Saturday, November 17, 2012

Daftar of Hazrat Abdul Khadar Jeelani (RA) in Srilanka!!!

 

 
Daftar Jailani, where the Sufi saint, Sheikh Muhiyadeen Abdul Qadir Jilani (d. 1166 CE, in Baghdad), renowned throughout South Asia as the founder of the Qadiriya order, is by legend said to have meditated for twelve years. Located along a generalized Muslim pilgrimage route that stretches northward from the Arabian Sea ports of Galle and Weligama to the pinnacle of Adam's Peak lies the hermitage shrine.

Jailani is situated at about 70 km from Adam's Peak, but the terrain is formidable. Roads daringly engineered by British tea planters wind part of the way upward from Ratnapura, 60 km away, and Maskeliya, the most convenient base for climbing the mountain, is a four hour drive from Jailani. Even more isolating is the ethnic and religious environment of the shrine: the nearest town is Balangoda, seat of a 96 per cent Sinhalese parliamentary constituency that encompasses the estate of the Ratwatte family, one of the leading twentieth century Sinhalese Buddhist political dynasties in the island.

Unlike dargahs located in historic urban Muslim enclaves, such as Galle or Beruwala, or village mosques in the Muslim-dominated agricultural regions of the eastern coast, the shrine at Jailani lies serenely exposed at the edge of a dramatic granite escarpment 22 km southeast of Balangoda, flanked

by wet-zone forested hills and surveying Sinhala Buddhist peasant resettlement projects on the Kaltota plain below. A small Muslim community of about thirty families has grown up in the vicinity, but relations with their Sinhala neighbours have been distant and at times hostile {Spencer 1990: 38-9, 50-1). It is a wildly beautiful location set midway up the Kandyan Hills, with a commanding, view southward toward the coast at Hambantota; a perfect site, it is said, for meditation and mystical gnosis. Although there are some tombs of local faqirs and holy men at Jailani, the place is not a mortuary shrine (dargah) but a hermitage, a place of saintly visitation and mystical meditation.

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