Sufi Shrines Research Articles

Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab: Dreams, Memories, Territoriality

Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab: Dreams, Memories, Territoriality

THE POLITICS OF POPULAR ISLAM: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION OF ISLAMIC REVIVALISM IN PAKISTAN

In the post-9/11 scenario, the rise of the Taliban and their coalition with Al-Qaeda have engendered new discourses about Islam and Pakistan. In this paper, I present a multi-sited ethnography of Bari Imam, a popular Sufi shrine in Pakistan while re-evaluating certain suppositions, claims and theories about popular Islam in the country. Have militarization, Shariatisation, and resurgence movements such as the Taliban been overzealously discussed and presented as the representative imageries of Islam? I also explore the Sufi dynamics of living Islam, which I will suggest continue to shape the lives and practices of the vast majority of Pakistani Muslims. The study suggests that general unfamiliarity of people outside the subcontinent with the Sufi attributes of living Islam, together with their lack of knowledge of the varieties of identification, observance and experience of Islam among Pakistanis, limit not only their understanding of the land of Pakistan, but also their perception of its people and their faith (Islam).

Religious Syncretism among Indian Muslims and Its Manifestation in Dargah Practices

The article explores a syncretic form of Islam in India in the context of the emergence of essentialist and puritanical religious discourses. The changes that such discourses can bring in the moral constitution of Muslims can disturb their harmonious integration with the religio-cultural elements of their immediate environment. The historical analysis of this phenomenon traces the syncretic nature of the social and economic exchanges between Hindus and Muslims, convergence of the spiritual aspects of bhakti and Sufism, and how Sufi shrines became cultural centres for both Muslims and Hindus. The article also situates the Moplah Rebellion in the context of syncretism in Kerala. The study makes an in-depth inquiry into the syncretic form of Islam prevailing in the dargahs in the state. The inquiry should aid understanding of the present state of syncretic identification among Muslims in Kerala.

Book review: Yogesh Snehi. 2019. Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab: Dreams, Memories, Territoriality

Yogesh Snehi. 2019. Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab: Dreams, Memories, Territoriality. London and New York: Routledge. xx + 256 pp. Maps, tables, figures, notes, bibliography, index. £115.00 (hardback).

Light at Pakistani Sufi Shrines: Notes on Lampstands, Lamp Niches, and Lamp Houses

Abstract In Pakistan, the burning of oil lamps at Sufi shrines shapes the visitor’s sensual perception, but is above all connected with the practice of making vows. The offering of light is therefore considered auspicious in popular devotional Islam. Conse­quently, the lighting of lamps at shrines also marks the beginning of commemorative rituals and festivities. The present article documents and investigates contemporary lampstands, lamp niches, and lamp houses in the lowlands of Pakistan that until today have remained largely unnoticed as far as material religion is concerned. On the basis of their various forms, these lighting devices are differentiated as free-standing oil lamps, ʿalam-shaped lampstands, tree-shaped lampstands, special forms of lampstands, lamp niches, and lamp houses.

City, narratives, and nation: The representation of Karachi in H.M. Naqvi’s The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack

ABSTRACT H.M. Naqvi’s 2019 novel The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack interweaves anthropological, historical, spatial, religious, cultural, and political narratives in comic fashion. Drawing on the tropes of the postcolonial city and “decolonization”, this article analyses Naqvi’s text in terms of political, cultural, and religious factors significant to urban centres like Karachi, and their implications for post-Independence Pakistan in its struggle to achieve a pluralistic and inclusive democratic system. Abdullah, the novel’s protagonist, seeks to present himself as a secular counterpart to the prevalent Sunni/Wahhabi orthodoxies in Pakistani culture. However, alongside his dramatization of a secular challenge to religious orthodoxy, Naqvi constructs a paradoxical representation of the enunciation of Islam at a Sufi Shrine, through the glorification of Abdullah Shah Ghazi’s tomb in Karachi. Thus, the novel’s representation of Islam contains unresolved paradoxes, in that it alternates between secularist denunciation of orthodox Sunni Wahhabism and a sympathetic representation of Brelvi/Shia sects.

