Sufi Shrines and the Pakistani State

Sufi Shrines and the Pakistani State PDF Author: Umber Bin Ibad
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786725479
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Sufi shrines became highly contested. Considered deviant and `un-Islamic', they soon fell under government control as part of a state-led strategy to create an `official', more unified, Islamic identity. This book, the first to address the political history of Sufi shrines in Pakistan, explores the various ways in which the postcolonial state went about controlling their activities. Of key significance, Umber Bin Ibad shows, was the `West Pakistan Waqf Properties Ordinance', a governmental decree issued in 1959. Formed when General Ayub Khan assumed the role of Chief Martial Law Administrator, this allowed the state to take over shrines as `waqf property'. According to Islamic law, a waqf, or charitable endowment, had to be used for charitable or religious purposes and the state created a separate Auqaf department to control the finances and activities of all the shrines which were now under a state sponsored waqf system. Focusing on the Punjab - famous for its large number of shrines - the book is based on extensive primary research including newspapers, archival sources, interviews, court records and the official reports of the Auqaf department. At a time when Sufi shrines are being increasingly targeted by Islamist extremists, who view Sufism as heretical, this book sheds light on the shrines' contentious historical relationship with the state. An original contribution to South Asian Studies, the book will also be relevant to scholars of Colonial and Post-Colonial History and Sufism Studies.

Sufi Shrines and the Pakistani State

Sufi Shrines and the Pakistani State PDF Author: Umber Bin Ibad
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786725479
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Sufi shrines became highly contested. Considered deviant and `un-Islamic', they soon fell under government control as part of a state-led strategy to create an `official', more unified, Islamic identity. This book, the first to address the political history of Sufi shrines in Pakistan, explores the various ways in which the postcolonial state went about controlling their activities. Of key significance, Umber Bin Ibad shows, was the `West Pakistan Waqf Properties Ordinance', a governmental decree issued in 1959. Formed when General Ayub Khan assumed the role of Chief Martial Law Administrator, this allowed the state to take over shrines as `waqf property'. According to Islamic law, a waqf, or charitable endowment, had to be used for charitable or religious purposes and the state created a separate Auqaf department to control the finances and activities of all the shrines which were now under a state sponsored waqf system. Focusing on the Punjab - famous for its large number of shrines - the book is based on extensive primary research including newspapers, archival sources, interviews, court records and the official reports of the Auqaf department. At a time when Sufi shrines are being increasingly targeted by Islamist extremists, who view Sufism as heretical, this book sheds light on the shrines' contentious historical relationship with the state. An original contribution to South Asian Studies, the book will also be relevant to scholars of Colonial and Post-Colonial History and Sufism Studies.

Sufi Shrines and the Pakistani State

Sufi Shrines and the Pakistani State PDF Author: Umber Bin Ibad
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786735474
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
After the creation of Pakistan in 1947, Sufi shrines became highly contested. Considered deviant and `un-Islamic', they soon fell under government control as part of a state-led strategy to create an `official', more unified, Islamic identity. This book, the first to address the political history of Sufi shrines in Pakistan, explores the various ways in which the postcolonial state went about controlling their activities. Of key significance, Umber Bin Ibad shows, was the `West Pakistan Waqf Properties Ordinance', a governmental decree issued in 1959. Formed when General Ayub Khan assumed the role of Chief Martial Law Administrator, this allowed the state to take over shrines as `waqf property'. According to Islamic law, a waqf, or charitable endowment, had to be used for charitable or religious purposes and the state created a separate Auqaf department to control the finances and activities of all the shrines which were now under a state sponsored waqf system. Focusing on the Punjab - famous for its large number of shrines - the book is based on extensive primary research including newspapers, archival sources, interviews, court records and the official reports of the Auqaf department. At a time when Sufi shrines are being increasingly targeted by Islamist extremists, who view Sufism as heretical, this book sheds light on the shrines' contentious historical relationship with the state. An original contribution to South Asian Studies, the book will also be relevant to scholars of Colonial and Post-Colonial History and Sufism Studies.

