‘Sindhis are Sufi by nature’: Sufism as a marker of identity in Sindh

Abstract

When ‘the land of Shah Latif bleeds again’, ‘can Sufism save Sindh?’ Thus asked an opinion article following a recent attack on a Shia imāmbārgāh in the northern Sindhi town of Shikarpur which left more than 60 people dead. For this commentator as for many in Pakistan, Sindh had so far been relatively spared by communal and sectarian violence thanks to its ‘Sufi ethos [which] has long been cherished as the panacea for burgeoning extremism in Pakistan’ (Akhtar 2015). Except for a few cases of communal violence in the years leading up to Partition, and a few cases of sectarian violence such the massacre of 116 Shias during a Muharram procession in Therhi in June 1963,1 Sindh is generally thought of as a province where various religious communities coexist peacefully. However, the omissions in this overly simple portrayal – such as the ethnic and sectarian violence in Sindh’s urban centers – in fact reveal the extent to which a certain reified conception of Sindh’s culture – rural, peaceful and traditional – is associated with a certain form of Muslim religiosity or Sufism, understood as a quietist search for divine union. The depiction of Sindh as a ‘land of Sufis’ has become a cliché repeated ad nauseam by Sindhis themselves as well as by non-Sindhis, including Karachi’s Muhajirs. Political leaders and activists have no scruples referring to it, whether it is common nationalist workers who, during my fieldwork, wanted to impress upon me that they, Sindhis, are ‘Sufi by nature’, or the former Sindh culture minister, Sassui Palijo, when she declared in January 2011 that ‘Sindh has remained relatively calm and peaceful for decades because of the overwhelming influence of Sufi teachings spread by great Sufi saints and poets’.2 With such statements, people reiterate a long discursive tradition that can be traced to colonial writings on Sindh around the time of its conquest by the British in 1843. Anthropologist Oskar Verkaaik has coined a term, ‘the ethnicization of Islam’, to describe the articulation, in Pakistan, of ethnic identities with certain approaches or practices of Islam. He argues that ‘Islam has become [over time] the main language with which ethnicity is produced [in Pakistan]. Islam is now the single-most important boundary-marker between various ethnic categories’ (Verkaaik 2007: 87). One aspect of Verkaaik’s argument is that since identity affiliations in Pakistan all revolve around Islam in one way or another, Pakistan’s nation-building process has been successful in placing Islam at the center of political debates on ethnicity. Another aspect of his argument highlights the association of certain approaches to Islam with certain ethnic groups, as the title of his article suggests by mentioning ‘Sindhi Sufis’, ‘Muhajir modernists’ and ‘tribal Islamists’. When it comes to Sindh, Verkaaik writes that ‘a separate Sindhi tradition of Islam was formulated and defended on the basis of refashioned, local, mystical traditions’ (Verkaaik 2007: 91). This ‘ethnicization of Sufism’ consists of the conscious reference to Sufism as a characteristic or as an essential trait of Sindhi identity, as illustrated by Sassui Palijo’s public statement, the previously quoted opinion article or the assertion made to me by nationalist activists. Claiming one’s religiosity of being Sufi has become a way, in certain social contexts, of asserting one’s Sindhi identity. Hence, the discourse of ‘ethnicized Sufism’ in Sindh has played, like any identity discourse, a performative role in reshaping social boundaries.3

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