Pakistan: A Hard Country (26 page)

SHRINES AND SUPERSTITION

The ‘superstition’ of the shrines and Sufi orders is one reason why radical secular reformers in the Muslim world have been deeply hostile to them; another, as far as modern nationalists are concerned, is that they advance the idea of a loyalty to their leaders which transcends that of the nation-state. Thus in Turkey, Kemal Ataturk launched a ferocious persecution of the shrines and the Sufis, and imposed restrictions which have been lifted only in recent years.

This was an ambiguity of which the British rulers of India were ful y aware. On the one hand – like many Muslim rulers earlier – they regarded the shrines and the landowning pir families as forces for stability and potential sources of support for imperial rule. In Punjab, they took care to incorporate the pir families into what they defined (along British lines) as the ‘landowning gentry’, and to reward them with consultation, honours and sometimes new land grants.

The British saw the pirs as barriers to the anti-British revolutionary movements of the Wahabis and some of the reformist Muslim preachers. Successive Pakistani governments have also relied on the pirs for local support and influence. General Zia-ul-Haq, with his personal sympathy for modern Islamist culture, was believed to be hostile to the shrines, but took little action against them, beyond fol owing previous (unsuccessful) policies of trying to regulate and partial y control their finances through the Waqf Board (statut0ry body which administers religious endowments).

On the other hand, in their Protestant souls the British shared the Islamist reformers’ views concerning the culture of the shrines, and despised the superstition, obscurantism, corruption and intoxication which they saw flourishing at the shrines and among their adherents; and, indeed, the paral els they drew between popular Muslim worship of the saints and the failings of ‘Popery’ in the West were often quite explicit.

In Major O’Brien’s view, ‘Al [Punjabi Muslims] alike are sunk in the most degrading superstition, and are in the most abject submission to their spiritual pastors or pirs.’12 The political needs of imperial rule aside, British officialdom much preferred the scripturalism, legalism and relative modernity of the urban Islamist reformists, and – as the last chapter described – sometimes favoured the Shariah against the local customary law, on progressive grounds.

Certainly some of the great shrines in Pakistan could be described (like Russia’s) as ‘an offence against the Protestant state of mind’.

This is especial y true of those with large fol owings of qalandars or malangs (the South Asian equivalent of the dervishes of the Arab world and Turkey), wandering holy beggars with certain affinities to the Hindu saddhus. Much of the contempt felt by the British and the Islamists for the shrines stems from the character of the malangs, and especial y the musth malangs – musth indicating a mixture of intoxication and madness.

Like many educated Sufis, Mr Khwaja of the fol owing of Pir Hasan Baba expressed strong disapproval not only of the scripturalist enemies of Sufism, but also of many of the Pakistani pirs and their fol owers:

Unfortunately, at the lowest level, some of the new saints and many of the malangs are fakes and are just in it for business.

There are so many of them out there bringing a bad image on us. Malangs sel drugs, run prostitution rackets and things like that. And the political hereditary pirs are also a problem. They discredit the Sufi tradition with their corruption and politicking. A true Sufi saint cannot be fat, healthy and rich. He has to be poor and simple, and living in poor conditions. But humanity has always worshipped false gods, and Pakistan is no different.

Surely if you look at the hereditary pirs, you can see clearly al the false gods that they worship.

Some of the malangs I have met, especial y at smal er rural shrines, do indeed tend to support British and Islamist prejudices: filthy, stoned to the gil s, and surrounded by retinues of giggling half-naked little boys as degraded-looking as themselves. One malang, however, justified their use of drugs to Katherine Ewing in words some of which could have come from recent reports by medical experts to the British and American governments:

Alcohol works on the outside – it makes a man violent and blinds his senses. Charas [hashish] works in the inside. It makes him peaceful and opens his spirit to God. So a malang should avoid alcohol as he should avoid women. Alcohol wil cut him off from God but charas brings him close to God. That is why we malangs use it.13

This is part of the malangs’ proclaimed belief that their exclusive concentration on God and their particular saint requires them to ‘place [themselves] outside the world’ and the world’s normal social rules.

