Paper short abstract:

The paper will try to understand if the poetry pattern of space as expressed by the Sufi Quṭub `Alī Shāh (1810-1910) had had an impact on the structure of the Jahāniyyān shrines, including his own dargāh, as well as the āstānahs his Hindu followers have built in India.

Paper long abstract:

Quṭub `Alī Shāh (1810-1910) was the heir of two Sufi traditions, the Sohrawardiyya and the Qalandariyya. His work is still much acclaimed among Sindhi speaking people. My contention is to show that the Sufi poetic space he has built in his dīwān is better expressed in the shrines built in India, than in his dargāh of Hyderabad, in Sindh. I shall thus investigate how the utopia he has built in his poetry finds a way to be expressed in the material space of the dargāh.

In his kalām, Quṭub `Alī Shāh drew a space which was centering on the concept of `ishq. Through it, many borders were suppressed like for example, there was no longer distinction between Muslims and Hindus: his poetic space was located beyond such affiliations. Nevertheless, his dargāh in Hyderabad (Sindh) hardly reflects this encompassing space: no inscription or other artefacts remind the utopia. In the darbār of Rā'i Rochaldās (1879-1957), located in Ulhasnagar near Mumbai, Quṭub `Alī Shāh's imaginative space was managed in a different way. It was translated into ritual, architecture and iconography.

Paper short abstract:

With this paper I wish to argue that understanding a place like Sehwan means that we pay attention to both its material and discursive dimensions keeping in mind that its historical particularities must make space for its imaginative continuities.

Paper long abstract:

Sehwan Sharīf, in Sindh, Pakistan is best described as a 'religious crossing space'. The antinomian character of its patron saint, the thirteenth century mystic Lāl Shahbāz Qalandar (d. 1274) continues to shape the particular character of Sehwan as a destination for qalandari fakirs. Following Amira Mittermaier's position that "understandings of saint shrines are incomplete unless they are conceptualized within a space which includes both the material and the imaginary", I wish to argue that understanding a place like Sehwan means that we pay attention to both its material and discursive dimensions such that its historical particularities must make space for its imaginative continuities.

Drawing from field research among fakirs, the proposed paper aims to highlight the ways in which fakir imaginations of Sehwan surface in the overlay of self-representations and bodily dispositions, in spatial choices and ritual itineraries, in engagements of material space with dialogical dream-space - suggesting in the person of the fakir crossings of space, body and notions of charismatic authority. Following Watenpaugh (2005), this paper demonstrates that spatial activity, in addition to self-fashioning and social behavior is instrumental to the construction of a fakīrī self. I will argue that a honing of inward and outward dispositions is not independent of fakir mastery of space putting the question of space and embodiment at the center of fakir self-representations. Furthermore, it adds to the discussion on the spatialising of bodies as well as the embodied ways in which antinomian notions of space are articulated and maintained in Sehwan.

Paper short abstract:

Photography is used to demonstrate the making of subjective Sufi spaces through a gesture of defining centers and sharing identities, thereby expressing concepts like liminality, hierarchy, and a dynamical creativity, counterpoised today through a gesture of drawing borders and confrontation.

Paper long abstract:

This lecture uses the photographic image to interpret Sufism in Pakistan. It argues that photography allows, as opposed to popular conceptions assuming it showing a transparent reality, for a personal perspective contained in the photographer's frozen view. With regard to the lecture's topic, the photographic image lends itself, in conjunction with the written word, to explore the subjective spaces in which participants find evolving the mystical experience - including notions of the liminal, hierarchy, power, and creativity, that is, the habitus and the discourses which form the notion of a shrine. Thus I will outline the intellectual gesture which primarily informs the formation of space in Sufi localities, and I will argue that the original gesture is one of defining spaces from the center outward and of sharing identities, a gesture which creates subjective foci which together make up a holy space, related to each other hierarchically as well as sharing each others' identity, generating a dynamic and creative impetus. I will also show that this gesture is in these days, particularly in the urban Punjab, counterpoised by one of exercising power through drawing borders and confronting exclusive entities, a change which is visible in the redefinition of holy spaces which in the process acquire a new, normative quality of separate divisions. 12-15 Photographic images will be shown in order not only to illustrate, but to interpret this proposition.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at contemporary negotiations between narratives of Sufi, national and community space in the work of the early 20th century Urdu writer and icon of Sufism Khwaja Hasan Nizami, highliting the internal and behavioral aspects of Sufi space, as well as its fluctuating geographical expansion.

Paper long abstract:

Based on a close reading of several pamphlets of the late colonial Urdu writer and icon of Sufism Khwaja Hasan Nizami, this paper looks at negotiations between narratives of Sufi, national and community space.