Inherited Charisma and Personal Qualities: Sayyids and religious reform in nineteenth century Multan

AbstractIt has generally been acknowledged that Sayyids, through their real or imagined connection to the Prophet, have represented a key trans-regional dimension of Islam. In the Punjab, the status of the Ashraf has been reinforced by their role as custodians of the Sufi shrines. In the Multan region, Sayyids and Qureshis acted frequently aspirandsajjada nashinfor many Sufidargahs. Their position, however, did not go unchallenged. The Chishti Nizami revival in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century saw the growth of an alternative religious network that competed with older families both religiously and socially. This process directly challenged the idea of inherited charisma and the established social hierarchy. Although reform movements are often considered to represent a shift towards a universal dimension of Islam, connected symbolically to Arabia and to the figure of the Prophet, the Chishti Nizami revival in Multan can be seen rather as a vernacularisation of Islamic authority. The movement favoured the social ascent of local tribes and non-Arab Ashraf families. The alliance between these groups would become a stable feature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contributed to the social status of Sayyid families being questioned.

Yogesh Snehi, Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab: Dreams, Memories, Territoriality

Yogesh Snehi, <i>Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in Punjab: Dreams, Memories, Territoriality</i>

‘Acting upon our Religion’: Muslim women's movements and the remodelling of Islamic practice in India

AbstractIn the last 15 years, India has witnessed the expression of a variety of new non-conformist religious practices performed by Muslim women. A range of vibrant campaigns has been pioneered by Muslim women's associations, asserting women's claims to hold and lead congregational prayers, enter and manage mosques, visit shrines, officiate Muslim marriages, and issueshari‘ah-based legal decisions. This article explores the twin questions of why these experimental remodellings of women's Islamic observance and leadership have been so pronounced in the Indian context compared with much of the Islamic world, and furthermore, why Muslim women's rights activists have put such confessional matters at the centre of their work. Exploring a series of specific female-led assertions of religious agency centring upon mosques,shari‘ahcouncils, and a Sufi shrine, the article argues that India's variant of ‘secularism’, which has normalized the state's non-intervention in religious institutions and laws, has given women the freedom to embark upon overhauls of Islamic conventions denied to their counterparts elsewhere. Simultaneously, this same framework for handling religious questions has historically given intra-community and clerical voices particular influence in regulating Muslim community affairs and family laws, compelling activists to seek women's empowerment in individual and local community contexts to further their objectives, including through the assertion of experimental forms of religious conduct.

Book review: Yogesh Snehi, Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in India: Dreams, Memories, Territoriality

Yogesh Snehi, Spatializing Popular Sufi Shrines in India: Dreams, Memories, Territoriality. London: Routledge, 2019, 256 pp., ₹995 (hardback). ISBN: 978-0-367-37499-0.

The Intertwinement of Spiritual and Local Healing Practices Among the Gurage People of South-Central Ethiopia

This study mainly focuses on the Syncretized processes and practices of scriptural and local healing and its interlacement with extraordinary healing power of traditional cults that have been ubiquitous for centuries among the Gurage ethnic groups who mainly inhabit the south central Ethiopia. Following the introduction of Islam and Christianity into the Gurage Land, the newly converted into either of the two religions, especially those agents of traditional cults, were remained claiming that they have an extraordinary power to cure diseases which were previously believed to be healed only through performing traditional ritual rites. This study also intends to explore the extraordinary heal power of the traditional deities that are used to cure various kinds of diseases through their ritual agents. Thus, an ethnographic study on the processes and practices of spiritual knowledge of healing will be carried out and how ritually sanctified disease, which were defined under the frame of the Sufi Islam religious denominations, especially the Sufi shrine of Abret, are cured. The main data gathering tools that are opted for employing in the selected research area are unstructured and semi structured interview, focus group discussion and participant observation. DOI : 10.7176/JAAS/58-02 Publication date :September 30 th 2019

Performing Piety in Pakistan's Transgender Rights Movement

Abstract Pakistani hijra/khwaja siras make up structured communities of feminine-identified gender-variant persons who have long but marginalized traditions of performing religious-cultural roles. Supreme Court rulings in 2009, promising rights to marginalized khwaja siras, have led to increased backlash against these performances and the community structures on which they rest. This article explores these traditional performance practices, within the Sufi shrine and in homes, as well as in explicit activism as khwaja siras contested their place in the national 2013 elections. These assertions of piety, drawn creatively from Sufi and Shi'a modes and often performed on the fringes or lower rungs of developmental activism, offer an embodied outlet for negotiating multiple axes of exclusion. While recent scholarship has claimed that in the context of reformist Islamic movements khwaja siras are turning away from the spaces of legitimacy that Sufism once offered and toward the liberal language of human rights to make claims for recognition, the author argues that these pious performances continue to provide a potent force for transgender activism in Pakistan.

