The Real Islam — page 3

From the very beginning of Sufism, music, dance, poetry and meditation have been seen as crucial spiritual strides on the path of love, an invaluable aid toward attaining unity with God—true paradise. Music, in particular, enables devotees to focus their whole being on the divine so intensely that the soul is both destroyed and resurrected. At Sufi shrines, devotees are lifted by the music into a state of spiritual ecstasy.

Yet these heterodox methods of worship have divided Sufis from many of their Muslim brethren. Throughout Islamic history, more puritanical Muslims have claimed that Sufi practices were infections from Christianity and Hinduism, quite alien to the original principles of Islam. As Najaf Haider, professor of medieval history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, tells it, such conflicts were inevitable: "In orthodox Islam the object of creation is the worship of God; God is the master and the devotee is the slave. The Sufis argue that God should be worshipped not because he has commanded us to but because he's such a lovable being. The cornerstone of Sufi ideology is love, and all traditions are tolerated because anyone is capable of expressing love for God."

The most formidable of all the anti-Sufi movements was Wahhabism from Arabia, its followers the progenitors of modern Islamic fundamentalists, who on coming to power in the early 19th century destroyed all the Sufi and Shi'a shrines in Arabia and Iraq. Today, the most prominent—and powerful—Wahhabis are the Saudis. Because they dominate media in the Arab world, many contemporary Muslims have been taught a story of Islamic religious tradition from which Sufism is rigorously excluded.

I first came across strongly anti-Sufi sentiments last fall when I visited a shrine just outside Peshawar in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. The Sufi shrine of Rahman Baba has for centuries been a place where Muslim musicians and poets have gathered. It is built around the tomb of a 17th century mystic poet whose Pashtu Sufi verses have led to him being described as the nightingale of Peshawar. A friend who had lived nearby in the 1980s advised me to visit on a Thursday night, when crowds of Afghan refugee musicians sing to their saint by the light of the moon—a sight he described as unforgettable. Since he had left Peshawar, however, much had changed. Two Saudi-funded madrasahs had been built on the road to the shrine, and they had taken it upon themselves to halt what they regarded as the shrine's un-Islamic practices.

One Thursday I drove out of Peshawar, passed the two madrasahs, and found the tarmac road giving way to a mud track, down which herds of sheep were throwing up huge clouds of dust as they were driven back to their village compounds for the night. Past the village was a well-irrigated enclosure sheltered by a windbreak of date palms. Beyond lay the glistening white dome of the shrine, and facing it a mosque and a new mud-brick library. Tamarind, neem trees and a great, spreading banyan grew beside a bubbling spring. But there were no musicians there that evening, only a small crowd of beggars, a man selling chick peas and dates from a trolley, and a couple of Sufi holy men carrying green flags. Watching suspiciously a short distance away were two young men wearing full beards, white robes and checked red-and-white Saudi ghuttras, or head scarves.

I asked one of the shrine's guardians, Tila Mohammed, why there were not more pilgrims and what had happened to the musicians for which his shrine was once famous. He motioned for me to come into his room beside the library, out of the earshot of the two men in ghuttras.

"My family has been singing here for generations," said Tila Mohammed. "But now these Arab madrasah students come here and create trouble. They tell us that what we do is wrong. They ask people who are singing to stop. Sometimes arguments break out—even fistfights. This used to be a place where people came for peace of mind. Now they just encounter more problems, so gradually people have stopped coming."

"We pray that Baba will work a miracle," Tila Mohammed continued, "that good will overcome evil. But our way is pacifist. We love. We never fight. When these Arabs come here, I just don't know what to do to stop them."

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