Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [82]
Reflecting the class and culture of its devotees, the shrine (which I visited in August 2009) is a beautiful building constructed from traditional materials, and designed by a leading Lahore architect – and follower of these saints – Kamil Khan. ‘Nothing like this has been built in Pakistan or India since the fall of the Mughal empire,’ the engineer, Rizwan Qadir Khwaja, told me. Reflecting the trans-communal nature of the shrines, the overall design is modelled on that of the famous Shia shrine of Ali in Najaf, Iraq, although Pir Hasan Baba was, technically at least, Sunni. As Mr Khwaja told me,
In Pakistan, you often find that a wife is Shia, the husband Sunni. And in the past this was never a problem, but now extremists want to divide us. Sufism and Sufi shrines play a very important role against this, by bridging Sunni and Shia. When someone asks me if I am Sunni or Shia I reply that like my saints I really do not care. It is irrelevant. I think only of the will of God.9
Followers of Pir Hasan and Hafiz Iqbal also went out of their way to stress these saints’ respect for other religions, that Hafiz Iqbal had called Pope John Paul II ‘a true saint’, and so on. ‘A problem in Islam is that the Koran is too explicit and rigorous, unlike other scriptures, so there is less room for flexibility,’ as one of the devotees told me – a statement calculated to cause apoplexy in many more-rigorous Muslims.
This shrine and its followers gave a strong sense of a living and growing tradition, and – like Qawali music – of a very strong cultural and emotional force. Mr Khwaja said, ‘We are not trying to invent something new, but to breathe new life into old traditions,’ and they seemed to have done just that. As to the miracles attributed to these saints, as a modern rationalist I could not help smiling at them – but as a Catholic (however faded) I have to recognize their central place in all religious traditions.
Like these saints, South Asian saints in general belong to one or other Sufi order, and their whole tradition has been called a Sufi one. This can be rather misleading for Western audiences whose ideas of Sufism are derived chiefly from Omar Khayyam (via Edward FitzGerald) and Idries Shah. The idea of Sufism as a vaguely deist, New-Age-style philosophy with lots of poetry, alcohol and soft drugs is also immensely appealing to members of Pakistan’s Westernized elites, whom it permits to follow a Westernized and hedonistic lifestyle without feeling that they have broken completely with their religion and its traditions.
This image of Sufism as representing a sort of latitudinarian and pacific moderation has led to a US strategy of supporting Islamist Sufis in the Muslim world against radicals – whereas in reality a more helpful strategy in the ‘war on terror’ might be to use the FBI to support American Methodists against American Pentecostals. The unpopularity of the US is such among ordinary Pakistanis – including Barelvis and followers of the saints with whom I have spoken – that US moves in this direction are a great asset to radical enemies of Sufism. As to the supposed ‘moderation’ of the Barelvis, the assassin of Governor Salman Taseer, who committed his crime in defence of Pakistan’s blasphemy law, is a Barelvi and was defended by most Barelvi clerics. The Barelvis are in fact deeply conservative reactionaries and are therefore opposed to modern Islamist revolution and to liberalism.
Sufis have often been at the forefront of movements insisting