The Real Islam — page 2

Here, it seemed to me, lay some sort of crux—a clash of civilizations, not between East and West but within Islam itself. Between the strictly regulated ways of the orthodox Tablighis and the customs of the heterodox Sufis lay not just two different understandings of Islam but two entirely different conceptions of how to live, how to die, and how to make the final and most important, and difficult, journey of all—to paradise.

Six years earlier, I had been sitting in a roadside tea shop amid the desert of Rajasthan when I saw a succession of five bicycle rickshaws appear over the horizon, winding their way through the dusty scrub of the Jaipur highway. Every time a juggernaut thundered past, the fragile rickshaws lurched toward the dirt of the hard shoulder. The desert was level and featureless. So flat was the ground that through the shimmering heat haze you could see the convoy struggling for a full half-hour before it finally drew level with the roadside dhaba. Inside the rickshaws were 12 Sufi dervishes, with wild eyes and long, unkempt beards. The fronts of their shalwars were covered with charms, pieces of tinsel and silver talismans. They were all—drivers and dervishes alike—hot and thirsty, and they pulled into the dhaba calling loudly for water and tea.

The men were braving the desert to attend the death anniversary of the Sufi saint Khwaja Garib Nawaz, who lived in the 13th century, a little before Nizamuddin's time and who belonged to the same mystical tradition. As they shook the desert from their clothes, I asked them about their journey. "We have cycled all the way from Delhi," said one of the drivers.

"Delhi? But that is—what?—400 km away?"

"Garib Nawaz will reward us for our pains," he replied. "It is he who gives us strength." The drivers and their passengers sat together on a charpoy, pouring their tea into tin saucers, then noisily sipping the hot, sweet liquid from the plates. "Anyone who steps through the door of his shrine," said another driver, "will get paradise as his everlasting home."

I was heading in the same direction, so the following day I went along to the Sufi festival in Ajmer. Virtually overnight the small provincial town was transformed into a heaving, mystic metropolis. Tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over India were milling around the streets, pouring out of buses, unrolling their bedding on the pavement, and cooking their breakfast on portable stoves. From the different encampments on the outskirts—tent cities that resembled the halting place of some medieval army—rivulets of devotees threaded through the bazaars, forming larger streams as they converged on the streets leading to the shrine.

A succession of Mughal mosques, tombs and pavilions were crammed to bursting with ecstatics and madmen, pilgrims and spectators. The entire complex was alive with the intoxicating smell of roses, which the devotees carried in sweet-smelling punnets to pour great fountains of petals onto the saint's grave. The numbers were amazing, but what was even more remarkable in a nation polarized by religious rivalries was the different traditions from which the pilgrims were drawn. Many were Muslim, but there were also Hindus, as well as the odd Sikh and Christian, all queuing to pay their respects to the saint. Here, for once, you saw religion bringing people together, not dividing them. Sufism was not just something mystical, ethereal and otherworldly, I felt, but a balm on India's festering religious wounds. I asked one group of Hindu pilgrims if they were made to feel welcome in a Muslim shrine. "Of course," said their leader, a trader from neighboring Gujarat state. "All Gods are the same."

When I asked why they had made the effort to come all this way, the man replied with the following story: "When our child was young, he became very ill. No medicines from any doctor helped. We tried everything, but our son only got weaker. Then some neighbors said we should come here. We were desperate, so we got on a bus. We brought the boy to the shrine and one of its guardians cured him. What could not be done in 12 months he did in a minute." So now the trader and his family return each year to give thanks.

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