Rob Rozehnal, Duke University

North Carolina State University

April 13, 2002

IMAGINING SUFISM:

RECONSTITUTING THE CHISHTI SABIRI

SILSILA IN CONTEMPORARY PAKISTAN

Within the combative discursive landscape of contemporary Pakistan, Sufism remains an emotive, multi-valent and highly contested symbol.  In a vociferous debate over Islamic authority and authenticity, a broad spectrum of competing groups—Islamists, reformists, secular intellectuals, neo-colonial political elites, the ulama and Sufis themselves—evoke Sufi doctrine, piety and practice to either defend or decry the tradition’s Islamic credentials.  Throughout South Asia, the lives of Sufi saints are deeply woven into local poetry and legends, and Sufi shrines remain vital centers of popular pilgrimage—fonts of local piety, identity and ritual practice.  Even so, many of the activities and groups associated with Sufi shrines are viewed with intense ambiguity and suspicion, particularly by Islamist groups—Wahhabis, Ahl-e Hadith, Deobandis and a diverse array of religious parties—who denigrate Sufism as an impure, un-Islamic accretion.  When it comes to Sufism, lines are drawn and sides are chosen. [1]

Sufism in Pakistan, however, is not merely enshrined and enacted in the popular practices surrounding the tomb complexes of long dead saints, or inscribed in the ecstatic poetry of pre-modern literary luminaries.  Beyond these static public manifestations—echoes of a long and storied Indo-Muslim past—Sufism remains a vibrant, living teaching tradition, communicated in the intimate exchange between master and disciple (pir-murid) and experienced through ritual performance.  As a case study of Islam’s internal debate over the roots of orthodoxy and external engagement with the institutions and ideology of modernity, this paper offers a portrait of how Sufi identity and practice have accommodated to the localized, territorialized milieu of contemporary Pakistan. [2]  My focus centers on the lives and enduring legacy of a trio of spiritual masters (shaykhs) from one of the Subcontinent’s oldest and most dynamic Sufi lineages: the Chishti-Sabiri silsila.  Collectively, these Chishti Sabiri shaykhs endeavored to sacralize the Land of the Pure and cement Pakistani religious and national identity through the public inscription of a sacred Sufi history and the private transmission of knowledge (ma’rifa) grounded on the disciplinary techniques of embodied and enacted ritual praxis (suluk).  At a deeper level, this multi-faceted project aimed at imagining, articulating and reconstituting Pakistani Sufism offers further evidence that modernity itself is ultimately translated, staged and performed in localized, particularized settings, outside the geography and ideology of the West and beyond the gaze of the colonial and post-colonial State.[3]

I.  THREE MODERN PAKISTANI CHISHTI SABIRI MASTERS

  I begin with a few words on the Chishti-Sabiri silsila.  Breaking from the lineage of the predominant Nizami branch in the thirteenth century, the eponymous founder of this sub-branch of the prolific Chishti order, Ali Ahmad Sabir (d. 1291), initiated an alternative model of spiritual asceticism and withdrawal from public, urban life and the allure of the royal courts.  From the beginning, the Sabiris were much less visible than their Chishti-Nizami counterparts—renowned for their intense, awe-inspiring (jalali) personalities, Sabiri shaykhs stuck to more rural locales, made fewer public appearances, trained fewer devotees, wrote fewer books and avoided building large shrine complexes (dargahs).[4]  Within the heightened atmosphere of polemics and competition spurred by resistance to colonialism and the lurching transition towards Partition, however, Chishti-Sabiri Sufis increasingly came to view silence and withdrawal as untenable.  Mounting the public stage to defend their tradition from its critics, prominent Chishti Sabiri shaykhs called for social reform, founding educational institutions like the famous Deoband madrasa and publishing a broad range of texts.[5]  Yet even as South Asia’s changing social, cultural and ideological landscape forced a radical rethinking of the order’s public posturing, the discipline of Sufi ritual—the embodied techniques of the Path centered around the intimate master-disciple relationship including dhikr (ritual chanting), muraqaba (meditation), ziyarat (pilgrimage), dream interpretation and sama (musical assemblies)—remained the enduring bedrock of Chishti Sabiri identity and practice.  In today's Pakistan, spiritual masters of the Chishti-Sabiri order continue to guide their followers (murids) along the Sufi path, armed with a spiritual genealogy (silsila) that links them directly to the authority and legacy of the Prophet Muhammad.  While the contours and challenges of the Path remain the same, the changing social, cultural and ideological landscape of contemporary Pakistan has forced a radical rethinking of the order's traditional modus operandi.  Given this continuous—but contested—tradition, I view the re-emergence and reconstitution of the Chishti-Sabiri order on the public stage of post-colonial Pakistan stands as an unprecedented historical anomaly worthy of further scholarly attention.

