Pakistan: A Hard Country (25 page)

It would be a mistake, however, to see the cults of the saints as purely rural or as purely derived from the past, and therefore – an assumption which is often derived consciously or unconsciously from the other two – doomed gradual y to be eclipsed either by Western-style secularism, or by the modernist Islamism of the new urban radicals. Some of the greatest and most ancient Pakistani shrines, in Lahore and Multan, were created by their founding saints in great cities and have large fol owings among local businessmen (a point discussed further in the chapter on the Punjab). Others were original y in the countryside, but have been incorporated into Pakistan’s mushrooming cities.

Nor are the shrines of Pakistan only about the worship of long-dead saints and their descendants. New local preachers are emerging al the time. Sometimes they emerge from the fol owers of existing shrines, like Pir Mir Ali Shah, who in the 1930s and 1940s greatly increased the fame of the ancient shrine of Golra Sharif near what is now Islamabad. In several cases in recent decades preachers have succeeded in establishing new and famous places of pilgrimage. A notable example is the shrine of Pir Hazrat Shah at Ghamkol Sharif in the NWFP. Hazrat Shah established himself there in 1951, and gained a reputation for holiness, preaching and miracles which attracted many fol owers, especial y in the Pakistani armed forces.

The network of this shrine extends to large parts of the Pakistani diaspora in Britain. As Pnina Werbner has documented, the growth of this shrine’s fol owing in Britain formed part of a movement which saw the influence of the scripturalist ‘Deobandi’ school pushed back among British Muslims in the 1970s and 1980s.8 The madrasah at Golra Sharif also sends preachers to Britain.

However, there are lots of new pirs unknown beyond their immediate neighbourhoods. Any Muslim can claim to be a saint, on the basis of a vision, or the appearance of another saint in a dream. To make good the claim, however, requires above al personal charisma, natural authority, psychological insight and good judgement in giving advice and solving local disputes. An ability to perform miracles or – depending on your point of view – a lot of luck are definite assets.

Most such newly emerged figures never do become more than smal local holy men. A few attract much more considerable fol owings.

Often, this wil be a process stretching over generations, with an impressive disciple succeeding the original pir and attracting yet more support.

Thus Pir Hasan Baba, a new saint in Lahore, who died in the 1950s, was the chosen successor of a previous shaikh, and Pir Hasan’s prestige in turn was consolidated by his successor, Hafiz Mohammed Iqbal, who died in 2001. Together, they attracted a considerable fol owing in the Lahori middle classes and intel igentsia. Hasan Baba was by origin an Englishman drawn like many others to Sufi mysticism.

Their fol owers are building a shrine for them on the site of the smal , ordinary house where Hasan Baba (a smal government clerk) lived and preached from the 1930s to the 1950s, and where they are both buried.

Reflecting the class and culture of its devotees, the shrine (which I visited in August 2009) is a beautiful building constructed from traditional materials, and designed by a leading Lahore architect – and fol ower of these saints – Kamil Khan. ‘Nothing like this has been built in Pakistan or India since the fal of the Mughal empire,’ the engineer, Rizwan Qadir Khwaja, told me. Reflecting the trans-communal nature of the shrines, the overal design is model ed on that of the famous Shia shrine of Ali in Najaf, Iraq, although Pir Hasan Baba was, technical y at least, Sunni. As Mr Khwaja told me, In Pakistan, you often find that a wife is Shia, the husband Sunni. And in the past this was never a problem, but now extremists want to divide us. Sufism and Sufi shrines play a very important role against this, by bridging Sunni and Shia.

When someone asks me if I am Sunni or Shia I reply that like my saints I real y do not care. It is irrelevant. I think only of the wil of God.9

Fol owers of Pir Hasan and Hafiz Iqbal also went out of their way to stress these saints’ respect for other religions, that Hafiz Iqbal had cal ed Pope John Paul I ‘a true saint’, and so on. ‘A problem in Islam is that the Koran is too explicit and rigorous, unlike other scriptures, so there is less room for flexibility,’ as one of the devotees told me – a statement calculated to cause apoplexy in many more-rigorous Muslims.

This shrine and its fol owers gave a strong sense of a living and growing tradition, and – like Qawali music – of a very strong cultural and emotional force. Mr Khwaja said, ‘We are not trying to invent something new, but to breathe new life into old traditions,’ and they seemed to have done just that. As to the miracles attributed to these saints, as a modern rationalist I could not help smiling at them – but as a Catholic (however faded) I have to recognize their central place in al religious traditions.

Like these saints, South Asian saints in general belong to one or other Sufi order, and their whole tradition has been cal ed a Sufi one.

This can be rather misleading for Western audiences whose ideas of Sufism

are derived chiefly from Omar Khayyam (via Edward FitzGerald) and Idries Shah. The idea of Sufism as a vaguely deist, New-Age-style philosophy with lots of poetry, alcohol and soft drugs is also immens

Edited by Foxit Readerely appealing to members of Pakistan’s Westernized elites, whom it permits to fol ow a Westernized and hedo Copyright(C) by Foxit Software Company,2005-2008nistic lifestyle without feeling that they have broken completely with their religion and For Evaluation Only.

its traditions.

This image of Sufism as representing a sort of latitudinarian and pacific moderation has led to a US strategy of supporting Islamist Sufis in the Muslim world against radicals – whereas in reality a more helpful strategy in the ‘war on terror’ might be to use the FBI to support American

Methodists

against

American

Pentecostals.

The

unpopularity of the US is such among ordinary Pakistanis – including Barelvis and fol owers of the saints with whom I have spoken – that US

moves in this direction are a great asset to radical enemies of Sufism.

