Nine Lives Page 17

  “Do the people here listen to you?” I asked.

  “Sadly this town is full of shirk and grave worship,” he replied, stroking his long, straggling black beard. “It is all the Hindu influence that is responsible. Previously these people were economically powerful in this area, and as they worshipped idols, the illiterate Muslims here became infected with Hindu practices. All over Pakistan this is the case, but Sindh is much the worst. It is like what happened with Moses and Pharaoh. The children of Moses were influenced by the children of Pharaoh, and when Moses left them to go and speak to God, a magician made an idol of a calf, and the children of Moses began to worship it. Our job is to bring the idol and grave worshippers from kufr [infidelity] back to the true path of the Shariah.”

  “And what about the drumming and the music and the qawwalis they play in the shrine?”

  “Music is also against the law of Islam,” he replied. “Musical instruments lead men astray and are sinful. They are forbidden, and these musicians are wrongdoers. With education we hope they will change their ways.”

  “So you think there is nothing Islamic about what goes on in the shrines?”

  “Sufism is not Islamic,” replied Saleemullah. “It is jadoo: magic tricks only. It has nothing to do with real Islam. It is just superstition, ignorance, perversion, illiteracy and stupidity. This town is full of fools—if people here were less stupid we could have filled this madrasa. We can accommodate 400 here, but only ten families have sent their children. Have you talked to the fakirs in the shrine? They are all illiterate. Really—what do they know of the Quran? Yet the people go to them and seek their opinion as if they were scholars. We have a long way to go here. At the moment only the poor will send their children to us, and then only because we feed them. We just have to be patient and explain to the people here that their superstition leads to Jahannam—hell—but the path of true Islam leads to Jannah—Paradise.”

  “And what of the Sufi idea that Paradise lies within you?” I asked. Here it seemed, lay a small but important clash of civilisations, not between East and West, or Hinduism and Islam, but within Islam itself. Between the strictly regulated ways of the Wahhabis and the customs of the heterodox Sufis lay two entirely different conceptions of how to live, how to die and how to make the final and most important, and difficult, journey of all—to Paradise.

  “Paradise within us?” said Saleemullah, raising his eyebrows. “No, no: this is emotional talk—a dream only. Is there evidence for this in the Quran? There is nothing in the Quran about Paradise within the body or in the heart: the heart is too small for God. Paradise is outside, a physical place in the heavens which God has created for his people. According to our beliefs there will be many levels of Paradise, eight in all, with a place for each believer. There will be couches to lie in the shade, and rivers of milk and honey and cool, clear spring water. To get there you must follow the commands of the Almighty. Then when you die, Insh’Allah, that will be where your journey ends. On Judgement Day the seas and oceans and earth will be turned into hell, but those Muslims who follow the law and do good deeds will be transported up to Paradise.”

  He paused and stroked his beard again. “Real Islam is a discipline,” he said. “It is not just about the promptings of the heart. There are rules and regulations that must be followed: how to eat, how to wash, even how to clip your moustache. The heart and ideas of love—these are all irrelevant if you fail to follow the rituals and practices commanded by the Holy Prophet.”

  Saleemullah’s organisation, he said, ran 5,000 madrasas across Pakistan, and were in the process of opening a further 1,500 in Sindh. These figures seem to be just the tip of the iceberg. According to one recent study there are now twenty-seven times as many madrasas in Pakistan as there were in 1947: from 245 at Independence the number has shot up to over 8,000. Across Pakistan, the religious tenor has been correspondingly radicalised: the tolerant, Sufi-minded Barelvi form of Islam is now increasingly out of fashion, overtaken by the rise of the more hard-line and politicised Deobandi forms of Wahhabism, which many now see as an unstoppable force overwhelming the culture of the country.

  “I am full of hope,” said Saleemullah. “Look what has happened in Bhit Shah. We have a large madrasa there and seven mosques in the control of the Deobandis. At first the people clung to shirk and resisted the truth. But slowly the children went back home and educated their parents. Now every day our strength is growing.”

