Constructing Religious Authority: Creating Exclusion along the Matrix of Knowledge and Power in Pakistan

Abstract

This article argues that in Pakistan, intra-Islamic differences and the contested field of Islamic identity politics affected and moulded the country’s integrated and overlapping religious identities into distinct and disparate categories at the micro level. The article discusses the process of formation of the jamaat of the Sufi-inspired silsila, the Naqshbandia Awaisia, by Major Ghulam Muhammad among the military and an urban middle-class constituency. It shows how the jamaat conceptualised and imbued Sufism with an exclusivist approach, positioning Sufism and Sharia within an Islamic discourse that categorically rejected the religion’s ritual and devotional aspects. This embroiled these mutually constitutive and intersecting dimensions, Sharia, esoteric Sufi doctrine and the devotional and ritual aspects in an ambivalent relationship. The exclusion of the devotional and ritual aspects became a boundary-setting label of difference between the ‘proper’ Muslim and the ‘other’ along a matrix of knowledge and power.

Keywords:

• Barelvi
• Deobandi
• esoteric
• exclusion
• jamaat
• knowledge and power
• military
• Naqshbandia Awaisia Silsila
• reformist
• revivalist

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor David Gilmartin and Professor Ali Usman Qasmi who have read drafts of this article and made valuable suggestions, and to the two reviewers for South Asia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 77–82.

2. Francis Robinson, ‘Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 42, nos. 2–3 (2008), pp. 259–81; also see Farhan Ahmad Nizami, Madrasahs, Scholars and Saints: Muslim Response to the British Presence in Delhi and the Upper Doab, 1803–1857 (London: Oxford University Press, 1983); Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2002); Francis Robinson, ‘Religious Change and the Self in Muslim South Asia since 1800’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. XX, no. 1 (1997), pp. 1–5; Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); and David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1989), p. 54.

3. Qasim Nanautvi, Rashid Ahmed Gangohi and Yaqub Nanautvi set up a seminary at Deoband near Delhi in 1866. They stressed the teaching of the orthodox version of Islamic law through a theologically oriented curriculum. Those who studied there subsequently came to be known as Deobandis: see Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Avril Powell, Muslims and Missionaries in Pre-Mutiny India (London: Curzon Press Ltd, 1993).

4. Ahmed Raza Khan, a prolific scholar of nineteenth-century Sunni Islam in India, provided an intellectual basis for the Barelvi tradition named after the North Indian town of Bareilly which was the residence of the movement’s founder.

5. The term Ahl-e Sunnat referred to the conformity of the Barelvis with the Sunna: see Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Moin Ahmad Nizami, Reform and Renewal in South Asian Islam: The Chishti-Sabris in 18th–19th Century North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 21–2.

6. Brannon D. Ingram, Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), p. 21.

7. Prominent early Deobandi muftis included Rashid Aḥmad Gangohi (1826–1905), Ashraf Ali Thanvi (1863–1943), Aziz al-Raḥman Usmani (1859–1928), Anwar Shah Kashmiri (1875–1933) and Mufti Muḥammad Shafi (1897–1976). These men were muftis steeped in Sufi thought and practice.

8. SherAli Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020); also see Ingram, Revival from Below, p. 29.

9. Usha Sanyal, ‘Sufism through the Prism of Sharia: A Reformist Barelvi Girls’ Madrasa in Uttar Pradesh, India’, in Katherine Pratt Ewing and Rosemary R. Corbett (eds), Modern Sufis and the State: Politics of Islam in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), pp. 128–44 [134].

10. A.J. Arberry, Sufism: An Account of Mystics of Islam (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 119–22; J.S. Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 103; Marc Gaborieau, ‘Criticizing the Sufis: The Debate in Early-Nineteenth Century India’, in Frederick de Jong and Bernd Radtke (eds), Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics (Leiden: Brill, 1999) pp. 452–67; and H.A.R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1947).

11. R.S. O’Fahey and Bernd Radtke, ‘Neo-Sufism Reconsidered’, in Der Islam, Vol. 70 (1993), pp. 52–87; Amir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); David Pinault, Notes from the Fortune-Telling Parrot: Islam and the Struggle for Religious Pluralism in Pakistan (London: Equinox, 2008); and Pnina Werbner, ‘The Making of Muslim Dissent: Hybridized Discourses, Lay Preachers, and Radical Rhetoric among British Pakistanis’, in American Ethnologist, Vol. 23, no. 1 (Feb. 1996).