Nizami represents the built architecture of the shrine as an ordered moral universe with a set code of conduct and normative emotions. In the context of the quest for a Muslim and an Indian identity and belonging during the heydays of nationalism Nizami projects the Sufi shrine as a space of continuity and unity capable to encompass the geography and bodies of India, as well as its ethos and self. He imagines the physical territory of the shrine as an internal space of the individual and the community, as well as the material space of the country, thus blurring understandings of the respective scopes of these spaces. At the same time he shapes the etiquette and image of the shrine in accordance with normalizing tendencies in Islamic reformism.

The paper argues that Khwaja Hasan Nizami's fashioning of the multiple aspects of Sufi space helps to understand the complex layers of contemporary mouldings of community and nation. It seeks to highlight the internal and behavioral aspects of Sufi space in its practiced actuality, such as emotions and ethics, as well as its fluctuating geographical expansion. Thus the presentation aims at a localized discussion of Sufi space in its historical and political situatedness questioning conceptualizations of Sufi space that separate its material from the imagined dimension.

Paper short abstract:

In two novels from 2006 and 2009 Mirza Athar Baig has revealed the functioning of “fake” Sufi shrines from the position of a sceptic who nevertheless has to admit their social relevance.

Paper long abstract:

For decades Sufism has been propagated by writers and intellectuals in Pakistan as a peaceful, tolerant form of Islam and thus as an alternative to militant, sectarian versions which threaten to disrupt social life in the country. On the other hand, several Urdu writers have exposed Sufi shrines as seats of power, exploitation and abuse. In a different manner, again, a variety of saint worship has been used by members of the bureaucratic and literary establishment as a stabilising ideology, directed primarily against leftist intellectuals and writers.

Apart from these tendencies, Mirza Athar Baig has constructed two fictional sites of saint veneration in his Urdu novels Ghulam Bagh (Garden of slaves, 2006) and Sifr se ek tak (From zero to one, 2009) which at first sight seem to be obvious fakes. In both cases the main protagonists see through the make-believe, or at least think so, but gradually come to understand the working of the place and its social relevance. Both are sceptics and in a certain way angry young men. Both have their own charisma, both work magic with words and are thus able to manipulate others, and yet they cannot escape the magic of the "false" shrines. The novels thus present deep insights into the exercise of power through suggestion and persuasion in interpersonal relations and religious life, while at the same time situating the shrine culture in the social fabric of urban and rural Pakistan.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses representations of Sufi space in Indian popular culture by analysing the motif of pilgrimage to Sufi shrines in Muslim devotional films produced during the 1970s and 80s.

Paper long abstract:

Several films classified as Muslim devotional were produced in India during the 1970s and 80s. Lengthy depictions of pilgrimage to Sufi shrines are ubiquitous to these films with sequences often shot on location. Although the genre has since all but vanished, its depiction of shrines has affected the visual aesthetics of popular qawwali recordings widely sold in and around South Asian Sufi centres.

This paper seeks to discuss the Sufi space in the intersection of religion and popular culture, belief and commercial entertainment. Pilgrimage to Sufi shrines is essential to the plot of Muslim devotional films, since only divine intervention can normally help in solving the problems the protagonist finds himself in. However, the pilgrimage sequences act simultaneously as attractions than aim at making the film more successful by appealing to the religious sentiments of the target audience. These scenes are regularly more elaborate than the plot alone would require: instead of only one shrine, the most extensive pilgrimages cover as many as fifty and the visits to shrines often take place against the background of qawwali music performed by the most popular artists.

By focusing on Muslim devotional films, the paper seeks to broaden the discussion on Sufi space beyond the conventional religious and institutional frameworks by taking into consideration the commercial representations produced by actors who do not hail from the class of religious specialists engaged with shrines.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on the healing practice of a Naqshabandi Mufti in Delhi from 2005-2013, this paper analyzes such healing as a method of adjudication in which embodied language produces new sufi spaces with the power to transform lives.

Paper long abstract:

The Old Delhi mosque in which I have conducted fieldwork since 2005 is home to a popular mufti who offers "spiritual healing" to sufi and non-sufi Muslims, Hindus, and anyone else who approaches him for help with physical or familial troubles. This naqshabandi mufti prescribes various remedies for physical and relationship problems: he writes amulets to be worn, quran verses to be dissolved in water and drunk, and amulets to be placed under beds, hung in door frames, or worn in clothing. Each of these remedies encourages troubled subjects to knowingly or unknowingly ingest holy words that have the capacity to change them and their relationships. In this paper, I argue that this process of adjudication is predicated on the idea that holy words infuse the spaces into which it comes into contact, whether material objects, the air we breath, or living bodies. That the mufti prescribes these remedies to anyone who asks for help, regardless of community affiliation, and that they make of bodies, beds, and thresholds spaces capable of healing suggests both the power of language and the dynamism of sufi space in this healing tradition.