  I got up to leave. “Mark my words,” said Saleemullah as he showed me out, “a more extreme form of the Taliban is coming to Pakistan. Certainly there are many challenges. But the conditions in this country are so bad. The people are so desperate. They are fed up with the old ways and the decadence and corruption. They want radical change—a return to the Caliphate.”

  “And what is your role in that?” I asked.

  “Most of the work is being done by the government and the [intelligence] agencies. Whatever they say to the Americans, we know that really they are with us. But our role? That is to teach the people that only our Islamic system can provide the justice they seek. We are the only people giving the poor education. We give the knowledge that the Islamic groups in Pakistan are using to change this country forever.”

  “And do you plan to take the battle to the shrine here?”

  “For the time being we cannot challenge the people directly in shrines. We have no wish to invite trouble, or to fight. All we can do is to befriend people, tell them what is right and wrong, educate their children and slowly change their minds. If we can get children away from their homes to board here with us we can influence them more thoroughly. With education, we hope the appeal of shirk and Sufism will fade, and that there will be no need for punishment.”

  “But if you get your Caliphate?”

  “When the Caliphate comes,” he said, “yes, on that day there is no question. It will be our duty to destroy all the mazars and the dargahs [Sufi shrines]—starting with the one here in Sehwan.”

  No one knows if the Sufis of Sindh can fend off the chill winds of Wahhabism that are currently blowing so strongly; but Lal Peri, for one, was certain that the mullahs would gain no following in Sehwan. To prove it, she said I should come and talk to her pir at his retreat in the desert. His name was Sain Fakir, and he was, she said, a great poet and scholar, who knew by heart the entire Risalo of Shah Abdul Latif. No one, she said, was a greater defender of the Sufis than he.

  The following day, my last in Sehwan, I picked up Lal Peri at Lal Bagh at 7 a.m. She got into the car, her ta’wiz clanking and her club banging against the ceiling of the car. Then we drove out, past the belt of tombs, into the scrub beyond.

  Three miles out of the town, we passed a placid blue lake, with egrets, kingfishers and flamingos nesting round the edge. A black swan flew overhead. Lal Peri pointed out some small thatched houseboats moored at the edge: “Those belong to the fishermen,” she said. “They are great devotees of Lal Shahbaz Qalander. They believe that it is he who provides them with their fish.”

  From there we drove out into the open desert. To me, the dry ridges and arid scree-strewn scrub, bare of vegetation, were stark and lowering, but Lal Peri regarded it all with a sort of rapt veneration. I asked what she was looking at.

  “Everywhere has its own beauty,” she said. “The sand, the foothills, the mountains in the distance: these are all different manifestations of God.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “Every place has the name of God in it. Each has its own meaning. God says in the Quran, ‘I have my signs everywhere: in the rocks, the trees and the landscape.’ But most people don’t realise these things are there.”

  As we drove, I thought over the previous day’s conversation at the madrasa. Maulana Saleemullah seemed so confident, yet it seemed there were good reasons to hope that the sane and beautiful madhouse of Sehwan, and the shelter it still offers to people like Lal Peri, might yet survive. For just as Italy and Spain never underwent the Refor
mation that swept through northern Europe with a wave of iconoclastic image breaking and shrine destruction, so Sindh is a very different place to the North-West Frontier, with a very different variety of Islam practised there. Here in the deserts of Sindh it seems that Sufi Islam, and the deeply rooted cult of the saints, with all its borrowings from the indigenous religious traditions of the area, may yet be able to act as a powerful home-grown resistance movement to the Wahhabis and their jihadi intolerance of all other faiths.

  An hour’s drive through a low dry valley brought us at the end to a small oasis. We passed through a belt of graves and then came to a small plantation of date palms, and in the middle, a modest dharamsala for pilgrims heading on the yatra to Lahut. Beside it was a walled garden, bubbling with spring water.

  “This is the Garden of the Panjethan, the Five Sacred Personalities,” said Lal Peri. A small boy was sitting looking after his goats on the mud bank of an irrigation runnel leading from the spring in the garden, and Lal Peri called to him by name, telling him to go and fetch his grandfather. After a few minutes, Sain Fakir appeared, hobbling on a stick, and directed us to a shady trellised shelter in the middle of the garden. Nearby a group of dreadlocked malangs on their way to Lahut sat silently smoking chillums of hashish, as a family of mynah birds chattered around them.

