In nineteenth-century Punjab, a cultural tug-of-war ensued as both Sufi mystics and British officials aimed to engage the local artisans as a means of realizing their ideological ambitions. When it came to influence and impact, the Sufi shrines had a huge advantage over the colonial art institutions, such as the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore. The mystically-inspired shrines, built as a statement of Muslim ruling ambitions, were better suited to the task of appealing to local art traditions. By contrast the colonial institutions, rooted in the Positivist Romanticism of the Victorian West, found assimilation to be more of a challenge. In questioning their relative success and failures at influencing local culture, the book explores the extent to which political control translates into cultural influence. Folktales, Sufi shrines, colonial architecture, institutional education methods and museum exhibitions all provide a wealth of sources for revealing the complex dynamic between the Punjabi artisans, the Sufi community and the colonial British. In this unique look at a little-explored aspect of India's history, Hussain Ahmad Khan explores this evidence in order to illuminate this web of cultural influences. Examining the Sufi-artisan relationship within the various contexts of political revolt, the decline of the Mughals and the struggle of the Sufis to establish an Islamic state, this book argues that Sufi shrines were initially constructed with the aim of affirming a distinct 'Muslim' identity. At the same time, art institutions established by colonial officials attempted to promote eclectic architecture representing the 'British Indian empire', as well as to revive the pre-colonial traditions with which they had previously seemed out of touch. This important book sheds new light on the dynamics of power and culture in the British Empire.

This book explores the organic lives of popular Sufi shrines in contemporary Northwest India. It traverses the worldview of shrine spaces, rituals and their complex narratives, and provides an insight into their urban and rural landscapes in the post-Partition (Indian) Punjab. What happened to these shrines when attempts were made to dissuade Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus from their veneration of popular saints in the early twentieth century? What was the fate of popular shrines that persisted even when the Muslim population was virtually wiped off as a result of migration during Partition? How did these shrines manifest in the context of the threat posed by militants in the 1980s? How did such popular practices reconfigure themselves when some important centres of Sufism were left behind in the West Punjab (now Pakistan)? This book examines several of these questions and utilizes a combination of analytical tools, new theoretical tropes and an ethnographic approach to understand and situate popular Sufi shrines so that they are both historicized and spatialized. As such, it lays out some crucial contours of the method and practice of understanding popular sacred spaces (within India and elsewhere), bridging the everyday and the metanarratives of power structures and state formation. This book will be useful to scholars, researchers and those engaged in interdisciplinary work in history, social anthropology, historical sociology, cultural studies, historical geography, religion and art history, as wel as those interested in Sufism and its shrines in South Asia.

After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Sufi shrines became highly contested. Considered deviant and `un-Islamic', they soon fell under government control as part of a state-led strategy to create an `official', more unified, Islamic identity. This book, the first to address the political history of Sufi shrines in Pakistan, explores the various ways in which the postcolonial state went about controlling their activities. Of key significance, Umber Bin Ibad shows, was the `West Pakistan Waqf Properties Ordinance', a governmental decree issued in 1959. Formed when General Ayub Khan assumed the role of Chief Martial Law Administrator, this allowed the state to take over shrines as `waqf property'. According to Islamic law, a waqf, or charitable endowment, had to be used for charitable or religious purposes and the state created a separate Auqaf department to control the finances and activities of all the shrines which were now under a state sponsored waqf system. Focusing on the Punjab - famous for its large number of shrines - the book is based on extensive primary research including newspapers, archival sources, interviews, court records and the official reports of the Auqaf department. At a time when Sufi shrines are being increasingly targeted by Islamist extremists, who view Sufism as heretical, this book sheds light on the shrines' contentious historical relationship with the state. An original contribution to South Asian Studies, the book will also be relevant to scholars of Colonial and Post-Colonial History and Sufism Studies.

