“The following evening, we finally reached my cousin’s village. The village was much larger than the one we came from, and our cousins were very good to us, and made us feel welcome. They built us a new house in the middle of a garden, and we had all the fruits and trees we could wish: mangoes, coconuts, bamboos, betel nuts, grapes, pomegranates. They even put me in a school—the only one I ever went to. My cousins were powerful people locally, and we feared no crime.
“In fact for the first year, the only fear we had was of the floods. The fields of the village were very rich, but every monsoon they would become inundated and the river would burst its banks so that we had to take shelter on makeshift platforms up in the trees. In the branches we would be safe—but the river swept away everything, including all our belongings. The houses we had made were kucha, made of bamboo and mud and palm thatch, and they could not withstand the floods. Everything was spoiled by the water. So we had to start again, and this time we built an embankment around the village. But the following year, during the rains, the same thing happened again.
“That year was 1971; a very bad year indeed. The West Pakistanis were fighting with the East Pakistanis, and the Biharis sided with the West Pakistanis against the Bengalis. We knew nothing about this, and the violence did not come to our village. But we heard that many people had been killed in towns nearby, and that both sides were murdering each other in every way they could. We also heard that Biharis were being kidnapped by Bengali militias and made to work as slave labour. Others were kidnapped, then beheaded. Many of our people took refuge in camps, but then died for lack of food. Things were so bad that we stopped eating fish from the river because there were so many bodies rotting in the water. Everyone was frightened, and no one knew what to do, or even what it was really about. We could just about understand why Hindus might want to kill Muslims, but why would Muslims want to kill Muslims? It seemed as if the whole world was soaked in blood.
“Then, just when things had become unbearable, the Pakistanis announced that any Bihari in Bangladesh who wanted to come to Pakistan could have land in the southern Punjab. We didn’t know anything about the Punjab, but we had heard it was very rich so were tempted, especially as Bangladesh was very, very poor after the floods and the war.
“In the end, the family split. My mother stayed in Bangladesh with her cousin, saying she was too old to move again, and that she would take her chances with the Bengalis. But my younger brother and I took the offer of some land in Pakistan. Bihari volunteers from a camp near Khulna organised our journey. They gave us documents and took us in trucks first to Calcutta, then to Delhi. From there we crossed into Pakistan and were put in a camp near Lahore. Finally they took us to a cotton factory near Multan. There was no land when we got there, but at least we were given a small room, and a job.
“For all of us, it was very strange. We couldn’t speak Punjabi, and none of us knew how to work ginning cotton. We were used to fish and rice, and all we were given was meat and roti. But at least we were safe, and for every eight-hour shift in the factory we were given Rs 15. When I was not working, I spent my time visiting shrines in Multan, and talking to the fakirs. It was at this time that I first began to think that one day I too might become a wandering Sufi.
“For ten years I lived this life, and even got used to the work in the factory. My brother always looked after me. But then my brother died in an accident in the factory, and his wife misbehaved with me, saying that I was stupid and cursed, that I had always lived off my brother’s money and given nothing in return, and it was my bad luck which had caused the death. She said she didn’t want to live with me any more. On the fortieth day after his death, when all the ceremonies were complete, I decided to leave. How could I stay after what had happened, after all the words that had been spoken?
“The day before I left, I visited the shrine of Sheikh Baha ud-Din Zakariya and prayed for guidance. That night I had a dream. I saw an old man with a long beard who came to me in my sleep. He was sitting in a great courtyard, and he said, ‘Now you are all alone. I will be your protector. Come to me.’ In my dream, I replied, ‘But I don’t know who you are or where you are.’ He said, ‘Just sit on a train, and it will bring you to me. But leave all your money, and do not pay for a ticket, or for food. I will provide.’
