‘Pure’ ideology

Some 35 km from Dera Ghazi Khan on the Punjab-Balochistan border is a shrine for the Sufi saint Hazrat Sakhi Sultan Syed Ahmed. Since mid-March, visitors to the Darbar Hazrat Sakhi Sarwar have been greeted by a banner asking them not to perform dhamaal, a Sufi trance dance performed to the beat of the dhol drum. The request – more an order, actually – was made by the police because extremists had threatened a suicide attack on the shrine if the dhamaal was performed. There was reason to believe that the threat would be acted upon. Two other Sufi shrines, for Rehman Baba (see pic) and Abdul Shakoor Malang Baba, both near the city of Peshawar, were destroyed in March and December, respectively. More ominously, on 13 December a Sufi leader was killed and later exhumed from his grave and hung in the city square in Swat.

Sufis practice a mystical form of Islam that preaches love and inner peace. It exists in the far corners of Southasia, including well-known centres such as Multan and Ajmer. A number of Sufi rituals, such as fateha – the recitation of Quranic versus for the well-being of the dead – and dhamaal, are considered anti-Islamic by Wahhabis, adherents of the ultra-orthodox Sunni school of thought. These hardliners also equate visits to shrines with idol worship, a grave sin.

Wahhabism took root and spread in Pakistan during the era of General Zia ul-Haq, who was ideologically close to Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahhabism. Under General Zia, who ruled from 1977 to 1988, the Auqaaf or religious-affairs department in Pakistan, was given the power to seize control of any mosque in which there were disputes. According to Nazir Ahmed, a Sunni maulvi, the process was made simple: Sunnis were sent to pray at the mosques of other sects, where they would start a dispute by objecting to the preacher. Under the law, the Auqaaf department was then allowed to appoint a new chief and speaker for the mosque in question. Invariably, these would be of the Wahhabi or Deobandi tradition, the latter being another ultra-orthodox group.

Wahhabi and Deobandi thought are tied to the Taliban in the sense that many of the mosques and madrassas run by these sects preach jihad. As is by now an open secret, madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan were prime breeding grounds for militants, especially during the war against the Soviets. At the time, the essence of a mujahid freedom fighter was that of a person with a gun, who also followed Islamic ideology strictly without bidaat – meaning not undertaking any activity not found in the Quran, including visiting shrines or graveyards. So strong was this ideology that when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, they promptly banned Sufism, locking the shrines and imprisoning followers.

Back in Pakistan, the recent spate of attacks on Sufi shrines shows the growing strength of the Taliban ideology, which does not consider Sufism to be Islam at all. All the while, other, more moderate groups remain silent, with none of the other sects of Islam seemingly having the energy to confront the Taliban.