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Introduction – Prof. Katherine Pratt Ewing
When we, as a public living at this particular historical moment, ask, “What is Sufism? Is Sufism part of Islam? What is the relationship between Sufism and the modern state?” our concerns have been largely shaped by a pervasive, globalized media- and policy- driven discourse about how Sufis might save the world from intolerant forms of Islam. Sufism, usually understood today to mean the mystical side of Islam, has been swept up into globalized debates that are increasingly framed as an opposition between “Sufis” and “Salafis.” Policy makers within the American government and in many countries with large Muslim populations have promoted Sufism and popular traditions associated with local shrines in an effort to discourage the spread of Islamists who may be prone to violence. A rhetorical chasm has developed between something that has come to be called Salafi, or “fundamentalist,” Islam and Sufism, and this chasm has come to shape the understandings and practices of Muslims themselves.
Sufism has undergone a reification in recent years that has transformed local practices into a new kind of cultural, religious, and political object, understood as a vestige of local culture and tradition that can be preserved and revived, much as the colonialism and orientalist scholarship of the nineteenth century turned Sufism into something quite different from what it had been during the time of the great Muslim empires. Within the world of South Asian Sufism today, perhaps the most dramatic phenomenon we have seen in recent years is a series of violent attacks against the shrines of Sufi saints, especially in Pakistan, but also in India. While the destruction of shrines certainly has precedent in other parts of the Muslim world, especially in connection with the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia beginning in the eighteenth century, this is something new in South Asia.
There is a sense among many Muslims that Sufism, however imagined, is beyond the pale of true Islam— a kind of “Sufiphobia” among Muslims themselves. In some circles this discursive process has gone so far as to split Sufism from Islam, a split that has led various reformist thinkers to recast earlier Islamic reformers as anti-Sufi, reshaping the past to create historically deep intellectual lineages for their own reformist projects. As Itzchak Weismann has noted, “the fundamentalists’ critique of Sufism as backward, superstitious, and apolitical involved the collective forgetting of the leading role that Sufi reformist brotherhoods had filled in premodern Islam.”
We explore in this volume how and why this polarization has happened, how this dynamic is playing out in South Asia, and what the consequences of current public representations and their politics are for both Sufis and the shape and direction of Islam today.
The contributors to this volume were brought together for the workshop “Rethinking Islam, Democracy, and Identity in South Asia: The Role of Sufism,” held under the auspices of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University in September 2015 and funded by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. The workshop was part of a research project, “Sufi Islam in 21st Century Politics,” itself part of a larger project, “Religious Toleration and Plural Democracies.” The broader Luce project aimed to better understand the political theologies of secular and religious leaders, asking what forces promote a discourse of democracy, inclusion, and toleration and foregrounding localized practices of accommodation and coexistence that could be found at shared sacred sites.
The overall plan for the Sufi component of the project was to ask what has made Sufism successful and effective at managing religious pluralism and ethnic diversity in various parts of the world, a question that is consistent with the goals of a number of foundations and granting agencies over the years to promote democracy and modernize Islamic societies.
Though springing from this rather problematically conceptualized agenda, the present volume and the workshop out of which it emerged have had a different aim. Instead of contributing to an ongoing effort to spread the good news about what practices seem to work to promote democracy and toleration, workshop participants were asked to consider what might be the effects and unintended consequences of policy- driven efforts to link Sufism with the propagation of peace, democracy, and toleration and to consider what role scholars and governments have played in shaping what Sufism has become in the twenty- first century.
The chapters challenge three common assumptions that are made about Sufism in public discourse today: (1) that Sufism is peaceful and apolitical; (2) that Islamic reform and Sufism are antithetical; and (3) that shrines are sites of harmony and toleration.
They consider the effects of these assumptions on what “Sufism” is becoming in India and Pakistan and offer specific analyses of the diversity, multivalence, and local embeddedness of Sufi political engagements.
The volume also foregrounds differences in the political environments of Pakistan and India and the effects of these environments on Sufi political action and self-representations, connecting Islamic rituals, sacred spaces, and theological debates to national and global issues of power, profit, and violence.
The Emergence of “Sufism” in the Colonial Period
“Sufism” is an aspect of Islam that has been particularly subject to the effects of a European gaze and government policies involving the close intertwining of scholarship and public discourse since the beginning of the colonial era. This history has played an important role in shaping how Sufism is imagined and practiced today.
As a category, “Sufism” was first coined by British Orientalist scholars working primarily in colonial India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was one of an array of “isms” taxonomically subsumed under the category of “religions.” The term “Sufi” emerged as early as the eighth century to designate a fringe group of ascetics, and much of what is now designated as Sufism, or taṣawwuf, had become an important aspect of Islamic practice and education by the tenth century. Nevertheless, these Arabic terms were part of a conceptual map very different from the orientalist classification scheme associated with “Sufism,” and there was no single label that was consistently used to refer to ascetics, mystics, “friends” of God, and those who belonged to the ṭarīqahs, or Sufi orders.
In his commentary on part 1 of the present volume, Carl Ernst traces the Orientalist process of category formation and its implications for current scholarship. In the South Asian colonial landscape, the concept of “Sufism” in orientalist sources was founded on at least two conceptual splits that helped shape Sufism’s boundaries and its relationship to Islam. Though most Muslims, including the ulama, were also Sufis or followers of Sufis, Sufism was imagined by colonial observers as having origins separate from Islam, as having roots elsewhere— such as Aryan Persia— apart from the Semitic environment that produced the Prophet Muḥammad, the Quran, and the institutional beginnings of Islam.
Reflecting Protestant Christian understandings of religion, the concept of Sufism as a form of mysticism stemming from the individual’s relationship with God was split off from legalistic Islam in the writings of late eighteenth- century and early nineteenth- century scholars associated with the East India Company, a distinction that continued to appear in the work of twentieth- century scholars of South Asia and Islam who played an influential role in shaping scholarship on Sufism in the American academy.
A second split was the bifurcation in nineteenth- century writings between, on the one hand, the Sufi as mystic and producer of poetry and other literature to be deciphered and translated by the orientalist scholar and, on the other hand, the pīr as the living holy man who was studied by colonial anthropologists/administrators and monitored as either a dangerous wanderer, a corrupt hereditary descendant of a Sufi ensconced at a shrine, or a charlatan purveyor of talismans and superstition, described in publications like colonial government- produced gazetteers and the late nineteenth- century periodical Panjab Notes and Queries, which focused on popular religion and folklore.