This volume describes the social and practical aspects of Islamic mysticism (Sufism) across centuries and geographical regions. Its authors seek to transcend ethereal, essentialist and “spiritualizing” approaches to Sufism, on the one hand, and purely pragmatic and materialistic explanations of its origins and history, on the other. Covering five topics (Sufism’s economy, social role of Sufis, Sufi spaces, politics, and organization), the volume shows that mystics have been active socio-religious agents who could skillfully adjust to the conditions of their time and place, while also managing to forge an alternative way of living, worshiping and thinking. Basing themselves on the most recent research on Sufi institutions, the contributors to this volume substantially expand our understanding of the vicissitudes of Sufism by paying special attention to its organizational and economic dimensions, as well as complex and often ambivalent relations between Sufis and the societies in which they played a wide variety of important and sometimes critical roles. Contributors are Mehran Afshari, Ismail Fajrie Alatas, Semih Ceyhan, Rachida Chih, Nathalie Clayer, David Cook, Stéphane A. Dudoignon, Daphna Ephrat, Peyvand Firouzeh, Nathan Hofer, Hussain Ahmad Khan, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Richard McGregor, Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Alexandre Papas, Luca Patrizi, Paulo G. Pinto, Adam Sabra, Mark Sedgwick, Jean-Jacques Thibon, Knut S. Vikør and Neguin Yavari

Sufism in Eighteenth-Century India focuses on one particular treasure from surviving Persian manuscripts in India, Nāla-yi ʿAndalīb, written by Muḥammad Nāṣir ʿAndalīb (d. 1759), a Naqshbandī Mujaddidī mystical thinker. It explores the convergence and interrelation of the text with its context to find how ʿAndalīb revisits the central role of the Prophet as the main protagonist in his allegorical love story with great attention to the circumstances of the Muslim community during the eighteenth century. The present volume elucidates ʿAndalīb’s Sufism calling for a return to the pristine form of Islam and the idealization of the first Muslim community. It considers his Ṭarīqa-yi Khāliṣ Muḥammadiyya as a derivation of the Ṭarīqa-yi Muḥammadiyya, which had an important role in promoting Islam. The book attempts to clarify and systematize all of the concepts which ʿAndalīb employs within the framework of the Khāliṣ Muḥammadiyya, such as the state of the nāṣir and the Khāliṣ Muḥammadī. It addresses controversial topics in religion, such as the struggles between Shiʿa and Sunni Muslims, and the controversies between Shuhūdīs and Wujūdīs. It illuminates two key personalities, Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq and ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, and two types of relationships, the maʿiyya and ʿayniyya, with the spirituality of the Prophet. The book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in Islamic studies, Islamic mysticism, the intellectual history of Muslims in South Asia, the history of the Mughal Empire, Persian literature, studies of manuscripts, Islamic philosophy, comparative studies of religions, social studies, anthropology, and debates concerning the eighteenth century, such as the transition from pre-colonialism to colonialism and the origins of modernity in Islam.

This book demonstrates how a local elite built upon colonial knowledge to produce a vernacular knowledge that maintained the older legacy of a pluralistic Sufism. As the British reprinted a Sufi work, Shah Abd al-Latif Bhittai's Shah jo risalo, in an effort to teach British officers Sindhi, the local intelligentsia, particularly driven by a Hindu caste of professional scribes (the Amils), seized on the moment to promote a transformation from traditional and popular Sufism (the tasawuf) to a Sufi culture (Sufiyani saqafat). Using modern tools, such as the printing press, and borrowing European vocabulary and ideology, such as Theosophical Society, the intelligentsia used Sufism as an idiomatic matrix that functioned to incorporate difference and a multitude of devotional traditions—Sufi, non-Sufi, and non-Muslim—into a complex, metaphysical spirituality that transcended the nation-state and filled the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional voids of postmodernity.

This book examines the history of, and the contestations on, Islam and the nature of religious change in 20th century Pakistan, focusing in particular on movements of Islamic reform and revival. This book is the first to bring the different facets of Islam, particularly Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented traditions, together within the confines of a single study ranging from the colonial to post-colonial era. Using a rich corpus of Urdu and Arabic material including biographical accounts, Sufi discourses (malfuzat), letter collections, polemics and unexplored archival sources, the author investigates how Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented religiosity interacted with one another in the post-colonial state of Pakistan. Focusing on the district of Mianwali in Pakistani northwestern Punjab, the book demonstrates how reformist ideas could only effectively find space to permeate after accommodating Sufi thoughts and practices; the text-based religious identity coalesced with overlapped traditional religious rituals and practices. The book proceeds to show how reformist Islam became the principal determinant of Islamic identity in the post-colonial state of Pakistan and how one of its defining effects was the hardening of religious boundaries. Challenging the approach of viewing the contestation between reformist and shrine-oriented Islam through the lens of binaries modern/traditional and moderate/extremist, this book makes an important contribution to the field of South Asian religion and Islam in modern South Asia.