PASSING DOWN THE SPIRIT

QAWWĀLI, DHAMĀL AND THE PURSUIT OF HĀL AT THE SEHWAN

SHARĪF MELA

DAVID LEWIS

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CONTENTS Page no. Content

3 Profile and Summary

6 Location

7 Log

29 Acknowledgement

30 Appendix I: Glossary

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PROFILE AND SUMMARY

PROFILE David Lewis graduated in 2012 with a BA in Geography

from Oxford and is currently a second-year MA

candidate in South Asian Studies at the University of

Pennsylvania, focusing on Pashto language. His primary

interest lies in the southwest Asia and over the past

6 years has accrued both work and travel experience in

the region.

SUMMARY The following report is the product of a four-week

research trip to Pakistan in June 2014, kindly

supported by a Travelling Fellowship from the Winston

Churchill Memorial Trust.

The purpose of the trip had initially been to conduct

research on the composition, symbolism and

contemporary significance of the Sufi qawwali song.

However, in-country the focus of the research shifted

towards a more holistic understanding on Sufi

practices more broadly in contemporary Pakistan. In

turn, attention was paid to other dhikr practices such

as the dhamāl, matam and their collective performances

at the Sehwan Sharīf mela.

In conducting this research, the author travelled

throughout Pakistan with pilgrims using local

transport, stopping in Lahore, Multan, Dera Ghazi

Khan, Dadu, Sehwan and Karachi. In these locations

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unstructured interviews, participant observation and

videography were used to document the findings.

The primary finding of the research was that of an

incredibly rich and historic tradition in Pakistan of

Shia Sufi practices of qawwāli, dhamāl and matam that

finds itself under violent threat from more

conservative Sunni elements of contemporary society.

The emphasis of Sufi practices on ecstasy (especially

hāl) dance, music, shrines and objects of worship has

increasingly put its practitioners at odds with a

growing current of conservatism propagating Islamic

orthodoxy in Pakistan since the late 20th century. The

consequence has been a decrease in the visibility of

Sufi rituals in public spaces and an increase in the

symbolism and significance of dhikr practices in the

Sufi pursuit of hāl; no longer simply religious

ritual, the pursuit of hāl becomes a cathartic conduit

for practitioners subject to violent discrimination.

Having collected, assessed and drawn the above

conclusions from the data collected during the

research trip, the next phase of the project is the

dissemination of the findings detailed in this report.

To date, the findings have been published as a

feature-length article by Al Jazeera English

(http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/07/shi

a-pilgrims-flock-pakistan-sufi-shrine-

201473175829740724.html) and are scheduled to be

published in the Royal Geographical Society’s

‘Geographical’ magazine in Spring 2015. Presently I am

also in contact with the Oxford University Exploration

Club, the Scientific Exploration Society, Wilderness

Award and The Judd School in order to arrange lectures

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(supported with photography and video) with their

respective members.

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LOCATION

Figure 1 Route undertaken by author (Source: Google Maps)

WAYPOINTS

1. Lahore (Punjab) 2. Multan (Punjab) 3. Dera Ghazi Khan (Punjab) 4. Dadu (Sindh) 5. Sehwan (Sindh) 6. Karachi (Sindh)

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LOG

PART ONE

LAHORE, PUNJAB

Lahore, cultural capital of Pakistan, was where the research trip began in early June 2014. Whilst typically known for its restaurants and Mughal architecture, Lahore is also one of the biggest centres of qawwāli music in the country. Upon arrival I met the famous Bader Ali Khan qawwāli clan. In their freshly pressed white shalwar tunics with delicate golden embroidery, the clan picked me up on the Mall Road before we dashed through the streets of Ānārkali towards the Data Ganj Bakhsh shrine, where an afternoon of qawwāli performances awaited.