Modern Sufis and the State

Modern Sufis and the State PDF Author: Katherine Pratt Ewing
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551460
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Sufism is typically thought of as the mystical side of Islam. In recent years, it has been held up as a supposedly peaceful alternative to the spread of forms of Islam associated with violence, an embodiment of democratic ideals of tolerance and pluralism. Are Sufis in fact as otherworldy and apolitical as this stereotype suggests? Modern Sufis and the State brings together a range of scholars, including anthropologists, historians, and religious-studies specialists, to challenge common assumptions that are made about Sufism today. Focusing on India and Pakistan within a broader global context, this book provides locally grounded accounts of how Sufis in South Asia have engaged in politics from the colonial period to the present. Contributors foreground the effects and unintended consequences of efforts to link Sufism with the spread of democracy and consider what roles scholars and governments have played in the making of twenty-first-century Sufism. They critique the belief that Salafism and Sufism are antithetical, offering nuanced analyses of the diversity, multivalence, and local embeddedness of Sufi political engagements and self-representations in Pakistan and India. Essays question the portrayal of Sufi shrines as sites of toleration, peace, and harmony, exploring cases of tension and conflict. A wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection, Modern Sufis and the State is a timely call to think critically about the role of public discourse in shaping perceptions of Sufism.

Re-centering the Sufi Shrine

Re-centering the Sufi Shrine PDF Author: Irfan Moeen Khan
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110781492
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Recentering the Sufi Shrine is a study of ritual, Sufi eschatology, and vernacular theopoetics of pilgrimage to Sufi shrines in the Indus region of Pakistan. The book examines the distinction between two different ritual contestations over pilgrimage to Sufi tombs: (1) an exposition of Ṭariqa-i Muhammadiyya’s millenarian Scripturalist reform of Sufism, and (2) Bulleh Shah’s (d. 1767) vernacular Sufism, a hard-hitting Sufi-poet of textual ("bookish") knowledge of religious scholars. This is the first work examining the legal theology of ritual intervention in using scripture to regulate the resurrected bodies of saints, on the one hand, and the ritual metaphysics of presence in understanding the significance and meaning of Sufi shrines, on the other.

Rethinking Islamic Studies

Rethinking Islamic Studies PDF Author: Carl W. Ernst
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611172314
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A groundbreaking response to the challenges of interpreting Islamic religion in the post-9/11 and post-Orientalist era Rethinking Islamic Studies upends scholarly roadblocks in post-Orientalist discourse within contemporary Islamic studies and carves fresh inroads toward a robust new understanding of the discipline, one that includes religious studies and other politically infused fields of inquiry. Editors Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, along with a distinguished group of scholars, map the trajectory of the study of Islam and offer innovative approaches to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have traditionally dominated the field. In the volume's first section the contributors reexamine the underlying notions of modernity in the East and West and allow for the possibility of multiple and incongruent modernities. This opens a discussion of fundamentalism as a manifestation of the tensions of modernity in Muslim cultures. The second section addresses the volatile character of Islamic religious identity as expressed in religious and political movements at national and local levels. In the third section, contributors focus on Muslim communities in Asia and examine the formation of religious models and concepts as they appear in this region. This study concludes with an afterword by accomplished Islamic studies scholar Bruce B. Lawrence reflecting on the evolution of this post-Orientalist approach to Islam and placing the volume within existing and emerging scholarship. Rethinking Islamic Studies offers original perspectives for the discipline, each utilizing the tools of modern academic inquiry, to help illuminate contemporary incarnations of Islam for a growing audience of those invested in a sharper understanding of the Muslim world.

