Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [83]
In the sixteenth century, some Sufi leaders denounced the Mughal emperor Akbar’s attempt to create a new syncretic cult. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, others supported the harsh Islamizing policies of the Emperor Aurangzeb. In the eighteenth century, the great Islamist reformer Shah Waliullah (mentioned in Chapter 1) was a member of the Naqshbandi Sufi order and, in the late nineteenth century, followers of his tradition founded the Deoband theological school, whose adherents today form the backbone of Islamist radical politics in Pakistan.
While these are often harshly critical of the shrines and their followers, their madrasahs are believed often to have private links to particular Naqshbandi shrines, showing the persistence of the shrine’s power and influence. As Carl Ernst has remarked, many of the leaders of modern Islamist radicalism came originally from backgrounds heavily influenced by Sufism.10
Shah Waliullah’s tradition of defending Islam against the West has – in their own perception – been continued by the adherents of Pir Hazrat Shah in Britain, who in 1989 helped lead the movement of protest against the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The classical teachings of all the recognized orders of Sufism have always taught that a knowledge of and obedience to the Shariah are essential if one is to become a shaikh or his murid.
In Pakistan, the cults of the saints, and the Sufi orders and Barelvi theology which underpin them, are an immense obstacle to the spread of Taleban and sectarian extremism, and of Islamist politics in general. This is not because the shrines or the Barelvis have powerful political parties of their own, like the Jamaat Islami (JI) and Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) of the Deobandi tradition. Every attempt at creating such parties over the decades has foundered on the deep rivalries and jealousies between (and indeed within) the great pir families, and also on the fact that, unlike the modern Islamist radicals, the shrines and the Barelvis have no uniting political ideology at all beyond loyalty to their own traditions.
Rather, when it comes to combating radicalism the importance of the shrines lies in two things: first, in the way that the different cults and traditions – especially in so far as they overlap with those of the Shia – make impossible the kind of monolithic Sunni Islam of which the Jamaat in one way and the Taleban in another dream. Second, and equally important, is the way in which the pir families are entwined with and help support and legitimize dominant landowning clans across much of the Pakistani countryside, and parts of the traditional business elites in the towns.
The pirs are therefore an important part of the dense networks of elite power and patronage which have been an immense and so far insuperable obstacle to revolution in Pakistan. Politically speaking, pirs behave in the same way as the great majority of other politicians. They use their network of influence to gain patronage and protection for their followers. Quite contrary to the conventional Western image of Sufism, therefore, one of the most important roles of the Sufi shrines in Pakistan has always been in the eminently practical area of politics.
Pirs with real personal religious prestige are at an advantage in being able to command support beyond their own lineages, and also sometimes to command a more unconditional loyalty. Often a key step in the rise of a newly emerged urban pir is when he gains a local politician as a follower – just as in the past, a saint’s reputation would be made by the public respect of a local prince, or even – in the greatest cases – the sultan himself. Thereafter, the politician and the saint