Based on the recent hagiography written by a devoted khalifa of a Naqshbandi Sufi saint, Zindapir, who died in 1999 in Ghamkol Sharif, not far from the city of Kohat in north-west Pakistan, the paper interrogates the meaning of ‘love’ as the essence of spirituality and ascent on the Sufi path. During his lifetime the author, like most of the saint’s disciples, expressed his love of the saint, and eulogised him poetically in qasidas often reminiscent of romantic Urdu poetry. After his death too, exceptionally among the disciples, he expressed his deep longing for the departed saint. Nonetheless in the hagiography love is most often used to describe a transcendent mystical spiritual connection – to the saint, the Prophet and God. Unlike a modernist trope focused on the individual search for personal experience of spirituality, here love is a mode of mystical knowing that disattends to individual feeling and experience. The paper will look at the different meanings of love as it is used in the hagiography by contrast to the meanings deployed during the saint’s life.
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