III. EMBODYING THE PATH
The Chishti Sabiri project of imagining Pakistani Sufism is articulated in a creative inscription of the tradition’s roots and enduring relevance within the contemporary geo-political landscape. For today’s Chishti Sabiri practitioners, however, it is the continuity of embodied and enacted ritual practice which provides the most tangible link to their sacred past and a bulwark against the social and cultural shifts occasioned by global modernity. Sufi praxis centers on techniques of mental and bodily discipline, a routinized and rigorous ritual praxis grounded on a comprehensive epistemology and detailed theory of subjectivity. Upon entering a Sufi order, a disciple (murid) relinquishes personal autonomy, surrendering selfhood to the will of a teacher (murshid, pir, or shaykh). [1] To quote a well-known adage, the murid’s surrender must be total and uncompromising, “like a corpse in the hands of a washerman.” In practice, however, the dynamic and intensely personal relationship with a spiritual mentor demands a careful (and constant) balancing act between submission to hierarchical authority and an enduring imperative for individual action and moral responsibility. It is the shaykh who guides the novice disciple through the twists and turns of the Path, but progress is impossible in the absence of individual acquiescence, determination and discipline. This complex balancing act, in turn, is continuously reinforced among a broader community of adepts. Though an individual’s spiritual progress ultimately depends on personal effort, disciples provide their spiritual compatriots with a vital support system—sharing experiences, clarifying doubts, ambiguities and anxieties, and participating in collective ritual activities. By examining some of the stories Chishti-Sabiri murids tell themselves and each other about the methods, meanings and experiences of the Sufi spiritual journey (suluk), this analysis offers further insights into both the continuities and changes in the construction and articulation of post-colonial identity amid the shifting landscape of today’s Pakistan. For contemporary Chishti Sabiri adepts, it is these shared narratives—as well as the interface and intimacy of the central master-disciple relationship--that perpetuate and preserve the legacy of Muhammad Dhawqi Shah, Shahidullah Faridi and Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani.[2]
Although there are prominent exceptions to the rule, the contemporary followers of the Chishtiyya-Sabiriyya-Zauqiyya silsila fit a general profile: educated, middle class and mobile urban professionals. Most murids move fluidly between multiple epistemological, linguistic and geographical universes, many having extensive networks of family and friends living abroad in the Gulf, England, Canada and the United States. Though well acquainted with the instruments and ideology of modernity, many disciples come from families with a long history of Sufi affiliations, and without exception they stress the centrality of their Sufi identity and practice in their busy, complex lives. [3] The order’s current teaching shaykh—the khalifa of Shahidullah Faridi—Siraj Ali, is himself the embodiment of this dominant pattern: a fourth generation Chishti Sabiri, he was a graduate of the prestigious Pakistani Air Force college and the senior most pilot for Pakistan International Airlines until his recent retirement. He is multi-lingual, a computer expert, and travels frequently both within Pakistan to visit his own disciples and abroad to see his sons and daughters (among them doctors, bankers and computer specialists) currently living in the US. The background and make-up of both the shaykhs and the bulk of the disciples in this order, it should be emphasized, entirely contradicts the prevalent stereotypes of South Asian Sufi practitioners as marginalized, rural and uneducated Muslims which their critics (Islamists and secularists alike) invariably evoke to explain away the ubiquity and continuity of Pakistani Sufi allegiances and practices.
