The abstraction of love: personal emotion and mystical spirituality in the life narrative of a Sufi devotee

Abstract

Based on the recent hagiography written by a devoted khalifa of a Naqshbandi Sufi saint, Zindapir, who died in 1999 in Ghamkol Sharif, not far from the city of Kohat in north-west Pakistan, the paper interrogates the meaning of ‘love’ as the essence of spirituality and ascent on the Sufi path. During his lifetime the author, like most of the saint’s disciples, expressed his love of the saint, and eulogised him poetically in qasidas often reminiscent of romantic Urdu poetry. After his death too, exceptionally among the disciples, he expressed his deep longing for the departed saint. Nonetheless in the hagiography love is most often used to describe a transcendent mystical spiritual connection – to the saint, the Prophet and God. Unlike a modernist trope focused on the individual search for personal experience of spirituality, here love is a mode of mystical knowing that disattends to individual feeling and experience. The paper will look at the different meanings of love as it is used in the hagiography by contrast to the meanings deployed during the saint’s life.

Keywords:

• Sufi ‘love’
• saintly hagiography
• mystical practice
• mystical knowledge
• spiritual experience
• spiritual transcendence

Acknowledgements

This paper is based partly on a hagiography of Hazrat Shah, known as Zindapir, written by his khalifa Rab Nawaz and published after the saint’s death in 1999. The hagiography was translated by Jon Hamidi with the support of a British Academy small grant. The paper was first presented at the Pakistan Workshop in the Lake District in May 2015, and benefitted from comments of the participants.

Notes

1. Here the author gives a quotation in Arabic – ‘Inda thikr al-salihin tanzil al-rahmah’.

2. Urdu, wa/raftah unclear here (translator).

3. The Urdu states hirs waz hawis parasti, See: Rab Nawaz, Kanz, 9.

4. All page references are to the original Urdu hagiography, published ca. 2005.

5. Much has been written about new forms of Sufi spirituality which have emerged as Sufi orders have expanded to incorporate westernised Muslim elites or non-Muslims. The main contrast drawn here is between Sufi ‘love’, usually mediated by the figure of the Shaykh or the Prophet, espousing the denial of the ego or nafs, and more explicitly universalist and at the same time inwardly focused individualised forms of meditation and mystical quest, sharing much in common with New Age and other Eastern religions such as Zen or yoga (on the Moroccan Budshishiyya see Haenni and Voix 2007, 252; Diaz 2015, 29; on German Sufis see Klinkhammer 2009, 138; Sedgwick 2009, 184, 191; on the USA see Hermansen 1997, Webb 2006, 88, 89; on London Iranians see Spellman 2004, 137).

6. On such manufacturing of charisma after a saint’s death see Ben Ari and Bilu (1992).

7. Ironically, Badshah Sahib, the pir’s only son, had told me on a previous visit that he had led a miserable, unhappy life as a child, ignored by his father, living in the wilderness of the lodge as it then was, surrounded entirely by male company, or with uncaring relatives in his natal village nearby. Later he found solace in his marriage and children and was, above all, a family man. Now his sense of neglect, of childhood loss, had been transmuted into a story of glorious sacrifice in which he was the centre, the ultimate symbol. He was the son of Abraham sacrificed to God in the valley of Mina. A modest, retiring man who had avoided the crowds throughout his father’s life, Badshah Sahib had been forced into the limelight by his father’s death. The loss of his father had thus become for him a felt daily reality.