            My research focuses in particular on three important Chishti-Sabiri leaders whose lives paralleled the birth and development of Pakistan itself:  Muhammad Dhawqi Shah (d. 1951), and his two principal successors (khalifas), Shahidullah Faridi (d. 1978), and Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani (d. 1995).  Standing at the crossroads of modernity, these Pakistani shaykhs embodied the complexity and contradictions of their times, and their lives and legacies offer novel insights into post-colonial subjectivity and its relation to religious identity and expression.  Dhawqi Shah was an early graduate of Aligarh University and went on to pursue a career in journalism and politics before emigrating to Pakistan and devoting himself exclusively to his spiritual duties as a Chishti-Sabiri shaykh.  His designated successor, Shahidullah Faridi, was an Englishman from an exceedingly wealthy industrialist family in London who, along with his elder brother, converted to Islam in 1936 and traveled widely throughout the Muslim world in search of spiritual knowledge. [6]   Moving to Pakistan with his spiritual mentor following Partition, Shahidullah spent the last thirty years of his life in Karachi immersed in Sufi practice, guiding his own corps of disciples.   Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani served in the British Indian Army in Malaysia during the Second World War, returning to Pakistan to work as a civil servant before committing himself to a life of scholarship and piety.  Collectively, the experiences of these modern Chishti-Sabiri shaykhs provided them with a unique perspective on Pakistani Sufism and its relation to colonial and post-colonial structures of authority, knowledge and power.   Educated (not, as their ulama counterparts, in traditional madrasas, but rather in Western-style universities), multi-lingual, urban and mobile, these spiritual exemplars moved fluidly in multiple cultural complexes and epistemological universes.  Acquainted (and profoundly disillusioned) by direct engagement with the instruments and ideology of the colonial and post-colonial State, they appropriated and critiqued the language of science, nationalism and secularization while revalorizing the centrality of Sufi history, thought and practice as the bedrock of an imagined Pakistani religious and national identity.  In what follows, I survey the enduring legacy of these three modern Sufi masters with selections from their voluminous writings along with ethnographic interviews from numerous contemporary disciples (murids) in order to assess how Chishti Sabiri Sufism has adapted to the challenges of life in today’s Pakistan. 

II.  IMAGINING AND INSCRIBING PAKISTANI SUFISM

Deviating from the precedent of their pre-modern predecessors who largely avoided urban spaces and networks of royal patronage in favor of a life of spiritual quietism and withdrawal in rural locales, Muhammad Dhawqi Shah, Shahidullah Faridi and Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani each entered the contested public sphere to stake their own claims to Islamic authority and authenticity.  Though it is clear that their principal loyalties, commitments and identities remained centered on their duties as teaching shaykhs, they also recognized the need to defend the Chishti Sabiri tradition in public discursive forums.  Evoking the model of political engagement established by his nineteenth century predecessors Hajji Imdadullah Muhajir Makki (1818-1899) and Rashid Ahmed Gangohi (1829-1905), Muhammad Dhawqi Shah drew on his experiences and expertise as a journalist to inscribe a new vision of Chishti Sabiri identity through a diverse range of publications.[7]  The Shaykh went even further in his political activism.  Attending the first meeting of the Muslim League in Karachi in 1907, he formally joined the organization in 1940 and went on to serve as vice-president for the district of Ajmer.  A confidant of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Dhawqi Shah wrote a series of letters to Pakistan’s future leader, a lengthy and lively correspondence which has recently been published by the silsila in a book entitled, Letters of a Sufi Saint to Jinnah.[8]  Among contemporary Chishti Sabiri disciples, the Shaykh is remembered for both his high spiritual status and political clout as an early Pakistani nationalist.  In Tarbiat al-Ushaq, a compilation of Dhawqi Shah’s discourses (malfuzat) compiled by his two khalifas, Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani writes:

People generally know that Quaid-e Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the founder of Pakistan, but it was all due to the spiritual leadership of Hazrat Shah Sahab, being inwardly the real founder of Pakistan.  This is a fact, that from ancient times the saints of the Chishtiyya silsila have always had an upper spiritual hand in the conquest of Hindustan...That is why Hazrat would often say, ‘Hindustan is the inheritance of the Chishtis’.[9]

In this reified, triumphalist imagining of a sacralized Indo-Muslim past, the Chishti Sabiri historigraphical project deviates radically from that of that of its Islamist counterparts.  Here, Sufi saints—and, in particular, Chishti Sabiri spiritual masters—are not portrayed as navel gazing, peripheral, marginalized mystics.  Rather, they are placed firmly at the forefront of both religious and political life, guiding and sanctifying the teleological evolution of Indo-Muslim culture from the Delhi Sultanate through the birth, under the spiritual direction of Muhammad Dhawqi Shah himself, of the Land of the Pure (Pakistan). 

