Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [79]
In the process, they, their shrines and their cults took on many local Hindu features, which made them beloved of the local population, but intensely suspect to fundamentalists. The latter have also long accused the cult of the saints of involving shirk, or the worship of figures other than the one God – perhaps the worst sin in the entire Islamic theological canon. Nonetheless, most of the population, especially in the countryside, came to see the saints as embodying the only Islam they knew. Moreover, the saints were usually from families claiming to be descendants of the Prophet (Sayyids), and in some cases had themselves come directly from the Arab world. This gave them immense prestige as bearers of Islam from its source, which continues to this day.
The local and decidedly non-Koranic aspects of the saints’ cults were due not only to the influence of the surrounding Hindu world. They have also reflected what seems to be a feature of almost every human society at one time or another, namely a desire for accessible sacred intermediaries between the human individual and his or her supreme, unknowable God. The Arabic phrase usually translated into English as ‘saint’ literally means ‘friend of God’. In the words of an early twentieth-century British officer:
The general idea of our riverain folk [the traditional settled rural Muslim population of Punjab, which had to live near the rivers to draw water for irrigation] seems to be that the Deity is a busy person, and that his hall of audience is of limited capacity. Only a certain proportion of mankind can hope to attain to the presence of God; but when certain individuals have got there, they may have opportunities of representing the wishes and desires of other members of the human race. Thus, all human beings require an intervener between them and God.3
The legends of the early saints contain many stories of their battles with Hindu priests and kings, in which their superior powers prevail, the priests are routed and the kings defeated in battle or converted. Most of what is now Pakistan was converted to Islam only very slowly, however, and long after it was conquered by Muslim dynasties.
In the words of the great scholar of South Asian Islam, Francis Robinson:
The holy men were ... the pioneers and frontiersmen of the Muslim world, men who from the thirteenth century played the crucial role in drawing new peoples, pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, Shamanists, into an Islamic cultural milieu. According to tradition, nine saints introduced Islam to Java; wandering holy men, we are told, first brought Islam to West Africa. What the holy men did, it appears, was to find points of contact and social roles within the host community. They shared their knowledge of religious experience with men of other spiritual traditions. They helped propitiate the supernatural forces which hemmed in and always seemed to threaten the lives of common folk. They interpreted dreams, brought rain, healed the sick and made the barren fertile. They mediated between rulers and ruled, natives and newcomers, weak and strong. 4
Stories of miracles grew up, first around the saints and then around their tombs and, as in the Christian world of the Middle Ages, the tombs became shrines (khanqahs) and places of pilgrimage, where people hoped to benefit from access to the saint’s baraka (barkat), or spiritual power. The death anniversaries or urs of the saints (from the Persian word for marriage, commemorating their ‘marriage’ with God at death) became great ‘fairs’. As with Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras, the langars (free kitchens) attached to the shrines play an important part in feeding the local poor, as well as pilgrims.
Muslim Pakistan, like Hindu India, is bound together by pilgrimages and allegiances to shrines and saints which stretch across provincial and linguistic boundaries. These bonds can be traced visually by the sayings and symbols of particular saints which often form part of the wonderfully extravagant decoration of the lorries