The malangs and qalandars therefore are known as the ‘be-shar’

(‘without law’) Sufis, as opposed to the pirs, who marry and have children, and fol ow (in theory) the rules of the Shariah.

At some of the large urban shrines attempts have been made to prevent the public smoking of hashish by devotees. This is especial y true of the clean, orderly shrines round Islamabad and Rawalpindi, with their strong fol owing among officials, others such as Ghamkol Sharif with strong military connections, and al shrines that I know of belonging to the Naqshbandi order of Sufis. At other great shrines, however (especial y during their annual urs, and at the sessions of prayer, chanting and dancing that take place every Thursday evening), to refuse to inhale hashish you would have to give up breathing altogether.

This is certainly true of the two great shrines in Sindh – Bhitshah and Sehwan Sharif. On visiting Sehwan, I couldn’t help grinning when I thought of the contrast between the prevailing physical atmosphere and the would-be spiritual atmosphere (one of unutterable official pomposity) which breathed from the booklet about the shrine and its saint, ful of pious phrases from ministers, that I had been given by the local government.

Sehwan Sharif is situated on the right bank of the Indus in central Sindh and, like Hadda, is associated with some legends derived from Hindu river worship. A vil age of low-caste Hindus stil exists nearby.

Sehwan’s founding saint was Shaikh Syed Usman Marwandi (1177 – 1274), a Persian known as Lal Shahbaz (the Red Falcon) Qalandar, having – according to legend – once turned himself into a falcon to rescue his friend and fel owsaint, Baba Farid of Pakpattan, from execution. Most of the leading saints of Sindh, including Shah Abdul Latif, were from the tradition Lal Shahbaz Qalandar founded.

Politicians take good care to honour the saint, and the golden gates of his shrine were donated by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The first thing that strikes you on approaching Sehwan Sharif (or in my case looking down on it from the guest house where the local government had kindly housed me, situated castle-like on a nearby hil ) is the fairground atmosphere. The shrines of the saint and his leading disciples, and many of the streets between them, are lit by thousands and thousands of coloured fairy-lights. The carnival continues in the streets themselves, which are a sort of bazaar-apotheosis – that is to say, a normal South Asian bazaar, but with more of everything: more music, more light, more crowds, more smel s (attractive and otherwise), more religious charms and souvenirs, more beggars and more thieves. Twice in the course of my visit I felt a hand steal into one of my pockets, where I had taken good care not to put my wal et or documents.

So in some ways Sehwan is Pakistan- (or India-) plus. Another aspect of this and other shrines however is very different indeed from the normal life of Pakistan, but helps explain the shrines’ popularity and social role: the behaviour of women. In Sehwan, groups of ordinary women pilgrims stride around with extraordinary (for Pakistan) freedom and self-confidence, unaccompanied by their menfolk though often with smal children in tow. They even smile at you – without, I hasten to add, being prostitutes, though female and male prostitution is said to flourish around some of the shrines.

The tomb of the saint is surrounded by family groups of women and children praying and chatting. In the courtyard, where the drumming and dancing in honour of the saint takes place, one section is roped off (but not screened) for women. On the evening when I visited the shrine, most of the women were sitting quite decorously with their dupattas (scarves) pul ed over their hair, chanting softly and moving their heads gently to and fro in time to the music. In the middle of them, however, three women were swaying and shaking their heads feverishly like maenads, with unbound hair flying around their faces – most probably some of the psychological y troubled people (women especial y) for whom the shrines provide a real if questionable therapy.

