Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [87]
Most of the men in the courtyard were ordinary folk, but the front ranks of the dancers are made up of malangs (or dervishes, as they are often called in Sindh), with long, wild hair and beards – thousand-year-old hippies – stretching their arms above their heads and pointing their fingers at heaven, very like at a pop concert. The smell of hashish was everywhere.
The Shia element was very apparent, both in the Shia family groups around the tomb, in the drumming, which was very reminiscent of that I had heard at the great Shia festival of Ashura in Lahore four months earlier, and in the chants of ‘Ya Ali’. Some of the malangs were clearly as crazy as the women dancers. One was draped in chains from head to foot. Another was dressed in women’s clothes, with a headdress made from animal skins and feathers, like a pagan shaman.
Quite what Lal Shahbaz himself would have made of all this we do not know – though above the gates stands a picture of the saint himself dancing, holding a sitar. What we do know is what the spectrum of ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim groups think of this kind of thing – and the answer of course is more or less what seventeenth-century puritans thought about Catholicism, minus the Pope and the bishops. As should be clear, the scenes at some of the shrines in Pakistan contain just about all the elements necessary to make a puritan feel nervous.
PURITANS, FUNDAMENTALISTS, REFORMISTS: THE JAMAAT ISLAMI
There could not be a greater contrast with Sehwan Sharif than the headquarters of the Jamaat Islami party – the only truly national Islamist party in Pakistan – at Mansura in Lahore. Like a number of institutions in Pakistan – the military especially – the appearance of Jamaat offices seems deliberately created to be as different as possible from the general mixture of dirt, disorder, colour, poverty and ostentation that is the public face of Pakistan.
The only hint of fun I have ever seen with the Jamaat has been its younger members playing cricket – and indeed there are aspects of the Jamaat of which Dr Arnold of Rugby would thoroughly have approved; they are clean-living, muscular Muslims. With the Jamaat, everything is disciplined, neat, orderly, plain, clean, modest and buttoned-up: a puritan style, with faint echoes of the barracks and strong ones of the boarding school. Its members also dress and behave in this way – a style which reflects both their ideology and their generally lower-middle-class urban origins and culture.
Jamaat activists certainly dress and behave very differently from the far rougher, largely rural Pathan members of the other main Islamist party from the Deobandi tradition, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (Council of Islamic Clerics, or JUI). The JUI’s parent party in undivided India, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, was founded in 1919 as part of the Khilafat movement against British rule.
The JUI split off in the 1940s to support partition and the creation of Pakistan. In Pakistan, however, the JUI has become an almost exclusively ethnically Pathan party, and so I have dealt with it in a later chapter, on the Pathans of Pakistan. In addition, the JUI no longer has a significant intellectual aspect, and has to a considerable extent become just another Pakistani patronage machine on behalf of its followers – as one of its leaders candidly admitted to me.
The Jamaat Islami is a very different kind of party, much more impressive and in its way more frightening – so impressive indeed that its lack of political success is all the more striking. The Jamaat has excellent Islamist intellectual credentials, having been founded in Lahore in 1941 by Syed Abu Ala Maududi (1903 – 79), one of the leading thinkers of the international Islamist canon.