“What sort of trouble?” I asked.
“They tell us that what we do is wrong. They tell women not to come at all, and to stay at home. They ask people who are singing to stop. Sometimes arguments break out—even fist fights. This used to be a place where people came to get peace of mind. Now when they come here they just encounter more problems, so gradually they have stopped coming.”
“How long has this being going on?” I asked.
“Before the Afghan war there was nothing like this,” replied Tila Mohammed. “But then the Saudis came, with their propaganda to stop visiting the saints and to stop us preaching ’ishq. Now this trouble happens more and more frequently.”
Making sure no one was listening, he leaned forward and whispered, “Last week they broke the saz of a celebrated musician from Kohat. We pray that right will overpower wrong, that good will overcome evil. But our way is pacifist. As Rahman Baba put it:
I am a lover, and I deal in love. Sow flowers,
So your surroundings become a garden.
Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet.
We are all one body,
Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.
The end came on 4 March 2009, a week before my visit to Sehwan. A group of Pakistani Taliban arrived at the shrine before dawn, and placed dynamite around the squinches of the dome. No one was hurt, but the shrine chamber was completely destroyed. The Taliban issued a press release blaming the shrine for opening its doors to women, and allowing them to pray and seek healing there. Since then several other shrines in areas under Taliban control have been blown up or shut down, and one—that of Haji Sahib Turangzai, in the Mohmand Tribal Federally Administered Tribal Region of Pakistan—has been turned into a Taliban headquarters.
Behind the violence lies a theological conflict that has divided the Islamic world for centuries, albeit one dramatically radicalised by the aftermath of the anti-Soviet jihad. Rahman Baba, like Lal Shahbaz in Sindh or Rumi in Anatolia, believed passionately in the importance of the use of music, poetry and dance as a path for remembering and reaching God, as a way of opening the gates of Paradise. But this use of poetry and music in ritual, and the way the Sufis welcome women into their shrines, are some of the many aspects of Sufi practice that have attracted the wrath of modern Wahhabis, and their South Asian theological allies, the Deobandis and Tablighis. For although there is nothing in the Quran that specifically bans music, Islamic tradition has always associated music with dancing girls and immorality, and infections from Hinduism, and there has been a long tradition of clerical opposition.
In the long story of the complex three-cornered relationship between Hinduism, Sufi Islam and Islamic orthodoxy—in which the determination of the Sufis to absorb Hindu ideas and practices has always clashed with the wish of the orthodox to root them out as dangerous and deviant impurities—Sehwan has historically played an important part. It was the home of the great Sufi philosopher-poet Mian Mir, who in turn became the pir of the seventeenth-century Mughal prince Dara Shukoh, the ruler who arguably did more than anyone else to attempt to bring together the two great religions of South Asia. Dara was taught by his Sehwan-born pir that there was an essential unity of the Islamic and Hindu mystical paths. Heavily influenced by Mian Mir’s philosophy, Dara would go on to write, in his great treatise on Sufism The Compass of Truth:
Thou art in the Ka’ba at Mecca,
as well as in the [Hindu] temple of Somnath.
Thou art in the monastery,
as well as the tavern.
Thou art at the same time the light and the moth,
The wine and the cup,
The sage and the fool,
The friend and the stranger.
The rose and the nightingale.
Dara also had the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads translated into Persian as The Mysteries of Mysteries, and he wrote a comparative study of Hinduism and Islam, The Mingling of Two Oceans, which emphasised the compatibility of the two faiths and the common source of their divine revelations. In it he speculated that the essential nature of Islam was identical to that of Hinduism, and following the Quranic injunction that no land had been left without prophetic guidance, became convinced that the Vedas constituted the mysterious concealed scriptures mentioned in the Quran as the ultimate scriptural spring of all monotheism. In the end, however, Dara’s Sehwan-influenced speculations proved too radical for the Muslim elite of India, and while Sufism has always had a large following, its influence among the Islamic ulema has always been controversial and frequently challenged. What is happening today is only the latest round of a much more ancient and intractable theological conflict within the Islamic world, albeit one super-charged by modern politics and weaponry.