Countering Extremism Through Sufi Practices in Sindh

This article is an analysis of Sufism and Sufi practices performed at Sufi shrines of Sindh. Moreover, the ways to counter the growing menace of extremism through Sufi practices is discussed in this paper. The approach adopted is from traditional to modern, in understanding the importance of Sufism. Sindh is considered the land of Sufis but unfortunately, it is badly affected by extremism. Although there is a huge number of Sufi shrines in Sindh, the data has been collected and analyzed from the shrines of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Usman Marwandi (Lal Shahbaz Qalander) and Sachal Sarmast, particularly at Urs celebrations. The important Sufi practices include Sufi music, Sufi poetry, Lunger, Urs celebrations etc. The participants in Urs celebrations belong to a variety of groups from upper class to lower and middle class, irrespective of their caste, creed and religion.

Sufism in Jammu

Sufism entered the Indian subcontinent in the twelfth century as a new socio-religious force. Within a short period, it mushroomed to different parts of India. Fro Punjab to Rajputana, from Jammu and Kashmir to Kerala, sufism influenced the life and thought of the people. Though on the eve of its advent, Muslim population in most parts of India was virtually negligible, yet the sufis hardly faced any local resistance to their activities. Sufism reviewed enthusiastic social response. It adjusted itself with the indigenous cultural modes in a smooth manner. As a result, it became a catalyst in shaping and consolidating the Indian regional identities from the thirteenth century onwards. In this context, sufi shrines of the different regions-Ajodhan, Sirhins, Delhi, Ajmer and Gulbarga – played a significant role. For example, Richard Maxwell Eaton has shown that the sufis of Bijapur contributed tremendously to the promotion of vernacular idiom and Dakhani language.

Historiography, fieldwork and popular Sufi shrines in the Indian Punjab

Based on three case-studies of popular Sufi shrines that have been in continuous existence in post-Partition Indian Punjab, this article examines the prevalent discourse of ‘secular’ historiography in India that privileges the archive and situates the narrative strategy of the popular as marginal or outside of historical discourse. Instead, I argue that a fuller understanding of social processes, outside of prescribed imaginary binaries of secularity and/or conflict, can take place only through attention to lived experience and communitarian formation. It is these registers of religious practice that suggests non-statist histories which demand the evolution of critical theories and methods to account for lived experiences that persist outside of nationalising discourses.

Spiritual Rituals at Sufi Shrines in Punjab: A Study of Khawaja Shams-Ud-Din Sialvi, Sial Sharif and Meher Ali Shah of Golra Sharif

This research narrates Sufi institution�s influence on the religious, political and cultural system. The masses frequently visit Sufi shrines and perform different rituals. The shrines of Khawaja Shams-Ud-Din Sialvi of Sial Sharif and Meher Ali Shah of Golra Sharif have been taken as case study due to their religious importance. It is a common perception that people practice religion according to their cultural requirements and this paper deals rituals keeping in view cultural practices of the society. It has given new direction to the concept of �cultural dimensions of religious analysis� by Clifford Geertz who says �religion: as a cultural system� i.e. a system of symbols which synthesizes a people�s ethos and explain their words. Eaton and Gilmartin have presented same historical analysis of the shrines of Baba Farid, Taunsa Sharif and Jalalpur Sharif. This research is descriptive and analytical. Primary and secondary sources have been consulted.

Poly-symbolic Religiosity and the Dilemmas of American Sufism; an Ethnographic Study of Zikr at a Sufi Shrine in Manhattan

This ethnographic endeavor seeks to explore the ritual of Zikr and its association with the shift and dilemmas in American Sufism at a Sufi Shrine in Manhattan, The United States of America. The study highlights the ways in which Islam accommodate socio- cultural change without losing its traditional identity: It has not changed in essence. Also, it throws light on the ways such monotheistic religions create social relevance for their followers in a culture alien to universalizing discourses and identities. The paper argues that esoteric versions of traditional monotheistic religions, like Sufism are more suited to postmodern religious consciousness of modern day individuals. The study employs the conceptual lens of postmodern religiosity. Four formal interviews of the Sufi followers (dervishes) alongside field jottings that expanded from January 2012 till December 2012 were conducted. The analysis was thematic in nature. The structure of the Zikr ritual was elaborated followed by offering prayer the ‘Sushi’ way. This form of prayer ensures convivial co-existence amongst intra-religiouscollectivities. The study concluded that the concept of religiosity is poly-symbolic in nature. The Zikr ritual acts as a distinct plain that invokes a sense of belonging for the participants in diverse settings. American Sufism is multifaceted in essence and in spirits

