Read an Excerpt
Pilgrims of Love
The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult
By Pnina Werbner Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2003 Pnina Werbner
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02885-3
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
SUFISM AS A TRANSNATIONAL RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT
RELIGIOUS GLOBALISATION AND THE TRANSNATIONAL SPREAD OF SUFI CULTS
The revival of new religious movements, spreading their message to ever more remote corners of the globe, has raised new questions for research. This book is about one such globalising movement. It focuses on a Sufi Naqshbandi order founded by a living saint, Zindapir, whose enchanting central lodge nestles in a small valley in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. During the saint's lifetime, his cult extended globally: to Britain and Europe, the Middle East and Southern Africa.
The book considers Zindapir's order, established in the dying days of Empire, as a late capitalist, postcolonial, global religious movement. But it is important to recognise that the global spread of Sufism is not a new phenomenon. Almost from its inception as a mystical religious strand within Islam more than a millennium ago, Sufis have followed the trade routes and paths of imperial conquest into the remotest corners of the globe, from the Near East to North Africa, Iran, Central and South Asia, Indonesia, and East, West and Southern Africa. Hijra, the migration of the Prophet to Medina, has traditionally been repeated in the extensive travels of illustrious Sufis, saliks, or travellers, seeking the path to true knowledge, as many saintly hagiographies document.
In South Asia, after the initial Arab conquests of Sindh and Multan in the eighth century, Islam was spread primarily through holy men. Indeed, Annemarie Schimmel has argued that despite the occasional appearance of Sufi-soldiers in the frontier provinces of India, 'the Islamisation of the country was achieved largely by the preaching of dervishes, not by the sword' (Schimmel 1975: 346). Hallaj, one of the great mystics of the Near East, travelled to Sindh in 905 (ibid.: 345). Following the second wave of Muslim conquests, around the year 1000, came mystics like Hujwiri, popularly known as Data Ganj Baksh, whose treatise on Sufism, Kashf Almahjub soon became a classic, and whose shrine in Lahore still attracts thousands of daily pilgrims. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Mu'inuddin Chishti founded the Chishtiyya order, which is distinctive to the Indian subcontinent. His tomb in Ajmer is still revered today, as are the shrines of key disciples at Pakpattan and Delhi (ibid.: 344–51). The circulation of Muslim mystics between the subcontinent, the Near East, Persia and Central Asia continued throughout the Mughal period during which further Sufi orders were established in India, among them the Suhawardiyya, Qadiriyya and Naqshbandiyya, the last being introduced into India from Central Asia by Khwaja Baqi Billah and developed by his disciple, Ahmed Faruqi Sirhindi (1564–1624), who played a major role in Indian religious, and to some extent political, life (ibid.: 367).
Since the nineteenth century, but even earlier, mystical Islam has also been transplanted into Dutch and British colonies by South Asian tradersand indentured labourers, and in the post-Second World War era, by refugees and economic labour migrants, moving in search of work from their rural villages to the expanding cities of the developing world, or to the West and the Gulf states. These mass counter-movements have created new diasporas and have forged, along with them, new connections to Sufi sacred centres in the migrants' homelands, across regional, national and international boundaries.
Thus in South Asia the transnational movement of Sufi saints has historically been a key to the spread of Islam. So too the Sufi regional cult at the centre of this study has expanded through movement: of army regiments; of retired soldiers returning to civilian life in their villages or towns; of labour migrants to the Gulf or to Britain; of pilgrims meeting on Hajj; and of disciples meeting at the central lodge of Zindapir weekly, monthly, or annually, during the 'urs, the three-day festival commemorating the mystical 'marriage' of a deceased saint with God.
The present study describes these various forms of transnational movement through which space is deterritorialised and reterritorialised. In belonging to a Sufi regional cult, labour migrants transplanted to foreign lands renew a unitary, cross-national, religious identity and subjectivity. In gathering together disciples normally widely scattered internationally, occasions such as the 'urs or the pilgrimage to Mecca are critical events of joint transnational ritual celebration.
Sufism has never respected national boundaries. Its counter-movement into the West today can be grasped as quite distinct from the global spread of political Islam. But even if it is rarely militant or revolutionary, Sufism is not simply apolitical. As I argue in this book, the attitudes of Sufis to temporal power and authority are highly ambivalent, a mixture of moral superiority and pragmatic accommodation, but they are never outside of politics.
A broad debate among sociologists of religion concerns the reasons for the global revival of new forms of religiosity in the face of modernityand the secular state. Whereas the rise of capitalism and liberalism led initially to a rationalisation and reform of the great religions, often with a stress on unmediated individual prayer and the separation of religion and state, the late twentieth century witnessed a rise of communalist, 'fundamentalist' or 'magical' religious movements. One dominant view is that the rise of these new religious movements, including the spread of Christian Pentecostalism, Hindu nationalism and political Islam, is a response to a 'failed' modernity or postmodernity. If Weber posited that modernity would lead to the 'disenchantment' of the world, the end of magic, then the failure of modernity has reversed that trend towards secularisation.
