Nine Lives(57)
As we drove, I thought over the previous day’s conversation at the madrasa. Maulana Saleemullah seemed so confident, yet it seemed there were good reasons to hope that the sane and beautiful madhouse of Sehwan, and the shelter it still offers to people like Lal Peri, might yet survive. For just as Italy and Spain never underwent the Reformation that swept through northern Europe with a wave of iconoclastic image breaking and shrine destruction, so Sindh is a very different place to the North-West Frontier, with a very different variety of Islam practised there. Here in the deserts of Sindh it seems that Sufi Islam, and the deeply rooted cult of the saints, with all its borrowings from the indigenous religious traditions of the area, may yet be able to act as a powerful home-grown resistance movement to the Wahhabis and their jihadi intolerance of all other faiths.
An hour’s drive through a low dry valley brought us at the end to a small oasis. We passed through a belt of graves and then came to a small plantation of date palms, and in the middle, a modest dharamsala for pilgrims heading on the yatra to Lahut. Beside it was a walled garden, bubbling with spring water.
“This is the Garden of the Panjethan, the Five Sacred Personalities,” said Lal Peri. A small boy was sitting looking after his goats on the mud bank of an irrigation runnel leading from the spring in the garden, and Lal Peri called to him by name, telling him to go and fetch his grandfather. After a few minutes, Sain Fakir appeared, hobbling on a stick, and directed us to a shady trellised shelter in the middle of the garden. Nearby a group of dreadlocked malangs on their way to Lahut sat silently smoking chillums of hashish, as a family of mynah birds chattered around them.
Sain Fakir was a venerable, frail, hawk-nosed old sage in his eighties, with liver spots under his eyes and fabulously gnarled hands. He sat down cross-legged on the mat, and before long was talking of his veneration of the two great saints of the region.
“I am the murid [disciple] of Lal Shahbaz Qalander,” he said, “and the talib [student] of Shah Abdul Latif. In Sindh we don’t really differentiate between the two. The two are inseparable, like Allah and the Holy Prophet.”
Saying this, he suddenly launched into a verse of the Risalo, singing with a surprisingly strong and melodic voice for a man of such age. As he completed each verse, Lal Peri cried out, “Haq!” (“Truth”), “Jiya Latif!” (“Victory to Latif”). When he was finished he smiled, and lay back, accepting the paan that Lal Peri had rolled for him.
“My ancestors were all followers of Lal Shahbaz,” he said. “But it is the poetry of Latif that has always set my heart aflame. We believe that his verses are more than poetry—they are the essence of the spirit of the Quran. The Quran is not always easy to understand, and as a result we Muslims fail to take the real message of the Prophet. Only the Sufis teach the true path, the path of love.”
“What about the mullahs?”
“The mullahs distort the Prophet’s message for their own purposes,” said Sain Fakir. “Men so blind as them cannot even see the shining sun. Their creed is extremely hard. It doesn’t understand human weakness.”
“It excludes everyone,” said Lal Peri. “Even other mullahs, at times.”
Sain Fakir shrugged his shoulders. “In this world, everyone commits sin. The Sufis have always understood this. They understand human weakness. They offer forgiveness, and people will always love those who forgive.”
“So you’re not that worried when you hear about the Taliban blowing up Sufi shrines elsewhere in Pakistan?” I said, and then told him about my meeting with Saleemullah.
“It is certainly true that they want to destroy all tombs and Sufi shrines,” said Sain Fakir. “Just like the Wahhabis did to the tombs of the Companions of the Prophet in Mecca. And of course we worry about that.”
“With this new madrasa, they will try to poison the people here against us,” said Lal Peri.
“But as a result of this, God’s wrath is upon them,” said Sain Fakir. “Latif had a saying: ‘Deal only with things that are good. If you trade coal, you will be covered in black soot. But if you trade musk, you will smell of perfume.’ Good deeds have good effects. Bad deeds have bad effects. See how these Wahhabis are always killing each other: at the Lal Masjid in Islamabad, in Swat, in Afghanistan, in Iraq. Now is the beginning of the end for them. I truly believe that.”
“So you think what happened at Rahman Baba’s shrine couldn’t happen here?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “They’ll never be able to destroy the shrines here in Sindh. The Sindhis have kept their values. They will never allow it.”