The Mysterious Man of the Mountain
"Man kunto Maula, fa-hadha Aliyyun Maula," the Prophet uttered at Ghadir Khumm—an event memorialized by the annual celebration of Eid al-Ghadir. "To those whom I am Maula, Ali too is your Maula!" And with this single statement did he not only solidify Islam, but also what would become the universal cult of Ali...
THE TREK UP MAULA ALI HILL
Around a year ago, my friend Mehdi bhai took me to the Maula Ali Dargah—a Muslim shrine in Hyderabad, dedicated to the Prophet’s son-in-law and spiritual heir, Imam Ali.
It was all sorts of wonder; pouring rain, stray dogs, rocky pathways. There was a” djinn masjid” at one point—a familiar sight in South Indian Muslim culture—where, allegedly, if you sleep anywhere near it at night, the annoyed genie pilgrims will quietly whisk you back to the base of the hill by morning, blankets and sleeping mats and all. At the centerpoint of the trek was a shrine dedicated to another one of Imam Ali’s sons, Hazrat Abbas—the defender and flagbearer of the prophet’s grandson, Hussain, at the battle of Karbala—and beside it was a small, cramped cave overlooking a pond, where an “alam” (a ritual battle standard) sat tucked into a corner, adorned with red votive strings and prayer slips.
By the time we’d made it to the top, I was exhausted—physically and spiritually. What I’d been waiting for was right at my fingertips. Literally! Behind the sequined, shimmering chadar laid over the main sanctum was a modest, black stone bearing a large handprint. I gently, cautiously placed my hand into it. There is a local belief that Imam Ali’s handprint morphs to match the outline of your own—but I was crying too much to notice. I struggled to recount the many prayers I’d been rehearsing, and hoped my tears would suffice.
Mehdi bhai then took me to the shrine’s leftmost wall, where a painted portrait of the Imam sat behind another curtain. As one of the shrine’s custodians lifted it, Mehdi bhai said in a wispy, somewhat creepy voice: “Look! The eyes follow you no matter where you go. Watch it…slooowly.” I think that did it for me. I took a sharp gasp in the middle of my sobs. My vision went black, and I could feel my wobbly legs giving out.
When I came to, I was in Mehdi bhai’s arms. Two other shrine-goers, startled by my fainting spell, grabbed me water and some bread. One of them introduced himself as Shiva, a Telugu guy living right around the shrine. The other was a Sufi pilgrim all the way from Ajmer Sharif. I didn’t get his name, but he recited the entirety of his silsila (chain of spiritual guides), all the way back to Moinuddin Chishti, and then even further, all the way back to Imam Ali. Shiva told me that my response was natural, that Maula Ali was “a powerful god.” Meanwhile, the Chishti Sufi sang qawwalis in praise of Ali as the utmost of spiritual guides. And there I was, as a Shi’a, for whom Ali was lesser than a god, but a little more than the king of mystics. But as we sat side-by-side in that courtyard, surrounded by green lattice and incense, Ali himself seemed to make no difference at all between the three of us.
YAQUT AND THE STONE
When Yaqut—an African khwajasira eunuch in the Qutub Shahi court—was afflicted with a life-threatening illness, what brought them back onto their feet was the vision of Maula Ali leaning against the rock formations on that very hill. As they climbed its peaks for any single trace of that saintly apparition, they came upon the black stone bearing the Imam's handprint, propelling the Shah to enshrine it in a dargah.
(For those unfamiliar with the term “hijra” and “khwajasira”—these are unique South Asian gender identities and intentional communities consisting largely of trans-feminine people, including a few intersex individuals and very occasionally trans-masculine people.)
Despite ostracization from the general public, the native hijra and khwajasira gharanas/parivars in Hyderabad maintain Yaqut’s connection to the region’s “azadari” or Muharram mourning rituals. Mehdi bhai mentioned their focal presence in the mourning of Hazrat Qasim, the great-grandson of the Prophet who was believed to have been martyred after a one-day marriage. (Let’s not debate whether or not that actually happened in Karbala, as this is about people’s beliefs, not historical accuracy!) The khwajasira community annually reenacts the widowing of Qasim’s wife, Fatima Kubra, by walking on coals and breaking their bangles over the alawa (fire pit), a tradition which reminded me of the Thirunangai widows of Koothandavar/Aravan in Tamil Nadu’s Koovagam. While Hyderabad once had numerous hijra/khwajasira-led shrines, due to intense hijraphobia today only one or two are functional, one of which I was fortunate enough to see, thanks to local historian and curator (and kindred spirit) Mubbashir Ali Khan. As many khwajasiras and hijras of various faiths participated in Bibi-ka-Alawa, Hyderabad’s most important Muharram procession—where the alam of the Prophet’s daughter Bibi Fatima is paraded atop an elephant—I couldn’t help but think that a lot of our modern culture wars are quite petty in front of the complexities of lived religious experience.
In a world littered with loud and persistent orthodox exclusionaries, Imam Ali on his hilltop abode appears as an active character of inclusion. This isn’t unique to Yaqut’s story either. Another one of the shrine’s legends recounts how a Syed, who came to perform khalwath (chillah, a forty-day seclusion) on the hill, noticed that the naqarah-player would announce, “Maula! Time for your morning prayers!” before beating the naqarah drums to announce fajr prayers, as if he were addressing Imam directly. As the days passed, the Syed became increasingly annoyed at what he perceived to be an idolatrous, infantile, and publicly disruptive mode of religiosity. On the fortieth day, when the naqarah-player announced, “Maula—!” the Syed finally confronted the drummer, slapping him across the face. Suddenly, the skies erupted with thunder and lightning—and with the clap and rumble of the clouds overhead, the Syed fell to the ground, his hair shedding, his features gaunt, lifeless.