Within colonial settings, “the oriental was either common in spirit but distant in time or of a common era but distant in space and culture, in either case denied the status of “modern.” Regardless of the vicissitudes of how differences between Sufism and Islam or between Sufism and popular practice were characterized by various nineteenth- century writers— whether Sufism was “good” in its sophisticated mystical inspiration and Islam was “bad” because of its legalism, or the inverse, in which Sufism was “bad” because of its ties to superstitious rituals and Islam was “good” because of its rationality and strict monotheism— it was the split itself and its political and rhetorical force in the colonial environment that was to be crucially significant for the subsequent evolution of Sufism/ taṣawwuf.
Echoes of this split can be heard in postcolonial Islamic reformist writings that distance themselves from Sufism. Muhammad Iqbal, for example, drew inspiration from Sufi poets such as Jalāl al- Dīn Rūmī (1207– 1273), yet he also denounced “Persian mysticism” based on a spiritual aristocracy of saints that was manifest in the institution of pīrī- murīdī, which he felt contributed to the thralldom of the people.
Echoes of the split of Sufism as mystical philosophy from local practices associated with shrine networks are still readily visible in the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship even today. Thus, Rex O’Fahey and Bernd Radtke have pointed out that though “Sufism” is “a term used indiscriminately to describe both the complex thought of Ibn ʿArabī and the variegations of popular Islam,” there is still a disciplinary divide between scholars of medieval Islam who study Sufism as mystical philosophy and anthropologists and historians of modern Islam, who assume that postclassical Sufism “can be dealt with simply as a set of symbols, litanies, prayers, miracles, tomb visitations and the like, the paraphernalia of maraboutic credulity.”
In everyday conversations about Sufis/ pīrs that I participated in during the 1970s and 1980s in Pakistan, many people did not recognize pīrs or shrines as having any connection to Sufism, which they associated with well- known local Sufi poets such as Shāh ʿAbd al- Laṭīf Bhittāʾī and Bulle Shāh.
The conceptual splits between Sufism and Islam that were pervasive in colonial discourse have facilitated the imagining of Sufism, even in its philosophical and literary forms, as something apart from and even antithetical to Islam, a position that has been taken up by some Islamic reformers in subsequent eras. It is not a great leap from this location of Sufism outside of the discursive tradition of Islam by orientalists in the colonial era to the sense among many modern Muslims that Sufism, however imagined, is beyond the pale of true Islam and to the sense of urgency among certain radical Muslims that Sufism is bidʿah (innovation) and must be wiped out.
Though the silsilahs (genealogical linkages) based on chains of pīr- disciple relationships that organize the Sufi orders continue to be important for South Asian Sufis, new forms of organization and religious identity emerged in the nineteenth century in the colonial environment and have continued to evolve in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries.
During the colonial period, Sufi practices and organizations were affected not only by orientalist understandings of Sufism but also by organizational forms introduced by the British as they imposed a new administrative structure on the subcontinent and by Christian missionizing efforts, which partially inspired the Hindu and Islamic reform movements that were transforming the religious landscape of India. Thus, within Hinduism, the colonial period saw the emergence of the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, new sampradāyas (devotional systems), and even the new idea of Bhakti as a broad movement that was said to have swept across India over the course of a thousand years.
Among Muslims, multiple reform movements also emerged at this time, including the reformist Ahl- e Hadith (often called “Wahhabi” by critics); the controversial Ahmadiyyah, whose founder claimed to be the promised Messiah at the end of time; the Deobandis; and the Tablīghī Jamāʿat, an offshoot of the Deobandis, in the early twentieth century.
The Deobandis established a new madrasa system modeled partly on British bureaucratic and educational forms such as classrooms and a fixed curriculum, creating an institution that replaced an earlier madrasa model based on the metaphor of kinship ties. This organizational shift enabled the creation of a transnational network of educational institutions, the Dār al- ʿUlūm, that now goes well beyond South Asia.
Though the Deobandis did not reject Sufism, they did reject popular practices associated with local shrine culture. In reaction to this perceived threat to local shrine culture, many South Asian Sufis and their followers organized under the new identity of “Ahl- e Sunnat wa- l- Jamāʿat” (the people of the Sunna and the community), often called “Barelwi” (especially by opponents), in order to resist the modernizing and purifying efforts of Deobandis and other Islamic groups such as the Ahl- e Hadith while simultaneously organizing madrasas with a structure and curriculum similar to the Deobandi madrasas. “Deobandi” and “Barelwi” came to be seen as competing identities. These new forms of organization have continued to develop and evolve in the twenty- first century.
Although both Barelwis and Deobandis each emerged under the leadership of Sufis, Barelwi and Deobandi networks have evolved in different directions, with Barelwis particularly concerned with preserving Sufi practices associated with shrine culture and rituals focused on respect and love for the Prophet Muḥammad. In the present volume, chapters by Hermansen, Ingram, Sanyal, and Philippon address various aspects of this Barelwi- Deobandi split.
Sufism and Its Modern Engagements with a Global Order
A key subject in the “Rethinking Islam” workshop was how Sufism has been understood by scholars and outside observers and what implications such understandings continue to have for government policy and the politics of Sufi practice. In an earlier essay, Rosemary Corbett traced perceptions of Sufism as a liberal Islamic mysticism to roots in American Transcendentalist and Protestant interest in Eastern mysticisms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She described how this idea of Sufism became established in both popular culture and American scholarship through the efforts of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and his colleagues. These colleagues included Sayyid Hossein Nasr, H. A. R. Gibb, Annemarie Schimmel, and Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman. These scholars debated the nature of mysticism at the new Islamic studies programs at McGill and Harvard, which had been established with extensive funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in the post– World War II period. The funding for the current Luce project can in many respects be viewed as a descendant of the efforts of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in the 1950s to reshape Islamic societies into liberal democracies through the work of scholars. For this volume, Rosemary Corbett extends her argument further in chapter 1 to examine the Rockefeller Foundation’s role in shaping U.S. policy makers’ impressions of Sufism as the peaceful Islam that could counter dangerous extremism. She explores how, despite some efforts to engage French orientalists, who were more aware of the Sufi- led, highly politicized anti-colonial efforts in North Africa than were the Rockefeller- funded scholars who shaped early Islamic studies departments and influenced U.S. policy makers, these latter scholars relied heavily on ideas about Sufism that had been drawn from South Asian contexts and were shaped by orientalist racializing stereotypes about passive South Asians and aggressive Arabs.
Such assumptions about the peacefulness of Sufism continue to be widespread today. Essays in the present volume question such preconceptions in order to examine the effects of such representations on the complex political dynamics of Sufism today.
