[Reader-list] "The bad Sufi"

Mon May 3 18:45:53 IST 2010

Dear Yasir

You have addressed me as if I have written the article. I have not.

In Pakistan, at one level, Sufi Traditions are used for further entrenchment of class divides. You seem to agree with Qalander on that.

In Pakistan, at another level, this Sufi Image is used in public pronouncements addressed to the rest of the world, to suggest, if I may say so, a difference between Good-Islam and Bad-Islam  (akin to Good-Taliban and Bad-Taliban)

In India, many idiots who want to project themselves as 'secular' think they can do so by declaring their identification with Sufism. It is a scream but any song that has an "Allah" or a "Maula" thrown into it is tagged as "Sufi"

Your comment " most religious rhetoric has just petered out." is amusing (laughable actually) if it is about Pakistan. Why give you spate of examples to justify my reaction, it should be enough to point out the embedding of "religious rhetoric" in the recent 18th Amendment and the continued harassing of minorities with one or the other excuse in the name of "Religion".

Kshmendra

--- On Sun, 5/2/10, yasir ~يا سر <yasir.media at gmail.com> wrote:

From: yasir ~يا سر <yasir.media at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] "The bad Sufi"
To: "Sarai Reader-list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Date: Sunday, May 2, 2010, 4:52 AM

if in your thinking you go through this, i will add that you again arrive on
similar ground, in which most people prefer or lets say dont know better
than to follow the docile sufi behaviour of supporting the status quo. let
alone the landlord-sufi types for now. that is this is definitely not
wahhabi. you're mixing things up. the class element of this is qalandar;'s
point and i find it valid (also as in sarah ansari's book on british
patronage of certain pir families), that sufism offers no way out. this is
arguable for other reasons such as histories of orders, leave that alone
too. your scepticism is going haywire without ground. yes, qalandar
describes the majority of pakistan's attitude well. there is no radical
social move (either other islamic or islamic sufi kind that challenges the
staus quo). the absence of this is a problem. it should be there. most
religious rhetoric has just petered out.

best

On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com>wrote:

> Manmohan Singh's (paraphrased) exultation "Isnt it great!!!!! Yousuf
> Gilani's ancestors helped my ancestors build the Golden Temple" reminded me
> of the article posted below. (Prompted by Gilani's roots being traced to a
> Sufi Order.)
>
> Kshmendra
>
>
> "The bad Sufi"
> By Qalandar Bux Memon
> Tuesday, 26 Jan, 2010
>
> It is often assumed that Sufism stands opposed to Wahhabism. Wrong. Sufism
> and Wahhabism, in fact, share a fatal characteristic – they are religions of
> the status quo.  In Pakistan, Sufism legitimises barbarities of inequality
> and starvation – ‘do nothing, it’s god’s will’ - while at the same time
> justifying structures of oppressive power, Pirism and landlordism, rather
> like Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia.  Contemporary Sufism, rather than being a
> solution to Pakistan’s problems, is the cause.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> I was sitting at the shrine of Shah Kamal in Lahore, with the dhol beats
> and whirling dervishes dancing to connect to the ‘centre of the universe in
> themselves’, when a friend turned and pointed to an old German fellow
> sitting a few meters from us. “He just delivered a lecture on Sufism. He is
> an expert on the subject, and talked about how it’s a religion of peace and
> love.”
>
> I replied curtly: “Have you ever been in love? Have you had your heart
> broken? What peace is there in that state? What peace was there when Mansur
> had his head chopped off on the orders of the Baghdadi Emperor? What peace
> was there when Shah Inayat was fighting against the Mughal emperor for his
> life and that of his commune? What peace is there in Sassui’s peeling feet
> as she searches for her beloved through the desert of Sindh?”
>
> My friend agreed and said: “But they pay me – I have to go along with
> them.”
>
> Western and Pakistani policymakers think Islam can be codified as either a
> religion of peace and love and given the brand of Sufism, or as a religion
> of violent jihad. They think it’s better, at this point in time, to promote
> the peaceful religion of Sufism.
>
> Note how the word Islam is taken out – Sufism is codified as not really
> Islam. Thus Sufism is considered a perfect native antidote to the violent
> religion of Islam.
>
> Why are dollars, pounds, rupees and Euros going to promote Sufism? What is
> it about today’s Sufism that allows it to serve a purpose for the American
> empire, and what function does it play locally in Pakistan?
>
> The answer was hard for me to stomach. I had spent much time researching
> aspects of Sufism, and I thought I’d found a touchstone from which to
> articulate a spirituality that was socially radical and politically
> challenging to Pakistan’s parasitic elite and the US/Nato invaders. Ziauddin
> Sardar, polymath writer and scholar of Islam, forced me to face the facts.
>
> He called Sufism “docile”, acting as an opiate for the masses, with most
> Pirs/Syeds/Sufis amounting to nothing short of “confidence tricksters”. And
> indeed, Sufism is docile. A shopkeeper in Main Market, Gulberg, had an
> emblem of the Sufi saint Lal Qalandar hanging in his shop, which he had got
> from Sehraw Sharif, Sindh, the town where the saint is buried. He said that
> “what these people do not realise is that 80 per cent of what we pray at the
> shrine [of Lal Qalandar] comes true.” A popular song sung across the Punjab
> at Sufi shrines tells women that if they light a lantern at the shrine of
> saints, their desire for a ‘son’ will be answered.
>
> Items given by holy Pirs - threads, rings, blessings, and even sexual
> induction before marriage (in the case of a notorious Sindhi landlord/Pir) -
> are taken as altering the universe and leading to the granting of prayers of
> health, wealth, and other worthy claims by this mass of the wretched that is
> the Pakistani citizen. It is not only candles and lanterns that are lit at
> the shrines; money is exchanged and power is sustained. It is this power
> that has created a “docile” Sufism.
>
> Pakistan is a vastly unequal society. Government figures put those below
> the poverty line at close to 40 per cent of the population, though the true
> figure may be closer to 50 per cent. Inequity is the hallmark of the Sindh
> province of Pakistan, which is celebrated as “the land of the Sufis” and is
> where Sufis and Pirs hold power.  A recent World Bank report noted that
> Sindh has the narrowest distribution of land ownership, with the richest one
> per cent of farmers owning 150 per cent more land than the bottom 62 per
> cent of farmers put together. Feudal landlords in vast parts of Sindh have
> holdings of thousands of acres, and most of them are Syeds or Pirs. These
> lands were sometimes acquired during the Mughal era but were largely
> consolidated during the British colonial rule in India. The British, looking
> for local collaborators, found Sufi Pirs willing to oblige.
>
> Sarah Ansari, in her book, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind,
> 1843-1947, notes: ‘the Sindhi Pirs participated in the British system of
> control in order to protect their privileges and to extend them further
> whenever and wherever possible’.
>
> Today’s feudalists are keen to protect and promote “docile” Sufism to
> sustain their wealth and power – this time with US help.
>
> Wealth is created by a pool of landless serfs who toil thousands of acres
> for their spiritual masters, while seeing their own children starve. These
> serfs create the wealth that sends the Bhuttos and the Gilanis to
> universities such as Oxford and Harvard, while their children get
> “blessings” and threads of “Pirs”. This stream of inequity from generation
> to generation is based on a lame theological idea, which nonetheless has
> been promoted by the Mughal Empire, the British Empire, the landlords
> themselves, and now by the American Empire, and thanks to such patronage has
> gained far more ground than the Taliban. It states that the Prophet was
> given divine light/knowledge, which passes on to his descendents. These
> descendents append the honorific title of ‘Syed’ [literally, ‘master’], and
> claim divine and material privileges.
>
> Pirs justify their superiority on a similar argument – they were given the
> light, and this light continues to radiate in their descendants. At a
> recital of the poetry of the radical Sufi Waris Shah held each year in
> Lahore, the descendents of Iman Bari Sarkar (a Pir) enter the arena to be
> received with awe and sought for blessings by the crowd. The recital stops
> and they are escorted to the front and seated. All eyes are on these holy
> men who are not only descendents of a Pir but also Syeds – thus, doubly
> blessed with ‘light’! And then they begin expounding their ideology: “We the
> Syeds get different treatment from God Almighty, for our good deeds we get
> double the reward compared to ‘murids’ [non-Syeds] who only get single
> reward for a single good deed … but, it’s not easy to be a Syed … [he
> laughs] … we have to suffer double the punishment for our any wrong deeds
> whereas you [non-Syeds] get only single punishment for a single
>  wrong deed!”
>
> There you have it! Our holy man explains why he has a Land Cruiser jeep and
> “non-Syeds” have donkey carts. He explains why most Pakistanis are living in
> poverty while he and his Syeds and Pirs are lapping it up in luxury.
>
> Contemporary Sufism is the ideology of Sindh’s landlords. It is the
> ideology that is used to uphold their wealth and despotism, and keeps
> millions in serfdom. A similar pattern is repeated throughout Pakistan.
> Given the lack of proportional representation and the vast inequality in
> power in each district between Pirs and the rest, it is almost always the
> case that elections flood parliament with Pirs/Syeds/landlords. The current
> Pakistani Prime Minister (Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani) and Foreign Minister
> (Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi) are examples. Both have the claim of being
> descended from Holy Pirs as the basis of their wealth and distinction. As a
> result, we cannot expect parliament to challenge inequity and injustice in
> Pakistan.
>
> Parliamentarians know that lack of education, coupled with the obscurantism
> of contemporary Sufism, sustains their power. Like the British before them,
> the Americans don’t care about Pakistan’s growing multitude of serfs and the
> underclass, they don’t care whether the Prime Minister and the Foreign
> Minister of Pakistan are deeply rooted in the cause of inequity and
> injustice in the country and part of the promotion of a system of starvation
> – a Sufism that tells people to take a blessing instead of demanding food,
> education, justice and liberty. Like the British, they will fund whoever
> furthers their interests. We, however, must care.
>
> This is an article by Qalandar Bux Memon, editor of Naked Punch, from the
> The Samosa, a new UK-based politics, culture and arts journal, campaigning
> blog and website.
>
>
>
>
>
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>
> http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/03-the-bad-sufi-ss-02
>
>
>
>
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