Amidst growing sectarian violence in Pakistan towards the Shia minority and a string of recent complex attacks, security was tight at the shrine and police appeared tense. Waved through the security checks by Bader Ali Khan, a local celebrity by any means, the inner sanctum of the shrine instead had an atmosphere that was calm and cool. Scattered across the marble floor were groups of performers from all across the Punjab, slowly tuning tabla drums and leafing through songbooks of scrawled Farsi and Urdu verse.

When summoned to their turn, the last performers of the afternoon, Bader Ali Khan and his brother slipped on a white skullcap, tucked a lock of oiled black hair behind his ear and strode towards the stage. Once seated in a staggered formation, they paused to prolong the air of anticipation before filling the room with an elaborate Urdu rhyming couplet. The harmonium followed suit with a drawn-out note, then the lone tap of a tabla before all three elements descended into a torrent of complementary rhymes, rhythms and tones.

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Figure 2 Bader Ali Khan sings qawwāli

The crowd listened on, occasionally erupting with a ‘Wah, wah!’ (‘Wow, wow!’) and tossing 10 Rupee notes into the air. As a dense pile collected at the performers’ feet a spectator rose from the crowd, his eyes closed and violently shook his head to the tempo of the tabla beat. Slowly raising his hands up towards the sky, he jerked his body towards then away from the sound in apparent enrapture before falling to the floor where he had been sitting. Little, if any, notice was paid to the spectator’s convulsive outburst and it became clear that something very powerful was at work in the performance of qawwāli that was central enough to its ethos that my astonishment, as an outsider, was not shared by any other spectators. Qawwāli, as Badar Ali Khan explained over a steamy cup of tea in a side street after the performance, is intended to ‘attack the heart’ of the listener while ‘emptying the heart of the performer’.

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A few days later at the Baba Shah Jamal shrine, tablas were swapped for large-barrelled dhols and palms for hooked sticks to strike the drum skins. Whereas Data Ganj Bakhsh is the locus of qawwāli in Lahore, Baba Shah Jamal can be considered the centre of the dhamāl. Traditionally a North Indian dance, the dhamāl is an essential part of Sufi practice in Pakistan. The movement is based on bodily rotation, as well as the circumambulation of dancers around the drummers maintaining the rhythm. The drummers’ control over the movement between low and high tempos controls the performance. Dancers drop their heads, beginning with slow, emphatic steps around a large circle before building up to the eventual violent headshaking and whirling, arms parallel to the ground and palms raised towards the sky symbolising their gesture as an attempt to reach God. Spectators look on excitedly, closely packed and cross-legged on the shrine floor. In the darkness of power-cut, the air was dotted with the bright orange glow of ‘dabl-cigarettes’ (tobacco cigrettes mixed with hashish).

I wanted to understand more about the significance of the dance to its practitioners and arranged an interview with Mittu Sain, one of the best-known drummers performing at Baba Shah Jamal. Mittu claimed his father has been attending Sufi shrines for the past 60 years or so, whereas the tradition of dhol drumming runs for roughly 150 years through the family’s generations.

On a bridge in a residential suburb of Lahore, he greeted us on a small Honda motorbike with his son precariously balanced before him. Signalling over his shoulder, we followed Mittu through the narrow alleyways of his neighbourhood towards his home. We were led through to the hujra, a room set aside for entertaining guests and, in the midday heat, regretfully closed the doors and turned off the fans for the best sound-recording quality.

The interview aimed to unpack the concept of hāl and its significance in the eyes of Mittu Sain, as one of the primary drummers at Baba Shah Jama. For a Sufi musician with international touring and interviewing experience, I was taken aback by the intensity of the engagement with which Mittu met my questioning; while I sat sodden in the closed-off room, fumbling with the voice recorder slipping in my hands, Mittu remained regally still, without breaking his eye-contact despite the sweat beads inching down his face. Below are some selected quotes from the interview;

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‘There are Muslims who pray five times a day and go to the mosque but many are still separated from God. As Sufis, we also pray but have many other rituals as well [such as dhamāl]. Through these [rituals] we have a connection with God.’

