Muslim Saints of South Asia: The eleventh to ... - blog blog blog

THE INDIAN TOMB
shoulders of private persons, in particular the pīr, the spiritual
successor of a saint and the head of the dargāh. It is true that in our
times a sajjādanishīn may be in service in a temporal establishment,
has a family and may not necessarily live in the dargāh. He is
supposed to spend a few nights in a year at the mazār of his ancestor
saint, and participate in maulūd, ‘urs and other festive ceremonies.
A great deal has been written about the cult of saints by Western
travellers, the South Asian men of letters and publicists and, of course,
by scholars: this phenomenon seemed to be too broad-based and
picturesque to be ignored. Writers of the nineteenth to twentieth
centuries passionately exposed the greediness and hypocrisy of pīrs,
who made a fortune out of the blind faith and backwardness of the
common people. Indeed, the wealth of major dargāhs was becoming
more and more flagrantly incompatible with the principles of pious
poverty (faqr), which the Sufis propagated, and with the destitution
of the majority of pilgrims.
In contrast to the writers, South Asian politicians were compelled
to take into consideration the important place the cult of a saint had
in people’s consciousness. Thus, in January 1948 Mahatma Gandhi
laid down as one of the conditions for breaking yet another of his
fasts unto death the restoration of the tomb of Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar
Kaki in Delhi, which was desecrated by Hindus and Sikhs during the
murderous communal clashes accompanying the partition of India.
The first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru, Nobel laureate
Rabindranath Tagore and the founder of Pakistan Muhammad ‘Ali
Jinnah have written about the value of the spiritual legacy of the
saints for the culture of the independent states of the subcontinent.
Today in Pakistan the veneration of saints is actively used as an
important factor of national self-consciousness in the official cultural
policy of the state. In programmatic official documents the reader is
told that:
The bond between Islam and Pakistani culture was strengthened
by the Sufis, saints and scholars. The Sufi poets used
native metaphors, similes and love stories to spread the
message of Islam. Even music, dance, painting and songs
gave eternal life to some of philosophical dimensions of Islam
... It was the popular Islam with its intellectual dimensions
that supported the establishment of an independent Pakistan
and not the political Islam of the mulla which had no cultural
roots in this territory.
(The Cultural Policy of Pakistan 1995: 18)
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