“I did as I was instructed. I didn’t even tell my sister-in-law I was leaving. I caught the first train that pulled into the station at Multan, and just as the man in my dream had said, the ticket inspector didn’t ask for a fare—instead he shared his food with me. The following day, when the train reached Hyderabad in Sindh, a great crowd of pilgrims and fakirs were on the platform. Some were beating drums, and one them shouted, ‘Dum Dum Mustt Qalander!’ I looked out at what was going on, and I must have caught the eye of the fakir, for through the bars of the train he handed me an amulet, saying, ‘This will protect you—keep it!’
“I looked down and saw that on the ta’wiz was a picture of the man in my dream. I ran out of the train and chased after the fakir, asking him who the old man was. ‘It is Lal Shahbaz Qalander,’ he replied. ‘We are on our way to his ’Urs.’ I asked whether I could come too, and he agreed. We all caught a bus together, and when we arrived, I recognised that the shrine was the place in my dream. The courtyard where Lal Shahbaz was sitting in my dream was the one where the dhammal takes place every day.
“That was more than twenty years ago. Since then I have never left this shrine, except for once a year when I go to the ’Urs at the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif in Bhit Shah. The first year I slept in the courtyard at the dargah. In those days I was not a fakir or a malang—just an ordinary homeless woman. But I did the dhammal every day, and gave water to the thirsty pilgrims, and swept the floor of his tomb chamber. The longer I stayed, the more people got to know me. They accepted me, and I became part of the family of this shrine. I took a pir, who taught me how to live as a Sufi, and eventually I moved here to Lal Bagh, to the place where Lal Shahbaz lived and meditated. I’ve been here ever since, and now I have disciples of my own.
“This place is very peaceful, but has a strong power. Anywhere else it would difficult to live alone as a woman, but here I am protected, and accepted—no one bothers me. My food is provided by the pirs of the shrine. There are other holy women who come occasionally, for a week or a month, but I am the only one who permanently lives here. My pir and the other malangs have taught me how to live this life. They have told me all I know about Lal Shahbaz and Shah Abdul Latif, and the ways of a Qalander. Lal Shahbaz has become like a father. He is everything to me. Shah Abdul Latif is like my uncle. Though I am a stranger here in Sindh, and am not educated, what Latif says in his poetry speaks to me. I think he understands the pain of women.
“These days, however, I sometimes feel that it is my duty to protect both these saints, just as they have protected me. Today in our Pakistan there are so many of these mullahs and Wahhabis and Tablighis who say that to pay respect to the saints in their shrines is shirk. Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the Prophet. Mullahs and Azazeel [Satan] are the same thing. My pir once taught me some couplets by Shah Abdul Latif:
Why call yourself a scholar, o mullah?
You are lost in words.
You keep on speaking nonsense,
Then you worship yourself.
Despite seeing God with your own eyes,
You dive into the dirt.
We Sufis have taken the flesh from the holy Quran,
While you dogs are fighting with each other.
Always tearing each other apart,
For the privilege of gnawing at the bones.
Lal Peri was not alone in her fears of the advance of the Wahhabis, and what this meant for Sufism in the region.
Islam in South Asia was changing, and even a shrine as popular and famous as that of Sehwan found itself in a position much like that of the great
sculpted cathedrals and saints’ tombs of northern Europe 500 years ago, on the eve of the Reformation. As in sixteenth-century Europe, the reformers and puritans were on the rise, distrustful of music, images, festivals and the devotional superstitions of saints’ shrines. As in Reformation Europe, they looked to the text alone for authority, and recruited the bulk of their supporters from the newly literate urban middle class, who looked down on what they saw as the corrupt superstitions of the illiterate peasantry.
