ABSTRACT
Based on the recent hagiography of a Naqshbandi Sufi saint, Zindapir (d. 1999), this paper interrogates the meaning of “love” as the essence of spirituality and ascent on the Sufi path. During the author’s lifetime, like most of the saint’s disciples, he expressed his love of the saint and eulogized him poetically in qasidas often reminiscent of romantic Urdu poetry. After Zindapir’s death, exceptionally among the disciples, he expressed his deep longing for the departed saint. Nonetheless, in the hagiography love is most often used to describe a transcendent mystical spiritual connection – to the saint, the Prophet and God. Unlike a modernist trope focused on the individual search for personal experience of spirituality, here, love is a mode of mystical knowing that disattends to individual feeling and experience. The paper looks at the different meanings of love as it is used in the hagiography, in contrast to the meanings deployed during the saint’s life.
