Cultural Fusion of Sufi Islam

Alternative Paths to Mystical Faith

Sarwar Alam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429872945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

It has been argued that the mystical Sufi form of Islam is the most sensitive to other cultures, being accommodative to other traditions and generally tolerant to peoples of other faiths. It readily becomes integrated into local cultures and they are similarly often infused into Sufism. Examples of this reciprocity are commonly reflected in Sufi poetry, music, hagiographic genres, memoires, and in the ritualistic practices of Sufi traditions. This volume shows how this often-side-lined tradition functions in the societies in which it is found, and demonstrates how it relates to mainstream Islam.

The focus of this book ranges from reflecting Sufi themes in the Qur'anic calligraphy to movies, from ideals to everyday practices, from legends to actual history, from gender segregation to gender transgression, and from legalism to spiritualism. Consequently, the international panel of contributors to this volume are trained in a range of disciplines that include religious studies, history, comparative literature, anthropology, and ethnography. Covering Southeast Asia to West Africa as well as South Asia and the West, they address both historical and contemporary issues, shedding light on Sufism's adaptability.

This book sets aside conventional methods of understanding Islam, such as theological, juridical, and philosophical, in favour of analysing its cultural impact. As such, it will be of great interest to all scholars of Islamic Studies, the Sociology of Religion, Religion and Media, as well as Religious Studies and Area Studies more generally.

Part I
Cultural fusion

1 Tasting the sweet

Guru Nanak and Sufi delicacies

Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh

It was India’s historic destiny that many human races and cultures and religions should flow to her, finding a home in her hospitable soil … Eleven hundred years of common history have enriched India with our common achievement. Our languages, our poetry, our literature, our culture, our art, our dress, our manners and customs, the innumerable happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour.

– Abul Kalam Azad, Presidential Address at Ramgarh, 1940¹

Introduction

In his 1940 address at the Fifty-Third Session of the Indian National Congress, the President of the National Assembly, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, reminded Indians of their shared Hindu and Muslim history on the Indian subcontinent. He gave this address during the height of identity politics fomented by the colonial Raj, seven years prior to the Partition of India in 1947. This chapter goes almost five centuries further back – to Guru Nanak (1469–1539), the founder of the Sikh religion.

Guru Nanak was born in the village of Talwandi (now in Pakistan) and lived in the rich cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious Hindu and Muslim world celebrated by Maulana Azad. Divinely inspired, Guru Nanak set forth to systematize his intense personal experience of the universal One for his contemporaries to re-experience its boundless infinity. He initiated the new script Gurmukhi to record his poetic reflex and to crystallize his message he instituted a guru successor, community gathering (sangat), community meal (langar) and selfless service (seva). He clearly “founded” Sikhism, one of the five world religions today. The repository of his 974 hymns is the Sikh canon, the Guru Granth Sahib, which was compiled by Guru Arjan (Guru Nanak’s fourth successor, 1563–1606) and enshrined in the modern-day Golden Temple in 1604. Based on the founder’s vision and syntax, Guru Arjan gathered together the verses of his predecessor Gurus as well as Muslim Sufis and Hindu Bhagats. The text is scripted in the Gurmukhi, and it spans across centuries, languages and regions. Its earliest author is the first recognized Punjabi poet, Chishti Sufi saint Shaykh Farid (1175–1265), nicknamed Ganji Shakar, the “treasury of sugar.” The Guru Granth Sahib constitutes the core of Sikh ethics, philosophy and aesthetics and presides at all public and private ceremonies, rituals and worship. The twenty-five million Sikhs worldwide rely on its existential power, and so the Sufi ingredients are an essential part of Sikh life.