According to the silsila’s contemporary biographers, the Chishti Sabiri prerogative for the spiritual and political guidance and protection of the Subcontinent continues unabated in the wake of Partition.  In Maqam-e Ganj Shakkar, Wahid Bakhsh champions the legitimacy of Shahidullah’s inheritance:  “After Hazrat Mawlana Dhawqi Shah, the political charge of India was handed over to his foremost khalifa, Hazrat Shah Shahidullah Faridi.  The apparent and hidden spiritual political duties that were carried out by him are well know to those with spiritual insight.” [10]  Though he wrote comparatively less than his mentor, Shahidullah Faridi also published numerous tracts, principally manuals on Sufi history and ritual practice.  And while he was not as publicly active or vocal about politics as his predecessor, the Shaykh remained deeply concerned with Pakistan’s development, particularly after the emergence of General Zia al-Haqq and his opportunistic embrace of a narrow, Arab-centric Islamism.[11]  In a remarkable speech delivered to his murids on February 3, 1977, Shahidullah directly entered the political fray, warning his followers of imminent political dangers for Pakistan [General Zia took over political power in a military coup just five months later, in July 1977] and advising them to lend their direct support to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.  In a letter addressed to his followers, Shahidullah asserts that his usual reluctance to engage in public discussion of political matters has been trumped by a vivid dream of the Prophet Muhammad:

On Tuesday night, the 18^th of Safar (February 8^th, 1977) I had a vivid dream in which the Lord of the Two Worlds, the noble Prophet of Allah (May Allah bless and keep him) came to this house in kingly garb and with royal dignity and spoke to me with great emphasis.  He referred to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and his party and said, ‘You must support our candidate.’  (Hamare candidate ki himayat karo)  He said this three or more times.  The thought crossed my mind that prayer alone was a way to support him.  So with this thought in mind I asked, ‘What is the best method of supporting him?’  He answered the thought which was in my heart with ever greater emphasis and some admonishment.  ‘No, you must support him!’  This meant that simply praying was not enough, but open support is necessary.  In fact, the whole purpose of the dream or vision appeared to be this, for I had made the intention during the day that I would only pray and not converse with people on this subject.  Since this is a command, the whole of the silsila must enter into it.  So please act upon it and inform all our people to do so.[12]

For Chishti Sabiri practitioners, Shahidullah’s dream of the Prophet offers irrefutable evidence of the righteousness of their cause—a Divinely sanctioned affirmation of the imperative for a socially engaged Pakistani Sufism.

Within the contemporary Chishti Sabiri order, however, it was Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani who clearly inherited the literary mantle and political legacy from his shaykh, Muhammad Dhawqi Shah.  Encompassing a massive collection of letters to his disciples, numerous translations of pre-modern Persian biographical texts, treatises on ritual practice, and polemical pieces defending the Chishti Sabiri tradition from its detractors, Orientalists and Islamists alike, Wahid Bakhsh produced a voluminous corpus of texts, wide ranging in scope and scale, and written in both Urdu and English. [13]  While a survey of this vast literary legacy is well beyond the scope of this paper, in the following pages I analyze one particular text, written late in Wahid Bakhsh’s life, that most lucidly encapsulates the contemporary Chishti Sabiri silsila’s imaginings of Pakistan and the roots of its national and religious identity:  Pakistan ki Azim ush-Shan Difai Quwwat or The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan.[14]

The Immense Power Potential of Pakistan is a weighty book, more than 550 pages in length in both its Urdu and English manifestations—a scale equaled by its scope which ranges from a comprehensive analysis of early Islamic military history to a survey of the legacy of Indo-Muslim culture, culminating in a frank assessment of Pakistan’s position (and, as the title suggests, “power potential”) in the contemporary global order.  It is a unique and in many ways atypical work in a market glutted with religious literature, much of it ideological and highly polemical.  Even for Wahid Bakhsh, whose literary pursuits embraced multiple genres in diverse registers, this work stands out.  In this text, the Shaykh employs a scholarly narrative voice to place Pakistan in its historical and geo-political context, but with a subtle, subversive twist that places Sufism at the very center of both Islamic thought and practice and Pakistani national identity and ideology.  For Wahid Bakhsh, Pakistan is rightfully both an Islamic and Sufi republic!

