Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [80]
The culture of the shrines thus permeates Pakistan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto sometimes presented himself to his followers as a divinely inspired guide and teacher, as does Altaf Hussain of the MQM (called by his followers ‘Pir Sahib’). The mausoleum of Zalfikar Ali Bhutto and his daughter Benazir near Larkana is consciously modelled on the shrine of a saint. At PPP rallies, I have seen party supporters shaking their heads violently from side to side in the manner of ecstatic devotees at saintly festivals. Saints have also been pressed into military service. During the 1965 war with India, stories circulated of saints catching Indian bombs in their hands.
As in the Christian world, the shrines grew wealthy on the strength of donations from pilgrims and, above all, land grants from monarchs, noblemen and tribes. However, in the Muslim world there is a crucial difference from that of Christianity (at least since the Catholic Church in the eleventh century began to insist successfully that priests and bishops could not marry): namely, that unlike Christian saints, most Muslim saints married and had children, and that in the world of Muslim saints spiritual power is hereditary. This power ‘is distributed among all the progeny of the saint and harnessed by the few who fulfil religious obligations and meditate on the tomb of the saint in order to perform miracles’.6
Not just the shrines themselves, but the pir families of the sajjada nashins (literally, ‘he who sits on the prayer carpet’) who were their guardians therefore became major landowners, exercising both religious and spiritual power in their neighbourhoods; sometimes performing miracles, often mediating local disputes and interceding with rulers, and occasionally going to war. They attracted whole local tribes as adherents and defenders, and intermarried with other Sayyid families to form powerful networks of kinship and patronage. Once again, in Pakistan it is not wealth alone, but wealth plus either kinship or spiritual prestige, or both, that gives political power.
The shrines and their guardians have therefore always vastly outclassed in prestige the menial and often despised village mullah, just as the shrines and monasteries of medieval Europe cast the humble village priest deep into the shade. The power of the pirs in Sindh and southern Punjab, and their role in combating the Taleban in the Pathan regions, will be discussed in later chapters.
These pir families remain of immense political importance in much of Pakistan, and especially in the PPP; as witness the fact that, as of 2010, the Prime Minister, Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani; deputy prime minister, Makhdoom Amin Fahim; foreign minister, Syed Mahmood Qureshi; and minister for religion, Syed Ahmed Qazmi are all from pir lineages, as are leading party supporters like Syeda Abida Husain. However, members of pir lineages are also to be found in prominent positions in other mainstream parties, like Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat of the PML(Q) and Makhdoom Javed Hashmi, Makhdoom Ahmed Mehmood and, greatest of all, the Pir Pagaro of Sindh, all of whom at the time of writing are supporting the PML(N).
Thus, back in 1988, a PPP politician from the family of the pir of Hadda in Sindh, Syed Parvez Jillani, recounted to me the legends of Hadda, including one which told how the fish of the River Indus would come to worship his cousin the pir (a legend presumably taken originally from the worship of a Hindu river-god). He described the absolute, unquestioning devotion of the murids of Hadda to the pir and his family. Then, as a good PPP politician, he added:
The difference between us and the other pirs is that we are in favour of bringing education to our murids, and that we have always played a democratic