As to the supposed ‘moderation’ of the Barelvis, the assassin of Governor Salman Taseer, who committed his crime in defence of Pakistan’s blasphemy law, is a Barelvi and was defended by most Barelvi clerics. The Barelvis are in fact deeply conservative reactionaries and are therefore opposed to modern Islamist revolution and to liberalism.

Sufis have often been at the forefront of movements insisting on stricter religious observance and obedience to the Koran, as in those fighting against European colonialism. The famous Qawali form of ecstatic devotional music (brought to Western audiences by great artists like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) stemmed from Sufism and is performed at many shrines – but has been banned by the Naqshbandi Sufi order.

In the sixteenth century, some Sufi leaders denounced the Mughal emperor Akbar’s attempt to create a new syncretic cult. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, others supported the harsh Islamizing policies of the Emperor Aurangzeb. In the eighteenth century, the great Islamist reformer Shah Waliul ah (mentioned in Chapter 1) was a member of the Naqshbandi Sufi order and, in the late nineteenth century, fol owers of his tradition founded the Deoband theological school, whose adherents today form the backbone of Islamist radical politics in Pakistan.

While these are often harshly critical of the shrines and their fol owers, their madrasahs are believed often to have private links to particular Naqshbandi shrines, showing the persistence of the shrine’s power and influence. As Carl Ernst has remarked, many of the leaders of modern Islamist radicalism came original y from backgrounds heavily influenced by Sufism.10

Shah Waliul ah’s tradition of defending Islam against the West has – in their own perception – been continued by the adherents of Pir Hazrat Shah in Britain, who in 1989 helped lead the movement of protest against the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.

The classical teachings of al the recognized orders of Sufism have always taught that a knowledge of and obedience to the Shariah are essential if one is to become a shaikh or his murid.

In Pakistan, the cults of the saints, and the Sufi orders and Barelvi theology which underpin them, are an immense obstacle to the spread of Taleban and sectarian extremism, and of Islamist politics in general.

This is not because the shrines or the Barelvis have powerful political parties of their own, like the Jamaat Islami (JI) and Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) of the Deobandi tradition. Every attempt at creating such parties over the decades has foundered on the deep rivalries and jealousies between (and indeed within) the great pir families, and also on the fact that, unlike the modern Islamist radicals, the shrines and the Barelvis have no uniting political ideology at al beyond loyalty to their own traditions.

Rather, when it comes to combating radicalism the importance of the shrines lies in two things: first, in the way that the different cults and traditions – especial y in so far as they overlap with those of the Shia – make impossible the kind of monolithic Sunni Islam of which the Jamaat in one way and the Taleban in another dream. Second, and equal y important, is the way in which the pir families are entwined with and help support and legitimize dominant landowning clans across much of the Pakistani countryside, and parts of the traditional business elites in the towns.

The pirs are therefore an important part of the dense networks of elite power and patronage which have been an immense and so far insuperable obstacle to revolution in Pakistan. Political y speaking, pirs behave in the same way as the great majority of other politicians.

They use their network of influence to gain patronage and protection for their fol owers. Quite contrary to the conventional Western image of Sufism, therefore, one of the most important roles of the Sufi shrines in Pakistan has always been in the eminently practical area of politics.

Pirs with real personal religious prestige are at an advantage in being able to command support beyond their own lineages, and also sometimes to command a more unconditional loyalty. Often a key step in the rise of a newly emerged urban pir is when he gains a local politician as a fol ower – just as in the past, a saint’s reputation would be made by the public respect of a local prince, or even – in the greatest cases – the sultan himself. Thereafter, the politician and the saint rise (and to a lesser extent fal ) together, each contributing to the al iance from their respective spheres. Murids have been known to commit murders on the orders of their pir, either for his own sake or that of one of his political al ies.

There are therefore two sides to the pirs and shrines: their political, property-owning and sometimes criminal role coexists with the beneficial spiritual and social functions described by Lukas Werth, a leading scholar of Sufism:

Many of the new pirs are not frauds. Ordinary people take great comfort from them. They give them an outlook on life, and an inspiration. They create an emotional counterweight against the constant troubles of life here, the calamities that everyone has to face, the sorrow and the sheer mess of life. They provide a place of spiritual rest for the people. They also educate children – which is more than the state does most of the time – calm down local fights, reconcile husbands and wives, parents and children, or brothers who have fal en out.11

A Sindhi intel ectual friend drew attention to another side of the cults of the shrines:

The negative side of mysticism and saint worship is that it makes people passive, respectful of their superiors and believing that everything comes from God or the saint and should be accepted. This is especial y damaging in Sindh, because we are a traditional, agrarian and backward society and mysticism helps keep us that way. We need an industrial revolution to take us out of this feudal domination of which the pirs are part. But people in Sindh love their pirs, and our whole culture is bound up with them. Even I am deeply influenced by this, though I loathe the political and social role of the pirs.

The pirs and the shrines are therefore also an obstacle to modern reform, democracy and development in Pakistan. It is true that pirs provide at least psychological help for poor people facing disease, when no help whatsoever is forthcoming from the state or the regular medical services. Some shrines are especial y popular with women, who often come to pray to be given children, or to be cured of various ailments.

This is especial y true of psychiatric problems. These are thought by the mass of the population to be due to possession by devils, and people suffering from them are brought to the shrines to be exorcized.

It may indeed be that for disturbed women in particular, the licence given to them at the shrines to defy al normal rules of behaviour by dancing ecstatical y and screaming either prayers or demon-induced obscenities does indeed provide an essential therapeutic release from their horribly confined and circumscribed (physical y as wel as emotional y) lives. On the other hand, it is unfortunately also true that many pirs actively discourage people from seeking regular medical help, tel ing them to come to them instead. Occasional y ghastly stories surface of smal -time rural pirs ordering their devotees to perform black magic and even human sacrifice.