‘Dhamāl is the faqir’s ecstasy…a totally different feeling, like that of jumping into a pool of water.’

‘Hāl has many meanings. On a basic level it means ‘condition’, such as the question ‘Kiya hāl hai?’ [How are you?]. But it is also a kind of ecstasy. When you are dancing you can feel mastī but when you feel hāl, then you are not conscious of yourself. You don’t know where you are nor what you are doing; you can get hurt but you would be unaware of the sensation.’

‘God said that whoever loves me will feel my presence in their body, their hands, their feet etc. … [So] we enter hāl in order to become acquainted with God in that moment.’

The conviction in Mittu’s words was powerful. Having met with Badar Ali Khan and witnessed his ‘attack’ on the hearts of the scores in the audience at Data Ganj Bakhsh and talked through the significance of hāl with with Mittu Sain, I organised a private performance of Sufi folk music with the Sayyi Yusuf. On the outskirts of Lahore, Sayyi Yusuf stood in flowing red, silver-embroidered cloth and a heavy bejewelled necklace resting on his chest. His head was covered by a tightly wrapped black turban, through which locks of henna-dyed hair fell at the back.

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Figure 3 Sayyi Yusuf sings Bulleh Shah poetry

As he stood before the tomb of a local saint in a nearby graveyard, Sayyi Yusuf adjusted the metal picks on his fingers before plucking the first chord into

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the evening air. Tilting his head back and closing his eyes, the familiar build up and descent of the dhamāl and qawwāli performances could be identified. ‘Āllah-hu, āllah-hu! (God is, God is!)’, Sayyi cried out amidst the bare trees and dried earthen mounds surrounding us, turning on the spot and pattering his feet on the ground while singing the poems of 18th century Punjabi Sufi, Bulleh Shah;

‘Oh! I have been to the mullah and to the pandit, / imploring people to help me find God / but I can’t find him among them.

I am trying to remove this burden of love / by singing the praises of God.’

With the words of Bulleh Shah still strongly in my mind, I sought further background understanding of the role of dhamāl, qawwāli and the pursuit of hāl from a local contact in Lahore, Shafqat Hussain. My meetings with Sayyi Yusuf, Mittu Sain and Badar Ali Khan showed Sufi dhikr practice to be at great (ritual) odds with the popular, orthodox portrayal of Islam in English-speaking media, especially with its emphasis of personal connection with God through dhikr rather than mediated by place and individuals such as the mosque and mullah.

Figure 4 Qalandriya devotees at shrine

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Amidst his revisionist historical account of the Marxist origins of Sufism in southern Pakistan, Shafqat did offer a useful early insight into these ritual practitioners’ motives;

‘We can say that it [dhamāl and qawwāli] is a cathartic kind of thing, when your inner self is dominating your present situation…The real person comes out and then mastī, hāl and liberty follow. And you enjoy your liberty, but not as a conscious kind of act…because your inner self is dominating you; you are with open hair, you are not considering your clothes – even if you are a woman – and you are sweating…but you are dancing!’

In addition to shedding light on the intimate experience of hāl, Shafqat was also able to point out the growing divide between Sufi practice and the belief system of conservative Deobandi Islam as propagated by the state, the evidence for which I’d already encountered at the stringent security checks of the Data Ganj Bakhsh. In 2010 a bomb blast at the shrine left 42 dead and at least 175 injured. Despite the introspective focus of these singing and dancing rituals, Sufi shrines and devotees in Pakistan have increasingly been targeted by more conservative elements of the country's Sunni majority community. Moreover, the community's activities in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province have been forced underground.

Pakistan's Shia community as a whole fares even worse, particularly in the province of Balochistan where rapidly escalating violence has left dead hundreds of Hazara Shias since 2008 alone. ‘We live in fear,’ a friend in Karachi explained;

‘Each year when we meet for the annual matam, during Muharram, someone will ask "Hey, where's that guy?" and someone will have to explain how he was shot on his way to work or buying groceries in the bazaar. This is the reality we face.’