On our way back down the hill, Mehdi bhai mentioned how, at one point, a custodian of Maula Ali denied non-Muslims entry into the main shrine, only to receive an angry visitation from the Imam himself in a dream. “Those are my guests, my loved ones,” he spoke. “Who are you to deny them them permission to see me?” From then on, the main shrine regained its enthusiastic number of non-Muslim visitors.
Beyond miraculous instances of deus(Imam?)-ex-machina, the Imam also was the quiet muse of a mysterious “jogini” Sufi movement, where unmarried women maintained secret society and interpreted the Imam as their eternal guide and male companion. (You can find multiple “jugini mama/amma” shrines in South India.) One initiate was reputed to be the courtesan Mah Laqa Bhai, perhaps the shrine’s most famous and notable patron—one whose mausoleum sits close to the site of her Imam.
There is a lot to be said about Shi’i azadari and the culture of courtesans in South Asia, particularly South India. During the seventh-day Muharram juloos in Chennai, the processional taziya (mourning) is characteristically loud, earth-shaking, complete with the rhythmic drumming of chest-beating, of nohey (eulogies) on speakerphones, of a few rows dedicated to tatbir (self-mortification with blades and knives), of lamentation oozing with the scent of both iron and rose water. However, upon entering the street where the local courtesans once used to live, the procession goes into a “chup taziya,” where all the chest-beating and nohey stop, and the mourners preserve their voices save for a few Hussaini slogans. When I asked around, the reasons for this were mixed; some sourced it to a form of respect, while others considered it an act of dissociation from courtesanship. At the same time, the descendants of the courtesans themselves—both Hindu and Muslim—are the enthusiastic custodians of their own ashurkhanas. While the axis of organized Shi’ism in Chennai appears to go “chup” (literally) on the existence of courtesans in their history, the descendents have carved out a space in the dis-organized spectrum of Hussaini devotion beyond religious borders, in this way paralleling the unique practices of Hyderabad’s Hussaini khwajasiras.
TO WHOM DOES MAULA BELONG TO?
Indeed the community borders within azadari culture appear quite liquid. The edicts of neither Sunni Islam nor Shi’ism here are written in stone. For example, the “Bara Imam Panja” ashurkhana in Chella Pillayar Koil Street is the centerpoint of Chennai’s Imami subcult, primarily consisting of Dakhni-speaking Hanafi Sunni Muslims. It is easy to be pleasantly surprised when the shrine-keeper Imthiaz Masthani sahab points to a poster in the back listing the names of the “twelve imams” (the same ones venerated by Shi’as) to whom the titular “Bara Imam” is dedicated to. But this is nothing new or strange in the community.
Despite this, there does seem to be a bit of an unspoken icy relationship between the Sunni-Sufi and Shi’a enclaves of Chennai’s Muharram scene. (Though there are exceptions—one of Triplicane’s Shi’i processional alam comes annually from a Sunni household.) So to whom does Maula Ali—and alongside him, Fatima Zahra, the Hussaini martyrs, and the remaining eleven Imams—belong to?
I thought back to Hyderabadi Shiva’s words: “There is no Hindu or Muslim here. Caste, religion—nothing matters. This Maula Ali is everyone’s.”
On the event of Eid al-Ghadeer, I found myself at Pallavaram’s own “Maula Ali Dargah” and associated Shi'a mosque. As my friend from Thousand Lights and her father ate to-go parcel biryani with me in a small corner of this hilltop shrine, here too I saw frequent visitors among the non-Shi’as.
In modern retellings of Pallavaram Maula Ali’s origin story, the “pazhankudi” (indigenous people) were the first to see a divine personality on the hill, who had allegedly come to tame a ferocious lion before staying at the peak for three days, then disappearing. The Shi’as interpreted this as a sighting of Imam Ali and hence enshrined an alam in the name of this “Panja Andavar,” as the locals then called him. I thought back to the concept of “Murugu,” a type of Tamil mountain protector spirit who eventually became crystallized into the deity “Murugan.” I have always felt that the underlying spiritual landscape in Tamil Nadu, regardless of Hindu, Muslim, or Christian external identities, roots itself in a very familiar set of Dravidian themes.
When I asked my friends Sakina apa and Mubbashir sahab about the pre-Qutub Shahi origins of Hyderabad’s Maula Ali Hill, they mentioned a similar theory—that the tribes of the area had long been venerating some sort of presence on the mountainous landscape, which, to Yaqut, became analogous to the Imam.
However, these twin shrines’ adherents don’t appear preoccupied with the specifics of this personality. The enigmatic figure on the hill is real to them, regardless of how each of them interprets or names him; he answers, particularly as an active, inclusionary force in a highly divisive society, beyond the small borders we’ve drawn up for him.
Isn’t that the case with everything? All the clergical castes of organized religions weave stern dogmas for their followers, but the way faith touches people in day-to-day life, in a myriad of expressions, can never be governed or understood by any single authority. Ali is no different; the question is not so much who he "belongs" to, but rather, how many communities have found shared belonging in him.
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