Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults
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EMBODYING CHARISMA Emerging often suddenly and unpredictably, living Sufi saints practising in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are today shaping and reshaping a sacred landscape. By extending new Sufi brotherhoods and focused regional cults, they embody a lived sacred reality. This collection of essays from many of the subject’s leading researchers argues that the power of Sufi ritual derives not from beliefs as a set of abstracted ideas but rather from rituals as transformative and embodied aesthetic practices and ritual processes, Sufi cults reconstitute the sacred as a concrete emotional and as a dissenting tradition, they embody politically potent postcolonial counternarrative. The book therefore challenges previous opposites, up until now used as a tool for analysis, such as magic versus religion, ritual versus mystical belief, body versus mind and syncretic practice versus Islamic orthodoxy, by highlighting the connections between Sufi cosmologies, ethical ideas and bodily ritual practices. With its wide-ranging historical analysis as well as its contemporary research, this collection of case studies is an essential addition to courses on ritual and religion in sociology, anthropology and Islamic or South Asian studies. Its ethnographically rich and vividly written narratives reveal the important contributions that the analysis of Sufism can make to a wider theory of religious movements and charismatic ritual in the context of late twentieth-century modernity and postcoloniality. Pnina Werbner is Reader in Social Anthropology at Keele University. She has published on Sufism as a transnational cult and has a growing reputation among Islamic scholars for her work on the political imaginaries of British Islam. Helene Basu teaches Social Anthropology at the Institut für Ethnologie in Berlin. She has studied spirit possession cults and living goddesses in Gujarat, India, and in Sindh. EMBODYING CHARISMA Modernity, locality and the performance of emotion in Sufi cults Edited by Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Selection and editorial matter Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Embodying charisma: modernity, locality, and the performance of emotion in Sufi cults/ [edited by] Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Sufism—20th century. I. Werbner, Pnina. II. Basu, Helene. BP189.23.E45 1998 297.4´09´049–dc21 97–37918 CIP ISBN 0-415-15099-X (hbk) ISBN 0-415-15100-7 (pbk) ISBN 0-203-02520-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-20462-X (Glassbook Format) CONTENTS List of illustrations viii List of contributors ix PART 1 Introduction 1 1 The embodiment of charisma 3 PNINA WERBNER AND HELENE BASU PART 2 Embodying locality 2 The hardware of sanctity: anthropomorphic objects in Bangladeshi Sufism 31 SAMUEL LANDELL MILLS 3 A ‘festival of flags’: Hindu-Muslim devotion and the sacralising of localism at the shrine of Nagore-e-Sharif in Tamil Nadu 55 S.A.A.SAHEB 4 ‘The saint who disappeared’: saints of the wilderness in Pakistani village shrines 77 LUKAS WERTH v CONTENTS PART 3 The performance of emotion 5 Langar: pilgrimage, sacred exchange and perpetual sacrifice in a Sufi saint’s lodge 95 PNINA WERBNER 6 Hierarchy and emotion: love, joy and sorrow in a cult of black saints in Gujarat, India 117 HELENE BASU 7 The majzub Mama Ji Sarkar: ‘a friend of God moves from one house to another’ 140 JÜRGEN WASIM FREMBGEN 8A majzub and his mother: the place of sainthood in a family’s emotional memory 160 KATHERINE P.EWING PART 4 Charisma and modernity 9 The literary critique of Islamic popular religion in the guise of traditional mysticism, or the abused woman 187 JAMAL MALIK 10 Prophets and pirs: charismatic Islam in the Middle East and South Asia 209 CHARLES LINDHOLM Name index 234 Subject index 238 vi ILLUSTRATIONS Plates 3.1 The lodge at Nagore-e-Sharif during the annual festival of the saint 57 3.2 The erection of the flagpoles on one of the five minarets, built by the Maratha ruler Pratap Simha, Tanjavur, Tamil Nadu 64 3.3 The illuminated chariot ready to carry the sacred flags in procession 66 3.4 The devotees are blessed by the ‘ritual saint’ (pir) through theertam, sandalwood paste, lemon, rose petals and amulets 67 3.5 Carrying the sandalwood paste with which the saint’s lineal descendant will anoint the tomb of the saint. The illuminated chariot of the procession is seen in the background 69 5.1 Cooking pots and wood piled high in anticipation of the ‘urs at Ghamkol Sharif 101 