“Lal Shahbaz Qalander will protect us,” said Lal Peri. “And we will protect him.”
“And what would you say to the mullahs and Wahhabis who say that what happens in Sufi shrines is not Islamic?” I asked.
“The Wahhabis are traders who sell their faith for profit,” said Lal Peri angrily. “They are not true Muslims—just fuel for the fires of hell.”
“A lot of it is about power,” said Sain Fakir, more gently. “The Sufis are a threat to the mullahs because we command the love, loyalty and faith of the ordinary people. No one is excluded. You can be an outcaste, a fallen woman, and you can come and pray at the shrine and the Sufi will forgive you, and embrace you.”
“You don’t even have to be a Muslim and you will be welcomed,” said Lal Peri.
“What difference does it make if you call Allah by his Hindu names—Bhagwan or Ishwar?”
“These are just words from different languages,” said Lal Peri.
“The mullahs are always trying to fight a jihad with their swords,” said Sain Fakir, “without realising that the real jihad is within, fighting yourself, achieving victory over your desires, and the hell that evil can create within the human heart. Fighting with swords is a low kind of jihad. Fighting yourself is the greater jihad. As Latif said, ‘Don’t kill infidels, kill your own ego.’”
“Jiya Latif!” cried Lal Peri.
We talked all morning about the Sufism of Sindh, and Sain Fakir’s belief that it would never succumb to the Wahhabis. One of Sain Fakir’s sons brought green tea, and we sat in the shade beside a bubbling rill of spring water as the midday desert sun beat down, sipping tea and tearing great flaps of newly cooked naan. Every so often father and son would burst into song, illustrating some theological point with a verse or two of the Risalo.
“You must understand,” said Sain Fakir, putting a hand on his heart, “everything is inside. This is what we believe. Both hell and Paradise—it is all within you. So few understand …”
“There is a story about Lal Shahbaz Qalander, which Sain Sahib once taught me,” said Lal Peri. “One day Lal Shahbaz was wandering in the desert with his friend Sheikh Baha ud-Din Zakariya. It was winter, and evening time, so they began to build a fire to keep warm. They found some wood, but then they realised they had no fire. So Baha ud-Din suggested that Lal Shahbaz turn himself into a falcon and get fire from hell. Off he flew, but an hour later he came back empty-handed. ‘There is no fire in hell,’ he reported. ‘Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, and their own pain, from this world.’”
The Monk’s Tale
Once you have been a monk, it is very difficult to kill a man,” said Tashi Passang. “But sometimes it can be your duty to do so.”
We were standing on a platform of the Tsuglag Khang, the temple attached to the Dalai Lama’s residence-in-exile in Dharamsala, high above the Kangra Valley and the dusty plains of the Punjab. All around us Tibetan pilgrims were circling the open-air ambulatory, around the prayer hall on the topmost terrace of the temple. Some, in their ankle-length sheepskin chubas, were clearly new arrivals, nomads and pastoralists from western Tibet, fresh across the high snowy passes; others were long-term residents of this Tibet-in-exile: red-robed refugee monks performing the thrice-daily parikrama, or circumambulation, of the Dalai Lama’s temple-residence. There was a strong smell of incense and burning butter lamps, and the air was filled with the low murmur of muttered prayers and mantras.
“I knew that if I stayed in a monastery under the Chinese there was no point in being a monk,” continued Passang. “They wouldn’t let me practise my religion. So, to protect the ways of the Lord Buddha, the Buddhist dharma, I decided to fight.”
The old monk had a wide leathery face, broad shoulders and an air of quiet calm and dignity. He wore enveloping maroon robes, a jaunty knitted red bonnet and thick woolly socks. Despite his age, his brow was unfurrowed and his face almost unlined. “Nonviolence is the essence of the dharma,” he said. “Especially for a monk. The most important thing is to love each and every sentient being. But when it comes to a greater cause, sometimes it can be your duty to give back your vows and to fight in order to protect the dharma.”
Standing talking on one side of the circling pilgrims, we seemed to be the only stationary figures in a great roundabout of religiosity. Some pilgrims paused on their parikrama to spin the line of brass-plated prayer wheels mounted in a recess on the outside wall of the shrine chamber; others performed formal prostrations, a few of them on wooden pallets laid out for the purpose. The pilgrims faced in the direction of the great gilt images of the Buddha and the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara that could be glimpsed, gleaming dimly in the light of a thousand lamps, through the great open doors of the temple. They stood up, facing the images, and with their hands clasped in a gesture of prayer, sank to their knees. Then they fell forward on to the pallet, measuring it with their full length, palms together, fingers outstretched before them, before slowly rising again to a standing position. They repeated this exercise over and over again, even though many were craggy octogenarians who between prostrations shuffled painfully around the temple, spinning their prayer wheels and bowing with visible effort before the images.