The Shaykh al-Islam in Medieval Khurasan

The shaykh al-Islam emerged in early Islamic Khurasan. A shaykh al-Islam's social-political roles developed organically, and his duties were exogenous to state bureaucracies. The Seljuq vizier, Niẓām al-Mulk, struck upon a “brilliant and original” scheme, to use the shaykh al-Islam to shape Islamic curricula and control lecturers. He officialized the position by appointing his “own lieutenant” as the shaykh al-Islam of Nishapur. Shāh-Rukh restarted the Seljuq initiative by appointing the shaykh al-Islam of Herat. The Timurid initiative was continued by the Safavids. The Ottoman şeyhülislam became the Empire's most formidable religious official. He presided over its educational system (ilmiye). There are two classes of shaykhs al-Islam: urban and rural. A city's shaykh al-Islam was the chief of its educational network of seminaries, hospices, teachers, and students; he examined the qualifications of lecturers, arbitrated disputes, and harmonized conflicts of law. A rural shaykh al-Islam was a local lord: major landholder, administrator, and magistrate. Typically, he was the custodian of a prominent Sufi shrine. The shaykh al-Islam's/shrine custodian's standing, and the influence and affluence of his institution within its catchment area, were enhanced by the Ilkhanids, Kartids, and Timurids when they tasked him with managing hydrological systems and agricultural production.

Highlighting the Importance of Women Sufis in Sindh

&#x0D; This study aims to express the importance of Sufi shrines in a Sindhi society. The Sufi shrines dwell a central status in our social, cultural and religious setup regarding socio-spatial relationships, status of women in Sufism/Mysticism, rituals, beliefs, spiritual influence, customs and traditions and spiritual healing. Sufi shrines are not only the source of satisfaction for the devotees but also a place where Muslims and non-Muslims participate in all rituals and festivities together. Sindh is the land of Sufis and it holds great importance in Sindhi culture. Hence, the case studies and observational research methods are used to analyze the importance of women Sufis in the Sindhi culture, because both these research methods are explanatory, descriptive, in-depth, detailed and exploratory in nature. Case studies of six women Sufi shrines (three from Karachi and three from Thatta) are incorporated to access the first hand knowledge on the subject. The historical and current scenario about women Sufis and their role in Sindh regarding Sufism is studied through an unstructured interview schedule. Six shrines from Karachi and Thatta were selected as a universe of the study, and the respondents were purposively selected for conducting interviews in detail. The findings reveal that the people of Sindh have blind faith on Sufis (men and women Sufis both). People consider that if they visit the Sufi shrines, they will be blessed with their desires. And moreover people go to the shrines to satisfy their socio-economic, psychological and physical, moral wishes and spiritual needs.&#x0D;

Cultural and Religious Perspective on the Sufi Shrines.

This paper explains the Sufi shrines which hold great importance in Pakistani society. The Shrines inhabit a vital position in the cultural and social as well as religious and culture life of rituals, Saints, traditional belief, sounds, trance, dance, music in ethnic healing, and spiritual illness/disease. It is not only a place of belief and devotion based on Sufi shrines but a place where Muslims and non-Muslim take part in happiness activities together. The design and architecture of the Sufi Shrines have local as well as worldwide influences, representative spiritual, belief systems, economic, and esthetic dimensions of Muslim social institute. Therefore, Muslims' association with the Sufi Shrines has much importance from traditional, political, social and economic perspectives. Centered on an ethnographic illustration, this research aims to highlight the use of Sufi Shrines space and Peoples' Perceptions about Visiting Sufi shrines in the ethnic perspective of rural and urban Sindh. In addition to discuss the socio spatial interactions about the Sufi shrines, this study has discovered that majority of the people and visitors have strong belief systems upon the blessings of Sufis and they visit shrines to fulfill their social, economic, physical, mental and spiritual wishes.