Saints and demons

It is clear that the hateful and violent Taliban feel threatened by the tolerant religious perspective of the Sufis.

The attack on the shrine of Sufi Baba Farid in Pakpattan on October 25, 2010 indicates a systematic attack on Sufi shrines by Taliban terrorist groups, this one being the fifth in a series of suicide bombings since 2007. These attacks have ranged across four regions, from the shrine of Bari Imam (Islamabad) in January 2007 to that of Rehman Baba (Peshawar) in January 2009 and from Data Darbar (Lahore) in July this year to Abdullah Shah Ghazi (Karachi) in October. It is clear that the Taliban feel threatened by the religious perspective of the Sufis. The ideology of hate, intolerance, and violence that characterises the Taliban is directly counterposed to the Sufi religious perspective of love, tolerance and peace, through which they spread Islam across Central and South Asia.

Abu Bakr Sirajuddin (Martin Lings), the great Sufi shaikh and scholar of our time, pointed out that the word religion, containing the letters ‘lig’, refers to a ligament with God. It can be argued that this ligament constitutes the experience of love in the relationship between an individual human being and God. Martin Lings has also pointed out that the heart is the means of experiencing the transcendent. This is why in the Sufi tradition, the experience of Oneness involves a journey to the heart. Shah Hussain, the great Punjabi Sufi poet, indicates this journey of achieving Oneness with God through love, as abnegation of the self, in the following lines: “You are the woof and you the warp/ You are in every pore/ Says Shah Hussain Faqir/ I am not, all is you”.

The great Sufi saints, of the land that today constitutes Pakistan, brought to the humble peasantry, the message that humility before God is the starting point of the journey to the heart where the ligament with God is constituted in adoration of Him. Thus, says Shah Hussain: “Paawain ga deedar Sahab da/ Hor bi neevan ho” — To reach Him, bow deeper still.

For a vast strata of the dispossessed peasantry, to be a Muslim was to nurture love, a sense of beauty and truth in the context of the relationship with society as well as with nature. These perennial features of human consciousness were cultivated amongst the poor people, by the great Sufi saints and became part of their cultural and social existence. With the rise of the modern world in this region, and the systemic competition for material possessions, assertion of the ego and greed as the emblems of success led to the marginalisation of the great intellectual tradition of Sufi saints in the social life of people. As Najam Hussain Syed, the contemporary Sufi poet writes: “Far on the banks of memory falls the shadow of Ranjha”. In the discourse of modernity, the message of love and the pursuit of beauty became what he calls the “unsaid”. He writes: “On the slopes of silence beat the drums of the unsaid”.

The Taliban must be aware of the sensibility of love, tolerance and human solidarity that underlies the life of the poor masses and the rhythms of their folk culture. This sensibility is clearly a threat to the ideology of egotism, hate and violence which the Taliban propound. This is why the shrines of the Sufi saints which signify the transcendent consciousness of love are being systematically attacked by those who practice the politics of hate.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 6^th, 2010.