamuddin established a monastery about a kilometer from where he now lies buried, to which he welcomed people of all faiths. He stood up to the nobles who tried to seduce him into their service, kept company with the poor, and tempered Sufi doctrine with generosity and practicality. Much like Gandhi, he was a very Indian sort of saint, and a bur in the side of the powers-that-were, and it is no wonder that in the precincts of his dargah he is still believed to be a living presence.

   

Some places have been hallowed for so long that even an irreligious young man like myself could feel the reverberations from the hordes of pilgrims who for six centuries had found their way here from the farthest reaches of the Moslem world. I felt as though I had found a refuge there too, and made friends over time with the local mullahs who permitted me to photograph the beggars as they sought out spots of sunlight in the sandstone alleys; the water carrier as he made his rounds through the adjacent cemetery, slaking the thirst of the dead with water he dribbled from a goatskin sack; the scholars studying their texts on the cold stone tombs; the women come to confer with astrologers and sages; the singers performing Qawwali in their lovely hoarse voices before Khusro's tomb; and the penitents with their beads reciting the 99 names of God: Allah the Merciful; Allah the Protector; Allah the Provider; Allah the Just; Allah the All Forgiving. This is the Islam -- generous, humble, open-hearted -- that stuck with me.

     I don't know whether Radical Islam has infected the residents of Nizamuddin Complex. I like to think that the saint's devotees would be immune to it. But what I think is misunderstood about Islamicist terrorists is that ultimately they are not directing their fire at the West. Even the attack on the World Trade Center was, to them, merely collateral damage. Their real targets are the kind of moderate and ecumenical Moslems whom I encountered at Nizamuddin Complex and the Islamic scholars who befriended my father at Aligarh University in the 1950s. 
     The terrorists hope that in our fear and outrage we will turn against all Moslems, and thereby compel them to join the ranks of the extremists. Radical Islam does not care a whit about Western unbelievers. Their intention is to force us to set fire to our end of the bridge that moderate Moslems have been trying to traverse between East and West, Old World and New. 

     That Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet but Christianity does not show Muhammad the same respect will always divide the two religions. But then, that's what religions generally do, isn't it? Divide? It's only when religion is entirely separated from nationalism, and people like Nizamuddin, Buddha, Gandhi, and the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas show a way to reconcile their own faiths with not just tolerance but true acceptance and respect for individual creeds that religion even begins to make any sense to me.