An important figure in the close interconnection between scholars and policy makers in the modern development of Sufism is Fazlur Rahman, who was hired by W. C. Smith at McGill, as a sort of diversity hire during Smith’s efforts to develop an Islamic Studies Department at McGill. After teaching in Canada, he was invited by Pakistani president Ayub Khan in 1963 to head the Central Institute of Islamic Research in Karachi. Under Ayub, he promoted a form of Islamic modernism that was based on ijtihād and was sympathetic to certain forms of Sufism. Inspired by the thought of Muhammad Iqbal, Rahman rejected popular Sufism as ignorant superstition but felt that a form of dynamic Sufism combined with modern education could form the basis for reforming sharia in Pakistan. He tried to weave Islam into the workings of government but was forced to leave Pakistan in 1968 when conservative clergy denounced him as an apostate. He moved to the United States and resumed his teaching career, ultimately taking a position in the Islamic Studies Department at the University of Chicago, where he played a role in shaping a generation of scholars, including some of the workshop participants. In chapter 2, Verena Meyer focuses on Fazlur Rahman’s Indonesian PhD student Nurcholish Madjid, who studied with Rahman at the University of Chicago between 1978 and 1984 and went on to become a major figure in Indonesian religious and political life. Meyer’s goal is to complicate the assumption that Madjid simply transmitted Rahman’s program of ijtihād from Pakistan to Indonesia via Islamic studies in the Western academy. Rather, she argues, Madjid was reframing Sufism in ways that addressed specific conditions in Indonesia, countering the authoritarian regime with ideas of secular democracy by strategically drawing on and altering Rahman’s concept of “Neo- Sufism” while dissociating it from colonial images of paganism. He was nonetheless a part of what became a transnational project to recast Sufism in the service of modernization and the secular state, thereby reinforcing the idea of Sufism as the “good” Islam.
Rahman introduced the concept of “Neo- Sufism” to refer to various Sufi- related movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that were concerned with renewal and reform. He used the term in his general introduction to Islam to refer to “Sufism reformed on orthodox lines and interpreted in an activist sense.” He was foregrounding reformist efforts to bring Sufi practices in line with Islamic “orthodoxy” by rejecting many of the popular practices associated with the old Sufi orders. Rahman identified orders in both South Asia and Northwest Africa that could be characterized in these reformist terms as Neo- Sufi. The term has provoked controversy among scholars of Sufism about whether the specific features that one scholar or another has identified with Neo- Sufism are really new practices and doctrines. While O’Fahey and Radtke argued that these features were not actually new, Islamic historian John Voll stressed that, in terms of organizational structure, Sufi orders that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were, in fact, new.
According to Nehemia Levtzion, there was a change in the eighteenth century, when brotherhoods became larger- scale, self- supporting, and more centralized organizations: “In the eighteenth century, brotherhoods transformed from old patterns of decentralized diffusive affiliation into larger- scale organizations, more coherent and centralized.” Even the formation of the supposedly traditionalist Ahl- e Sunnat wa- l- Jamāʿat (Barelwis) in South Asia was a move toward a new form of organization in response to the political forces of the late nineteenth century. This trend has developed even further in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, as some Sufi organizations have begun to operate on a global scale.
Marcia Hermansen explores new modes of recruitment and mobilization in chapter 3. She asks how the idea of the “Barelwi” itself is changing by examining the organizational structure that has emerged with the rise to prominence of religious leader and politician Tahir- ul- Qadri, founder of the transnational Minhaj- ul- Quran movement. As she notes, Qadri also founded a political party, won a seat in the Pakistani national assembly, and rose to political prominence for a short time in 2014 by drawing on Sufi tropes and the idea of Sufism as the peaceful Islam to mobilize a large following to pressure government reform. Qadri also operates on a global scale, using the media in new ways to capitalize on the image of the Sufi as a peaceful alternative to violent Islam.
Hermansen argues that Qadri is an example of how there has been a shift from ṭarīqah- based Sufism to Sufism as a globally based “traditional Islam” that challenges several features of Barelwism, such as the pīr- disciple relationship: Qadri rejects the title of pīr and preaches that one can become a member of the Qādirī Sufi order by filling out a Minhaj- ul- Quran membership form. Qadri’s political activities as a Sufi leader on a very public Twitter- and YouTube- fueled stage exposes tensions between Sufi sources of authority and the expectations of a disenchanted, secular public sphere and raises questions about the effects of his form of populism on democratic order.
An assumption commonly made in public discourse is that in contrast to the political threat posed by orthodox Islam, Sufism’s adherents are apolitical and should be supported as a way of fending off extremism. This is a form of the “good Muslim, bad Muslim” split that, according to Mahmood Mamdani, has driven U.S. foreign policy since 9/11. Mamdani critiques the distinction between the secular, Westernized Muslim and the fanatical, premodern/anti – modern Muslim made by scholars such as Bernard Lewis, who provided an intellectual justification for his conceptualization by arguing that the idea of freedom and a nonreligious society are totally alien to traditional Islam. Though Mamdani emphasizes how the good Muslim is thought to be secular and modern, this public discourse that he is critiquing also constitutes the Sufi as a good Muslim, with the help of scholarship such as that funded by the Luce Foundation, which aims to draw close connections between various aspects of Sufism and the values of secular democracy. Part of this perceived compatibility stems from the Protestant Christian lens through which Sufism continues to be seen. Thus, even Ernst, in his Shambhala Guide to Sufism , which aims to disrupt Orientalist assumptions that have shaped the study of Sufism and is focused on Sufism as a fundamentally social and historical phenomenon, offers a definition of “Sufi” in terms of an individual’s orientation toward ethical and spiritual goals. This definition focuses on the individual, just as talk of democracy rests on the individual as a bearer of rights and freedoms founded on the idea of the individual’s autonomous will.
This definition of the Sufi also separates the individual from the social and political, making this form of religion apolitical: Sufi experience is fundamentally private and thus compatible with the place of religion in a secular society when framed in terms of individual spirituality.
The chapters in this volume disrupt the assumption that Sufism is apolitical by focusing on the political engagement of Sufis in South Asia. In some respects this inquiry is more in line with a definition of Sufism offered by Nile Green in his 2012 global history of Sufism, which, like Ernst’s guide to Sufism, attempts to recast our understanding of Sufism away from the grand narrative of decline associated with the development of the Sufi orders and their institutional forms. Green prioritizes Sufism’s social dimensions in his definition of Sufism as “a tradition of powerful knowledge, practices and persons.” Sufism, like all religions, is a social and political practice, despite modern efforts to relegate religion to the private sphere.