Where this process differed from sixteenth-century Europe was in the important role played by colonialism. Religiously conservative Hindus and Muslims both suffered the humiliation of colonial subjugation and had to watch as their faith was branded degraded and superstitious by the victorious colonisers and their missionaries. In both faiths, reform movements re-examined and reinvented their religions in reaction to the experience of conquest; but while Hindu reformers tried to modernise their diverse spectrum of theologies and cults to more closely resemble Western Christianity, Islamic radicals opted instead to turn their back on the West, and return to what they saw as the pure Islamic roots of their faith. In the aftermath of the brutal massacres by the British following the Great Uprising of 1857, Islamic radicals left the ruins of Delhi and the demolished Mughal court, rejecting both the gentle Sufi traditions of the late Mughal emperors and the ways of the West.
Instead, disillusioned refugees from Delhi founded a Wahhabilike madrasa at Deoband which went back to Quranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything European from the curriculum. One hundred and forty years later, it was out of Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history, a regime that in turn provided the crucible from which emerged al-Qaeda, and the most radical fundamentalist Islamic counterattack the modern West has yet had to face. In the al-Qaeda training camps of Kandahar, Deobandi currents of thought received a noxious cross-fertilisation with ideas that emerged from two other intellectuals forced to rethink their faith in reaction to the West: the intellectual fathers of the Egyptian jihad, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb.
If it is the Islamists’ assaults on India and the West that has understandably absorbed the Western press, it is sometimes forgotten that the Taliban are also at war with rival comprehensions of Islam. This had been made especially clear by the 2009 dynamiting of the shrine of the seventeenth-century Pashto poet-saint Rahman Baba, at the foot of the Khyber Pass in the North-West Frontier region of Pakistan.
By chance, this was a shrine I knew very well. As a young journalist covering the Soviet–mujahedin conflict in the late 1980s from Peshawar, I used to visit the shrine on Thursday nights to watch Afghan refugee musicians sing songs to their saint by the light of the moon. For centuries, Rahman Baba’s shrine was a place where musicians and poets had gathered, and Rahman Baba’s Sufi verses in the Pashto language had long made him the national poet of the Pashtuns—in many ways the Shah Abdul Latif of the Frontier. Some of the most magical evenings I have ever had in South Asia were spent in the garden of the shrine, under the palms, listening to the sublime singing of the Afghan Sufis.
Then about ten years ago, a Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrasa was built at the end of the track leading to the dargah. Soon its students took it upon themselves to halt what they saw as the un-Islamic practices of the shrine. On my last visit there, in 2003, I talked about the situation with the shrine keeper, Tila Mohammed. He described how young Islamists now regularly came and complained that his shrine was a centre of idolatry, immorality and superstition. “My family have been singing here for generations,” said Tila. “But now these Arab madrasa students come here and create trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?” I asked.
“They tell us that what we do is wrong. They tell women not to come at all, and to stay at home. They ask people who are singing to stop. Sometimes arguments break out—even fist fights. This used to be a place where people came to get peace of mind. Now when they come here they just encounter more problems, so gradually they have stopped coming.”
“How long has this being going on?” I asked.
“Before the Afghan war there was nothing like this,” replied Tila Mohammed. “But then the Saudis came, with their propaganda to stop visiting the saints and to stop us preaching ’ishq. Now this trouble happens more and more frequently.”
Making sure no one was listening, he leaned forward and whispered, “Last week they broke the saz of a celebrated musician from Kohat. We pray that right will overpower wrong, that good will overcome evil. But our way is pacifist. As Rahman Baba put it:
I am a lover, and I deal in love. Sow flowers,
So your surroundings become a garden.
Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet.
We are all one body,
Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.
The end came on 4 March 2009, a week before my visit to Sehwan. A group of Pakistani Taliban arrived at the shrine before dawn, and placed dynamite around the squinches of the dome. No one was hurt, but the shrine chamber was completely destroyed. The Taliban issued a press release blaming the shrine for opening its doors to women, and allowing them to pray and seek healing there. Since then several other shrines in areas under Taliban control have been blown up or shut down, and one—that of Haji Sahib Turangzai, in the Mohmand Tribal Federally Administered Tribal Region of Pakistan—has been turned into a Taliban headquarters.