12. Nizami, Reform and Renewal in South Asian Islam; Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity; Ingram, Revival from Below; and Katherine Pratt Ewing and Rosemary R. Corbett (eds), Modern Sufis and the State: Politics of Islam in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). Also see Ali Altaf Mian, Invoking Islamic Rights in British India: Mawlana Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s Huquq al-Islam (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2021); Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); and Sanyal, ‘Sufism through the Prism of Sharia’, p. 134.

13. Katherine Pratt Ewing, ‘The Politics of Sufism: Redefining the Saints of Pakistan’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XLII, no. 2 (1983), pp. 251–68 [267]; Jamal Malik, Colonialization of Islam: Dissolution of Traditional Institutions in Pakistan (Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1996); and Yasmin Saikia, ‘Ayub Khan and Modern Islam: Transforming Citizens and the Nation in Pakistan’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 37, no. 2 (2014), pp. 292–305 [298].

14. Maulana Allahyar Chakralwi pledged allegiance to the spirit of the shaykh of the Naqshbandia Awaisia Silsila, Sultan ul-Arifin Khawaja Allah Din Madni, who was buried in Langar Mukhdum (Sargodha district) 400 years earlier. Maulana Allahyar was introduced to the spirit of Sultan-ul-Arifin by a Sufi of the Naqshbandia Mujadadia order, Maulana Abdur Raheem: see Abul Ahmed-ud-Din, Hayat-e-Tayaba (Chakwal: Awaisia Publishers, 2005).

15. Ewing, ‘The Politics of Sufism’.

16. Umbar Bin Ibad, Sufi Shrines and the Pakistani State: The End of Religious Pluralism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 56.

17. Ewing, ‘The Politics of Sufism’, p. 269.

18. Saikia, ‘Ayub Khan and Modern Islam’, p. 295.

19. Maulana Allahyar Chakralwi believed the community’s fortunes depended on strict observance of Sharia and complete submission to the Prophet: see the letters of Maulana Allahyar to Colonel Matloob, 27 Aug. 1971, in Maktubaat (Chakwal: Awaisia Publishers, 1989).

20. Barzakh is the celestial world, the (spiritual) other-world where souls reside in a living form: see Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam.

21. A halqa-e-dhikr is a circle or group of followers who assemble at one place and perform dhikr.

22. The centre would be coupled with the regional centres, working in connection with the jamaat headquarters Dar-ul-Irfan. A department of press and publications was also set up and it published a monthly risala (collection of Islamic rulings and prescriptions) titled Al-Murshid. The Committee of Publication comprised Hafiz Razzaq, Colonel Matloob, Professor Buniyad Hussain, Professor Baagh Hussain Kamal, Fazal Akbar, Haji Altaf Ahmed and Muhammad Hamid: see Ahmed-ud-Din, Hayat-e-Tayaba, p. 313.

23. On the Sufi/reformist jamaat, see Dietrich Reetz, ‘Sufi Spirituality Fires Reformist Zeal: The Tablighi Jamaat in Today’s India and Pakistan’, in Archives de sciences sociales des religions, no. 135 (juillet–septembre 2006), pp. 34–40, DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/assr.3715.

24. Maulvi Suleiman was a teacher of Arabic in a local school. Hafiz Abdul Razzaq and Buniyad Hussain Shah worked as lecturers in Islamic Studies at the Government Degree College in Chakwal and the Government Degree College Jhelum, respectively: see Ahmed-ud-Din, Hayat-e-Tayaba, p. 99.

25. Ahmed-ud-Din, Hayat-e-Tayaba, p. 358.

26. For a more detailed study, see Saadia Sumbal, ‘The Jamaat of Allah’s Friends: Maulana Allahyar’s Reformist Movement and Sacralising the Space of the Armed Forces of Pakistan’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 31, no. 1 (Jan. 2021), pp. 1–21.

27. Ibid.

28. Ewing, ‘The Politics of Sufism’.

29. Farzana Sheikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (London: Hurst Publishers, 2009) pp. 3–5; and Qasim Zaman, ‘Sectarianism in Pakistan: The Radicalization of Shii and Sunni Identities’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 32, no. 3 (1998), pp. 689–716.