Sufis, Sharia, and Reform
Another assumption that dominates public discourse about Sufism is that Islamic reformism stands in opposition to Sufism, which is associated with traditionalism and shrine visitation and continues to bear the shadow of the colonial label that linked popular Sufism with superstition. The chapters in part 2 focus on the issue of Sufis and Islamic reform. Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s commentary calls attention to how the very term “reform” and its deployment are politically fraught. Each chapter questions the idea that Islamic reform is necessarily anti- Sufi or that Sufis themselves are unconcerned with reform. They also disrupt any neat categorization of Deobandis as pro- reform and Barelwis as anti- reform. One of the ways that the past is rewritten is through the misrecognition of earlier distinctions, judgments, and practices that are taken to be the same as what is happening today. Thus, for example, an earlier criticism of shrine visitation is taken to be a rejection of Sufi practices. Before the modern era, most Muslim scholars and teachers were also Sufis, and the Sufi ṭarīqahs (orders) were a central element of Muslim social worlds.
Thus, the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyyah of Damascus, who in the modern era has been claimed as a predecessor by anti- Sufi reformists such as the eighteenth- century Arabian reformist Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al- Wahhāb and the Indian/Pakistani reformer Abū al- Aʿlā Mawdūdī, was himself a Sufi shaykh of the Qādirī order. Ibn Taymiyyah had been critical of the of the growing use of elaborate tombs erected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to enhance the legitimacy of local rulers such as the Mamluks and was also concerned about reforming the popular practice of worshipping the dead and petitioning them as intermediaries with God. But this to him was not the same as Sufi practice, and he had considerable praise for contemporary shaykhs. Similarly, though Deobandis today are assumed by many to be anti- Sufi, especially by their critics, they have always retained a tie to the Sufi orders, even as they have sought reform and condemned popular practices associated with the shrines.
Focusing on Deobandi discourse as manifest in the writings of major Deobandi scholars whose madrasas in Northwest Pakistan have trained members of the Taliban, Brannon Ingram in chapter 4 shows us how ambivalent these Deobandis have been toward Sufism: Like Deobandis in the nineteenth century, they feel that Sufism is essential to the cultivation of piety yet place strict limits on what is permissible at shrines, which they feel are sites that cultivate illicit beliefs and practices. Ingram cautions us against assuming that the Taliban attacks on shrines, including those of Dātā Ganj Bakhsh and Bābā Farīd, two of Pakistan’s most important, arise from a general critique of Sufism. He argues that they have more to do with local Barelwi- Deobandi contestations and Taliban conflicts with the Pakistani government.
Usha Sanyal, in chapter 5, foregrounds the extent to which Barelwis defy easy classification as rural, traditional, or “unreformed” in their Sufi orientations. Sanyal describes a Barelwi girls’ madrasa in India that teaches a disciplined regimen for how to be a “good” Muslim through daily prayer and study so that these girls become role models for their families. This commitment to sharia is interwoven with Sufi orientations that include love of the Prophet and honor of saints of the Qādirī silsilah . At the same time, she argues, the teachings and routines of this madrasa do not prioritize other Sufi institutions such as shrine visitation, despite the Deobandi assumption that shrine visitation is a key and unlawful element of Barelwi practice.
In chapter 6, Brian Bond addresses the question of Sufi orientations toward Islamic reform in India by focusing on the issue of music and its performance at Sufi shrines in Kachchh, Gujarat, very close to the border between India and Pakistan. He traces reactions among Muslim musicians to a legal opinion (fatwa) issued by a prominent local Barelwi preacher who stated that music is impermissible in Islam. This is a “reformist” position, part of a more general context of reformist activities undertaken by Sufi- oriented Barelwis in this part of India. Bond argues that musical performance is a critical site around which competing ethical stances among Sufis are articulated and enacted. Such contestations, arising from local splits among Barelwis, are eclipsed when “Sufis” are pitted against “legalists” or “orthodox Muslims” in literature on music and Islam.
These chapters are not the first scholarship to demonstrate that Sufi practice can be contiguous with reformist sentiments and concern for orthodoxy. Indeed, the same orientalists and Islamic studies scholars who argued for the liberality of South Asian Sufis made such arguments as early as the 1940s. Those thinkers— especially H. A. R. Gibb— did so prescriptively as much as descriptively, however, hoping to write the future of Islam in terms of an idealized past, interpreted through what they believed to be the universal template of European Protestant history. As Corbett has pointed out, Gibb and several of his students positioned Sufism and reformism (they were the first to apply the Protestant label “fundamentalist” to Muslims) as antithetical in the Hegelian sense: as opposing forces that required synthesis for the sake of progress and religious evolution. Although few contemporary scholars argue for synthesizing Sufism and reformism in such ways now, Gibb’s heuristic division between Sufis and so- called fundamentalists remains powerfully influential.
By charting movements that blend reformist impulses with Sufi traditions, these chapters challenge the idea that Sufism and reformism are necessarily opposed, but do so without romanticizing the convergence of these traditions or prescribing a formula for using one to combat the perceived excesses of the other.
Sufis and Politics in Pakistan
Despite a shared past, the situations of Muslims in Pakistan and India are very different, and their political possibilities are in many respects incommensurable. During the late colonial period, communal violence in the subcontinent began to escalate, culminating in a massive loss of life during the Partition of India and Pakistan at the moment of Independence in 1947. In India, Muslims were positioned as a minority in the Nehruvian secular order that was established with Partition. Anti- Muslim sentiment intensified as Hindu nationalism became the dominant political force. Muslims were rhetorically labeled the historical enemy who invaded and illegitimately controlled India. The post- Independence era continues to be punctuated by periodic attacks against Muslims.
The tension between Sufism and Islamic reform thus takes on a very different valence in this political environment from that of Pakistan, where debates about Islamic reform and the legitimacy of Sufi Islam have been intertwined with struggles to negotiate the type of Islamic state and society that Pakistan aspires to be.
In both India and Pakistan, the shrines associated with Sufism are key sites where Sufi practice intersects with government policies and regulation. When it comes to the incursions of government into the operation of shrines and representations of Sufism, we see stark differences between India and Pakistan in the significance of shrines for the state and in state efforts to shape its citizenry. In parts 3 and 4, focused on Pakistan and India, respectively, some of these differences are vividly on display. The history of awqāf law in Pakistan demonstrates the close intertwining of governmentality— the shaping of and caring for a modern population— and policies toward shrines. Sufis continue to be organized as ṭarīqahs (Sufi orders, literally, “paths”) with a chain of spiritual succession (silsilah) passing from master/teacher ( pīr) to disciples, along the lines of a kinship model, in which fellow disciples of a single pīr often called themselves pīrbhā’ī, or brothers of the same teacher, and silsilahs can be traced back for centuries, to the early founders of the orders and, ultimately, to the Prophet himself.
