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Maizbhandari

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Maizbhandari order
Tariqah-e-Maizbhandaria
AbbreviationMaizbhandari
Formation19th century
TypeSufi order
HeadquartersChittagong, Bengal
Key people
Ahmad Ullah Maizbhandari

The Maizbhandari (Bengali: মাইজভাণ্ডারী), or sometimes Maijbhandari (Arabic: المائجبهندارية, romanizedal-māʾijbahandāryyah),[1] order or tariqa of Sufism within Sunni Islam was founded in the late 19th century by the Bengali Sufi saint Ahmad Ullah Maizbhandari.[2] It is the only Sufi order to have originated from within Bengal, and, as a movement, it has continued to enjoy significant popularity in the 21st century.[1]

Discover more about Maizbhandari related topics

Bengali language

Bengali language

Bengali, generally known by its endonym Bangla, is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia. It is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken of the 22 scheduled languages of India. With approximately 300 million native speakers and another 37 million as second language speakers, Bengali is the fifth most-spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by total number of speakers in the world. Bengali is the fifth most spoken Indo-European language.

Romanization of Arabic

Romanization of Arabic

The romanization of Arabic is the systematic rendering of written and spoken Arabic in the Latin script. Romanized Arabic is used for various purposes, among them transcription of names and titles, cataloging Arabic language works, language education when used instead of or alongside the Arabic script, and representation of the language in scientific publications by linguists. These formal systems, which often make use of diacritics and non-standard Latin characters and are used in academic settings or for the benefit of non-speakers, contrast with informal means of written communication used by speakers such as the Latin-based Arabic chat alphabet.

Tariqa

Tariqa

A tariqa is a school or order of Sufism, or specifically a concept for the mystical teaching and spiritual practices of such an order with the aim of seeking haqiqa, which translates as "ultimate truth".

Sufism

Sufism

Sufism, also known as Tasawwuf, is a mystic body of religious practice, found mainly within Sunni Islam but also within Shia Islam, which is characterized by a focus on Islamic spirituality, ritualism, asceticism and esotericism. It has been variously defined as "Islamic mysticism", "the mystical expression of Islamic faith", "the inward dimension of Islam", "the phenomenon of mysticism within Islam", the "main manifestation and the most important and central crystallization" of mystical practice in Islam, and "the interiorization and intensification of Islamic faith and practice".

Sunni Islam

Sunni Islam

Sunni Islam is the largest branch of Islam, followed by 85–90% of the world's Muslims. Its name comes from the word Sunnah, referring to the tradition of Muhammad. The differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims arose from a disagreement over the succession to Muhammad and subsequently acquired broader political significance, as well as theological and juridical dimensions. According to Sunni traditions, Muhammad left no successor and the participants of the Saqifah event appointed Abu Bakr as the next-in-line. This contrasts with the Shia view, which holds that Muhammad appointed his son-in-law and cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib as his successor.

Bengalis

Bengalis

Bengalis, also rendered as Bangalee or the Bengali people, are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the Bengal region of South Asia. The current population is divided between the independent country Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura, Barak Valley, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Jharkhand and part of Meghalaya and Manipur. Most of them speak Bengali, a language from the Indo-Aryan language family.

Ahmad Ullah Maizbhandari

Ahmad Ullah Maizbhandari

Syed Ahmad Ullah Maizbhandari was a Bengali Sufi saint and founder of the Maizbhandari Sufi order in Bengal.

Bengal

Bengal

Bengal is a historical geographical, ethnolinguistic and cultural term referring to the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. The region of Bengal proper is divided between modern-day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. The administrative jurisdiction of Bengal historically extended beyond the territory of Bengal proper. Bengal ceased to be a single unit after the partition of India in 1947.

Origins

The Maizbhandari order bases its tradition and draws its legitimacy from a saying of the tenth-century Sufi scholar Ibn Arabi, who predicted that a great spiritual leader would be "born in China", and that he would speak the language of the country. Maizbhandari Sufis interpret Ibn Arabi's prophecy to mean Chittagong, where the expansion of Islam had ended and where the Indian subcontinent butted up against "China" in the sense of the Chinese, or ancient Mongol, sphere of influence.[2] Ahmad Ullah Maizbhandari was born in Chittagong in 1828, which, according to Maizbhandari Sufis, was as foretold six hundred years earlier by Ibn Arabi.[2]

Since its 19th-century origins, the Maizbhandari movement has developed into "a powerful religious institution whose very popularity and influence defy any notions of marginality. It has been able to draw adherents from all sections of society, including the urban middle class", and been able to assert its reformist perspective on Islam, "while keeping in touch with the religious mainstream in Bengal", according to scholar Hans Harder.[3]

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Literary tradition

The Maizbhandari order has been responsible for "a sizeable textual output ...since the beginning of the twentieth century, including hagiographies and theological treaties, in the form of monographs, leaflets and journals".[3]