The rest of the courtyard is packed with dancing, swaying men. At intervals, servants of the shrine force their way through the crowd spraying scented water to cool people down, but the heat is indescribable and the dancers drenched in sweat. In the middle of the courtyard stand huge skin drums, and relays of volunteers come forward to beat them. Rather charmingly, my official guide, a very staid-looking middle-aged government clerk with glasses (and the inevitable pen stuck to the outside of his breast pocket as a symbol of his status), seized the drumsticks at one point and beat out a tremendous tattoo.

Most of the men in the courtyard were ordinary folk, but the front ranks of the dancers are made up of malangs (or dervishes, as they are often cal ed in Sindh), with long, wild hair and beards – thousand-year-old hippies – stretching their arms above their heads and pointing their fingers at heaven, very like at a pop concert. The smel of hashish was everywhere.

The Shia element was very apparent, both in the Shia family groups around the tomb, in the drumming, which was very reminiscent of that I had heard at the great Shia festival of Ashura in Lahore four months earlier, and in the chants of ‘Ya Ali’. Some of the malangs were clearly as crazy as the women dancers. One was draped in chains from head to foot. Another was dressed in women’s clothes, with a headdress made from animal skins and feathers, like a pagan shaman.

Quite what Lal Shahbaz himself would have made of al this we do not know – though above the gates stands a picture of the saint himself dancing, holding a sitar. What we do know is what the spectrum of ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim groups think of this kind of thing – and the answer of course is more or less what seventeenth-century puritans thought about Catholicism, minus the Pope and the bishops. As should be clear, the scenes at some of the shrines in Pakistan contain just about al the elements necessary to make a puritan feel nervous.

PURITANS, FUNDAMENTALISTS, REFORMISTS: THE JAMAAT ISLAMI

There could not be a greater contrast with Sehwan Sharif than the headquarters of the Jamaat Islami party – the only truly national Islamist party in Pakistan – at Mansura in Lahore. Like a number of institutions in Pakistan – the military especial y – the appearance of Jamaat offices seems deliberately created to be as different as possible from the general mixture of dirt, disorder, colour, poverty and ostentation that is the public face of Pakistan.

The only hint of fun I have ever seen with the Jamaat has been its younger members playing cricket – and indeed there are aspects of the Jamaat of which Dr Arnold of Rugby would thoroughly have approved; they are clean-living, muscular Muslims. With the Jamaat, everything is disciplined, neat, orderly, plain, clean, modest and buttoned-up: a puritan style, with faint echoes of the barracks and strong ones of the boarding school. Its members also dress and behave in this way – a style which reflects both their ideology and their general y lower-middle-class urban origins and culture.

Jamaat activists certainly dress and behave very differently from the far rougher, largely rural Pathan members of the other main Islamist party from the Deobandi tradition, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (Council of Islamic Clerics, or JUI). The JUI’s parent party in undivided India, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, was founded in 1919 as part of the Khilafat movement against British rule.

The JUI split off in the 1940s to support partition and the creation of Pakistan. In Pakistan, however, the JUI has become an almost exclusively ethnical y Pathan party, and so I have dealt with it in a later chapter, on the Pathans of Pakistan. In addition, the JUI no longer has a significant intel ectual aspect, and has to a considerable extent become just another Pakistani patronage machine on behalf of its fol owers – as one of its leaders candidly admitted to me.

The Jamaat Islami is a very different kind of party, much more impressive and in its way more frightening – so impressive indeed that its lack of political success is al the more striking. The Jamaat has excel ent Islamist intel ectual credentials, having been founded in Lahore in 1941 by Syed Abu Ala Maududi (1903 – 79), one of the leading thinkers of the international Islamist canon. Indeed, in some ways the Jamaat is too intel ectual for its own good.

Maududi and the Jamaat were strongly influenced by the Deobandi tradition of hostility to British rule, and attachment to the idea of the universal Muslim Ummah. They also deeply distrusted the secularism of Jinnah and other Muslim League leaders. On these grounds, they initial y opposed the creation of Pakistan, preferring to struggle for a more perfect Muslim society within India.