These chains of succession link networks of Sufis across time, space, and national boundaries. Such chains of succession are perpetuated not only through links between a Sufi teacher and his spiritual (rūḥānī) successors but also through hereditary families whose descendants retain the spiritual authority of their Sufi ancestors within communities in which the pīr- murīd (teacher- follower) relationship itself is passed down through generations.
The status of hereditary pīr families was reinforced by colonial policy. In 1959, less than a decade after the establishment of Pakistan, President Ayub Khan initiated a new administrative policy intended to undercut the political and economic power of both the hereditary pīr families and the ulama as he sought to create a modern state, a policy that in its general outlines was continued and extended by his successors. The Pakistani government did not choose to undercut the power of Sufi pīrs by abolishing shrines and pīrs entirely. They did not ban them, as Ataturk had done in Turkey, in order to advance the cause of secularism. Nor did they destroy them, as was done in Saudi Arabia for the almost opposite reason of returning to a more fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that was also a manifestation of modernity. One of the main sources of inspiration for how to deal with the perceived problem of pīrs and shrines in Pakistan was the thought of Muhammad Iqbal, who inspired much of the ideology for Pakistan, and his son Javid Iqbal, who advised the creation of a Ministry of Auqaf. He suggested that this ministry should take possession of and administer all religious endowments (awqāf) in Pakistan. The first of a series of Auqaf ordinances was passed in 1959. These ordinances gave the government the power to take direct control over and manage shrines, mosques, and other properties dedicated for religious purposes, with each successive act further extending the authority of the Auqaf Department.
As part of the direct assault on the role of the pīr, the Auqaf Department has stressed the aspect of Sufism that Iqbal had drawn on and himself embodied: the original Sufi as poet and social reformer. The government published pamphlets describing several of the major Sufi poets of Pakistan. In sharp contrast to traditional hagiographies, they do not give accounts of the miracles performed by the saint. Rather, they stress pious actions of the saint, actions within the capacity of the ordinary person.
Under successive governments, the Auqaf Department also concentrated on shifting the focus of activities at the shrines away from those that directly involved the leadership of the gaddī nashīn (hereditary caretaker of a shrine). The goal was to make the shrines centers of more general social welfare by building hospitals, schools, and other facilities for poor and rural people. The hospitals are, in a sense, in direct competition with the gaddī nashīns, who claim as one of their spiritual powers the ability to heal, though many see the two approaches to healing as complementary. This policy of providing modern services at major shrines has continued and been extended, even as Islamization developed in subsequent decades. Policies have evolved and shifted over successive regimes, but the structure of the Auqaf Department has meant that the government has been able to carry out specific policies through on- the- ground administration of the shrines.
Despite post- Independence efforts to diminish the political and economic roles of hereditary pīr families in Pakistan, their power and influence persist, as Sarah Ansari discusses in chapter 7. Ansari questions the suggestion often raised in Pakistani public discourse that Sufism might be a panacea for extremism and intolerance by examining how local pīr families continue to wield extensive religious and political authority in Sindh. She argues that, though middle- class Sindhi nationalists view Sufism as a defining characteristic of the province, many of these pīrs are actually members of large land- owning families who serve as intermediaries and power brokers between the countryside and the Pakistani central government and whose political interests thus do not usually coincide with the urban interests of the Sindhi nationalists who evoke Sufism as an ideal of equality and toleration.
Pakistan’s 1973 constitution dictated that all laws must conform with sharia, setting the stage for intensifying debates about what constitutes the limits of true Islam and how Sufi practice associated with shrines should be understood and regulated. When Mohammed Zia- ul- Haq became president in 1978, he pursued a program of Islamization, including a tightening of blasphemy laws in 1986. Though he and subsequent leaders also promoted certain activities at shrines, these have in recent decades increasingly been the target of criticism and even violent attacks, including bombings at several shrines. Though often framed in terms of the proper practice of Islam, Ingram emphasizes in chapter 4 that these attacks arise from specific conflicts with the Pakistani government rather than from the pressure of Islamic reform itself, which can be enacted at shrines, and not just against them. In such cases, “reform” becomes a signifier for more context- specific power struggles.
Political leaders in recent years have supported Sufis to counter Taliban pressure. For example, as president, Pervez Musharraf established the short- lived National Sufi Council, discussed in chapter 8 by Alix Philippon. Current global perceptions of Sufism as a moderate antidote to fundamentalism have been directly translated into local conversations and social activism, as in headline- grabbing protests in Pakistan led by Sufi and scholar Dr. Tahir- ul- Qadri, founder of Tehreek- Minhaj- ul- Quran International, discussed by Hermansen in chapter 3. The political involvement of Barelwis has led to their mobilization on a national level using new methods of recruitment based on charismatic leadership and preaching rather than the traditional oath of allegiance to a shaykh, a process that could fall under the category of “Neo- Sufism.”
Some scholars and local actors are concerned that the association of Sufism with Western efforts to foster a more moderate Islam is having a negative impact on the politics of Sufism within Pakistan. Some of the religious violence in recent years has involved attacks on Sufi shrines, but there are also Sufi- oriented Barelwis who have become anti- Western and less tolerant of pluralism.
Philippon, in chapter 8, explores aspects of Barelwi involvement in contemporary Pakistani politics and considers the effects of public and government- sponsored discourse about the nature of Sufism on Barelwi politics. Philippon argues that Sufism in Pakistan has been politicized through a process of culturalization, in which the shrines and Sufi art forms have been identified as a central element of Pakistani heritage that must be protected against radical Islam, following the model of Turkey, where Sufism, which had been banned during the early days of the new republic in the 1920s, was allowed to return as a form of cultural performance. She points to the ways that General Pervez Musharraf, who was president of Pakistan in the period immediately following 9/11, promoted a vigorous ideological reformulation of Sufism as an Islam “of peace and love”— a component of the War on Terror against the Taliban and a policy that was continued by subsequent governments.
Aiming to give Sufism added legitimacy in the wake of anti- Sufi pressure from “Talibanization,” the government organized conferences, promoted Sufi cultural performances on TV, and publicized festivals at shrines, activities that were also supported by the U.S. government in various ways. Barelwis, especially those who were shrine custodians, were organized by the government into a National Sufi Council. Local critics saw this use of Sufism as a military dictatorship’s efforts to legitimize itself to Western powers through the harmless symbols of Sufism. The ironic result is that some Barelwis themselves became radicalized and have mobilized to defend Islam, sometimes violently. Philippon demonstrates that the state- sponsored ideology of peaceful Sufism was just one position among many and that Barelwi groups have taken an array of political positions, including struggle for their version of an Islamic state, in opposition to Deobandi and Ahl- e Hadith groups that have targeted Barelwis and shrines as un- Islamic.
