What Hazrat Ali Hujwiri said about Hazrat Abu Bakr?
Hazrat Ali Hujwiri [Daata Sahib of Lahore] on Hazrat Abu Bakr: An Insight into Islamic History
“Our abode is transitory
our life therein is but a loan
our breaths are numbered
and our laziness is inevitable.”Hazrat Abu Bakr Sadiq RA
By this, Hazrat Abu Bakr Sadiq RA signified that the world is too worthless to engage our thoughts; for whenever you occupy yourself with what is perishable, you are made blind to that which is Allah, the Eternal.
Inscription from Shrine of Ali Hujwiri (Data Ganj Bakhsh)
The friends of God turn their backs on the world and the flesh which veil them from Him, and they decline to act as if they were owners of a thing that is really the property of another.
And he said: “O’ God, give me plenty of the world and make me desirous of renouncing it!”
This saying has a hidden sense, i.e..: “First bestow on me worldly goods that I may give thanks for them, and secondly help me to abstain from them for Your sake, so that I may have the triple merit of thanks giving and liberality and abstinence, and lastly my poverty may be voluntary, not compulsory.”
These words refute the master of mystical practice, who said: “He whose poverty is compulsory is more perfect than he whose poverty is voluntary; for if it be compulsory, he is the creature (san’at) of poverty, and if it be voluntary, poverty is his creature; and it be better that his actions should be free from any attempt to gain poverty for himself than that he should seek to acquire it by his own effort.”
I say in answer to this: The creature of poverty is most evidently that person who, while enjoying independence, is possessed by the desire for poverty, and labours to recover it from the clutches of the world; not that person who, in the state of poverty, is possessed by the desire for independence and has to go to the houses of evildoers and the courts of governors for the sake of earning money. The creature of poverty is he who falls from independence to poverty, not he who, being poor, seeks to become powerful”
Abu Bakr is the foremost of all mankind after the Prophets, and it is not permissible that anyone should take precedence of him, for he set voluntary poverty above compulsory poverty.