30. Michel Boivin, ‘The Sufi Center of Jhok Sharif in Sindh (Pakistan): Questioning the Ziyārat as a Social Process’, in Clinton Bennett and Charles M. Ramsey (eds), South Asian Sufis: Devotion, Deviation and Destiny (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 95–110 [95]; also see Patricia Jeffery, ‘Creating a Scene: The Disruption of Ceremonial in a Sufi Shrine’, in Imtiaz Ahmed (ed.), Ritual and Religion among Muslims in India (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1981), pp. 163–94.

31. D.J. Boyd, Esquire, ICS, Lahore, ‘Record of the War Services of Mianwali District (1914–19)’, Civil and Military Gazette Press (1922), p. 7, Deputy Commissioner Record Office, Mianwali, Pakistan; also see Saadia Sumbal, ‘Defending the Empire: Analyzing Military Recruitment in Colonial Mianwali’, in The Historian, Vol. 8, no. 1 (Jan.–June 2010), p. 6.

32. Gilmartin, Empire and Islam, pp. 41–2; also see Sarah F.D. Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843–1947 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

33. Sultan Zikria, a Sufi of the Qadriyya order, was married to the daughter of Malik Yari Khan of Musa Khel, Mian Muhammad Ali was married to the daughter of Malik Ghazi Khan of Piplan, and Mian Hussain Ali was married to the sister of Malik Fateh Khan Tiwana of Mitha Tiwana: see Sumbal, ‘Defending the Empire’, p. 4.

34. Interview with Professor Wali Anjum, Wan Bhachran, 27 July 2019.

35. Interview with Professor Arif Ahmed, Wan Bhachran, 7 Aug. 2019.

36. Bryan Turner, Religion and Social Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1983), p. 139.

37. Zaman, ‘Sectarianism in Pakistan’, p. 715.

38. Wishing to rein in sectarian conflict and the violent activities of religio-political organisations, the district administration suggested the curtailment of the religious authority of the imams by bringing mosques and madrasas under the government’s Waqf department: see Memo no. 4265/HC issued from superintendent of police to deputy commissioner, 22 May 1968, Deputy Commissioner Record Office, Mianwali, Pakistan.

39. Ibad, Sufi Shrines and the Pakistani State, p. 6.

40. Major Ghulam Muhammad, Murshad Jaisa Na Dekha Koyi (Chakwal: Awaisiah.com, 2014).

41. Sheikh, Making Sense of Pakistan, p. 109. See also Jawad Syed et al. (eds), Faith-Based Violence and Deobandi Militancy in Pakistan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Vali Reza Nasr, Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Vali Reza Nasr, ‘The Rise of Sunni Militancy in Pakistan: The Changing Role of Islamism and the Ulema in Society and Politics’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, no. 1 (2000), pp. 139–80.

42. Nasr, Islamic Leviathan, pp. 78–9; also see Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

43. Sheikh, Making Sense of Pakistan, p. 7; Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010); and Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror (London: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), p. 28.

44. John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 36.

45. Interview with Ghulam Muhammad, Wan Bhachran, 2 June 2020.

46. Interview with Wali Anjum, Wan Bhachran, 12 April 2020.

47. Interview with Ghulam Muhammad, Wan Bhachran, 24 April 2020.

48. The khirqa was a source of spiritual baraka (blessings). It symbolises that after attaining it, a person rejects material things for spiritual riches: see Jean Louis Michon, ‘khirka’, in P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (n.d.), 5:17.

49. Muhammad, Murshad Jaisa Na Dekha Koyi.

50. Ron Geaves et al. (eds), Sufis in Western Society: Global Networking and Locality (New York: Routledge, 2009); also see Pnina Werbner, ‘Stamping the Earth with the Name of Allah: Zikr and the Sacralizing of Space among British Muslims’, in Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 11, no. 3 (1996), pp. 309–38 [322].

51. For Sufi orders, see Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam, p. 23.

52. Ibid.

53. Interview with Fahim Ahmad, Gujranwala, 24 Aug. 2019; also see Beatrix Pfleiderer, ‘Mira Datar Dargah: The Psychiatry of a Muslim Shrine’, in Imtiaz Ahmed (ed.), Ritual and Religion among Muslims of the Sub-continent (Lahore: Vanguard, 1985), pp. 197–8; and Pnina Werbner, Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2003), p. 41.