  Sain Fakir was a venerable, frail, hawk-nosed old sage in his eighties, with liver spots under his eyes and fabulously gnarled hands. He sat down cross-legged on the mat, and before long was talking of his veneration of the two great saints of the region.

  “I am the murid [disciple] of Lal Shahbaz Qalander,” he said, “and the talib [student] of Shah Abdul Latif. In Sindh we don’t really differentiate between the two. The two are inseparable, like Allah and the Holy Prophet.”

  Saying this, he suddenly launched into a verse of the Risalo, singing with a surprisingly strong and melodic voice for a man of such age. As he completed each verse, Lal Peri cried out, “Haq!” (“Truth”), “Jiya Latif!” (“Victory to Latif”). When he was finished he smiled, and lay back, accepting the paan that Lal Peri had rolled for him.

  “My ancestors were all followers of Lal Shahbaz,” he said. “But it is the poetry of Latif that has always set my heart aflame. We believe that his verses are more than poetry—they are the essence of the spirit of the Quran. The Quran is not always easy to understand, and as a result we Muslims fail to take the real message of the Prophet. Only the Sufis teach the true path, the path of love.”

  “What about the mullahs?”

  “The mullahs distort the Prophet’s message for their own purposes,” said Sain Fakir. “Men so blind as them cannot even see the shining sun. Their creed is extremely hard. It doesn’t understand human weakness.”

  “It excludes everyone,” said Lal Peri. “Even other mullahs, at times.”

  Sain Fakir shrugged his shoulders. “In this world, everyone commits sin. The Sufis have always understood this. They understand human weakness. They offer forgiveness, and people will always love those who forgive.”

  “So you’re not that worried when you hear about the Taliban blowing up Sufi shrines elsewhere in Pakistan?” I said, and then told him about my meeting with Saleemullah.

  “It is certainly true that they want to destroy all tombs and Sufi shrines,” said Sain Fakir. “Just like the Wahhabis did to the tombs of the Companions of the Prophet in Mecca. And of course we worry about that.”

  “With this new madrasa, they will try to poison the people here against us,” said Lal Peri.

  “But as a result of this, God’s wrath is upon them,” said Sain Fakir. “Latif had a saying: ‘Deal only with things that are good. If you trade coal, you will be covered in black soot. But if you trade musk, you will smell of perfume.’ Good deeds have good effects. Bad deeds have bad effects. See how these Wahhabis are always killing each other: at the Lal Masjid in Islamabad, in Swat, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. Now is the beginning of the end for them. I truly believe that.”

  “So you think what happened at Rahman Baba’s shrine couldn’t happen here?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “They’ll never be able to destroy the shrines here in Sindh. The Sindhis have kept their values. They will never allow it.”

  “Lal Shahbaz Qalander will protect us,” said Lal Peri. “And we will protect him.”

  “And what would you say to the mullahs and Wahhabis who say that what happens in Sufi shrines is not Islamic?” I asked.

  “The Wahhabis are traders who sell their faith for profit,” said Lal Peri angrily. “They are not true Muslims—just fuel for the fires of hell.”

  “A lot of it is about power,” said Sain Fakir, more gently. “The Sufis are a threat to the mullahs because we command the love, loyalty and faith of the ordinary people. No one is excluded. You can be an outcaste, a fallen woman, and you can come and pray at the shrine and the Sufi will forgive you, and embrace you.”

  “You don’t even have to be a Muslim and you will be welcomed,” said Lal Peri.

  “What difference does it make if you call Allah by his Hindu names—Bhagwan or Ishwar?”

  “These are just words from different languages,” said Lal Peri.

  “The mullahs are always trying to fight a jihad with their swords,” said Sain Fakir, “without realising that the real jihad is within, fighting yourself, achieving victory over your desires, and the hell that evil can create within the human heart. Fighting with swords is a low kind of jihad. Fighting yourself is the greater jihad. As Latif said, ‘Don’t kill infidels, kill your own ego.’”