There is, of course, some truth in this thesis in so far as postcolonial developing countries are concerned. Underdevelopment, the perceived autocracy or inefficiency of regimes and their dependence on the West, and the moral uncertainties of disorganised (post) modern life, lead people to seek legitimate grounds for dissent and to look to utopian or millenarian futures, based (in the case of Islam) on the perfect community of Muslims at the time of the Prophet. For some, including Pakistani migrant-settlers to Britain, millenarian forms of religion may indeed afford 'magical' solutions to their predicament and sense of malaise.
But a more persuasive thesis for the global rise of the new religious movements, both in the West and the developing world, is that these provide certain modern 'solutions' and platforms for geographically and socially mobile subjects. This is an argument put forward in relation to the spread of Christian charismatic churches in Latin America by Bernice Martin (1998), against the failed postmodernity hypothesis suggested by Zygmunt Bauman in the same volume (1998). It is an argument which may equally be used to counter the failed modernity thesis in relation to the rise of political Islam.
In any case, Sufism is not an oppositional movement in any simple sense. Rather than rejecting modernity, a case can be made for the continued vitality of Sufism as a positive response to modernity. Sufi fraternities and saintly blessing legitimise and support worldly achievements, as argued in chapter 7. They provide mutual support in work contexts, the experience of moral amity in the face of urban anonymity, an intellectual challenge to disciples lacking formal educational qualifications, and a platform for the leadership aspirations of those beyond the official public sphere (on the last, see P. Werbner 2002).
This is not to argue that Sufis are 'moderns', who are simply living out an 'alternative' modernity. Sufism rejects ideas of individual religious agency, autonomy and rationality which are the bedrock of liberal modernity, stressing instead the embodied charisma, perfection and transcendence of the Sufi master, whose spiritual intimacy with God leads to the magical enchantment of the world. Yet despite the valorisation of world renunciation, Sufi followers easily integrate into worldly contexts of work and contemporary politics.
Hallencreutz and Westerlund (1996) make the point that even in the case of the Islamists, it is often not modernity per se that is rejected but secular modernity and, above all, the secular state (1996: 6). Sufis, by contrast, tend to thrive on the liberalism and pluralism of the secular state, and to cooperate well with its political representatives, extracting boons for their orders in exchange for promised political support. Yet in South Asia, the movement cannot be conceived as merely quietist. It engages in constant critique of the mendacity and hypocrisy of politicians. Its 'ulama (clerics) and lay preachers are attune to popular political sentiments, and frequently make fiery political speeches against the West. On the whole, however, such sentiments remain at a rhetorical and symbolic level. Sufism and its world-renouncing saints are almost everyhere committed to peaceful coexistence and tolerance. It is these which allow regional cults to expand and prosper, despite changes of regimes and local political conflicts.
In a sense, then, Sufism, at least in the Pakistani version described in this book, represents a counter-globalising trend to political Islam. It is traditional and sentimental. It stresses personal renewal, group amity, mutual support and tolerance. It is accommodating to worldly politics and encourages thrift and worldly success. A murid, a saintly disciple, is a lover who seeks intimacy with his shaikh and with God. Sufi regional cults, this book shows, are produced in all their organisational complexity by the forces generated through the love of murids for their saint.
THE REFORMIST CRITIQUE AND THE CONTINUED VITALITY OF SUFISM
The veneration of saints at saintly shrines in South Asia, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, has been castigated by Islamic reformists as idolatrous innovation replete with non-Islamic, 'Hindu' customs, a view often accepted by Western scholars. Against this, it has been argued:
The error of both reformers and Western ethnographers is to consider only two forms: a rather fundamentalist conception of Islam, on the one hand, and Hindu customs on the other. They ignore an important middle form, namely medieval Sufi piety, which is responsible for most of the devotions to saints and which was imported to India from abroad (Gaborieau 1989: 234).
In other words, Sufi rituals denounced by the reformists as 'Hindu', in fact have their origins outside South Asia, in the medieval world of Europe and the Near East. Nevertheless, the growing Islamic reformist and modernist critiques against saint cult practices led historically to an increasing self-consciousness among Sufi adherents, and to the emergence of reformist Sufi regional cults which stressed Islamic law and Shari'at and prohibited some of the more extravagant celebrations at saints' shrines. The regional cult founded by Zindapir falls clearly within this reformist tradition, one which emerged as early as the seventeenth century among Naqshbandi Sufi followers. In line with strict Naqshbandi practice, Zindapir prohibited the playing of instrumental music, radio and television at the lodge, although he did allow the singing of praise poems to the Prophet, and of loud, melodic forms of zikr (remembrance of God) which became over time the characteristic feature of the order.