The Shaykh’s political magnum opus is firmly grounded in historical context.  In my mind, much of the book’s assumptions and assertions and all of its polemics are understood only against the backdrop of late Cold War South Asian geo-politics.  The book was written at a time of profound upheaval and uncertainty for Pakistan:  internally, the military dictatorship of Zia al-Haq and the resulting debates over Islamic orthodoxy and its relationship to the state and, externally, the de-stabilizing proxy war in Afghanistan fought by US-sponsored mujahidin groups against the Soviets.  Amid these turbulent times, Wahid Bakhsh appeals to a sacralized, reified Islamic history in order to make sense of Pakistan’s past and future.  In a striking reversal of Samuel Huntington’s spurious thesis, The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan rests on a pervading sense of the “Clash of Civilizations”—in this case an essentialized, homogenized “West”—meaning, for the author, Europe, America and, by extension, its satellite state, Israel—perpetuating the colonial legacy in an attempt to subvert and control the Muslim world, both culturally and politically.   In Wahid Bakhsh’s words: 

Now that the valiant people of Asia and Africa have expelled the colonialists, they are trying to stage a comeback by weakening these countries from within.  They are applying direct as well as indirect strategies, which include naked aggression, subversion, a cultural offensive, an economic aid offensive, a technical aid offensive and the so-called ‘peace’ offensives.  The Muslims must wake up to assess and respond to these seemingly innocuous but otherwise more dangerous dimensions of threats.[15] 

Echoing the polemical attacks of numerous Islamists (from al-Afghani to Mawdudi), the Shaykh castigates the West for its hypocrisy, cruelty, greed and violence.  Obsessed with its endless quest for power, money and conquest, it is now morally bankrupt.  Though technologically advanced, Wahid Bakhsh asserts, it has sacrificed religion in the name of science, secularism and worldly gain. and it is this fatal choice, he maintains, that will be the West’s undoing:  

They accepted what related to the physical sciences and what contributed towards material progress, but rejected what belonged to the purification of self, spiritual progress and success in the life Hereafter.  Consequently, their one sided development has created a culture which is unstable, imbalanced and moving on a single track.  Since they rebelled against their religion, they have been deprived of the treasures of religious knowledge.  They have jumped from one extreme to the other, as they have run away from absolute renunciation and walked into the trap of absolute materialism.  They have rejected absolute superstition but adopted absolute secularism.  Their absolute hatred for women has been replaced by absolute sexual frivolity.  They have freed themselves from religion, but got into a race for material progress and national superiority.  In their reckless pursuit of power they have stumbled, only to discover that the weapons of mass destruction, which they claim as their proud inventions, are there to destroy the entire edifice of their civilization.[16] 

As Partha Chatterjee’s work illustrates, this rhetorical move parallels the ideological formations of early Indian Nationalism, appropriating the nation-state while turning Orientalist essentialisms on their head to valorize a spiritualized “East” against a Godless “West”.[17]  As a response to the West’s cultural and political challenge, Wahid Bakhsh calls upon Muslims to reclaim and resurrect their own spiritual heritage in order to attack the neo-colonialists where they are most vulnerable and stake their own claim to modernity.  In his words:

The miraculous power of Islamic spirituality is so strong that we, the Muslims, are not required to pick up swords to conquer the spiritual wastelands of the West.  Since every heart by nature years for Divine love and Divine bounty, any heart with a spiritual vacuum is absolutely defenseless against the expanding spiritual torrent of Islam.  The West is helpless and exposed to the ingress of the Truth.  The process of Islamic conquests in spiritually starved humanity is therefore an eternal and continuous process.[18]

For this modern Sufi master, a return to the lost Golden Age of Islam presupposes a revitalization of the roots of Islamic orthodoxy:  for him, the immutable blueprint enshrined in the Qur’an, sunna and, most significantly, Sufi thought and practice.  Throughout the book, Wahid Bakhsh continuously evokes numerous Sufi exemplars, among them Imam Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Junaid Baghdadi, Jalal ud-Din Rumi, Bayazid Bistami, Sayyid Ali Hujweri and, as befits a Chishti Sabiri shaykh, the early luminaries of the Chishti silsila:  Khwaja Muin du-Din Chishti and Baba Farid ud-Din Ganj Shakkar.  In Wahid Bakhsh’s eyes, these saints embody the virtues of the Prophet himself:  piety, self-sacrifice, sincerity, charity, humility and a commitment to social justice.  Their lives and legacies, the Shaykh asserts, offer a moral compass for Muslims and disenchanted Westerners alike.  In his words, “We, the Muslims, must realize that the Westerners themselves are alienated against the Western civilization.  They have very high hopes and high expectations from Islam.  The new manifestation of religion which I have pointed to is the ever-increasing demand of the West for Sufism.  It is our first and foremost duty to offer Sufism to the West.  And in this lies the secret of our success.” [19]  The West, Wahid Bakhsh maintains, is ready for a fall, and it is Sufism—the heart of Islam and the essence of orthodoxy—that stands ready to fill the “spiritual vacuum.”[20]

