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Intr Ducti N: Mapping the Chishti Sabiri Sufi Order 1

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Intr Ducti N: Mapping the Chishti Sabiri Sufi Order 1 N tes Intr ducti n: Mapping the Chishti Sabiri Sufi Order 1. For an overview of Sufi history and practice, see especially Carl W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambhala Press, 1997); Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). 2. For a comprehensive overview of the Chishti order, see Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). The definitive work on the Chishtiyya is Khaliq Ahmad Nizami’s Urdu magnum opus: Tarikh-i mashayikh-i Chisht [The History of the Chishti Sufi Masters] (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyyat-i Delli, 1980/1985). See also Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, “Chishtiyya,” in Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1965), 11: 50–56. 3. On the history of Sufism in South Asia, see especially Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 370–402, where the author provides a masterful survey of the Sufi contributions to Indo-Muslim culture and the development of regional literary and, in particular, poetic traditions. See also the two-volume work by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1975, 1983/1992). 4. The most comprehensive overview of the history and legacy of the Deoband madrasa remains Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 5. On the politics and polemics of contemporary Sufism, see Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism, 199–228. 6. Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 3. 7. Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 37. For a broad discussion of the construction of “tra- dition” in Muslim discourse, see in particular Chapter Two, “The Invention of Tradition in Muslim Politics,” 22–45. 8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), xix. 9. On the connections between modernity and religion, see, e.g., Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Gustavo Benavides, “Modernity,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 186–204; Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). In the specific context of Islam, see also Armando Salvatore, Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1997). 232 N tes 10. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4. 11. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 13 (emphasis is in the original). 12. Timothy Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xxvi. 13. Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), 17. 14. Jonah Blank, Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity among the Daudi Bohras (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 286. 15. Katherine P. Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 4. 16. See, e.g., Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique, No. 20 (Winter 1991–1992): 5–32. See also the collection of essays in Russell T. McCutcheon, ed., The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader (New York: Cassell, 1999); James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 17. Thomas A. Tweed, “On Moving Across: Translocative Religion and the Interpreter’s Position,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 70, No. 2 (June 2002): 260. Tweed’s nuanced theoretical model emerges from his work among Cuban-American Catholic immigrants. 18. Kirin Narayan, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 62. 19. Tweed, “On Moving Across,” 270–271. 20. Carl W. Ernst, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), xi–xviii. On the Orientalist “discovery” of Sufism, see also Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism, 1–18. 21. One of the more ambitious (and influential) historical studies of Sufism comes from J. Spencer Trimingham, a specialist in the history of Islam in Africa. Trimingham’s book, The Sufi Orders in Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), posits a threefold theory of Sufism’s historical devolution. For a trenchant critique of this model, see Ernst and Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love, 11–12. 22. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism, 200. 23. For a concise overview of these two interpretive paradigms, see John R. Bowen, Muslims through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4–8. See also Vincent J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), xl. 24. See, e.g., the essays in Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu, eds., Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults (London: Routledge, 1998). 25. The term “discursive tradition” is borrowed from anthropologist Talal Asad. See Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” in Occasional Paper Series, by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, March 1986), 14. 26. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 140. N tes 233 27. For a critical review of the literature of South Asian Sufism, see Ernst, “Preface to the Second Edition,” xi–xviii. See also David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, “Introduction,” in Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, ed. David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 1–20; Marc Gaborieau, “Introduction to the New Edition,” in Muslim Shrines in India: Their Character, History and Significance, ed. Christian W. Troll (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), v–xxiv. 28. Pnina Werbner, Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). I offer a detailed review of this book in the Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 63, No. 4 (November 2004): 1187–1189. 29. Arthur F. Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998). 30. On the Chishti Sabiri order, see Ernst and Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love, 118–127, 130–140. Chapter 1 Sufism and the P litics f Islamic Identity 1. A version of this chapter was published as an article: “Faqir or Faker?: The Pakpattan Tragedy and the Politics of Sufism in Pakistan,” Religion 36 (2006): 29–47. 2. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 6. For a trenchant critique of Casanova’s arguments, see Asad, Formations of the Secular, Chapter Eight, “Secularism, Nation-State, Religion,” 181–201. 3. For perspectives on the public and private spheres in Muslim societies, see the essays in The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies, ed. Miriam Hoexter, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Nehemia Levtzion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 1–8. On contemporary debates of the Islamic public sphere, see also Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, “Redefining Muslim Publics,” in New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, ed. Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1–18. 4. Ewing, Arguing Sainthood, 67. On the origins and development of the Pakistani state, see also Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 5. For a thorough examination of the Taliban and the rise of the militant Islam within the complex geopolitics of Central Asia, see the recent works by Ahmed Rashid: Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000); Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). On the Taliban and its rela- tionship to sectarian Deobandi groups in Pakistan, see Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam, 136–143. 6. The MMA comprises six diverse religious parties—the Jama'at-i Islami; two factions of the Deobandi Jamiat 'Ulama-i Islam; the Barelwi party, the Jamiat 'Ulama-i Pakistan; a small Wahhabi group, the Jamiat Ahl-i Hadith; and a Shi'a group, the Islami Tehrik Pakistan. See Andrew Holden, “Pakistan’s Religious Parties: A Threat to Musharraf’s Policies?” Central 234 N tes Asia-Caucasus Analyst (Johns Hopkins University, SAIS, November 6, 2002). On the regime of General Musharraf and the landscape of post-9/11 Pakistan, see Ahmed Rashid, “Pakistan on the Edge,” New York Review of Books, October 10, 2002, 36–40; Isabel Hilton, “The General in His Labyrinth: Where Will Pervez Musharraf Lead His Country?” New Yorker, August 12, 2002, 42–55. 7. Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Islamic Leviathan:
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