of his disciple’s spiritual attainments and whenever Mawlana Jami sent his
own disciples for further training to Khwaja Ahrar, the latter discouraged
the practice, saying that there was no need to take the trouble of coming to
him after being trained under Mawlana Jami, as the spiritual training given
by him was complete in itself.
Jami left an enormous body of written work spanning virtually all the
genres, from prose to poetry. His
Nafahaat al-uns
(‘The Breezes of Intimacy
from the Sacred Presences’), a collection of over six hundred biographies of
Sufis, based on anthologies written several centuries earlier, is an attempt to
give the fullest possible picture of Sufism.Together with a book that followed
it,
Rashahat-i ‘Ainul Hayat
(‘Tricklings from the Fountain of Life’) written
by his brother-in-law, Fakhruddin Husain Kashfi, it is an important source
for the history of Sufism in general and the Naqshbandi order in particular.
Of the other Sufi works of Jami, the most important are:
Asheat ul
Lama’at
– a commentary on Iraqi’s
Lama’t
;
Lawam’e
– a commentary on
Fusus ul Hikam
of Ibn ‘Arabi;
Naqdun nusus
– a commentary on
Nusus
of Sadr
ud din Qunavi.
His contribution to Sufi narrative (
masnavi
) poetry is not devoid of
original features. In his
Haft Aurang
(‘The SevenThrones’, which in Persian
also denotes the constellation of the Great Bear), he extended Nizami’s pattern
of five poems to a set of seven. Only two of his poems,
Layla va Majnun
and
Khiradnama-i Iskandari
(‘The Book of Alexander’s Wisdom’), have subjects
represented in the
Khamsa
of his predecessors. The story of Khusraw and
Shirin is replaced by the Quranic story of love betweenYusuf and Zulaykha,
which, in the hands of Jami, became a magnificent tale of mystical love with
a powerful allegorical meaning. The set of seven
masnavis
is completed by
three didactic poems:
Silsilat az zahb
(‘The Golden Chain’),
Tuhfat al-Ahrar