We see another form of shrine- based conflict examined by Noor Zaidi in chapter 9. Zaidi focuses on sectarian conflict that developed in the 1970s between the Shiʿi community and Sunni- oriented government authorities who administer the shrine of Bībī Pāk Dāman in Lahore, Pakistan. She examines how the rise of Sunni conservative theology associated with the government in the 1970s exacerbated existing tensions at the shrine, despite government efforts to “non- sectarianize” the shrine as a way of promoting public order. This shrine is an important site for South Asian Shia because it is purported to be the burial site of the daughter of the first Shiʿi imam. This chapter provides an example of how sectarianism can be produced and amplified on the ground and how a shrine, even as it draws visitors of different backgrounds, can become a flashpoint for conflict despite government claims that the shrines transcend religious difference. Such conflicts take particular forms within the context of Pakistani politics.
As Thomas Guglar, who participated in the workshop, has pointed out, moments of Barelwi violence have been inspired by Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, which were strengthened in the 1980s under President Zia- ul- Haq. The Islamization policy initiated by Zia has become a key vehicle of religious intolerance, supported by factions within the government itself. Gugler has traced how mass sentiments have been generated by a rhetoric of threats to Islam, focused particularly on insulting the Prophet, which Barelwis feel is a particular outrage perpetrated by Deobandis, who criticize rituals intended to honor the Prophet. These affective politics, rooted in Sufi practices, have stirred mass protests and disruptions of the criminal justice system.
Sufism in Indian National Spaces
In recent years Muslims in India face escalating hostility from Hindu nationalists and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), now firmly established under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who came to power in 2014 and won sweeping re- election in 2019. Under his government, Hindu nationalists have targeted Muslims as the dangerous, alien enemy of the nation, and mob lynchings have become more common. Although this Hindutva rhetoric positions Muslims as outsiders, Sufism continues to play a special and rather different role within this national imaginary. As Arshad Alam has noted, the Hindu Right has for decades engaged in a vitriolic tirade against the madrasas, calling them “ ‘dens of terror’ training jihadis to massacre Hindus and turn India into an Islamic nation.” The historical memory of Sufis and their place in India plays into this narrative of Muslims by way of contrast: Unlike the Turko- Afghan dynasties who invaded India in the medieval period, Sufis are depicted as the peaceful mystics who syncretized Islam with Hinduism, a perpetuation of the distinction articulated by colonial orientalists. Sufi shrines play an important role in the Indian national imaginary as sites of toleration and communal harmony, an idea that continues to be promoted by the Indian government.
Modi himself spoke at the World Sufi Forum in Delhi in 2016, a conference “encouraged by the government . . . to convey India’s message of peace and harmony.” In 2019 Modi presented a chādar (sheet for covering a body or grave) to be laid on the grave of the thirteenth- century Sufi saint Muʿīn al- Dīn Chishti during the annual ʿurs. In contrast, Modi’s BJP has sought to erase the importance of the shrine of Ghāzī Miyāñ in Delhi, a shrine that, according to Shahid Amin, disrupts their nationalist narrative because Ghāzī Miyāñ is purported to have been the invader- turned- Sufi nephew of the quintessential invader Maḥmūd of Ghazni. In his study of competing narratives about the shrine, Amin argued that the sense of community around the shrine is constituted because of this memory of conquest, not in spite of it, thereby disrupting the dichotomy between invading, violent Muslims and quietistic Sufi syncretism.
The government- promoted assumption that Sufis are the bearers of peace and harmony and that shrines are thus sites that exemplify secular pluralism has also generated a considerable amount of research in recent years that examines how the peaceful co- presence of Hindus and Muslims is managed at various shrines, in apparent defiance of the growing communal tension and violence between Hindus and Muslims as Hindutva has become politically ascendant. The framing of scholarly inquiry on Sufism in these terms has been quite different from the concerns of scholars working in Pakistan, and it is usually rather detached from questions of Muslim politics in India today, in effect reinforcing the idea that politics can somehow be transcended in environments controlled by Sufis. This narrative is, of course, a political one, promoted in many corners of Indian officialdom and reinforced by diversely situated actors, from NGOs to Sufis themselves.
Thus, Torsten Tschacher has discussed with considerable irony his own description of his observations at a local shrine, which he gave in his exit interview to a government official in Pondicherry, South India: “I told of the astonishing harmony between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians visiting the shrine and the shared culture of worship I supposedly encountered.” He went on to explain that this was the “politically correct answer” that extolled India’s “unity in diversity.” Tschacher has described how shrines and Sufi poetry have been taken up in Tamil nationalism as examples of a shared ethos. In this and other cases, Sufism and shrines have become vehicles for promoting various ideological and political messages in India, serving nationalist discourses or “suffering the fate of propagating syncretic dialogues of Hindu- Muslim secularism.”
In chapter 10 of this volume, Carla Bellamy’s ethnographic study of a Muslim shrine in a Mumbai neighborhood in India makes the point that the devotional atmosphere at a shrine can reinforce religious difference rather than simply subsuming it. She shows how the experiences at a shrine can be very different for different categories of people. Yet she also nuances this point by depicting how devotees may form “transgressive” relationships across sectarian boundaries that they value because these relationships allow them to overcome the religious differences that increasingly divide people in their everyday lives. She thus documents an example of the possibilities for how difference is actually negotiated. In an essay from the 1990s, Peter van der Veer depicted analogous differences between Hindu and Muslim experiences of a shrine, describing how the shrine was a place of danger for Hindus in a way that it wasn’t for Muslims, who understood the spiritual forces at the shrine differently.
Anand Taneja’s presentation at the workshop offered yet another model of the shrine’s potential with respect to difference: He argued that Hindu- Muslim interactions at a Muslim shrine in Delhi offer new ethical potentialities in which nameless, anti- identitarian intimacies become the basis for healing, a point that he explores more fully elsewhere.
The Nehruvian vision of secularism in which minorities are to be tolerated and brought into the mainstream through education can be seen in action in chapter 11, where Helene Basu illustrates an effort to use the shrines as sites for education and modernization. This chapter foregrounds how governmentality— the Indian secular state’s efforts to simultaneously care for and modernize its population— penetrates shrine spaces as sites of healing, even though the Indian government does not directly control the shrines, as in Pakistan. Psychiatrists established cooperative programs with shrines in Gujarat, India, and attempted to collaborate with Sufi healers. But their efforts at purifying mental health care from contamination by ritual healing were, in effect, an abjection of the enchanted world of the pīr and were experienced by the pīrs in charge of the shrine as a process of stripping the shrine of meaning. The outcome was growing resistance from the healers at the shrines, resulting in the failure of the program. This effort to use Sufi shrines as a site for educating or modernizing populations is reminiscent of policies emanating from Pakistan’s Auqaf Department, but it seems to lack the kind of infrastructural support and trust from Muslim communities that we see in Pakistan.