  “Jiya Latif!” cried Lal Peri.

  We talked all morning about the Sufism of Sindh, and Sain Fakir’s belief that it would never succumb to the Wahhabis. One of Sain Fakir’s sons brought green tea, and we sat in the shade beside a bubbling rill of spring water as the midday desert sun beat down, sipping tea and tearing great flaps of newly cooked naan. Every so often father and son would burst into song, illustrating some theological point with a verse or two of the Risalo.

  “You must understand,” said Sain Fakir, putting a hand on his heart, “everything is inside. This is what we believe. Both hell and Paradise—it is all within you. So few understand …”

  “There is a story about Lal Shahbaz Qalander, which Sain Sahib once taught me,” said Lal Peri. “One day Lal Shahbaz was wandering in the desert with his friend Sheikh Baha ud-Din Zakariya. It was winter, and evening time, so they began to build a fire to keep warm. They found some wood, but then they realised they had no fire. So Baha ud-Din suggested that Lal Shahbaz turn himself into a falcon and get fire from hell. Off he flew, but an hour later he came back empty-handed. ‘There is no fire in hell,’ he reported. ‘Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, and their own pain, from this world.’”

  The Monk’s Tale

  Once you have been a monk, it is very difficult to kill a man,” said Tashi Passang. “But sometimes it can be your duty to do so.”

  We were standing on a platform of the Tsuglag Khang, the temple attached to the Dalai Lama’s residence-in-exile in Dharamsala, high above the Kangra Valley and the dusty plains of the Punjab. All around us Tibetan pilgrims were circling the open-air ambulatory, around the prayer hall on the topmost terrace of the temple. Some, in their ankle-length sheepskin chubas, were clearly new arrivals, nomads and pastoralists from western Tibet, fresh across the high snowy passes; others were long-term residents of this Tibet-in-exile: red-robed refugee monks performing the thrice-daily parikrama, or circumambulation, of the Dalai Lama’s temple-residence. There was a strong smell of incense and burning butter lamps, and the air was filled with the low murmur of muttered prayers and mantras.

  “I knew that if I stayed in a monastery under the Chinese there was no point in being a monk,” continued Passang. “They wouldn’t let me practise my religion. So, to protect the ways of the Lord Buddha, the Buddhist dharma, I decided to fight.”

  The old monk had a wide leathery face, broad s
houlders and an air of quiet calm and dignity. He wore enveloping maroon robes, a jaunty knitted red bonnet and thick woolly socks. Despite his age, his brow was unfurrowed and his face almost unlined. “Nonviolence is the essence of the dharma,” he said. “Especially for a monk. The most important thing is to love each and every sentient being. But when it comes to a greater cause, sometimes it can be your duty to give back your vows and to fight in order to protect the dharma.”

  Standing talking on one side of the circling pilgrims, we seemed to be the only stationary figures in a great roundabout of religiosity. Some pilgrims paused on their parikrama to spin the line of brass-plated prayer wheels mounted in a recess on the outside wall of the shrine chamber; others performed formal prostrations, a few of them on wooden pallets laid out for the purpose. The pilgrims faced in the direction of the great gilt images of the Buddha and the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara that could be glimpsed, gleaming dimly in the light of a thousand lamps, through the great open doors of the temple. They stood up, facing the images, and with their hands clasped in a gesture of prayer, sank to their knees. Then they fell forward on to the pallet, measuring it with their full length, palms together, fingers outstretched before them, before slowly rising again to a standing position. They repeated this exercise over and over again, even though many were craggy octogenarians who between prostrations shuffled painfully around the temple, spinning their prayer wheels and bowing with visible effort before the images.

  Later, we sat in the winter sunlight of the temple tea stall, high above the corkscrewing mountain paths of Dharamsala. Passang talked easily, almost abstractedly, about his youth as a nomad on the Tibetan plains; of his time studying in a now destroyed monastery; and of his ambition to become a hermit, living alone in a cave. He also described how quickly those hopes had evaporated with the coming of the Chinese. Their attempts to impose their atheistic creed on a Tibet whose values could not have been more different, and their campaign to close down the monasteries, had, he said, ended that life forever.