Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [161]
Data Ganj Baksh (original name Abul Hassan Ali Hajvery) was an eleventh-century Sufi preacher from Ghazni in Afghanistan who played a key part in converting people in northern Punjab to Islam. His shrine became famous for miracles, and for many centuries he has been the most beloved of Lahore’s many saints. ‘He is our very own link with God,’ I was told by Mukhtar, a worshipper at the shrine from Mianwali in western Punjab near the border with the NWFP.
However, the shrine now looks much less like an ancient inner-city shrine than it did when I first visited it in the 1980s. Then, like most old shrines, it was surrounded by houses, and you approached its gate through a narrow crowded lane. The buildings of the mosque dated back to Mughal times and were far too small for all the worshippers from Lahore’s immensely expanded population. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, therefore, when Nawaz Sharif was chief minister of Punjab, he rebuilt the shrine at immense cost, including the creation of a strikingly modernist mosque by a Turkish architect, an underground parking lot, and a huge forecourt on the edge of a main road, to create which several streets of houses had to be bought up and demolished.
This says something very interesting about overlapping Punjabi identities and the relationship between religion and politics. Like many traditional Punjabi commercial families, the Sharifs are by origin Kashmiris who moved to Punjab centuries ago. In 1947, they migrated from east Punjab to Lahore, where Nawaz Sharif was born in 1949. Partly from older family tradition, and partly perhaps because of the impact of migration, Nawaz Sharif’s father joined the Ahl-e-Hadith, a religious tradition with strong Wahabi leanings. This is an affiliation which later strengthened, and was strengthened by, Sharif ties to Saudi Arabia, where Nawaz Sharif’s father went into business after Z. A. Bhutto nationalized his industries in the 1970s, and where Nawaz took refuge after being overthrown by Musharraf. Nawaz Sharif therefore has been widely suspected of sympathies with radical Islamist theology.
However – presumably in order to consolidate their position in their new home, Lahore – Nawaz Sharif’s family married him to a girl from a leading Kashmiri family of Lahore’s Old City. In a reflection of this Old City culture, Kulsum Sharif is the niece of Bohlu Pehlewan, an Indian wrestling champion before partition. Like most of the old Kashmiri families of Lahore, her family are by tradition Barelvi Sunnis, and followers of Lahore’s saints and especially of Data Ganj Baksh. In a sign of the way that allegiance to the saints often cuts across sectarian divides, she named their two sons Hassan and Hussain – the two greatest names of the Shia tradition.
It may be assumed, therefore, that Mrs Sharif and her family had some impact on Nawaz Sharif’s decision to spend a fortune (admittedly of state money) rebuilding the shrine of Data Ganj Baksh. A political calculation was also no doubt involved – the desire to increase Muslim League support among the saint’s followers in Lahore and elsewhere. In an amusing example of jumping on the bandwagon (or possibly Mr Sharif trying to kill two birds with one stone), followers of another, modern Lahori Sufi saint (mentioned in Chapter 4), Hafiz Iqbal, claimed that their saint was actually responsible because he appeared to Mr Sharif in a dream and told him to help his brother Data Ganj Baksh.
Whether this story was initiated by Hafiz Iqbal’s followers in order to appeal to the Sharifs, or the Sharifs in order to appeal to Hafiz Iqbal’s followers, I cannot say (nor of course would I wish for one moment to discount the idea that saints could in principle appear to Mr Sharif). The point however is that religion