In chapter 12, we see a very different example of the ways that modern forms of governmentality, whether through state or nonstate institutions, draw on the idea of the Sufi and the identification of Muslims with Sufi shrines to shape a national imaginary. Rachana Umashankar, like Brian Bond in chapter 6, focuses on qawwālī (Sufi music) performed at shrines. Umashankar examines how qawwālī has been used in Indian cinema. She demonstrates that since the turn of this century and the rise of violence associated with Hindu nationalism and interreligious strife, Sufi themes and music have been used in films to evoke the desire for a morally higher unity and a renewal of the promise of an egalitarian, secular, and pluralist society that the Indian state has failed to keep as it moves further toward Hindutva as its core political ideology. The image of Sufism as the peaceful Islam is here used to invoke the ideals of the secular state. We see here a setting in which the idea of the Sufi shrine as a place of peace, pluralism, and tolerance has been reinforced in the Indian national imaginary through film. Bellamy’s and Basu’s essays, as well as Modi’s photo- ops with the caretakers of major shrines, offer glimpses of the enduring institutional structure of Sufism in India, which is supported by the Indian legal system and the structure of awqāf: The authority of the Dewan to represent the shrine and to run events at the shrine has been guaranteed by the Indian courts since the colonial era.
India’s central Wakf Council, which oversees the administration of shrines as well as a range of other charitable bequests, was established in 1954. State wakf boards were established under the 1995 Wakf Act. Since 2006, the administration of awqāf is under the general oversight of the Minister of Minority Affairs, who is ex- officio chair of the central Wakf Council. Muslims writing about awqāf in India have focused on the poor governance, corruption, and expropriation of waqf properties, a problem foregrounded in a 2017 India Today exposé: “Waqf Land Grab Exposed: India’s Biggest Land Scam,” which documented how custodians of waqf estates had been caught selling these charitable assets for a profit, sometimes with a shrine included, often with kickbacks to the state Wakf Board.
Another concern has been the sectarian affiliations of official caretakers (mutawalīs), some of whom are unsympathetic or even opposed to the activities at the shrines that they administer.
In contrast to research questions focused on how religious difference is managed at Sufi shrines in India, there has been little research on the power struggles among Muslim leaders with respect to orientations toward Sufism. Sectarian splits among Muslims, including the Barelwi- Deobandi divide, continue to be salient for Muslims in India as well as in Pakistan, despite the minority status of Muslims in India. These splits generate similar struggles over control of shrines and institutions such as wakf boards. Based on fieldwork at the most important Barelwi madrasa in India, the Jamiat al Ashrafiya Misbahul Ulum in eastern Uttar Pradesh, Alam has shown that “for students of this madrasa , the ‘other’ is not a Hindu, but a Muslim from another maslak ,” even as members of the Hindu right were calling madrasas “dens of terror.”
Tracing the history of the Deobandi- Barelwi contestation in Mubarakpur, the town where the madrasa is located, Alam notes its roots in a class divide in which wealthy Deobandis sought to reshape popular practice in the area. Van der Veer makes a similar observation based on his fieldwork at the shrine of a Rifāʿī saint in the North Indian city of Surat in Gujarat in the early 1990s: He notes that the reform- oriented “Tablighi Muslims” who oppose rituals at the shrine are not concerned with Hindu participation or with maintaining a communitarian boundary between Hindus and Muslims, but rather with critiquing the Rifāʿī faqīrs themselves as un- Islamic.
Greater scholarly attention needs to be paid to Sufi political voices in the public arena and how these voices have been shaped by the growing perception in the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries that Sufis represent peace and toleration, in contradistinction to Wahhabis or Salafis. In the Indian political environment, where Muslims are viewed with such hostility and suspicion, the stakes of claiming an association with peace- loving Sufis are high. Within the Indian political arena, some Barelwis have played the Sufi card and claimed to be peace loving, contrasting themselves with Deobandi Jihadis, a stance that U.S. diplomats have bought into and used as a basis for policy recommendations, as evidenced by WikiLeaks’ revelations of confidential diplomatic cables.
Kelly Pemberton has discussed how Chishtī Sufis in India have responded to common stereotypes in India of Muslims as backward and intolerant by increasing efforts to foster intercommunal harmony through interfaith activism, especially since the bombings of shrines in India by right- wing Hindu groups. While her emphasis is on the fact that this movement to promote communal harmony is a “continuation of extant forms of social activism among Chishtis,” she is talking about an ideological shift that has occurred since the 1990s, in which a Sufi message developed that was similar to that of artists, musicians, and NGOs that were also promoting communal harmony.
These various actors draw on themes and images from hagiographies of the early Chishtī Sufis, but they are recast and embellished in new ways, much as successive Pakistani governments have recast the hagiographies of saints associated with major shrines to foreground contemporary themes.
Ronie Parciack, examining the visual culture that has developed in relationship to Chishtī Sufi shrines and is disseminated through new media, has demonstrated a popularly negotiated visual formula that has borrowed motifs drawn from Hindu nationalist iconography in ways that have the potential to make Hindu nationalism attractive to Muslims who are drawn to Sufis associated with Chishtī shrines. These new images have had an impact on sectarian struggles.
Umashankar has shown how, paradoxically, the Indian secularist incorporation of Muslims by embracing Sufism (which is often associated with local shrines) has exacerbated suspicion of Sufism among conservative Muslim groups. This is in part a consequence of secularist and spiritualist claims that Sufism has little to do with Islam. Sectarian struggles among Muslims are playing out through new organizations that transcend local politics, with institutional structures that reflect those of many other modern organizations.
Several Sufi pīrs have sought to be national representatives of Muslim communities through various Sufi- based organizations. The Centre for Islamic Studies at Bareilly Sharif, for instance, was founded in 2000 by Akhtar Rażā Khān, who claimed the title Grand Mufti of India. These organizations are engaged in contests over this ideological divide between Sufis and Islamic reformists. The All- India Ulama and Mashaikh Board was founded by Mohammad Ashraf Kichhouchhwi as “a representative body consisting of the Sajjada Nasheen (Patrons- in- Chief) of Dargahs, imams of mosques, Muftis and teachers of madrasas,” and was set up with subcommittees in each state. The board has been holding large gatherings of Sufi shaykhs and others to push back against anti- Sufi Wahhabi and Deobandi influence by supporting secular political candidates. In 2011 they staged a “coming out” event at which they denounced Muslim extremists and complained that, despite representing 80 percent of Sunni Muslims in India, “they have not been able to assert themselves because the Deobandis and the Wahabis have captured key Muslim institutions such as the Wakf Board and the madrasas.” In 2016 they held the World Sufi Forum, which was launched by Prime Minister Modi and was attended by Sufis and scholars from several other countries, including Tahir- ul- Qadri. Their aim has been to shape government policy concerning Muslims as a minority, including laws that would affect succession and leadership of shrines and mosques, which leaders such as Syed Babar Ashraf claim have been usurped by “people of extremist ideology.”