Maizbhandari theological and hagiological writings have taken on various forms, including long treatises, fatwas or short articles (prabandha), and have been noted as a distinctly local tradition, with the "larger part" of the writings being independent works by writers hailing from either Chittagong or other areas of Eastern Bengal.[1]

One seminal work in the tradition is Aminul Haq Farhadabadi's (1866-1944) Tuḥfat al-aḫyār fī dafʿ šarārat al-šarār ("The precious gift of the good regarding the refutation of the evilness of the evil", 1906/7), which is a fatwa or legal opinion on the legitimacy of samāʿ and activities such as listening to music.[1] Originally a mix of Arabic and Persian, the text was later circulated as a manuscript (pũthi) with a Bengali translation.[1]

Another key work is Abdul Ghani Kanchanpuri's Āʾīna-i Bārī (‘Mirror of the Lord’), an Urdu work written and published in 1915 as both a hagiographical account of Ahmad Ullah's life and a collection of more than 100 Urdu ghazals, a form of poem or ode. As an exposition of the Maizbhandari movement's theological foundations, it remains "the most comprehensive outline of Maijbhandari theology available to this day".[1]

A more concise account of Maizbhandari theology is Abdussalam Isapuri's Fuyūẓāt al-Raḥmāniyya fī ṭarīqat al-māʾiğbhand˙āriyya, a Persian language work.[1]

Taken as a whole, the tradition has various literary sources, including medieval Islamic literature from Bengal, medieval Persian literature by Sufis in the courts of the former capitals Gaur, Pandua and Dhaka, and the literature of "pan-Sufic" authors such as Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273), Farid al-Din Attar (d. 1220), Mu'in al-Din Chishti (d. 1236) and the founder of the Qadiriyya ṭarīqa, Abd al-Qadir Gilani (d. 1166).[1]

Maizbhandari thought has also gone on to influence other fields, with the movement's ethical precepts being re-interpreted in Bangladesh for applications in subject areas such as business management, where spiritual conceptions of self-purification have been translated into ethical models for building and sustaining trust with customers.[4]

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Sama (Sufism)

Sama (Sufism)

Sama is a Sufi ceremony performed as part of the meditation and prayer practice dhikr. Sama means "listening", while dhikr means "remembrance". These performances often include singing, playing instruments, dancing, recitation of poetry and prayers, wearing symbolic attire, and other rituals. Sama is a particularly popular form of worship in Sufism.

Arabic

Arabic

Arabic is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world. Having emerged in the 1st century, it is named after the Arab people; the term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula, as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece.

Persian language

Persian language

Persian, also known by its endonym Farsi, is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Iranian Persian, Dari Persian and Tajiki Persian. It is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan, as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran. It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet, a derivation of the Arabic script, and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet, a derivation of the Cyrillic script.

Bengali language

Bengali language

Bengali, generally known by its endonym Bangla, is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia. It is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken of the 22 scheduled languages of India. With approximately 300 million native speakers and another 37 million as second language speakers, Bengali is the fifth most-spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by total number of speakers in the world. Bengali is the fifth most spoken Indo-European language.

Ghazal

Ghazal

The ghazal is a form of amatory poem or ode, originating in Arabic poetry. Ghazals often deal with topics of spiritual and romantic love and may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation from the beloved and the beauty of love in spite of that pain.

Ode

Ode

An ode is a type of lyric poetry. Odes are elaborately structured poems praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also enter.

Gaur

Gaur

The gaur, also known as the Indian bison, is a bovine native to South Asia and Southeast Asia, and has been listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List since 1986. The global population was estimated at a maximum of 21,000 mature individuals in 2016, with the majority of those existing in India. It has declined by more than 70% during the last three generations, and is extirpated from Sri Lanka and most likely Bangladesh. Populations in well-protected areas are stable and increasing.

Pandua, Malda

Pandua, Malda

Pandua, also historically known as Hazrat Pandua and later Firuzabad, is a ruined city in the Malda district of the Indian state of West Bengal. It served as the capital city of the independent Sultanate of Bengal for nearly a century, until the capital was moved to nearby Lakhnauti in 1450.

Dhaka

Dhaka

Dhaka, formerly known as Dacca, is the capital and largest city of Bangladesh. It is the sixth-largest and seventh-most densely populated city in the world. Dhaka is a megacity, and has a population of 10.2 million residents as of 2022, and a population of over 22.4 million residents in Greater Dhaka. It is widely considered to be the most densely populated built-up urban area in the world. Dhaka is an important cultural, economic, and scientific hub of the Bengal region and South Asia, as well as a major Muslim-majority city. Greater Dhaka nominal GDP is $226 Billion whereas Dhaka district nominal GDP is $141 Billion USD with per capita GDP $9,626 USD. Dhaka ranks second in South Asia after Mumbai and 39th in the world in terms of GDP. Lying on the Ganges Delta, it is bounded by the Buriganga, Turag, Dhaleshwari and Shitalakshya rivers. Dhaka is also the largest Bengali-speaking city in the world.