In spite of these pressures and violent threats, the practices of dhamāl, qawwāli and matam and up to a million pilgrims converge once a year for an event in a small town in Pakistan’s Sindh province: the Sehwan Sharīf festival (or mela). If I was to come any closer to understanding his explanation of the pursuit of hāl as a ‘cathartic kind of thing’, Shafqat told me I had to make the journey to Sehwan. It was advice with

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which Mittu and I had parted a few days earlier, too; ‘if you go to the mela, you will see what Sufism really is’.

PART TWO

INTERIOR PUNJAB AND SINDH

The journey began just after midnight, from the Kamyar Pura district of Lahore. Out of devotion to the 13th century Sufi Saint, Lal Shahbaz Qalander (or The Red Falcon), a group of Qalandriya Shias led by community leader, Mudho Sain, began a pilgrimage that would take them to shrines throughout Pakistan's Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan provinces. Central to the Qalandriya ethos is the principle of ascetism and, in turn, unconditional love, devotion and submission before God in the pursuit of ecstatic divine presence and unity. Welcoming my presence on the bus, Mudho declared:

‘If someone has fallen in love with [Lal Shahbaz] Qalandar he will come [to Sehwan Sharīf ], whatever stands in his way … [for] his heart is filled with the gentle words of Ali. Everything is Qalandar in this world … [and] our love is directionless.’

Mudho Sain hurried about frantically with pen and paper in hand, trying to ensure everyone was accounted for. The last few stragglers clambered onto the roof of the bus and haphazardly- tied bundles of roti and biryāni were passed up through the windows. Once each passenger had drunk a glass of rosewater, the bus chugged into motion. Amidst the hooting and waving, a young man pinched his right ear between his thumb and forefinger, closed his eyes and projected a drawn-out call into the air; ‘Nār-e Haider?’ (‘What is the slogan of the lion?’). Fellow pilgrims tilted their heads back in anticipation before forcefully nodding with a communal cry; ‘Ya, Ali!’

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Figure 5 Pilgrims share food on the road

From Lahore, the tasseled red flag on the bus’ roof rippled as we moved southwards towards Sehwan. Along the way, the pilgrims paid their respects at a number of shrines in Multan, Dera Ghazi Khan and Baba Karim Shah. At each stop, the dhol players would strike up a fervent beat on their huge wooden-barreled drums, forming a column of devotees behind them. Leading the procession was spiritual leader, Murshid Mudassar Shah, solemnly walking barefooted towards the shrine. His thick metal ankle-rings clinked with each step. Once in the shrine, devotees circumambulated the inner sanctum, stopping occasionally to place a forehead on the rose-petal bedecked veil covering the tomb and whisper a few words of prayer before returning to the bus.

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Figure 6 Murshid Mudassar Shah in Sindh

Inside the bus, the atmosphere was a quintessential mix of the pains of long-distance land travel with the perseverant joviality that accompanies any journey on the subcontinent, especially a religious pilgrimage. At times it seemed we were engaging in nothing more than a fruitless battle against sun, driving into the furnace of Sindh’s desert landscapes. ‘Bari garmi hai!’ ('What a big heat!'), adults declared to each another with eyes closed and a slow shake of the head. Children pestered parents over whether there was a metal cupful of ‘thanda pani’ (cool water) left. Fellow passengers woke each other up if the sun had moved onto their face, men wiped an index finger across their forehead before casting the sweat into the gangway and women waved scraps of cardboard in front of their children to cool them down. Each morning, it was a matter of holding one's breath a little bit more as the number of passengers inside the bus doubled; those who had slept on the roof now decided they wanted a seat out of the sun.

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Figure 7 Dhol drummers take rest atop the bus

Despite the difficulties, the bus retained an unmistakable atmosphere of excitement and anticipation for the mela ahead. Young men were commissioned with a yell by their seniors to roll ‘dabl sigrets’ (tobacco mixed with hashish) and crack open watermelons to distribute. Elders pressed their palms together before their chest, exclaiming ‘Shaabaash, shaabaash!’ (‘Bravo, bravo!’) in response to the rhyming couplets of qawwāli songs ringing through the bus.