In response to their detractors who denigrate Sufism as a perversion of the reified traditions of an idealized Muslim past, today’s Chishti Sabiri practitioners are quick to reclaim the sunna and the sharia as the foundations of their own faith and practice. In the words of one murid, a conservative, middle aged woman who lived for 20 years in both Saudi Arabia and Turkey and who now runs an informal madrasa for women in Lahore:
The argument which I give to myself and to whoever asks is that our Prophet (PBUH) was the greatest Sufi. Self negation in everything, that was his way. But, at the same time, he was so disciplined. Each moment of his life was within the sharia. What is Sufism? It is self-negation, controlling your self, controlling your nafs. And what is sharia? Sharia is there to guide you, to keep you within bounds. And if you don’t have the boundaries, you just do whatever you want to do. And then even tasawwuf is indulgement. You’re indulging, you’re enjoying it. Escapism!... Tasawwuf has kept his [the Prophet’s] life, his role model alive. If you take the ulama, if you take the people who are just practicing the sharia without the spirit of it, it would have been just dry. The spirit of sharia is tasawwuf.[4]
This is a typical refrain: far from being a peripheral practice, or the outgrowth of external cultural accretions, Sufism is re-positioned at the very heart of Muslim history, belief and practice. Muin ud-Din Chishti Ajmeri, Baba Farid Ganj Shakar, Nizam ud-Din Awliya, Ahmad Ali Sabir, Muhammad al-Ghazali, Ibn al-Arabi, Abd al-Qadir Jilani, Jalal ud-Din Rumi—stories and legends about a host of Sufi luminaries are constantly circulated among Chishti Sabiri disciples in order to reaffirm this mantra. In this logic, the challenge for modern Pakistani Muslims eager to experience the deepest truths of their own tradition is to (re)discover the discipline of the Path, guided by a living spiritual master (shaykh) who is the true heir of the Prophet teachings. As a senior male murid—a middle aged professional in Lahore—put it:
Our antennas are so deeply attuned to the material world. We rarely tune in to the spiritual transmitter. It’s rare to transcend and really examine the spiritual world. There is a whole world there that directly impacts this material world, what we’re doing here. Allah Ta’allah is the source of the spiritual transmission. He’s on 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Its up to us to find the frequency. If you want to find this frequency, you must join a tariqa. The shaykh is your antenna. I use this example to help explain. A computer, for example, is a very powerful thing. But unless someone is there to push the button, its worthless. The real thing is seeing, in Persian and Urdu, deed. Once true vision happens, everything else falls into place. Your shaykh is the only catalyst who can do it for you.[5]
The use of technological metaphors here is telling, a reflection of the worldview and experience of many Chishti Sabiri devotees who consciously see themselves as modern (even post-modern) Muslims, fully enmeshed in the contingencies of the lived-in, localized world of contemporary Pakistan while simultaneously committed to a disciplined life of the spirit which links them to a sacralized past.
Time and again in interviews, Chishti Sabiri murids highlight the distinction between outer/exoteric (zahir) and inner/ esoteric (batin) dimensions of knowledge and experience. As the “science of the heart”, they assert, Sufism aims at a balance, a complementarity between these two realms—a purification of the inner self which, in turn, manifests itself in external behavior (adab).[6] In private, many murids vociferously condemn their co-religionists whose narrow focus on outward displays of piety, they assert, veils a woeful ignorance of Islam’s deeper meanings. Predictably, they are especially critical of the Deobandis who, they maintain, have perverted the original teachings of their own Chishti-Sabiri founders. This critique, often couched in stories of direct personal confrontation, also extends to the Ahl-e Hadith, Wahhabis, the Jama’ati Islam and the Tablighi Jama’at—the very groups that dismiss Sufism as an-Islamic cultural accretion in public discourse. A quote from a conversation about the increasing “Talibanization” of Pakistani society with a senior murid—a family member of Shaykh Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani who holds a doctorate in engineering from an American university—encapsulates this critique:
The Taliban see themselves as reformers, a movement to restore past glory. The logic is we must become exactly like the Sahaba [the early community surrounding the Prophet Muhammad]. But you can not be like that—the Prophet and the Sahaba are not coming back! This is just imitation (taqlid), nothing else. Imitating them without their purification and perfection...You see, a focus on outward display is an easy way out for something that is simply not so easy. The sunna of the Prophet is beyond the capacity of any Muslim. That’s why the emphasis is on the outward, because that you can do easily. I think it’s incumbent on all Muslims to try to follow the sunna of the Prophet in all areas. But there is a difference between imitation and sunna. The outward becomes mere imitation.[7]