Islam and Religious Change in Pakistan

Islam and Religious Change in Pakistan PDF Author: Saadia Sumbal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100041504X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This book examines the history of, and the contestations on, Islam and the nature of religious change in 20th century Pakistan, focusing in particular on movements of Islamic reform and revival. This book is the first to bring the different facets of Islam, particularly Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented traditions, together within the confines of a single study ranging from the colonial to post-colonial era. Using a rich corpus of Urdu and Arabic material including biographical accounts, Sufi discourses (malfuzat), letter collections, polemics and unexplored archival sources, the author investigates how Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented religiosity interacted with one another in the post-colonial state of Pakistan. Focusing on the district of Mianwali in Pakistani northwestern Punjab, the book demonstrates how reformist ideas could only effectively find space to permeate after accommodating Sufi thoughts and practices; the text-based religious identity coalesced with overlapped traditional religious rituals and practices. The book proceeds to show how reformist Islam became the principal determinant of Islamic identity in the post-colonial state of Pakistan and how one of its defining effects was the hardening of religious boundaries. Challenging the approach of viewing the contestation between reformist and shrine-oriented Islam through the lens of binaries modern/traditional and moderate/extremist, this book makes an important contribution to the field of South Asian religion and Islam in modern South Asia.

Islam, Sufism and Everyday Politics of Belonging in South Asia

Islam, Sufism and Everyday Politics of Belonging in South Asia PDF Author: Deepra Dandekar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317435958
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
This book looks at the study of ideas, practices and institutions in South Asian Islam, commonly identified as ‘Sufism’, and how they relate to politics in South Asia. While the importance of Sufism for the lives of South Asian Muslims has been repeatedly asserted, the specific role played by Sufism in contestations over social and political belonging in South Asia has not yet been fully analysed. Looking at examples from five countries in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan), the book begins with a detailed introduction to political concerns over ‘belonging’ in relation to questions concerning Sufism and Islam in South Asia. This is followed with sections on Producing and Identifying Sufism; Everyday and Public Forms of Belonging; Sufi Belonging, Local and National; and Intellectual History and Narratives of Belonging. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines, the book explores the connection of Islam, Sufism and the Politics of Belonging in South Asia. It is an important contribution to South Asian Studies, Islamic Studies and South Asian Religion.

The Islamic Welfare State

The Islamic Welfare State PDF Author: Christopher Candland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009268430
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The Islamic Welfare State explains the relationship between lived Islam, everyday human security, and government legitimacy in an Islamic society. Readers see the frequent abuse of Islamic injunctions by government and political parties. But readers also see the essential humanitarian spirit that makes Islam a compelling, community-strengthening faith. Readers appreciate how the humanitarian moral sentiments of Islam both provides everyday human security to millions of people and challenges legitimacy of government by allowing government to focus on protecting Islam rather than providing for the citizenry. The focus is on ground realities, on social welfare workers, and their beneficiaries, mostly patients and students from low-income families, their activities and experiences. The attention to affective politics permits the reader to understand politics and political change in Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Sufi Saints and State Power

Sufi Saints and State Power PDF Author: Sarah F. D. Ansari
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521405300
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
In this book, Dr Sarah Ansari examines the system of political control constructed by the British in Sind between 1843 and 1947. In particular, she explores the part of the local Muslim elite, the pirs or hereditary sufi saints. Using a wealth of historical material and in depth interviews, the author looks at the development of the institution of the pir, its power base and the mechanics of the system of control into which the pirs were drawn. The overall success of the political system depended on the willingness of the elite to participate and Dr Ansari argues that it did indeed work in Sind. This enabled the British to govern while allowing the pirs to adapt to colonial rule, and later independence, without serious damage to their interests. The author demonstrates that only in the heightened nationalist atmosphere of the 1940s did the system break down.

Islamic Sufism Unbound

Islamic Sufism Unbound PDF Author: R. Rozehnal
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230605729
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Robert Rozehnal traces the ritual practices and identity politics of a contemporary Sufi order in Pakistan: the Chishti Sabris. He takes multiple perspectives from the rich Urdu writings of Twentieth Century Sufi masters, to the complex spiritual life of contemporary disciples and the order's growing transnational networks.