As the bus began to slow down a young Sindhi boy in a dusty pistachio shalwār kamīz jumped in through the open rear door. Balancing a steel bowl of glistening coconut slices on his shoulder, he weaved his way in between luggage, vomit, biscuit wrappers and sleeping children strewn throughout the gangway, trying to attract customers certainly parched from the journey. Out the window, buses impossibly laden with pots, firewood, goats and people jostled for space in a scene that could almost be mistaken for a biblical exodus if it wasn’t for the rhythmical dhol beat pulsating against all this chaos. After over 1000km, we had reached Sehwan Sharif; resting place of Lal Shahbaz Qalander.

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Figure 8 Pilgrims smoke hashish atop the bus

PART THREE

SEHWAN, SINDH

The Sehwan Sharif mela occurs over three days in Sehwan Sharif, just four hours’ drive north of Karachi and is a death anniversary (or urs) for the Sufi saint, Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Attracting pilgrims from all over Pakistan each year to Qalander's final resting place, the town of 30 000 inhabitants groans each year with the swell of humanity that makes the journey to pay their respects to the saint and seek blessings from his shrine. But it is among this very mass of humanity that the mela's seemingly paradoxical existence in contemporary, increasingly conservative Pakistan becomes self-evident.

From the whirling of Turkish dervishes to the world-famous devotional songs of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the pursuit of hāl underscores Sufi practices across the globe and by any account, for the Qalandriya Sehwan acts as a centre of that pursuit each year.

In the courtyard of Qalander’s shrine, the main destination of pilgrim parties, a mass dhamāl was already underway to signal the beginning of the mela.

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Traditionally a north Indian folk dance, the dhamāl is a critical element of Qalandriya practice in Pakistan, through which practitioners aim to get closer to God and experience ecstatic divine presence. Men, women, third-genders and children all shake their heads, throwing their arms to the dhol rhythm. Dancers pitter-patter their feet and some pilgrims simply lie on the ground shaking their heads to the beat. Mudho declared:

‘Everyone is welcome here; there is no discrimination of caste, race, and colour, only those who love God.’

A female dancer’s elder stepped forward towards the climax and untied the dancer’s headband, just as Shafqat had explained. With this invitation the kneeling young girl, hands on the warm marble, began to slowly rotate her head. Each turn became faster and more emphatic as the beat quickened. Soon her long, black hair was being thrown through the air in a frenzy, casting beads of sweat into the performance circle. And then a final thud. Falling to one side, the dancer lay collapsed on the floor, panting heavily, the hair strewn over her face hiding empty, half-open eyes.

Figure 9 Dhamāl dancer throws her hair

The motivation of the dancers, of course, varied from pilgrim to pilgrim. Some saw Koranic symbolism in the movements; the pitter-pattering of feet mimicking the heat of the desert in which Hussein was killed at

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Kerbala in 680 CE or hair-spinning as an appreciative gesture of Fatima to clean the floor on which those commemorators of her son’s death congregate. To be sure, some dancers simply fancied a dance, others earned a living from the performance and among them many imitators could be found at Sehwan Sharif. But a true dhamāl, delivering that still moment of enrapture amidst the tumult motion and sound, is for a few the very essence of hāl.

Figure 10 Female dhamāl dancers whirl their heads

The rhythm of the mela was relentless. All day long, pilgrim parties departed in columns from their makeshift bamboo and tarpaulin camps in Lāl Bāgh. Parading through bazaars lined with trickling pyramids of Afghan raisins and mulberries, as well as stacks of thick, syrupy jalebis and halwa, they delivered their respective neighborhood’s veil, containing blessings and prayers, to Qalander’s tomb.