            The bulk of The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan centers on a comprehensive (and profoundly ideological) review of Islamic military and cultural history.  From the outset of his narrative, Wahid Bakhsh challenges his fellow Muslims to revive the glory of the umma by embracing the lessons of the past—a neglect of Islam’s traditions, he asserts, has resulted in doubt, weakness and civilizational drift.  In his words:

One of the causes of Muslim decline is their indifference to and detachment from their glorious history.  This book therefore brings to focus the feats of valor, operational brilliance and tactical excellence of the great captains of Islam.  It also throws light on the contributions of our forefathers to science, technology, artistry, social sciences and cultural fields.  The aim is to pull our Westernized and defeated minds out of their inferiority complex so that they realize that the are sparkling stars of the glorious galaxy of the Muslim civilization and culture.[21] 

Beginning—as any narrative of Islamic sacred history must—with the early community of believers surrounding the Prophet Muhammad, Wahid Bakhsh explores the subsequent march of Islamic conquest and cultural florescence, from the Hijra to Medina and the military conquests of Persia, Byzantium and Spain, to the Crusades, the fall of the Ottoman Empire and resistance to colonial regimes.  The Shaykh gives particular attention to Muslim incursions into the Subcontinent and the subsequent rise of a unique Indo-Islamic civilization.  Throughout his analysis, Wahid Bakhsh lauds the self-confidence, faith, bravery and bravado of the pre-modern Muslims. 

In this context, he also offers a spirited defense of the honor and necessity (the orthodoxy!) of jihad— a simultaneous “struggle” against both the lower self (the Greater Jihad or Jihad-e Akbar) and the enemies of Islam (the Lesser Jihad or Jihad-e Asghar).  Muslims, Wahid Bakhsh argues, are compelled by their faith to fight against oppression, injustice and tyranny, and he invokes the Qur’an (An-Nissa, Verses 74-76) to “urge the Muslims to fight for Truth and Justice, and wage Jihad for human rights.”[22]  Detailing the rules of military engagement, the Shaykh asserts that a just war demands discipline, moderation, mercy, and firm limits of conduct;  torture, mutilation, the killing of non-combatants, for example, are strictly forbidden.[23]  Aware of the Western polemic against jihad, Wahid Bakhsh remains unapologetic, taking the West to task for its hypocrisy and double standards: 

Some Western thinkers criticize Jihad.  Their criticism is not understandable as they themselves have acquired greater wealth and power by subjugating weaker peoples, conquering foreign territories and plundering others’ treasuries.  Their hands are stained with the blood of many innocent and weaker nations.  If enhancement of national superiority and imperialism through exploitation of weaker nations is considered legitimate by them, how do they criticize Jihad, the objectives of which are to extirpate falsehood, uphold Truth, uproot oppression, eliminate infidelity (kufr) and associationism (shirk), and wipe out all kinds of malpractices?[24] 

The rapid spread and fruition of Islamicate civilization affirms the fruits of just struggle—a paradigm Wahid Bakhsh urges modern Muslims to emulate in order to reclaim their own Divine destiny. 

Wahid Bakhsh’s historiographical imaginings convey a triumphalist and teleological portrait of Islamic sacred history, culminating in an attempt to re-imagine the origins of Pakistan as foreshadowed in a Divinely sanctioned, sacralized past.  In his words:

The creation of Pakistan is therefore not a fortuitous happening, or the consequence of an accident of history.  It is rather a Divine reward for the centuries of sacrifices, toiling and tribulations of the Mujahidin of Islam.  Those visionary leaders had sensed that the decline of the Ottoman and Mughal empires would spell disaster for the Muslims and their future would be absolutely dark.  The Muslims had to be rescued, and an ideological state like Pakistan was a dire necessity of the time and the right answer to the prayers of the millions of oppressed human beings in general, and the Muslims in particular.[25] 

A patriotic nationalist, Wahid Bakhsh asserts that contemporary Pakistan carries the mantle of the “first Pakistan”, the Muslim state formed by the Prophet Muhammad and the early community of believers in Medina.[26]  In his eyes, Pakistan is rightfully an ideological state, modern but not modernist, Islamic but not Islamist.  Written forty years after Partition, however, Wahid Bakhsh’s discourse is permeated by a sense of moral outrage, indignation and loss.  In his view, Pakistan, mired in poverty, nepotism, corruption and a profound crisis of identity, has betrayed its auspicious beginnings and failed miserably in its mission to revive the spirit and values of the Prophet’s Medina:

[The Muslims of South Asia], their dream was Pakistan—a Muslim state based on the ideology of Islam and a state founded on the edifice of Nizam-e Musafa [the state system of the Prophet in Medina], and a state which would be the precursor of Islamic renaissance.  By the grace of Almighty Allah, the sacrifices, toiling and efforts of the Muslims led to the creation off Pakistan.  A part of the dream had come true:  we had a geographic entity called Pakistan, and we had to develop it into a citadel of Islam.  But alas, we lost our way!  We forgot the lofty ideals and objectives for which Pakistan was created.  We changed our direction and we drifted away from our course—the course that would have led us to Mecca Muazzamah and Madina Munawwarah.  We are now heading towards temples, churches and abodes of idolatrous practices.  We had sought to make Pakistan a fortress of Islam.  But we have turned it into the center of greed, corruption, luxury, materialistic values and internal discord.[27] 

This conception of Pakistan as an Islamic State, the constant evocation of the paradigm of Mecca and Medina, and the pervading sense of social and moral decay mirrors the arguments and rhetorical style of numerous Islamist ideologues.  Wahid Bakhsh’s portrait, however, is distinguished by his assertion that Sufi history, thought and practice is at the heart of Islamic (and, by extension, Pakistani) identity.

Incensed by Pakistan’s crisis of identity, Wahid Bakhsh calls for widespread societal revival and reform to combat this endemic cultural rot.   In the Shaykh’s assessment, individual moral reform is the vital precursor to the revitalization of social and political institutions, and he attacks those who call for top-down structural changes in the absence of a prevailing change in the way people think and act: 

Some of our impatient politicians, who include some religious scholars as well, claim that they can reform the society only after coming to power.  And that too despite the prerequisites spelled out by the tradition of the Prophet (Peace be upon him).  Unless the masses are reformed, pious and virtuous individuals will not come to power...In order to bring pious individuals to power, we need to commence our work at the grass roots level.  Piety will not trickle down from top to bottom.  Reconstruction of any nation is possible only if scholars, educationalists, reformers and thinkers reform the masses by interacting with them.  There is a need to establish religious schools, arrange talks for the common men, write articles in newspapers, magazines and journals, write books and help in the control and eradication of crime from society.  Once the society is reformed, virtuous people will emerge in accordance with the laws of nature.[28]

Islamic values and practice, Wahid Bakhsh asserts, can not simply be codified, systematized and enforced, they must be inculcated, internalized, embodied and enacted.   Once again, the Shaykh champions the Golden Age of the early community surrounding the Prophet as the eternal, universal paradigm—a ready made blueprint, he asserts, through which national policy and public institutions can emerge directly from piety and practice. 

            Calling for an educated, pious elite to lead the Pakistani masses back to their Islamic roots, Wahid Bakhsh asserts that the restoration of Pakistan’s foundations is not solely a spiritual battle, but one that must be fought simultaneously on multiple worldly fronts.  Though frequently short on details, the Shaykh offers a broad palate of prescriptions designed to purge Pakistan of its colonial vestiges.   He calls for legal reforms to institutionalize and enforce sharia [29]; educational reforms to promote science and technology while solidifying “religious literacy”[30]; economic reforms to promote growth and stability while eliminating interest (riba) and the vicious cycle of the debt trap laid by international monetary institutions[31]; sweeping military reforms to secure internal social stability and promote a unified front of Islamic nations to resist Euro-American, Israeli and Indian “expansionism and hegemony”[32]; and political reforms to institutionalize an “Islamic democracy” under the leadership of an educated, pious elite of select “intellectuals, scholars, thinkers and social reformers.”[33] 

None of these structural realignments will be possible, Wahid Bakhsh asserts, if Pakistan fails to overcome the forces of internal dissolution and division.  Regionalism and local ethnic identity politics, for example, threaten nation unity, undermine political institutions and weaken the boundaries of defense.  In the Shaykh’s words:

We need to bury our political, religious and ethnic differences and face the enemies of Islam like a solid wall...Nationalist parties are raising slogans of ‘Pashtunistan’, ‘Azad Balochistan’, and ‘Sindhu Desh.’  But selfish motives, mutual rivalries and jealousy blind them.  They do not realize that four smaller countries, which they wish to create, will be swallowed by India overnight.  Their dreams of independence will be shattered and their personal ambitions ruined. When the necks are chopped off, who will wear garlands?  And what use is the crown when the heads have rolled?[34] 

An even greater danger to Pakistan’s integrity and the growth of global Islamic networks, Wahid Bakhsh argues, is the specter of religious sectarianism.  Drawing on a well-known Hadith, he calls for Muslim unity, maintaining that divisions within the umma are a blessing, promoting healthy debate and competition which deepens faith and solidifies piety.  The proliferation of sectarian groups—Wahahbi, Deobandi, Alh-e Hadith, Barelwi and Shia alike—waging a war with words and guns against their fellow Muslims threatens Pakistan’s very survival.  Instead of using religion for political gain, the Pakistani state should endeavor to promote similarities rather than exacerbate differences.  In Wahid Bakhsh’s words:

These differences among Sunnis, Shias, Barelwis, Deobandis, Muqallids and non-Muqallids are of a peripheral nature.  They have nothing to do with the core issues of Islam on which, by the grace of Allah, the entire Ummah has consensus...We must not worry about the sectarian differences while enforcing Islam in the country.  Our constitution should permit all sects to practice religion the way they want.  The Government should enforce only those clauses on which all the sects have consensus, such as prohibition of interest, laws of inheritance, prohibition of drinking, adultery, corruption and criminal procedures.  Peripheral or controversial issues like visits to the shrines, sama [listening to music], ta’ziya [Shia processions during Muharram], and milad [public celebration’s of the Prophet’s birthday] should be left to the individual sects.[35] 

In Wahid Bakhsh’s optimistic assessment, once its own house is in order Pakistan can realize its full potential as a central player in the global geo-political order.  Here he characterizes Pakistan as a key buffer state for Middle Eastern and Asian countries alike, a counter-weight to the West’s hegemonic designs.   In a spirited call to arms, he challenges his fellow Pakistanis and Muslims to work together to resist the perpetuation of global neo-colonialism:

Colonization of the entire under-developed world by the West has a lesson for all the Muslims and non-Muslims.  Strong Islamic Empires did and can even now help to protect the rest of humanity from the ravages of the West...Although colonialism has ended and the physical size of European empires has shrunk to their native lands, they continue to dominate the international politico-economic sphere and exploit the weak nations on the basis of their industrial power, economic prosperity and military muscle...India and other Asian countries must therefore strengthen Pakistan rather than weaken it.  The politicians and religious clergy of Pakistan must understand the role of Pakistan in the global power structure.  They must overcome mutual rivalries and get united to fight the enemies of Islam.  They must remember that any weakness in Asia will promote Western hegemony.[36] 

For Wahid Bakhsh, this ultimately is Pakistan’s true calling:  to assume the vanguard of a Divinely sanctioned global Islamic renaissance and resurgence.[37]  In his reified (and unwaveringly optimistic) portrait of Islamic sacred history, nothing less will do if Pakistan is to live up to its name (“The Land of the Pure”) and rightful legacy (the heir to the “first Pakistan”—the Prophet’s Medina).

            In The Magnificent Power Potential of Pakistan, as elsewhere in the vast Chishti Sabiri literary corpus, Shaykh Wahid Bakhsh  Rabbani valorizes Chishti Sabiri identity as a defense against the tradition’s critics and an antidote for what he perceived as widespread societal malaise.  Like his Islamist counterparts, Wahid Bakhsh recognizes and resists the parameters of modernity—what Bassam Tibi has called the simultaneous development of “structural globalization” and “cultural fragmentation.”[38]  While the Shaykh embraces the instruments of modernity—science, technology, mass media—he rejects its pervasive values, its ideology; to borrow a phrase from Bruce Lawrence, his worldview is “modern but not modernist.”[39]  In the twilight of the Cold War, Wahid Bakhsh views the world through polarized, essentialized lenses, bifurcating the globe into two predominant civilizational fracture zones:  a mechanized, secularized, materialistic, Godless “West” and a traditional, communal, spiritualized Muslim “East.”  Looking back to a reified Golden Age, he calls for a return to the fundamental values and foundational institutions of the earliest Islamic community.  In effect, Wahid Bakhsh champions a revitalization of orthodoxy—and here an ‘orthodoxy’ with Sufism as its foundation—as a bulwark against the profound identity crisis that plagues contemporary Muslims dominated culturally, economically and politically by an aggressive, expansionist West.  In his mind, it is the destiny of the Muslims of Pakistan to lead this global resurgence, reviving and then modernizing the Islamic traditions of military, cultural and political independence, vitality and strength in order to stake their rightful claim in the emerging new world order.  For Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani—echoing the ideology of his spiritual predecessors, Muhammad Dhawqi Shah and Shahidullah Faridi—the resolution to Islam’s conflict with modernity is to be found in a reconstructed Pakistani cultural and national identity that is simultaneously Muslim, modern and mystic. 

[1] For a broad discussion of the contemporary debates over Islamic authority and authenticity, see Eickelman and Piscatori (especially Chapter One) and Lee.  On the history of the polemical debates surrounding Sufi thought and practice, see DeJong and Radtke, Ernst (1997), and Sirriyeh.

