and then, unsatisfied with the knowledge of the learned, travelled to Central
Asia to study under the Sufis. Thereafter, he returned to Kabul and from
there went on to India. He visited Lahore, Delhi, Sambhal (in present day
UP), and then retraced his steps to Lahore from where he proceeded to
Kashmir. His search for spiritual truth took him back to Central Asia where
he met many Sufis of Balkh and Badakhshan. The turning point of his life,
however, seems to have taken place at Amkina, near Samarqand, where he
was received by Khwajagi Amkinagi (d.1600), a spiritual descendant of
Khwaja Nasiruddin Ubaidullah Ahrar.
It is said that one night Baqi Billah saw Khwaja Amkinagi in a dream
saying to him: ‘O son!We are waiting for you. Come soon and wipe off the
pangs of separation.’
8
Receiving the call, Baqi Billah went to him and was
accepted as his spiritual disciple.The Khwaja appears to have exerted powerful
spiritual influence on Baqi Billah, for the latter was not only re-invigorated
by the meeting, but also decided, on the advice of the Shaykh, to return to
India. It is said that the other disciples of the Shaykh were jealous of him
and the attention bestowed on him by their master. But they were silenced
by the remark that Baqi Billah was already a perfect Sufi before presenting
himself to the Shaykh, who only stabilized his spiritual condition without
having to start from the very beginning. The Shaykh appointed him his
khalifah
.
Once back in India, Baqi Billah travelled as far as Delhi and then settled
in its vicinity, in Ferozabad, on the banks of the Jamuna. He spent barely
four years there before death overtook him.
8
Hazirat ul Quds
, p..231, quoted from Zahurul Hassan Sharib,
The Sufi Saints of the Indian Subconti-
nent
, Delhi, 2006 (
Hazirat ul Quds
is a work by a disciple of Ahmad Sirhindi, Shaykh Badruddin bin
Ibrahim Sirhindi – d. 1610 — of which the first volume is dedicated to the biographies of the
earlier Naqshbandi saints up to Baqi Billah, while the second volume deals exclusively with Ahmad
Sirhindi).
Th e Na q s h ba n d i Or d e r 164
