Millennium and Charisma Among Pathans (Routledge Revivals) by Akbar Ahmed

Author:Akbar Ahmed [Ahmed, Akbar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781136810749
Google: XwHtXtcLDjUC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-07-26T04:42:20+00:00

6 A note on Sufic orders and Islamic revivalism in the nineteenth century

Poverty is a pure sovereignty and the rich man knows not of its delights

This chapter will attempt to explain the emergence of revivalist Islamic movements in the nineteenth century in the hinterland Muslim areas within a conceptually holist framework. These movements have certain recognizable features as they are stimulated through interaction with colonial, European and industrial powers. Religious and racial (Christian and white) differences only underline and exacerbate the nature of the encounter. The Islamic response, still archaic and traditional, as are its symbols and weapons, is led by men of religious ‘baraka’ (sociologically translated as ‘charisma’).

The first section of this chapter is parenthetic in nature but provides a sociological framework for the argument developed later. However, it should be underlined that the explanation of Sufic behaviour and apperception is the Sufi version (1) and not necessarily a sociological one. The discussion is therefore consciously monolithic and undifferentiated in order to enable an understanding of generalized Sufi ideal-types and the models that derive from them. The reader who finds the argument excessively circuitous may go to the conclusions on p.98.

The argument will attempt to pick up the universalist strands connecting, with mutual effect, socio-religious normative life of geographically distant Islamic communities. The point at issue is to argue (with Swat in mind) that an examination, however particularistic or synchronic, of an Islamic community or society in isolation from its wider socio-religious context, is to exclude a basic dimension of its form and thereby to omit an important variable in its analysis.

Islamic societies are notorious in requiring a holistic framework of analysis due to their homologous structural arrangements and in the universality of their politico-religious symbolism which are maintained by contact in general with contiguous Islamic communities and persistent contact in particular with Mecca and Medina. These latter cities act both as common Islamic source-points for socio-religious activities and as disseminating points for revivalist-reformist ideas and movements. Conceptually, this locational factor gives the Islamic world a physical orientation around which to order its existence and from which to derive its spiritual inspiration. Universal and easily identified Islamic symbols are carried into and exist in the most remote Muslim societies: (2) numerous identical words and verbs, common socio-religious festivals and certain normative values. Various groups, both formal and informal, keep the channels of communication open within the Islamic world: hajjis, pilgrims, missionaries, scholars, migrants and traders. These channels sometimes block up or fall into disuse but have generally remained functional. (3) It is this channel, for example, that provided news of a Turkish victory over the Greeks in Europe in the late 1890s and stirred enthusiasm amongst the Pathans in the North-West Frontier of India against the British. Secret British Government Reports invariably begin despatches regarding tribal revolts by linking them to international events and ‘foreign agents’. Conversely, Islamic defeats are reflected in the tone of the Friday sermon in the mosque where the congregation is apprised of the calamity and exhorted to reform and thereby purify itself for the ‘coming crisis’.

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