What we have here is nothing less than a battle over the definition of Islamic orthodoxy itself, a public wrangling over authority and authenticity, a debate about who knows, and who has a right to speak for “Islam.” For the Chishti Sabiri practitioners, the answer is unambiguous—only the Awliya Allah (the Friends of God), whose authority, forged through self-discipline and experiential knowledge, carry the mantle of the Prophet. In the words of another senior male disciple:
Our group is not like the Jama’ati Islami and others. You are not told that you should behave in this or that manner. It is just the way you feel inside. If someone is sleeping during salat time, let him sleep. In the Tablighis, however, you couldn’t imagine not praying at the exact times! We reject all elements of compulsion or force—if they are there, the khalus isn’t there. There is a saying of Hazrat Shahidullah Faridi that you can’t do dawa without permission. Until you are explicitly given permission, you are just a student, you have no business doing dawa. So many of these maulvis give passionate speeches. People leave in tears. But people don’t change! It’s because these maulvis do not have permission to speak. The shaykhs do not say a word, but people’s lives are profoundly changed—they have the express permission to do dawa. [8]
As this quote suggests, Chishti Sabiri murids find simplistic attempts to reify, synthesize, codify and systematize Islamic piety and practice highly dubious. True knowledge, I was told time and time again, must be earned through a disciplined journey along the Path under the watchful tutelage of a spiritual master. In the absence of individual moral and spiritual reform cultivated under the discipline of ‘ibadat, channeled through strict adherence to shari’a and grounded in the rigors of suluk , any attempt to institutionalize top-down social reforms is doomed to failure. Such rhetoric, they argue, is nothing more than un-Islamic political posturing.
In both their public and private conversations, Chishti Sabiri murids highlight the importance (and difficulties) of balancing the mundane demands of the world (dunya) with the pursuits of a life of the spirit (din). Long hours at the office, increasing demands of time, money and family life, the incessant worries brought on by political instability and economic uncertainty in urban Pakistan—being in the world but not of it is easier said than done. Acknowledging that the social landscape has changed, Chishti Sabiri disciples look back on their pre-modern predecessors with a palpable sense of envy and nostalgia. They regretfully acknowledge, however, that the days of the traditional Khanqah—the pre-modern Sufi hospice memorialized in classical malfuzat texts—have come and gone. Accepting the paramount need to respond to the realities of modernity, there is a constant refrain that a new time demands a new paradigm for Sufi practice. Suluk, the Chishti Sabiri disciples maintain, must be adapted to suit the needs of the day. In the words of a senior male murid:
I think that the saints have concluded that it’s not possible now, to have a Khanqah where everyone would live together in one place. Because of the requirements of the times, the requirements of jobs with everyone living such a fast pace of life. This is why we see a totally different type of emphasis—it’s how Sufism deals with the modern age. The thing which is emphasized is not to give up your spiritual exercises, even as you remain fully engrossed in the day to day workings of the modern world. Whatever you are doing. That’s the message to almost every murid, whether he is in business, an engineer or an Army officer. The course length, the number of hours you put in is probably shorter. Hazrat Wahid Bakhsh used to say “Now you can get a lot by doing very little.” In previous times people had to do a lot of mujahida [spiritual work] to get a little [spiritual growth]. Today, staying away from TV is a mujahida. Staying away from all the worldly activities. Hazrat Siraj Sahab says those 3 rules of “less talking, less eating, less sleeping” are not really applicable these days. He said, “So what is it now that’s required? Less socializing.”[9]
Given the increasing worldly demands that each disciple must bear, suluk itself demands a firm resolve and unwavering personal discipline. “A serious person on the Sufi Path,” one murid told me, “is recommended to do spiritual work four to five hours a day, in addition to their job and daily routine. Two to three house in the morning after fajr, and one to two hours after isha prayers. It’s all your intention. It all comes down to your seriousness. A student studying for A-levels studies this much. It affects your ability to socialize—you’re cut off from outsiders, even family. Your guest list just drops off!”[10] Progress on the Path, disciples assert, rests primarily on a person’s attention to their own spiritual homework—for the Chishti Sabiris a daily diet of supererogatory prayers, Qur’an recitation, dhikr and muraqaba as prescribed by the teaching shaykh.
