Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [85]
On the other hand, in their Protestant souls the British shared the Islamist reformers’ views concerning the culture of the shrines, and despised the superstition, obscurantism, corruption and intoxication which they saw flourishing at the shrines and among their adherents; and, indeed, the parallels they drew between popular Muslim worship of the saints and the failings of ‘Popery’ in the West were often quite explicit.
In Major O’Brien’s view, ‘All [Punjabi Muslims] alike are sunk in the most degrading superstition, and are in the most abject submission to their spiritual pastors or pirs.’12 The political needs of imperial rule aside, British officialdom much preferred the scripturalism, legalism and relative modernity of the urban Islamist reformists, and – as the last chapter described – sometimes favoured the Shariah against the local customary law, on progressive grounds.
Certainly some of the great shrines in Pakistan could be described (like Russia’s) as ‘an offence against the Protestant state of mind’. This is especially true of those with large followings of qalandars or malangs (the South Asian equivalent of the dervishes of the Arab world and Turkey), wandering holy beggars with certain affinities to the Hindu saddhus. Much of the contempt felt by the British and the Islamists for the shrines stems from the character of the malangs, and especially the musth malangs – musth indicating a mixture of intoxication and madness.
Like many educated Sufis, Mr Khwaja of the following of Pir Hasan Baba expressed strong disapproval not only of the scripturalist enemies of Sufism, but also of many of the Pakistani pirs and their followers:
Unfortunately, at the lowest level, some of the new saints and many of the malangs are fakes and are just in it for business. There are so many of them out there bringing a bad image on us. Malangs sell drugs, run prostitution rackets and things like that. And the political hereditary pirs are also a problem. They discredit the Sufi tradition with their corruption and politicking. A true Sufi saint cannot be fat, healthy and rich. He has to be poor and simple, and living in poor conditions. But humanity has always worshipped false gods, and Pakistan is no different. Surely if you look at the hereditary pirs, you can see clearly all the false gods that they worship.
Some of the malangs I have met, especially at smaller rural shrines, do indeed tend to support British and Islamist prejudices: filthy, stoned to the gills, and surrounded by retinues of giggling half-naked little boys as degraded-looking as themselves. One malang, however, justified their use of drugs to Katherine Ewing in words some of which could have come from recent reports by medical experts to the British and American governments:
Alcohol works on the outside – it makes a man violent and blinds his senses. Charas [hashish] works in the inside. It makes him peaceful and opens his spirit to God. So a malang should avoid alcohol as he should avoid women. Alcohol will cut him off from God but charas brings him close to God. That is why we malangs use it.13
This is part of the malangs’ proclaimed belief that their exclusive concentration on God and their particular saint requires them to ‘place [themselves] outside the world’ and the world’s normal social rules. The malangs and qalandars therefore are known as the ‘be-shar’ (‘without law’) Sufis, as opposed to the pirs, who marry and have children, and follow (in theory) the rules of the Shariah.
At some of the large urban shrines attempts have been made to prevent the public smoking of hashish by devotees.