Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple

Author:William Dalrymple [Dalrymple, William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

So your surroundings become a garden.

Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet.

We are all one body,

Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.

The end came on 4 March 2009, a week before my visit to Sehwan. A group of Pakistani Taliban arrived at the shrine before dawn, and placed dynamite around the squinches of the dome. No one was hurt, but the shrine chamber was completely destroyed. The Taliban issued a press release blaming the shrine for opening its doors to women, and allowing them to pray and seek healing there. Since then several other shrines in areas under Taliban control have been blown up or shut down, and one—that of Haji Sahib Turangzai, in the Mohmand Tribal Federally Administered Tribal Region of Pakistan—has been turned into a Taliban headquarters.

Behind the violence lies a theological conflict that has divided the Islamic world for centuries, albeit one dramatically radicalised by the aftermath of the anti-Soviet jihad. Rahman Baba, like Lal Shahbaz in Sindh or Rumi in Anatolia, believed passionately in the importance of the use of music, poetry and dance as a path for remembering and reaching God, as a way of opening the gates of Paradise. But this use of poetry and music in ritual, and the way the Sufis welcome women into their shrines, are some of the many aspects of Sufi practice that have attracted the wrath of modern Wahhabis, and their South Asian theological allies, the Deobandis and Tablighis. For although there is nothing in the Quran that specifically bans music, Islamic tradition has always associated music with dancing girls and immorality, and infections from Hinduism, and there has been a long tradition of clerical opposition.

In the long story of the complex three-cornered relationship between Hinduism, Sufi Islam and Islamic orthodoxy—in which the determination of the Sufis to absorb Hindu ideas and practices has always clashed with the wish of the orthodox to root them out as dangerous and deviant impurities—Sehwan has historically played an important part. It was the home of the great Sufi philosopher-poet Mian Mir, who in turn became the pir of the seventeenth-century Mughal prince Dara Shukoh, the ruler who arguably did more than anyone else to attempt to bring together the two great religions of South Asia. Dara was taught by his Sehwan-born pir that there was an essential unity of the Islamic and Hindu mystical paths. Heavily influenced by Mian Mir’s philosophy, Dara would go on to write, in his great treatise on Sufism The Compass of Truth:

Thou art in the Ka’ba at Mecca,

as well as in the [Hindu] temple of Somnath.

Thou art in the monastery,

as well as the tavern.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.