Significantly, disciples recognize this increased emphasis on individual action and moral responsibility as a key modification of the traditional paradigm. Since murids are no longer able to live together in an insular monastic setting—instead gathering when they can for weekly communal dhikr sessions and for annual urs celebrations—the personal, intimate relationship between master and disciple assumes an even greater importance, as does the individual’s personal commitment and discipline. Once they have taken bayt (a formalized oath of allegiance) with a shaykh, Chishti Sabiri disciples are strongly discouraged from seeking spiritual advice from outside the insulated boundaries of the silsila. Similarly, initiations in multiple Sufi orders—a common practice among pre-modern Chishti Sabiri spiritual masters—are now proscribed. This too is seen as a response to the times: given the weighty demands of both din and dunya, a firm commitment to a single guide and a single path are indispensable for spiritual development. In the words of a highly respected, elder murid: “There are so many branches to the Chishti silsila. Just here in Karachi there may be 300 or 400 branches. There are many Chishti Sabiris too—some branches have been merging. We don’t maintain contact with them at all. We don’t mix with anyone. Once you’re a murid, you stay in one place, in one silsila. You don’t go around with others. Before you’re a murid, its alright to visit other silsilas though, and other shaykhs.”[11] When asked about the adage that a Sufi disciple must be “like a corpse in the hands of a washerman” with his or her spiritual mentor, another senior male murid explained:
This statement does not mean inaction on the part of the murid. This surrender implies total obedience, but not sitting idle. Being very active in total obedience, like a good servant, a servant who is running around all day. Your submission is such that if the shaykh sends you one hundred times to the store to fetch something, you happily do it a hundred times. That is being like a corpse. Whatever the shaykh utters, whatever he prescribes, you do it with full enthusiasm. Actively striving. That’s the essential part. And this still implies individuality.[12]
For most Chishti Sabiri murids then, the Path is a highly individual affair—daily spiritual practices are carried out in isolation, and largely confined to the private realm of the home, early in the mornings or late at night. Face to face contact with the shaykh (sohbat) remains a prized, if rare, opportunity. In Karachi, Hazrat Siraj Sahab—currently the order’s only teaching shaykh—leads weekly halqa (collective dhikr sessions) on Thursday evenings, and holds an open, public dars (an informal question and answer lecture session) at his own home on Sunday mornings. In Lahore, a senior male murid, the nephew of Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani, also leads a weekly halqa. Those who can find the time come, though it remains a dedicated inner core who generally attend these regular communal ritual gatherings. For most murids, access to the shaykh is often limited to infrequent visits to Karachi or, more typically, relegated to Cyberspace, where the shaykh provides advice on both temporal and spiritual matters via email letters (the fluid incorporation of technology into suluk is another important modern concession).
So what of the broader sense of silsila—of a shared, communal Chishti Sabiri identity? Where is it located and how is it marked? For the modern Chishti Sabiris, it is the annual pilgrimages (ziyarat) to the shrines (mazars) of Sufi saints where this collective consciousness is most clearly expressed and experienced. In the silsila, four yearly urs [death anniversaries] are celebrated: the urs of Khwaja Muin ud-Din Chishti Ajmeri (6 Rajab) and Baba Farid Ganj Shakkar (5 Muharram) in Pakpattan Sharif, the urs of Shahidullah Faridi (17 Ramadhan) in Karachi, and that of Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani (24 Zikat) in Allahabad (southern Punjab). Significantly, this pilgrimage calendar has been reconfigured in response to the legacy of Partition since the redrawing of geo-political boundaries on a map has occasioned a parallel shift in sacred space and ritual practice. For example, since travel to India is now exceedingly difficult, Chishti Sabiris now celebrate the urs of Muin ud-Din at the shrine of Baba Farid in Pakpattan. The transfer of political and religious boundaries is further delineated by the recent emergence of entirely new Chishti Sabiri sacred spaces on Pakistan soil evidenced in the growing tomb cults of Shahiduallah Faridi in Karachi and Wahid Bakhsh in Allahabad. On the occasions of these urs celebrations, Chishti Sabiri murids travel from all over Pakistan and beyond, gathering together for several days of intense spiritual immersion. In effect, urs now serves as a serial Khanqah—a rare opportunity for Chishti Sabiri murids to live together in the presence of their shaykh and perform prayers, dhikr, muraqaba and, most significantly, sama together, as a collective, unified whole. This too is recognized as a modern innovation, a necessary response to the needs of the times. As one male murid explained:
