Abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore, Pakistan, this article explores the political effects of the activities of hidden Sufi saints. In Pakistan, hidden Sufis are often said to intervene in worldly affairs (for example, in the killing of Osama bin Laden). Analyzing the wider cosmological background for claims to Sufi supremacy and power, I show how unseen—or in fact ‘supremely visible’—domains outstrip the visible world. In doing so, I examine how Sufi followers draw on esoteric knowledge to create what is in effect a political theory to analyze the violent present of opposition and terror attacks. Contrary to a general notion of Pakistani Sufis as inherently apolitical, the article thus offers an account of Sufi protection and spiritual governance as instances of ‘cosmological activism.’ To appreciate local Sufi theorizing and practices as expressions of immanent political modalities of Pakistani Sufism, I attend to my interlocutors’ versions of the Sufi principle of the ‘oneness of existence’ (wahdat al-wujud) as a potential anthropological analytics.
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