one of his friends,
said to him one day, "Formerly our sovereign Aurangzeb loved to listen
to discourses on the subject of mysticism, and I have often had the
honour of reading before him passages from the Masnavi of Jalaluddin
Rumi.[64] The Emperor was often so touched by them that he shed tears;
certainly when he comes to Lahore he will wish to see you." "No,"
replied Mullah Shah; "we shall never see him:

'The night is great with child, see what it will bring forth.'"

In 1661 he had an attack of fever which lasted about fifteen days. That
year fever became epidemic at Lahore, and on the 11th of the month of
Safar Mullah Shah had another attack, which carried him off on the night
of the 15th of the same month. He was buried in a plot of ground which
he had already acquired for the purpose. The Princess Fatimah bought the
surrounding land, and erected a shrine of red stone over his tomb. The
foregoing sketch of Mullah Shah gives a general view of oriental
spiritualism as it prevailed two and a half centuries ago over a great
part of Asia. The first point worthy of notice in it is the immense
popularity of mystical ideas at that time, and the wide influence which
they exercised over all minds. Round Mullah Shah gathered persons of
every condition; poor peasants as well as princes were seized with the
same enthusiasm for his doctrines; the same ascetic training produced
the same results in the most varying temperaments. The Master seems to
have exercised a kind of magnetic influence over his neophytes. He fixes
his gaze upon them for a longer or shorter time, till their inward
senses open and render them capable of seeing the wonders of the
spiritual world. All the accounts are unanimous in this respect, and
they carry such a stamp of sincerity that their veracity is
indisputable. We are then obliged to admit that at this period many
minds shared a predisposition to religious ecstacy and enthusiasm.

Under the apparent stagnation of the East, there is continually going on
a collision between two opposing forces--the official hierarchy of the
Ulema, conservative to the core, and mysticism in its early phases,
pietistic and enthusiastic, but gradually tending to scepticism, and
finally to pantheism and the negation of all positive religion. The
Mussalman hierarchy, which in its own interests desired to maintain the
prestige of dogma and of the revealed law, combatted this tendency to
mysticism, but, as we have seen,