[In pre-modern days] there were too many living saints, and travel was difficult, so urs probably didn’t have that much country-wide or continent-wide significance. But now with modern travel, no khanqahs and fewer living shaykhs, this has assumed a greater importance. They [Chishti Sabiri shaykhs] don’t discourage people who fly from Canada, or even Jeddah to come and attend the urs. It’s that valuable. People are encouraged to part with so much money. The Malaysian murids, they also come. That’s also tazkiyya-e nafs. Then they get a short refresher, 6-7 days. And that is what is not understood by most other people, the traditionalists who think of it [urs] in negative terms....I think the festive part of it has remained for a very long time, people coming and offering nazranas [ritual gifts] and things. But this kind of attendance we have, it is not for nazrana, its not for anything else but the rigorous company of the shakyh.[13]
It is at the urs ceremonies where disciples, particularly novices, benefit from the knowledge and experiences of their peers through a complex nexus of story telling. Between prayers and ritual disciplines, disciples can be found sitting together in small groups where they recall personal experiences—dreams, visions, doubts and fears—and narrate legends about past spiritual masters and the lives of their own shaykhs. In the words of a young male novice:
A lot of guidance comes indirectly as well through these group activities. I missed three or four urs because of my job. The urs in Allahabad [the shrine of Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani] recently was one of the first urs I’ve been to after two years. I was amazed at the amount of things I picked up, and realized I was missing, just by living with the other murids. If you as a murid had sat with the shaykh three years ago and heard him say something, you’d narrate that. Or you’d say that you read it in a book and then discussed it with him, and his interpretation was this or that. We keep learning in this way.[14]
This dynamic spiritual support system—this serial Khanqah—provides Chishti Sabiri murids a vital if rare forum to clarify doubt and ambiguities, share collective wisdom and learn about the tradition’s roots directly from each other.
The Chishti Sabiri’s ritual calendar is punctuated by these vital outlets for collective ritual activity and identity formation. Yet, in questioning murids about their own notions of silsila allegiances—their personal sense of belonging to a broader, corporate whole—I was surprised to discover that many disciples were quite unaware of the order’s history and communal identity. As one particularly knowledgeable elder male murid explained to me, this is only to be expected in the contemporary environment in which the Path is increasingly traversed in isolation. Interviewed at the urs in Pakpattan Sharif, this particular disciple took Western scholars of South Asian Sufism to task (by name and with references to their books!) for their obsession with spiritual genealogies and the resulting one-dimensional portraits of Sufi orders as public, corporate institutions. His words are worth quoting at some length:
The thing that needs to be corrected in Western scholarship is this over emphasis on the silsila’s organization. This isn’t a workshop or a reunion [urs]. None of us knows about each other’s spiritual state or development. The sole purpose is to be in the presence of the shaykh. Once we leave here it is all individual. You don’t even tell your wife about how you pray or do dhikr, even if she asks. You don’t tell each other, “I’m doing 6000 dhikrs a day and so many muraqaba.” This is a great misconception. It doesn’t operate like the Tablighis! There is no kinship here. If there is a Chishti shaykh next door, I will not go and see him. I will have respect for him in my heart though. Even murids of the same shaykh don’t consult with one another. We have individual meetings with the shaykh, and spiritual progress is never discussed in public. ‘Chishti Sabiri’ is our lineage—our family name. Its more like an airplane. Passengers buy tickets, check in their luggage, take their seats and fly. Then they collect their luggage and leave. We’re all there at Pakpattan. Not as a community association, but simply because of the occasion of the urs. Nothing else. It’s natural that you will develop relationships and love with your fellow murids, but that’s not the initial purpose—as it is for some groups like the Tablighis. There is no planned group work