Muhammad Atta-ullah Faizani

Muhammad Atta-ullah Faizani was an Afghan Islamic scholar. He was born 17 April 1923 (the twenty-first day of Ramadan of that year) in Herat, Afghanistan to a family of miagan (religious scholars descended from a great Islamic saint). The honorific "Faizani", a derivation of an Arabic word which denotes something that overflows with God's light (blessings), was bestowed upon him by the imam of the Kaaba during his Hajj.

As a child Faizani was home-schooled in the traditional Afghan manner. Entering his teens, Faizani studied at a High School in Herat and finally at Kabul University, where he graduated in 1941. For eight years following his graduation he served as a High School principal in his hometown until a passion for God overcame him. At this time Faizani left home and traveled widely throughout the Islamic world of the mid-20th century seeking knowledge of Islam and its various practices. °

As this period of traveling drew to a close, there came an intensification of his spiritual rigor and practices. He returned to Herat and secluded himself within a cave at a local mosque. There he remained for five years performing ascetic practices including long periods of fasting, Zhikr and fikr (also called taffakkur or deep contemplation). Taffakkur is a technique by which the practitioner "contemplates the Magnificence and Perfection of Glorious God in the creation."

After a spiritual incident at the end of his ascetic practices, he began wandering again and wound up in Mazari Sharif. Upon arriving in the city, Faizani was overcome by the overt materialism of the elite and their unIslamic practices, based more upon tribalism and traditional power structures than upon brotherhood and religious sentiment. In response, Faizani began preaching, filling his sermons with the fire of moral and spiritual discontent. His critical sermons addressed the corrupt political practices that surrounded the people of Mazar-i-Sharif and he spared neither cleric, nor government official, nor the landlords who participated in the crude feudalism of their country of that time. However, as is the norm when spiritual luminaries criticize established authorities in "developing" nations, Faizani quickly became a target for men of great power who did not want to upset the status quo.

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