ABSTRACT
The preaching of the great shaikhs of the Chishtiyya order, as we have seen, was essentially moral and practical, and their all-absorbing passion for God was embodied in their active love for their fellow man. However, all of them, and in particular Shaikh Farid, combined spiritual work, necessary for fostering everyday piety, with the most ardent mysticism of a purely individual nature. Thanks to the Chishtis, pietism and charity, concomitant with mysticism, started being perceived as the principal virtue of a saint, and the ecstatic, ‘intensive’ mysticism of the chosen few developed into an ‘extensive’ mysticism, accessible to many. Apparently that is why by the end of the fourteenth century the social composition of South Asian awliya¯ had become diversified: ‘amateurs’ had started appearing as if from nowhere; blacksmiths, weavers, butchers, grocers and so on were added to the familiar figures of ‘professional’ mystics – the hermit or the ascetic, the wandering dervish or the shaikh, dwelling in a kha¯nqa¯h. They continued to live a mundane life and be engaged in their hereditary trade, but at the same time gave evidence of spiritual perfection right up to sainthood.
