Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [84]
There are therefore two sides to the pirs and shrines: their political, property-owning and sometimes criminal role co-exists with the beneficial spiritual and social functions described by Lukas Werth, a leading scholar of Sufism:
Many of the new pirs are not frauds. Ordinary people take great comfort from them. They give them an outlook on life, and an inspiration. They create an emotional counterweight against the constant troubles of life here, the calamities that everyone has to face, the sorrow and the sheer mess of life. They provide a place of spiritual rest for the people. They also educate children – which is more than the state does most of the time – calm down local fights, reconcile husbands and wives, parents and children, or brothers who have fallen out.11
A Sindhi intellectual friend drew attention to another side of the cults of the shrines:
The negative side of mysticism and saint worship is that it makes people passive, respectful of their superiors and believing that everything comes from God or the saint and should be accepted. This is especially damaging in Sindh, because we are a traditional, agrarian and backward society and mysticism helps keep us that way. We need an industrial revolution to take us out of this feudal domination of which the pirs are part. But people in Sindh love their pirs, and our whole culture is bound up with them. Even I am deeply influenced by this, though I loathe the political and social role of the pirs.
The pirs and the shrines are therefore also an obstacle to modern reform, democracy and development in Pakistan. It is true that pirs provide at least psychological help for poor people facing disease, when no help whatsoever is forthcoming from the state or the regular medical services. Some shrines are especially popular with women, who often come to pray to be given children, or to be cured of various ailments.
This is especially true of psychiatric problems. These are thought by the mass of the population to be due to possession by devils, and people suffering from them are brought to the shrines to be exorcized. It may indeed be that for disturbed women in particular, the licence given to them at the shrines to defy all normal rules of behaviour by dancing ecstatically and screaming either prayers or demon-induced obscenities does indeed provide an essential therapeutic release from their horribly confined and circumscribed (physically as well as emotionally) lives. On the other hand, it is unfortunately also true that many pirs actively discourage people from seeking regular medical help, telling them to come to them instead. Occasionally ghastly stories surface of small-time rural pirs ordering their devotees to perform black magic and even human sacrifice.
SHRINES AND SUPERSTITION
The ‘superstition’ of the shrines and Sufi orders is one reason why radical secular reformers in the Muslim world have been deeply hostile to them; another, as far as modern nationalists are concerned, is that they advance the idea of a loyalty to their leaders which transcends that of the nation-state. Thus in Turkey, Kemal Ataturk launched a ferocious persecution of the shrines and the Sufis, and imposed restrictions which have been lifted only in recent years.
This was an ambiguity of which the British rulers of India were fully aware. On the one hand – like many Muslim rulers earlier – they regarded the shrines and the landowning pir families as forces for stability and potential sources of support for imperial rule. In Punjab, they took care to incorporate the pir families into what they defined (along British lines) as the ‘landowning gentry’, and to reward them with consultation, honours and sometimes new land grants.
The British saw the pirs as barriers to the anti-British revolutionary movements of the Wahabis and some of