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Figure 11 Pilgrims camp outside Sehwan town

Devotees flocked to circumambulate the inner shrine, pushing their luck to get so close as to touch it without being hauled back into the swell of people charging forward barefoot on the muddied marble. Along the perimeter of the shrine, pilgrims did their best to escape this torrent of humanity and raise their cupped palms to offer a prayer.

Precisely this sensory spectrum is the hallmark of Sehwan Sharif. If it wasn’t the unrelenting dhol in the background it was the group of matam attendees and their choir. By the second day of the mela, already 53 people had died from the heat and lack of water. Yet with the sun at its zenith, rows upon rows of bare-chested men stood to flagellate themselves for Hussein’s martyrdom in the shrine’s courtyard.

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Figure 12 Pilgrims self-flagellate at Sehwan

A tightly formed choir circle of singers stood either side of the men. Beginning with little more than a whisper, the choirs called out to the flagellants alternately. Soon they were yelling from their stomachs, throwing hands down to emphasise certain lyrics then whipping them through the air to rally their fellow devotees.

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Figure 13 Choir sings in accompaniment to matam

The flagellants leant back and, looking to the sky, raised one arm before beating it down onto their bruised chests and raising the other. Some devotees held their faces in their hands, sobbing in commemoration of Kerbala. The flagellant leader screamed in between the beats. After a few minutes, the men dropped both arms in exhaustion and moved a few meters closer to the shrine before stopping and lining up to do it all over again. And the same groups of men would return the following day, too but this time with knife-blades chained to a wooden handle.

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Figure 14 Pilgrims self-flagellate at Sehwan

‘What is it about the mela?’ asked the Dr. Mehdi Reza Shah, whose family has kept the shrine for almost seven centuries. His question followed a long, tongue-in-cheek conversation as to whether pilgrims nowadays came out of cultural obligation or piety. Rhetorical as it was, it struck at the heart of what Sehwan Sharif offered to those who made the journey to be here.

From the discomforts of even reaching the town, the heat, the sweat, the thirst, the filth and crush of up to a million bodies to the incessant drumming, chanting, yelling, stomping, whirling, exhaustion, beating and bleeding, the mela is a panoply of raw violence. On paper the costs and benefits of pilgrimage don't quite add up at first, yet in the midst of the violence there was a peculiar presence of something more that made it all worth it. Something in the panting of the collapsed dhamāl dancer, something in the vacant face of the flagellant that was calm and fulfilled.

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Figure 15 Pilgrim after completion of matam

Whether you call it hāl or not, it is in those final moments of ecstatic release that it became clear that what is at stake in Sehwan is not a chaotic violence but a conscious pursuit of liberty, a freedom of expression. The very liberty derivative of hāl that Shafqat had explained 1000km away - in the catharsis of Sayyi Yusuf’s lyrics, Mittu Sain’s drumming and Badar Ali Khan’s singing - was strongly at work in Sehwan.

Whereas the experience of hāl itself is not consciously felt, the decision by devotees to pursue it in Sehwan appeared both conscious and intentional. After the mela, a Shia friend contextualised this decision and the events of festival more broadly;

‘You must understand, David, that what you saw at Sehwan… this is not about a belief, per se. This is about an experience, about living through an emotion.’

Whatever violent threats the pilgrims face in their everyday lives across Pakistan, the Sehwan Sharif mela provided a sanctuary of tolerance and expression rooted in the country's multi-ethnic and multi-faith history that is rapidly disappearing from public consciousness.

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PART FOUR

KARACHI, SINDH

After three days of sensory bombardment, the roar of the mela left Sehwan with a peculiar quiet. Gone were the bristling buses and wafting smoke of campfires, the cries for Ali and thundering footsteps of hopeful devotees. Leftover red- and black-dyed bracelets and empty glucose biscuit wrappers littered the streets blown with breezes you could now hear. The blood still stained the shrine floor but the pilgrims were all but gone. In need of a place to collect my observations and organise video footage, I travelled a few hours south to Karachi where the sea air offered a well-needed respite from the hanging heat of interior Sindh.