This chapter brings attention to Guru Nanak’s visual representations in early Sikh art and to his sublime lyrics recorded in Sikh scripture. Both these genres resound with Maulana Azad’s inspirational words, as they highlight the pluralistic dimensions of Guru Nanak’s personality and poetics. We find here not only a rich confluence of colonial constructs “Hinduism” and “Islam” which Maulana Azad was referring to in his speech in a pre-partitioned India but also the infusion of diverse Buddhist, Jain and Nātha yogi traditions current in medieval India. To illustrate the important theme of Sarwar Alam’s volume, I will here focus only on the Sufi currents, and I am most grateful to Sarwar for inciting me to explore this neglected topic in Sikh studies. Sadly, because of identity politics, Sikh writers have ignored the Sufi connections in their religious heritage, and because of their own assumptions, objective historians have outrightly dismissed them. The influential historian William H. McLeod has repeatedly postulated his “admixture” theory, which denies Guru Nanak as the rightful “founder” of a new mode of thought and praxis and instead categorizes him as “reworking the Sant tradition.” McLeod defines the Sant tradition essentially as “a synthesis of the three principal dissenting movements, a compound of elements drawn mainly from Vais˙˙nva bhakti and the hatha-yoga of the Natha yogis, with a marginal contribution from Sufism… .”² His theory

affirms a basically Hindu origin and holds that Muslim influence, although certainly evident, is no-where of fundamental significance in the thought of Guru Nanak. The religion of Guru Nanak, and so of Sikhism as a whole, is firmly imbedded in the Sant tradition of northern India, in the beliefs of the so-called Nirguna Sampradaya. The categories employed by Guru Nanak are the categories of the Sants, the terminology he uses is their terminology, and the doctrines he affirms are their doctrines.³

Such theoretical formulations fail to recognize Guru Nanak’s personal sensibility, originality and genius, and they deter scholars from exploring and savoring the direct, dynamic course of Sufi delicacies in Guru Nanak’s biography and imagination. Scholarly warnings to “exercise caution in our comparisons with Sufi belief”⁴ are appetite suppressants.

Guru Nanak does not acknowledge following any spiritual “Sant” teacher or upholding any Sant doctrine or principle anywhere in his vast oeuvre. We do not find him emulating any specific mystic or school of thought or reworking out ideas anywhere; in fact, we hear Nanak criticize hatha-yoga and other Natha perspectives posited in McLeod’s “admixture” theory. What Guru Nanak felt was a profound spirituality common to all people in his milieu – Hindu, Muslim, Yogi, Buddhist, Jain or Sikh – and what he created were enduring relationships with people of other faiths. Both our visual and literary sources provide evidence of Guru Nanak’s personal revelation and of his rich engagement with Sufi poetics and practitioners. We see Guru Nanak as a typical Sufi saint warmly meeting with a host of Sufis, and we hear his rhythmic speedy verse flowing with Sufi metaphors, symbols and images, often set in Sufi musical measures. Of course, there are some fundamental differences between the existing traditions and the Sikh world Guru Nanak was ushering in. For our topic in particular, certain essential elements of Sufism – the fear of judgment, the eschatological perspectives,⁵ worship at the graves of Sufi masters and the instrumentality of erotic love (‘ishq-e majazi) for metaphysical love (‘ishq-e haqiqi) – are missing in Guru Nanak’s poetic horizon. Yet there are many splendid ingredients with Sufi flavors throughout his vast repertoire. The more we recognize Sufi and Sikh affinities, the more we cognize the reflexes that emerge from our common human ligaments, reflexes – preceding all manmade divisive and fanatic doctrinal conceptualizations and promulgations.

My overall aspiration in this chapter is to realize Aristotle’s statement that poetry is concerned with the universal (chapter 9 of the Poetics) and get to feel the impact of art as defined by Tolstoy: “a means of union among men” (What Is Art?). I very much hope the Sufi delicacies in Guru Nanak’s visual representations and in his sonorous melodies nourish us, so we may practice in our own dangerously divided global society the pluralism Maulana Azad remembered in a religiously torn colonial India. The subsequent independence of India from the British, in 1947, came with forced migrations and ethnic violence. Carved out of India, Pakistan was the first modern nation founded on the basis of religious identity. The provinces of Punjab and Bengal were split between two nations (by now three – Pakistan, Bangladesh and India). A horrific holocaust ensued as millions of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs began to migrate across the national borders. To this day that ghastly past continues to haunt the South Asian psyche and politics. Muslim-Sikh hostilities are just too entrenched. Indeed, by going beyond the conventional theological, juridical and philosophical Muslim studies, Sarwar Alam’s innovative theme for this volume discloses the primal Sufi infusion – the emotion of love – that flows in human blood and emerges in human emotions, imagination and expressions, be they Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Parsi, Jain or Buddhist.

