Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [78]
Taleban attacks on shrines are motivated partly by religious hostility. The Wahabis have been bitterly opposed to shrines since their very beginnings in the eighteenth century, and first leapt to international notoriety when they captured Mecca and Medina and destroyed the shrines and tombs there, not sparing even that of the Prophet himself. Particular hatred between Wahabis and Shia dates back to the Wahabis’ sack of the great Shia shrines of Karbala, Iraq, in 1802. In Saudi Arabia today, shrines continue to be banned and Sufi orders persecuted.
Taleban hostility to the shrines also stems from the role played by these families in the local elites, which means that the Taleban have to attack and destroy them in order to seize local power. However, as of 2010, the evidence suggests that far from gaining wider support, these attacks have in fact alienated large numbers of people who were initially attracted by the Pakistani Taleban’s support for the jihad in Afghanistan, advocacy of the Shariah and actions against local criminals. As I was told by people I interviewed on the street in Peshawar in the summer of 2009, among Pathans this was especially true of the Taleban bomb attack on 5 March 2009 which damaged the Peshawar shrine of the Pathan saint Pir Rahman Baba (Abdur Rahman Mohmand, 1653 – 1711 CE), who like a number of Sufi saints is revered not only for his spiritual power but as a poet of the local vernacular language and has been called the ‘Pashto nightingale’. Data Ganj Baksh too is beloved by Punjabis and indeed by Muslims all over South Asia.
The attacks on these shrines was therefore a mistaken strategy, which some other Taleban were clever enough to avoid. Thus at the shrine of Pir Haji Sahib Taurangyi in the Mohmand Tribal Agency (some of whose descendants will be described in a later chapter), the local Taleban were careful not to attack the shrine but to co-opt it, stressing that the saint had been a leader of jihad against the British Raj just as the Taleban were fighting the British and Americans invaders and oppressors in Afghanistan, and their ‘slaves’ in the Pakistani government.
SAINTLY POLITICIANS
In attacking the saints, the Islamist extremists – though they refuse to recognize this themselves – are striking at the very roots of Islam in South Asia. One might say that the beginnings of South Asian Islam were the Book and the Saint. In principle the Saint was the bearer of the Book, but in practice it often did not work out quite like that. The Book is of course the Koran, and to a lesser extent the hadiths, or traditional statements and judgments of the Prophet and stories concerning him, recorded (or invented) and more or less codified by early generations of Muslim scholars.
The Koran is the absolute, unquestionable foundation of Islam, and since Islam’s earliest years every movement seeking to reform Islam from within has been ‘scripturalist’, or ‘fundamentalist’ in the sense of emphasizing a return to the pure spirit of the Koran, just as Christian fundamentalists (for whom the term was coined in the nineteenth century, by the way), have sought to do in the case of the Bible.
The saints were the Muslim preacher-missionaries, mostly from the tradition loosely called ‘Sufi’ (a very complex and often misleading term). In South Asia, the saints are known by the Arab term shaikh, and they and their descendants by the Persian one pir (old man). As much as the great Muslim conquering dynasties, the saints actually spread Islam to many of the ordinary people of South Asia, just as, thousands of miles away,