Behind the violence lies a theological conflict that has divided the Islamic world for centuries, albeit one dramatically radicalised by the aftermath of the anti-Soviet jihad. Rahman Baba, like Lal Shahbaz in Sindh or Rumi in Anatolia, believed passionately in the importance of the use of music, poetry and dance as a path for remembering and reaching God, as a way of opening the gates of Paradise. But this use of poetry and music in ritual, and the way the Sufis welcome women into their shrines, are some of the many aspects of Sufi practice that have attracted the wrath of modern Wahhabis, and their South Asian theological allies, the Deobandis and Tablighis. For although there is nothing in the Quran that specifically bans music, Islamic tradition has always associated music with dancing girls and immorality, and infections from Hinduism, and there has been a long tradition of clerical opposition.
In the long story of the complex three-cornered relationship between Hinduism, Sufi Islam and Islamic orthodoxy—in which the determination of the Sufis to absorb Hindu ideas and practices has always clashed with the wish of the orthodox to root them out as dangerous and deviant impurities—Sehwan has historically played an important part. It was the home of the great Sufi philosopher-poet Mian Mir, who in turn became the pir of the seventeenth-century Mughal prince Dara Shukoh, the ruler who arguably did more than anyone else to attempt to bring together the two great religions of South Asia. Dara was taught by his Sehwan-born pir that there was an essential unity of the Islamic and Hindu mystical paths. Heavily influenced by Mian Mir’s philosophy, Dara would go on to write, in his great treatise on Sufism The Compass of Truth:
Thou art in the Ka’ba at Mecca,
as well as in the [Hindu] temple of Somnath.
Thou art in the monastery,
as well as the tavern.
Thou art at the same time the light and the moth,
The wine and the cup,
The sage and the fool,
The friend and the stranger.
The rose and the nightingale.
Dara also had the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads translated into Persian as The Mysteries of Mysteries, and he wrote a comparative study of Hinduism and Islam, The Mingling of Two Oceans, which emphasised the compatibility of the two faiths and the common source of their divine revelations. In it he speculated that the essential nature of Islam was identical to that of Hinduism, and following the Quranic injunction that no land had been left without prophetic guidance, became convinced that the Vedas constituted the mysterious concealed scriptures mentioned in the Quran as the ultimate scriptu
ral spring of all monotheism. In the end, however, Dara’s Sehwan-influenced speculations proved too radical for the Muslim elite of India, and while Sufism has always had a large following, its influence among the Islamic ulema has always been controversial and frequently challenged. What is happening today is only the latest round of a much more ancient and intractable theological conflict within the Islamic world, albeit one super-charged by modern politics and weaponry.
Now the same madrasas which had so radically and successfully challenged the Sufi traditions of the Frontier were beginning to spread their web around rural Sindh. Lal Peri had told me about a new Deobandi madrasa that had just that month opened on the edge of the Sehwan bazaar, so after leaving her at Lal Bagh that evening, I went and met its director, Maulana Saleemullah.
The madrasa was located in an old haveli, recently renovated at some expense in gleaming marble, but still only semi-furnished. The twenty or so children in residence were still sleeping on mats and bedding on the floor, and the only furniture in the classrooms where the kids sat cross-legged chanting the Quran was a single desk for the teacher.
Saleemullah turned out to be a young, intelligent and well-educated man, who received me warmly. He was articulate in debate; but there was no masking the puritanical severity of some of his views.
For Saleemullah, the theology of the dispute between the Sufis and the orthodox was quite simple. “We don’t like tomb worship,” he said. “The Quran is quite clear about this, and the scholars from the other side simply choose to ignore what it says. We must not pray to dead men and ask things from them, even the saints. In Islam we believe there is no power but God. I invite people who come here to return to the true path of the Quran. Lal Shahbaz is dead, I tell them. Do not pray to a corpse. Go to the mosque, not to a grave.”
Nine Lives Page 16