[2] The studies of South Asian Sufism vary widely in focus and methodology, scope and scale.  For an exploration of the history and ritual practices centered on Sufi shrines, see Currie and Eaton, as well as the edited volumes by Troll and Werbner.  For studies of the construction and appropriation of Sufism in colonial politics, see especially Ansari and Gilmartin.  Studies of Sufism’s role in the Islamic ideology of the Pakistani state are found in Ernst (1997), Ewing (1997) and Nasr.  For an analysis of South Asian Sufism as a spiritual discipline, see Buehler, Ernst and Lawrence, Liebeskind, Pinto and Schimmel.

[3] Mitchell, “Introduction.”  In this context, see also Appadurai, Asad (1986, 1999) and Van der Veer.

[3] For the history of the Chishti Sabiri silsila see Ernst and Lawrence, Nizami and Rizvi

[5] A detailed history of the Deoband madrasa is found in the monograph by Metcalf (1982).  See also Malik.  For insights into the role of the Deoband madrasa in the rise of the Taliban, see the recent article by Dugger.

[6] Shahidullah Faridi, born John Gilbert Lennard in London in 1915, was the son of one of the largest paper manufacturers in Great Britain.  After reading al-Hujwiri’s Kashf al-Mahjub, he converted to Islam in 1936 at the hands of a Bengali imam in an East End mosque.  His elder brother, Faruq Ahmed (born John William Lennard in1913 ) died in Lahore in 1945 and is buried in the compound of al-Hujwiri ‘s shrine (Data Ganj Bakhsh).  This biographical information comes from a series of interviews in Karachi, September 1-2, 2001.

[7] While Metcalf (1982) discusses the contributions of these key figures, she glosses the Chishti Sabiri affiliations and identity of the founders of the Deoband madrasa.  For Dhawqi Shah, however, these connections were vital, and throughout Tarbiat al-Ushaq he constantly evokes the figures of both Hajji Imdadullah and Rashid Ahmed Gangohi, claiming to have met the former during Hajj as a young boy and to have received the khilafat from the latter through a series of dreams.  See Tarbiat al-Ushaq, 480, 494.

[8] This text contains a series of letters between Dhawqi Shah and Jinnah written between 1937 and 1947.

[9] Tarbiyat al-‘Ushshaq, 76-77.  For a more detailed explication of this teleological interpretation of sacred history which champions a vital role of Chishti Sabiri saints in the development of Indo-Muslim religious and political culture, see also Wahid Bakhsh Rabbani’s introductory chapter in Maqam-e Ganj Shakkar, 24-27.  For a detailed analysis of the Chishti malfuzat genre, see Ernst (1992) and Lawrence (1978).

[10] Maqam-e Ganj Shakkar, 26

[11] For a detailed examination in the evolving role of Islamic ideology in the construction of Pakistani national identity and ideology, see Jawed and Nasr.

[12] This letter was originally circulated among Chishti Sabiri disciples, and has since been printed in a pamphlet entitled, “Security of Muslims”.  The text, however, has never been printed for public distribution.

[13] A large collection of Wahid Bakhsh’s personal letters to and from murids is preserved in the small library housed at his growing tomb complex in Allahabad, a small town in the southern Punjab. 

[14] Written in 1986, and first published in Urdu, this book was re-published in 2000 in an English translation with commentary compiled by a disciple of Wahid Bakhsh’s, Brigadier Muhammad Asghar.  Interestingly, there are plans to incorporate this text into the syllabus of Pakistani military academies.

14Immense Power Potential, 479-80.  Much of the language and many of the arguments posited by Wahid Bakhsh in this book echo the polemical writings of earlier Islamist ideologues like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897)—though here with a distinctly Sufi gloss.  See Esposito and Keddie.

[16]Immense Power Potential, 475.

[17] Chatterjee, 49.  On the construction of national identities via inscription and mass media, see Anderson.

[18] Immense Power Potential, 501.  See also 528.  

[19] ibid., 527.

[20] ibid., 24.

[21] ibid., 3-4.

[22] ibid., 51.   This rhetorical strategy—evoking the Qur’an in defense of a jihad for ‘truth, justice and human rights’--offers a clear example of Wahid Bakhsh’s eclectic (and thoroughly modern) ideology and idioms.

[23] ibid., 5-76. 

[24] ibid., 36.  See also 44, 232.

[25] ibid., 15.

[26] ibid., 14; 530. 

[27]ibid., 383. 

[28] ibid., 431.

[29] ibid., 449.

30ibid., 451, 467.

[31] ibid., 462

[32] ibid., 566-63.

[33] ibid., 437-41.  

[34] ibid., 199.

[35] ibid., 428-29.

[36] ibid., 248-49.

37 ibid., 496.   

[38] Tibi, 5-6.

39 Lawrence (1989), 17.  In Lawrence’s assessment, Islamists appropriate the instruments of modernity (internet, mass media) while rejecting its ideology (in particular, the processes of secularization).