as such, it is all between the shaykh and the murid. The most important part of suluk is what you do every day at home, every day and night. Those who don’t work the whole year, they still benefit from urs. They my start working. But we do not try to create a group mentality. It’s not a group, a sect. The objective is the cleaning of the heart in the company of the shaykh. The shaykhs do not even bother about their own family—their sons and daughters. Though suhbat and barakat their children may achieve high stations, but often not. The shaykhs are so fixed on God, everything else is less important. The difference with other pseudo-Sufi groups is important. The main point for us is to be in the presence of the shaykh and the shrine [of Baba Farid]. The shaykh [Hazrat Siraj Sahab] is also here to seek spiritual development.[15]
This is a revealing (if atypical) statement about the significance of tariqa affiliations to contemporary Chishti Sabiri Sufi identity, both individual and collective. Certainly, silsila commitments and communal identity still matter. Chishti Sabiri disciples remain attuned to spiritual genealogy, if generally uninformed about the hagiographical details; the recitation of the order’s shajrah, or spiritual family tree, for example, remains an important ritual activity. Likewise, murids spend a lot of time telling stories about past shaykhs, continuously revisiting the words and deeds of their predecessors, the spiritual luminaries of their collective tradition. They call themselves the “Chisthi Sabiri Zauqi silsila” and maintain strict borders and ritual boundaries which define who is in and who is not. They travel together and live together for short but intensive periods of communal spiritual immersion during urs celebrations. Many also attend weekly communal dhikr sessions. There is, in short, a palpable sense of shared experience and a common vocabulary for Chishti Sabiris to describe and resolve their individual doubts, ambiguities and desires. Even so, it may be wrong to over-emphasize these formal institutional linkages when trying to understand and explain how Sufism is experienced, understood and articulated by most Sufi disciples. For most contemporary Pakistani Chishti Sabiri adherents, spiritual life centers on the figure of the living master and the one-to-one, direct and highly personal relationship between pir and murid.
Within this symbiotic system, the living shaykh is understood as the heir and embodiment of all that has gone before—the living reflection of the Prophet himself. While the silsila’s formal, historical linkages—inscribed in biographical texts and retold in a shared narrative network—offer a blueprint for spiritual progress, the Path is most often traversed alone. In this sense, the environment of the silsila’s communal gatherings can be somewhat misleading to the outside observer, creating a rather distorted impression that such forums for collective ritual experience are the daily norm. Since others happen also to be linked to the same shaykh, a sense of communal identity does emerge, but this broader network emerges post-facto and is not the primary nexus of the individual seeker’s daily (and nightly) spiritual journey. For the contemporary followers of the Chishti Sabiri order, the private individual master-disciple linkage remains the primary locus and focus of Sufi practice. Working and living amid the landscape of modern, urban Pakistan, these spiritual seekers—as their pre-modern predecessors before them—continue to ground a Sufi habitus on the adab of pir-murid relations.[16]
IV. CONCLUSION
In the pursuit of the powers of coercion and control, the colonial and post-colonial State has consistently attempted to co-opt, appropriate and manipulate the sites, heroes and symbolic capital of South Asian Sufism. Pre-modern Muslim saints are publicly embraced as poets and proto-nationalists, Sufi shrines are marked and celebrated as sacred national spaces, and individual spiritual masters (shaykhs or pirs) and hereditary custodians (sajjada nashins) are integrated into state institutions and ideology as political agents and power brokers, mediators in regionalized networks of local identity and power. With rare exception, Western scholars of Islam—Islamicists and social scientists alike—have encapsulated Sufi thought and practice in precisely the same terms. In this paper, however, I have suggested that Sufism—inscribed in texts, mediated through personal networks, transmitted via the intimate master-disciple relationship and firmly grounded in a technology of personal discipline and embodied ritual praxis—could not and can not be so easily codified, delineated, tabulated, appropriated or controlled. As a result, the complexity, dynamism and continuity of Sufi knowledge and practice have evaded the gaze of the State and, to a large extent, the purview of academic scholarship.
