To My Shaikh with Love

This incredible book is presented as the spiritual biography of Abu Anees (1911-1997), a Sufi of the Chishtiyyah order, whose career began with the British Army Engineering Corps in India (1930–45). Being written in the form of a khutbah by his best student and friend (since 1962) is both an asset and a detriment. Following Partition in 1947, Abu Anees migrated to Faisalabad (Punjab) where he founded the first Darul Ehsan as a non-political, non-profit religious organisation. (Others now exist in places like Frankfurt and Dublin.) But he remained fiercely critical of his new country, Pakistan, for its ‘lack of leadership, absence of real democracy, despotic dictators, prevalent nepotism, and corruption’ (p. 129). Lovingly called ‘Babaji’, Abu Anees was a man of God, in Sufi terms even the world’s axis (Qutb), believed to have instantaneously travelled to distant places, even the heavens. Abu Anees saw himself living in total predestination since ‘no one has his own will’ and ‘no one can cause harm’ (p. 183f.). With dozens of miracles and 400 (!) books to his credit and also being buried in a glittering place, Abu Anees turned into a proto-typical Muslim ‘saint’ whose limitless devotion to his Prophet neatly overshadowed his focus on Allah. Characteristically he wrote: ‘Devotion to Muhammad is my faith [!], his love my way of life, and obedience to him [!] my goal.’ Little wonder that he was ‘invalidated from the service’ when his British superiors diagnosed him as a faqir suffering from ‘real intoxication and hermetic life’ to the point of being ‘useless as a soldier’ (Appendix I).