Ibn Arabi

Ibn Arabi

Ibn ʿArabī, nicknamed al-Qushayrī and Sulṭān al-ʿĀrifīn, was an Arab Andalusian Muslim scholar, mystic, poet, and philosopher, extremely influential within Islamic thought. Out of the 850 works attributed to him, some 700 are authentic while over 400 are still extant. His cosmological teachings became the dominant worldview in many parts of the Muslim world.

Mu'in al-Din Chishti

Mu'in al-Din Chishti

Chishtī Muʿīn al-Dīn Ḥasan Sijzī, known more commonly as Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī or Moinuddin Chishti, or by the epithet Gharib Nawaz, or reverently as a Shaykh Muʿīn al-Dīn or Muʿīn al-Dīn or Khwājā Muʿīn al-Dīn by Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, was a Persian Sunni Muslim preacher and Sayyid, ascetic, religious scholar, philosopher and mystic from Sistan, who eventually ended up settling in the Indian subcontinent in the early 13th-century, where he promulgated the famous Chishtiyya order of Sunni mysticism. This particular tariqa (order) became the dominant Muslim spiritual group in medieval India and many of the most beloved and venerated Indian Sunni saints were Chishti in their affiliation, including Nizamuddin Awliya and Amir Khusrow.

Qadiriyya

Qadiriyya

The Qadiriyya are members of the Sunni Qadiri tariqa. The tariqa got its name from Abdul Qadir Gilani, who was a Hanbali scholar from Gilan, Iran. The order relies strongly upon adherence to the fundamentals of Sunni Islamic law.

Urs gatherings

The Maizbhandari order is also known for its urs, an annual religious gathering purported to be at least the fifth largest congregation of Muslims in the world.[5] The event begins each year on the tenth day of the Bengali month of Magh, and sees five to six hundred thousand people gather for several days of festivities centred around the performance of devotional music singing the praises of the Maizbhandari saints. The gatherings are attended by both Muslims and Hindus and some of the most famous Maizbhandari performers are Hindus.[5]

Musical tradition

Partly born out of the popular and ecumenical nature of the Urs gatherings, the order's form spiritual listening and devotional music has become well-known and widespread,[6][7] and the Maizbhandari tradition of spiritual songs has come to represent one of the largest corpuses of popular songs in Bengal.[1]

One early 20th-century Maizhbandari tradition musician, Ramesh Shil, composed about 350 Maizbhandari songs praising the order and Ahmad Ullah Maizbhandari. These songs had been published in nine volumes titled Ashekmala, Shantibhandar, Muktir Darbar, Nure Duniya, Jibansathi, Satyadarpan, Bhandare Maula, Manab Bandhu and Eshke Sirajia.[8] Abdul Gafur Hali, who died in 2016, was a late 20th-century musician of the genre who similarly wrote hundreds of songs and was known for his "extraordinary knowledge" of the tradition.[9]

Today, there is a catalogue over 10,000 Maizbhandari songs, many transmitted orally originally but now available on CD and video, making up a distinct genre of music in Bangladesh.[3]

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Muslims

Muslims

Muslims are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abraham as it was revealed to Muhammad, the main Islamic prophet. The majority of Muslims also follow the teachings and practices of Muhammad (sunnah) as recorded in traditional accounts (hadith).

Hindus

Hindus

Hindus are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism. Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for people living in the Indian subcontinent.

Ramesh Shil

Ramesh Shil

Ramesh Shil was a Bengali bard. He belonged to the class of bards, called Kabiyals, who improvised songs in poetic contests evolved in Calcutta and its outskirts in the 18th and the 19th centuries, and also became known for his composition of songs in the Maizbhandari musical tradition. He was awarded Ekushey Padak in 2002 by the Government of Bangladesh.

Ahmad Ullah Maizbhandari

Ahmad Ullah Maizbhandari

Syed Ahmad Ullah Maizbhandari was a Bengali Sufi saint and founder of the Maizbhandari Sufi order in Bengal.

Abdul Gafur Hali

Abdul Gafur Hali

Abdul Gafur Hali was a Bangladeshi folk lyricist, composer and singer of the Maizbhandari musical tradition. He was the first folk play author to use the Chittagonian language. His works are created mainly in his native language of Chittagong. He was also known by his Sufi name, Gafur Hali Maizbhanderi.

Source: "Maizbhandari", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, January 30th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maizbhandari.

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References

Citations

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Harder 2011.
  2. ^ a b c Mannan 2015.
  3. ^ a b c Harder 2011, p. 15-22.
  4. ^ Hoque et al. 2021.
  5. ^ a b Raj & Harman 2006, p. 95.
  6. ^ Alam 2019.
  7. ^ Dey 2005.
  8. ^ Islam, Sirajul (2012). "Shil, Ramesh". In Islam, Sirajul; Ahmed, Wakil (eds.). Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh (Second ed.). Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.
  9. ^ Hans Harder (2000). "Article: Abdul Gaphur Hali: Mystische Lieder aus Chittagong'. NETZ 2)" (in German). pp. 30–34.

Sources

Further reading

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