and died five years after his son's birth. Jalal was educated and raised by his maternal uncle, Syed Ahmad Kabir Suhrawardi. in Makkah. He excelled in his studies; became a hafiz and mastered fiqh. He became a makhdoom, teacher of Sunnah and, for performing prayers in solitary milieu and leading a secluded life as an ascetic, al Mujarrad was post-fixed to his name. It is claimed he achieved spiritual perfection (Kamaliyyat) after 30 years of study, practice and meditation. Travel to South Asia Jalal's maternal uncle, Syed Ahmad Kabir, gave him a handful of soil and asked him to travel to the Indian subcontinent. He instructed him to choose to settle and spread Dawah in any place in India where the soil exactly matches that which he gave him in smell and colour. Shah Jalal journeyed eastward from Makkah and met many great scholars and Sufi mystics. Sheikh Ali of Yemen gave up his duty as a prince to join Jalal on his expedition. Many people joined Jalal from the Arabian peninsula including his nephew Shah Paran. Jalal also came across Sheikh Chashni Pir, a pedologist who would check the soil of the places that Shah Jalal would visit in order to find the matching soil given by Sheikh Ahmad Kabir. Jalal passed through Baghdad and was present there during the time of the murder of the last Abbasid caliph Al-Musta'sim in 1258. Driven off by the Mongol invasion of Baghdad, they continued journeying to the east. Jalal reached Uch in the Punjab, where he and many of his companions were initiated into the Sufi order of Suhrawardiyya. Jalal was joined by many other disciples throughout his journey. He passed through Delhi where he was made a guest of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. Nizamuddin offered him a gift of two rare pigeons which would later be called Jalali Kobutor (Pigeons of Jalal). It is said that these pigeons continue to breed and its descendants remain around Jalal's dargah. Conquest of Sylhet In 1303, Sultan Shamsuddin Firoz Shah of Lakhnauti was engaged in a war with the neighbouring Gour Kingdom in the Sylhet region, then under the rule of the Hindu king Gour Govinda. This began when Shaykh Burhanuddin, a Muslim living in Sylhet, sacrificed a cow for his newborn son's aqiqah (birth celebration). Govinda, in a fury for what he saw as sacrilege, had the newborn killed as well