Historical context

Islam had come to the Sindh as early as 711 ce, but it was not until Mahmud of Ghazna started his conquests around 1000 that the Punjab developed several Muslim religious centers and a substantial Muslim population. By the late eleventh century, Delhi became the capital of Muslim dynasties, and the Punjab, being the caravan route from the Middle and Near East to Delhi, was enriched with Sufi shrines, khanqas (hospices), langars (food halls) and mosques. The graves, or dargahs, of Sufi masters became vital sites of pilgrimages where people from diverse religious backgrounds came together to seek blessings. David Gilmartin explains how these shrines embodied “diverse local cultural identities, whose variety reflected both the diversity of ecological, social and kinship organizations in Punjab and the diversity in the spiritual needs of the people.”⁶ Culturally as well as politically, Sufis were extremely important on the Indian subcontinent for the Muslim rulers, notes Barbara D. Metcalf, as they “patronized them as inheritors of charisma (baraka) derived through chains of succession (silsila) from the Prophet himself.”⁷ Guru Nanak, born in 1469, lived mostly during the relatively peaceful Sultanate period – the Sayyid Sultans ruled from 1414 to 1451; the Lodi Sultans, from 1451 to1526. The sultans created networks throughout India and into Central Asia while cultivating “a new religious and classical culture in the Arab and Persian traditions.”⁸ Militaristically strong, the sultans provided protection from the thirteenth-century Mongol devastations, and many Muslim scholars and holy men found a sanctuary on the subcontinent and in turn sanctified its soil. Guru Nanak’s life stories recount his meeting with many spiritual persons. The Sikh Guru in his lifetime also witnessed the terrible defeat of the last Lodi Sultan by the descendant of Timurs and the Mongols, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), who established the Mughal empire, “the most powerful and richest polity the subcontinent had ever known.”⁹

Rather than the official theologians or religious scholars, it was the Sufis who played a critical role in the expansion of Islam in India, acquiring a following that constitutes the largest concentration of Muslims in the world.¹⁰ To begin with, Sufis were flexible and tolerant to divergent views, but they were also very effective in communicating their views and tapping into the human heart. They infused the Pillars of Islam in the popular local folk songs – sung at weddings, sung as lullabies, sung during corn grinding and cotton spinning.¹¹ The esoteric and abstract mystical stages and states formulated by Sufi philosophers such as the Arabo-Hispanic Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 1240) were utterly simplified and conveyed in the accessible vernacular regional languages. Arabic and Persian, the Muslim religious and elite languages, were replaced by the spoken languages of the specific regions, and Classical Sufism was modified and adapted into the local idioms. Growing up in his village, Nanak would have breathed in the air, blowing with the Sufi love for God, fragrant with Islamic vocabulary, concepts, ideals and practices. He also traveled widely, visiting sacred spaces and meeting with holy men from different religious traditions. Sikh historians recount that during his travels Guru Nanak met with Shaykh Farid’s twelfth successor, from whom he procured the compositions that were enshrined in the Guru Granth Sahib in 1604. Though some scholars question the identity of the earliest Guru Granth Sahib author,¹² most believe he is indeed the venerated Shaykh Farid, one of the founding fathers of the popular Chishti Sufi order in India. As such, his four hymns and 130 couplets, composed in Punjabi and part of the Sikh scripture, form the earliest extant example of Punjabi writing. Shaykh Farid was a devout Muslim who settled in Pakpattan on the river Sutlej in central Punjab. Fleeing the Mongol invasions, Shaykh Farid’s ancestors left their home in Central Asia and came to the Punjab. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and table
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Cultural fusion
• Part II Poetry and literature
• Part III Devotional expressions in hagiography and music
• Part IV Political discourse
• Index