54. In the Naqshbandia Awaisia Silsila, dhikr is done through pas-i-anfas (guarding one’s respiration). In this particular exercise, the worshipper summons in his mind a picture of his heart situated within his left breast and imagines that he sees the word Allah engraved on it in luminous Arabic characters, and that while inhaling, he produces the sound ‘Allah’, and while exhaling, the sound ‘hu’: see John A. Subhan, Sufism, Its Saints and Shrines (Sheridan, WY: Creative Media Partners, 2018), pp. 51–2.

55. Clinton Bennett and Charles M. Ramsey (eds), South Asian Sufis: Devotion, Deviation and Destiny (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 187.

56. Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 95.

57. See Carl W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (New Delhi: Shambhala South Asia edition, 1997); also see Robert Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

58. Desiderio Pinto, Piri–Muridi Relationship: A Study of the Nizamuddin Dargah (Delhi: Manohar, 1995) p. 21. For the same concept, see Barbara Daly Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California, 1984).

59. Prominent air force members who joined included Group Captain Sarfraz, Group Captain Arif Kazmi, Wing Commander Muzamil Jibran, Squadron Leader Mohsin Khan and Squadron Leader Faizi: see Muhammad, Murshid Jaisa Koi Na Dekha, p. 56.

60. Interview with Major Ghulam Muhammad, Wan Bhachran, 23 July 2019.

61. See Claudia Liebeskind, Piety on Its Knees: Three Sufi Traditions in South Asia in Modern Times (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jurgen Wasim Frembgen, ‘The Majzub Mama Ji Sarkar: “A Friend of God Moves from One House to Another”’, in Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu (eds), Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 140–59 [155].

62. Ibid.

63. Interview with Major Ghulam Muhammad, Wan Bhachran, 6 Sept. 2019.

64. See Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Sufis and Anti-Sufis: The Defence, Rethinking and Rejection of Sufism in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 2013).

65. Interview with Sibt-e-Hassan, Lahore, 16 July 2019.

66. Richard Maxwell Eaton, ‘The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid’, in Barbara Daly Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley: University of California, 1984), pp. 336–7.

67. Nizami, Reform and Renewal in South Asian Islam.

68. On the same concept, see Gilmartin, Empire and Islam.

69. Existentialism is a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the problem of human existence and focuses on the lived experience of human beings—feeling, acting a sense of fear, everyday life problems, confusion and anxiety: see Bryan S. Turner, Religion and Social Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1983).

70. Interview with Ghulam Muhammad, Wan Bhachran, 18 Sept. 2019. Also see Katherine Pratt Ewing, ‘The Sufi as Saint, Curer, and Exorcist in Modern Pakistan’, in Contributions to Asian Studies, Vol. 18 (1984), pp. 106–14 [108].

71. See Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India.

72. Interview with Professor Ziauddin, Mianwali, 26 Dec. 2019.

73. For a contestation of Sufism, see de Jong and Radtke (eds), Islamic Mysticism Contested; Sirriyeh, Sufis and Anti-Sufis; and Omid Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam: Negotiating Ideology and Religious Inquiry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chap. 5.

74. Interview with Ghulam Muhammad, Wan Bhachran, 12 Aug. 2019.

75. Interview with Ghulam Muhammad, Wan Bhachran, 10 Sept. 2019.

76. Interview with Salman Ahmad, Lahore, 24 Sept. 2019.

77. Ibid.

78. Dominique Sila Khan, Crossing the Threshold: Understanding Religious Identities in South Asia (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004).

79. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1956), pp. 44–5.

80. Pinto, Piri–Muridi Relationship, p. 165; also see Richard Kurin, ‘The Structure of Blessedness at a Muslim Shrine in Pakistan’, in Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 19, no. 3 (July 1983), pp. 312–25.

81. See Sara Mills, Michel Foucault (Routledge: London, 2003); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 38; and Giuliana Parodi and Dario Sciulli (eds), Social Exclusion: Short and Long Term Causes and Consequences (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2012), p. 45.

82. For the argument about traditional and reformist Islam, see Nizami, Reform and Renewal in South Asian Islam; and Julia Day Howell, Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007).

83. See V.S. Kalra and N.K. Purewal, At the Interstices of Religious Identity in India and Pakistan: Gender and Caste Borders and Boundaries (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); and Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld (eds), Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation and Conflict (Delhi: Social Science Press, 2003).