For the Chishti Sabiri Sufis of Pakistan, the cultural and political changes spurred by Partition prompted a reconstitution and re-imagining of the silsila’s history, organization and ritual expression. Since Partition, Chishti Sabiri shaykhs have endeavored to inscribe a sacred history that places Sufism—and specifically the genealogy and ritual practices of their own silsila—at the very center of national identity. Adopting the idioms of modernity—the language of science, rationalism and the market—they employ the instruments of mass media (from the printing press to Cyberspace) to engage a broad national and international audience, arguing for the compatibility of a Pakistani identity that is simultaneously modern, Muslim and mystic. In private spaces as well, Chishti Sabiris have recognized the imperative for reform, the pressing need to respond to the times. The transformation of ritual space reconfigured by new geo-political boundaries is only the most obvious example of Pakistan’s altered political and spiritual landscape. For individual disciples, the contingencies of modern, urban life—the increased demands of the workplace, the imperative for mobility and travel, the pervasive ambiguity and anxiety compounded by social, political and economic instability—have also forced a reassessment of how best to balance the demands of the practical, lived-in world (dunya) with the discipline (and rewards) of the spiritual quest (saluk). While the frequency and location of Chishti Sabiri ritual practice has been modified to accommodate contemporary realities, at the level of the individualized, embodied Self, there remains a striking continuity. Within the rigors of the Sufi Path, both the technologies of bodily discipline (experienced through ritual activities performed under the strict tutelage of a shaykh) and the interpretive frameworks of selfhood remain very much intact. It is here, at the level of the Body and the realm of subjectivity, that Chishti Sabiri Sufism remains firmly rooted in tradition, linked to its pre-modern historical, genealogical, ontological, epistemic and heuristic foundations. In short, in today’s Pakistan, Chishti Sabiri Sufism is imagined and inscribed anew in texts, even as it is continuously embodied and enacted in ritual contexts.
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[1] For details on the states (hal), stations (maqam) and psychology of the Sufi Path, see Buehler, Schimmel, Ernst and Lawrence. On the Chishti tradition of sama’, see Ernst (1997), Lawrence (1983) and Qureshi.
[2] The following ethnographic survey is drawn from taped interviews (in Urdu, English and, frequently, a mix of the two) with Chishti Sabiri murids conducted during14 months of dissertation research in Pakistan under the auspices of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) from September 2000 to November 2001. At the request of senior figures in the silsila, I have withheld the names of individual respondents in the interest of privacy and anonymity.
[3] Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani also had nearly one hundred Malaysian disciples. I spent a month in Kuala Lumpur in November, 2001 with this dynamic group of murids who maintain their own dhikr circles, publish a wide range of Sufi texts and travel frequently to Pakistan for pilgrimage. The spread of the order into Southeast Asia marks an intriguing break from the tradition’s South Asian roots—an instructive comparative model to explore the re-imagining of Chishti Sabiri thought and practice in diverse localized contexts within global modernity.
[4] Interview recorded March 9, 2001 in Lahore.
[5] Interview recorded October 15, 2000 in Lahore.
[6] For broader insights on the centrality of adab in Indo-Muslim thought and practice, see Metcalf (1984). For a comparative study of the concept in North African Sufi traditions see Cornell.
[7] Interview recorded October 1, 2001 in Lahore.
[7]Interview recorded April 24, 2001 in Lahore.
[9] Interview recorded August 26, 2001 in Lahore.
[10] Interview recorded October 30, 2000 in Lahore.
[11] Interview recorded in Karachi on the occasion of the ‘urs of Shahidullah Faridi, December 15, 2000.
[12] Interview recorded March 16, 2001 in Lahore.
[13] Interview recorded August 26, 2001 in Lahore.
[14] Interview recorded March 22, 2001 in Islamabad.
[15] Interview recorded April 25, 2001 in Lahore.
[16] On the idea of habitus, see Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice.
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Around 1445 AD 
The two bases of Walisongo (Demak and Giri) which grew stronger and stronger everyday were always under the watchful eyes of the Majapahit kingdom. The new ruler of Majapahit, Bhre Kertabumi, the third successor of Sri Rajasawardhana, was suspicious of the leader of these two bases. It was because Raden Fatah was son of Sri Kertawijaya, previous king of Majapahit who was toppled and replaced by Sri Rajasawardhana. While Raden Paku's mother was the granddaughter of Bhre Wirabumi of Blambangan, an old enemy of Majapahit whom they defeated long before that. 
But it was not until the 13th century when the rulers of Samudra Pasai and Perlak at northern Sumatra started to embrace Islam and made the first Islamic kingdoms in Indonesia. The most obvious evidence of this is the tombstone of the first Islamic ruler of Samudra, Sultan Malik Al-Saleh, which bears the date 1297. 