The tension between Sufism and Islamic reform, which is playing out all across the Muslim world, is thus a force shaping the significance of shrines for Muslims in India. This tension intersects with the growing discrimination against Muslims as the Indian state moves away from secular democracy toward the promotion of Hindu nationalism. In this environment, Sufis have been involved in promoting Muslims as Indian citizens, and shrines have been cultivated as sites of interfaith forms of belonging, while the Indian government and creators of popular culture use Sufi shrines and cultural forms such as qawwālī to promote an Indian national imaginary of secular tolerance.
Beyond South Asia
Though most of the chapters focus on either Pakistan or India, this volume is also an effort to think critically about the role of public discourse in shaping the place and trajectory of Sufism today in a way that situates what is happening in Pakistan and India within a broader global context that goes beyond South Asia.
Though Modern Sufis and the State only touches on this “beyond,” two chapters, by Rosemary Corbett and Verena Meyer, make clear the far- reaching influence of South Asian Islam on modern ideas of Sufism.
Corbett contrasts the experience of French colonizers with Sufis in North Africa, many of whom were involved in anti- colonial militias, with British colonizers, who imagined Sufis as pacifist. Meyer examines the influence of Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman, who had played an important role in the development of Islamic Studies in the United States, on Neo- Sufism in Indonesia.
Islamic studies continue to have an Arab- centered bias, an overemphasis on the beginnings of Islam, and an assumption that the core of the Islamic tradition lies in its Arab institutions as revealed in Arabic sources. This is true despite the occasional efforts of some scholars to move away from this Arabic- centric view of Islamic studies, beginning with Hodgson’s 1974 epic The Venture of Islam, which posited a multicentered world order in which Persianate, Turkic, and Indic societies were key components of the Islamicate world; and including Richard Bulliet’s View from the Edge, which not only looked at the concerns of recently converted populations who were far from the “center” of the Caliphate but also argued that the religious scholarly elites on the “edge” and the institutions they developed in their unsettled regions eventually had a transformative effect on the “center” itself. Recently, Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? generated a scholarly sensation because of its focus on the “Balkans- to- Bengal complex,” away from a prioritization of Arabic sources as somehow being closer to a true Islam. Ahmed’s book is also important for the way that it firmly encompasses Sufism within normative Islam in an era when it is increasingly excluded. Green’s 2012 overview of Sufism similarly tried to give an even amount of attention to developments in Sufi institutions across all regions of the Islamic world.
In the modern period thinkers from South Asia, far from being on the periphery of developments in the Islamic world, have been key players in the generating new interpretations of Islam that have had a global impact. Abū al- Aʿlā Mawdūdī’s articulation of the need for reform and his anti- Sufi position, forged in the crucible of the late colonial period in India, have had a deep influence on Islamic reformers, and his books— translated into Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, and other languages— are still widely read across the Middle East. Simi – larly, Muhammad Iqbal, the South Asian poet who is credited with the idea of Pakistan and often called its “Spiritual Father,” was an inspiration for the first president of independent Senegal, Léopold Senghor. Building on this legacy of Iqbal, the Senegalese government today is committed to supporting a form of Islam inspired by Sufism as they seek to contain the influence of foreign- trained Islamic reformists.
These examples suggest that it is important to take seriously developments in Sufism in South Asia, not just as relevant for the history of Islam in South Asia, but for the broader Islamic world. Sufis are on the move, forming transnational networks, getting involved in translation projects, setting up shrines in new homes outside of South Asia, transmitting dreams across the world and blowing blessings through phone lines, communicating through Skype and the Internet, and engaging in arguments with anti- Sufis in new forums.
Endnote
One guiding question at the empirical level has been how do the very different political climates for Sufis shape what’s going on in India versus Pakistan? In Pakistan, Muslims run the show, and Sufism has become a controversial issue in shaping the contours of Muslim/Pakistani identity. A spate of bombings at shrines would seem to reinforce the conclusion that Sufis are in dire peril in the face of Islamist efforts to set narrow limits on what is properly Islam. But this is a view that is far too simple and blinds us to the complex dynamics of Sufism in Pakistan today.
In India, Muslims are a minority subject to discrimination in many arenas. Communal violence between Hindus and Muslims has been a feature of India’s political and social landscape since the colonial period, but this violence and the role of Muslims in it is imagined very differently than “Islamic terrorism.” In this setting, Sufism and its shrines are doing quite different things than in Pakistan, not only for local populations but also for Indian national imaginings of Muslim minorities, democracy, tolerance, and diversity.
Furthermore, scholars are asking rather different questions about Sufism in these two environments. What are the effects of policy- based efforts to promote Sufis as the friends and allies of democracy, tolerance, and peace, an effort supported by the very Luce- funded project through which this volume’s contributors were gathered? The political project can be simply stated: How can scholars contribute to making Muslims and the nations to which they belong into modern democratic global citizens? One important answer has been to identify peaceful players, and thus to promote (but also possibly to delegitimate) Sufism. But this volume’s goal is to consider how we can understand this act of positioning of the Sufi as the peaceful Muslim, the bearer of tolerance and democracy.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described how in modern Western philosophy and postcolonial reason, the “native informant” functions as a foreclosed other on which the modern subject is founded, meaning that this native is visible only through the traces of erasure— first negated and then affirmed as something other than itself. From this perspective, we could say that the Sufi has become the other of the other, in a kind of double foreclosure. The Sufi has been recovered from the oddly bifurcated realm of superstition and oriental spirituality to become “the enemy of my enemy” (the intolerant, violent Muslim). The Sufi is my friend, but not in the lateral plane that the term “friendship” implies. In the process, the Sufi of a global discourse that has developed over the past half century has become increasingly removed from the complex politics of Sufi practice in South Asia, though Sufis in India and Pakistan are in turn shaped by this discourse of “the good Sufi.” Perhaps an analogue would be the Muslim woman in Europe, who is more easily assimilable than the Muslim man, but only through a process that both reinforces the stigmatization of Muslim men as dangerous and abusive and positions the Muslim woman as a victim to be saved by the Western liberal. Thanks to this complex and politically powerful discourse, it has become increasingly difficult to claim a Sufi identity in the modern world.
