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5 B O D Y R E V I V E D The Heart of Hajji Imdadullah Give thefullest when you measure and always weigh withfair balance, for that is good and the most wholesome interpretation. Do not imitate another in that of which you have no certain knowledge, for surely he bears responsibility for all sensed by the ear, the eye and the heart. Do not walk over the earth with pride, for you will never penetrate its depths or reach the mountains in height. —Qur'an iy:33-37 The Qur'an gives us moral guidance and advice: be fair, be honest, deal with others truthfully and generously. It uses marketplace imagery of weights and measures as standard themes to speak of justice, but it also links this moral advice to surprising images. Each individual bears absolute responsibility for everything sensed by ear, eye, and heart. Sensed by the heart? How is the heart a sense organ? Our common notion of five senses does not account for this; our sense of the heart as the seat of emotions does not account for the Qur'aris insistent centering of the heart as an indispensable organ of perception and moral judgment. If the heart cannot perceive clearly the human essence, then we might walk over the earth with pride, forgetting our humble origins and falling into the arrogance that we can penetrate its depths or reach the mountains in height. As Nakhshabi has said/'If you feel the heart is commander in chief / No no, one who takes heart gains the wisdom of true belief."1 In the previous chapter, we observed how Shah Hussayn abandoned the external constraints of the sharia to discover in this abandonment an expression of love and passion through the physicality of the body. Humility, for him, came from releasing all pretense to self-control, which is the root of hypocritical pride. Most Sufis, however, sought to gain intimacy to the presence of God through some sort of discipline. Most of them tempered emotive passion and erotic energy with a sense of internal control and civic rectitude. They saw the heart as the pivot of the balance of discernment in values more conducive to the public marketplace, rather than as the fountain of uncontrollable lovingpassion in valuesmore conducive to secret intimacy . One Sufi whose life story exemplifies the search of a balance between these seemingly incompatible values is Hajji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki (1817-99).This chapter delves into his rich treatment of ritual to explore his anatomy of the heart as a moral organ. In Hajji Imdadullah's view, the heart is not just the font of vitality for the physical body. Rather, the dominant character of the heart is its constant motion; despite the appearance of its muscular mass, the heart is hollow, and that is the secret of its effectiveness. In his Sufi imagination, the heart is a barzakh, a place of meeting between two substances that contradict and yet relate. In the heart resides the spirit, and it acts as the interface between a persons body and personal presence. If the heart can be keep pure in intention and concentration, this interface between body and persona will be harmonious and tranquil, allowing the heart to reveal its deeper nature as the wellspring for God's presence in the world. Such profound ideas will become clearer as we explore Hajji Imdadullah's intriguing mixture of devotional meditation and imaginative anatomy. This chapter on the heart not only explores Hajji Imdadullah's devotional manual and guide to the inner life, Diya' al-Qulub, or "The Brilliance of Hearts." It also explores his life, for he lived at a historical barzakh, a boundary between two qualitatively different times for Muslims in South Asia: the earlymodern period, with continuity from medievalgrandeur, and the modern period, with the humiliation of colonial European rule. The previous chapter, on Shah Hussayn's homoerotic play, suggested that the medieval and early modern periods were a time of flexibility and pluralism in Islamic communities, when understandings of gender were more fluid, norms of sexuality more flexible, and boundaries of communal allegiance more permeable. While this premodern fluidity should not be exaggerated (for Shah Hussayn ran up against boundaries that were usually enforced with violence, even as he transgressed them successfully), it is the sign of a strong polity governed by an optimistic elite and infused with self-confidence of its place in the political, economic, and moral order of the world...

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