5.2 A pilgrim leads his sacrificial goat for the langar 102 5.3 Distributing the langar to the pilgrims 106 7.1 The majzub Mama Ji Sarkar 141 7.2 The living saint Mama Ji Sarkar in his darbar in Rawalpindi, to the left of his attendant ‘Abdul Rashid 147 7.3 The painter and devotee Sayyid Ishrat 149 7.4 The veneration of the dead saint in the astan in Rawalpindi; the majzub is depicted in a painting by Sayyid Ishrat 152 7.5 The devotee Sain ‘Abdul Majid, residing in the village of Nurpur Shahan 154 8.1 Rabi‘a, mother of a majzub 164 8.2 Sa’in Sahib 174 8.3 A mela at the family shrine 179 9.1 The shrine of Shâh Daulah 193 vii ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 3.1 Travels of Sahul Hameed Nagore Andavar in India, Asia and Europe 59 3.2 Ground plan of the sacred complex of Nagore-e-Sharif 71 5.1 The structure of sacrificial giving 103 5.2 Sacrifice and offering in the context of migration 104 9.1 Rano’s mystical path 198 Table 3.1 The types of sacred performances conducted at the Nagapatnam and Nagore sacred centres during the Kanduri festival of the Saint Sahul Hameed Nagore Andavar 63 viii CONTRIBUTORS Helene Basu teaches Social Anthropology at the Institut für Ethnologie, Free University of Berlin. Her monograph Habshi Slaves, Sidi Faqirs: A Muslim Cult in Western India (Das Arabische Buch, Berlin 1995, in German) is on a black Muslim Sidi saints’ cult in Gujarat, India, and she has published several articles on the cult. She is currently studying female renunciation and shakti ‘living goddesses’ among the Charan caste, with special emphasis on women’s participation in neo-Hindu movements and nationalist politics in Western India. Katherine P.Ewing is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and has done field work in Pakistan and Turkey. She has also received psychoanalytic training at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. She has published numerous articles on Sufism in Pakistan, is the editor of Shari‘at and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam, and is the author of Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and Islam (Duke University Press, Durham NC 1997). Jürgen Wasim Frembgen is Head of the Oriental Department of the State Museum of Anthropology, Munich, and Lecturer in Religion at the University of Munich. He has conducted extensive research on popular Islam, material culture, ethnohistory and tourism in Karakorum, Kohistan, the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab, as well as in North India and Rajasthan. His publications include ten books and numerous articles, most recently Darwische, Gelebter Sufismus (Cologne 1993), Derwiche und Zuckerbacker (Munich 1996), and an edited volume, Rosenduft un Sabelglanz (Munich 1996). Samuel Landell Mills is an anthropologist who wrote his doctoral thesis at the London School of Economics. He has also held a British Academy post-doctoral research fellowship at Cambridge University. Having done fieldwork in Bangladesh on Sufi saints and Islamic fundamentalism, he has recently been working with the Baul tradition of West Bengal. He has published several articles, and his forthcoming book, The Face of God, is a study of Sufi and fundamentalist movements in Bangladesh. ix CONTRIBUTORS Charles Lindholm is a member of the University Professors’ Program and of the Anthropology Department at Boston University. He did his fieldwork in Swat, Northern Pakistan, and recently published a book of essays based on that research entitled Frontier Perspectives: Essays in Comparative Anthropology (Oxford University Press, Karachi 1996). His most recent book is The Islamic Middle East: An Historical Anthropology (Blackwell, Oxford 1996). His present research is on cross-cultural notions of the self and agency, and on the ramifications of egalitarian ideologies. He has also written extensively on various forms of idealisation, and is the author of Charisma (Blackwell, Oxford 1990). Jamal Malik obtained his doctorate from the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg (1988), and his Habilitation in Islamic Studies from Bamberg University (1994). He teaches at the universities of Bamberg and Bonn. He is author of Colonialization of Islam (Manohar, New Delhi 1997) and Islamic Scholarly Tradition in North India (Brill, Leiden 1997, in German), as well as numerous academic articles on mysticism, Islamicisation, urban societies and traditional institutions. S.A.A.Saheb is a senior researcher in the Social Anthropological Survey of India, Southern Regional Centre, Mysore. He has been a member of the New York Academy of Sciences since 1994.