Such self-consciousness, hedonistic restraint and stress upon Shari'at are not to be taken, however, as leading to Sufi decline, or to the diminution of faith in the perfection of the shaikh and his powers of intercession. Nowhere did I encounter an apologetic double-consciousness in the face of modernity of the kind that Ewing (1997) reports from her fieldwork among Sufi saints and followers. On the contrary, feelings of love and devotion expressed by both ordinary and modern, educated murids (disciples) and khulafa (vicegerents, deputies, emissaries), for Zindapir were so intense that these murids found it inconceivable that anyone who encountered the shaikh would not, like them, be totally overwhelmed by his extraordinary spirituality.
Both the colonial and postcolonial Pakistani governments have acted to regularise the finances or take over the management of many shrines previously controlled by descendants or disciples of famous saints, and to abolish some of the allegedly unIslamic practices and tribute-collecting arrangements at these shrines (Gilmartin 1984, Malik 1998b). Unlike these shrines, Zindapir's lodge has retained its autonomy since the shaikh is an originary saint and founder of a new regional and transnational cult. As such he is the owner of the lodge and all that surrounds it, built with voluntary labour and donations freely given by his disciples. He thus exemplifies both the old and new in Sufi Islam, the settlement of the wilderness, on the one hand, and the embeddedness of Sufi cults in the postcolonial state and in processes of globalisation, on the other.
Above all, Zindapir's regional cult proves that despite the modernist challenge, revitalised by the constant rise of 'new' charismatic saints the vigour of Sufism in South Asia remains quite remarkable. Such continued vitality challenges the assumption that Sufi 'folk' or 'magical' beliefs and, even more fundamentally, notions of saintly intercession, are antithetical to the modern state or industrial capitalism.
Proponents of the Sufi and saintly cult 'decline' hypothesis, such as Gellner (1981), draw a rather straightforward analogy between Sufism and Catholicism, and thus equate the rise of Islamic reform movements with the historical emergence of Protestantism in Christianity. This analogy is, however, misleading. There are elements in Sufism, the present book argues, which, like Calvinism and Protestantism more generally, support this-worldly orientations towards individual achievement and autonomy. By contrast, most reformist movements in South Asia, while disapproving of some Sufi practices and rejecting notions of divine intercession in favour of the sacredness of the Qur'an and Hadith, replicate Sufi forms of regional and transnational social organisation focused around exemplary charismatic leaders. Moreover, the Islamic reformists still continue to stress communal rather than individual goals and achievements.
There is a possible additional reason why Sufism in South Asia did not suffer the same decline in prestige and pervasive influence which it may have experienced in North Africa and the Near East. In the more religiously plural context of South Asia under British colonial rule, a scholarly movement of 'ulama — the Barelvi movement — developed, to defend the practices at saints' shrines and the belief in intercession (Metcalf 1982, Malik 1998b). This meant that the confrontation between Sufism and reform Islam was not simply (as elsewhere) one between 'ulama and saints, but between different types of 'ulama, espousing different Islamic approaches (see P. Werbner 1996a).
Recognising the elective affinity between Sufism and the achievement of worldly individual success in a modern and postmodern world is, I suggest, a key to understanding Zindapir's popular appeal to members of the armed forces and other top civil servants in Pakistan. It also explains the popularity of the shaikh in Britain where the order is led by a khalifa based in Birmingham who was Zindapir's companion during his army days. This khalifa has built the British order up into a major British regional cult, while continuing to recognise the ultimate authority of Zindapir and the lodge in Pakistan.
SACRED INTIMACY AND THE MYTHOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
Although Sufism in South Asia may not be in terminal decline, the question remains: what is the relation between the 'magical' customs at saints' tombs and Sufism, conceived of as an abstract philosophical system? Zindapir himself, in true Naqshbandi fashion, prohibited extreme expressions of adulation towards his person, or even the distribution of his picture during his lifetime. Shortly after his death, however, as chapter 12 discloses, his shrine was already becoming the focus of customary saintly veneration.
For the secular observer as for the Muslim reformist, the obsequious prostration of supplicants at the tombs of dead saints, or disciples' obeisant kissing of a living saint's hands and the edges of his gown, summon up a world of magic and superstition. It is a world that seems utterly remote from the imaginary universes, ideal symbols and abstract qualities described in the works of famous Sufis. A large number of scholarly studies have analysed these elaborate mystical worlds and spheres of reality, constructed by Sufi thinkers who claim to have retraced their mystical journeys towards sacred intimacy and unity with God through a series of theophanic visions.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pilgrims of Love by Pnina Werbner. Copyright © 2003 Pnina Werbner. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