Figure 16 Blood-stained floor of Qalander shrine

Lahore had provided me with a useful background and somewhat theoretical basis with which to be introduced to Sufi practices in Pakistan. Yet, just as Shafqat had predicted, it was the experience of Sehwan that the ‘on-the-ground’ reality of the pursuit of hāl – whether in song, dance, prayer or pilgrimage – took on a more tangible meaning.

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The explanations of performative significance by Mittu Sain, Badar Ali Khan and Shafqat Hussain made sense, cognitively at least and corresponded to my estimation of the significance of Sufi practices. That is to say, that in ‘attacking the heart’, the highly affective and violent practices of qawwāli and dhamāl are integral components of a Sufi’s spiritual journey towards divine unity by accessing one’s inner-self, stripped of ego. Sufi instructional texts prescribe practices of dhikr as the very means to achieve the end-goal of divine unity and interpret Quranic verse in such a way to legitimise this effort. One such verse reads:

‘This is the place of bewilderment (hayra): He/not He. “You did not throw when you threw, but God threw.”…Would that I knew who is the middle, the one who stands between the negations – His words “You did not throw” – and the affirmation – His words, “But He threw.” He is saying, “You are not you when you are you, but God is you.” This is the meaning of our words concerning the Manifest and the loci of manifestation and the fact that he is identical with them, even though the forms of the loci of manifestation are diverse.’ (William Chittick’s The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination [1989] p.114)

Without doctrinal context and belief, the above verse lacks easy comprehension and Sufi writers such as Ibn al-Arabi write clearly on the difference between knowledge possessed (‘ilm) and knowledge understood (ma’rifa). Yet for the purpose of this discussion, the emboldened line enables a very simple but pertinent question when one considers its centrality as a tenet to Sufi belief on the path to hāl.

If the pursuit of hāl, the ecstatic moment of divine unity when ‘you are not you when you are you, but God is you’ is the spiritual end goal of Sufi practitioners, what do you do when you can’t be you? That is to say, when your everyday beliefs and practices are the target of sustained persecution as they are in Pakistan?

It is this question that I began to wrestle with at Sehwan, serving the departure point from which to understand Sufi practices in Pakistan in a fundamentally different manner than when I had left the UK. Logically, the explanations of the

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aforementioned interviewees in Lahore were sound but experientially, the practices of devotees in Sehwan were much more nuanced and layered in their significance.

As an atheist and socio-economically removed from those I observed, I do not make the claim to share in the lived experience of Qalandriya shia pilgrims attending the mela. Nonetheless, political awareness of the increasing religious conservatism and sectarian violence in Pakistan, especially Sindh and Balochistan, coloured my conversations among devotees to whom Sehwan was ‘not about a belief, per se…’ but ‘living through an emotion’.

Thus, as a centre of dhikr practices, Sehwan was a locus in a cathartic pursuit of hāl that is as much a function of growing political pressure as Sufi scriptural instruction. The cyclic momentum of this symbolism cannot be understated; Sufis seek salvation from egotism in divine unity of hāl through dhikr but are also persecuted for doing so, increasing its symbolic and spiritual value and thus catalysing it further.

Given Sufism’s aforementioned emphasis on ascetic lifestyle, the importance of belief to the low socio-economic class of pilgrims to Sehwan must also be taken into consideration when attempting to understand the drivers behind the cathartic pursuit of hāl. If you haven’t material possessions, it is more likely that your belief system will be of greater significance to you than someone who does.

In this way, the importance of dhikr and, in turn, Sehwan is multi-faceted. Prior to arriving in Pakistan, I suspected its significance lay in scriptural instruction and reward. I returned, however, with a much more nuanced impression of the socio-political dynamics closely tied into the pursuit of hāl convergent at Sehwan.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for the kind award of a Travelling Fellowship, without which this journey and its findings would not have been possible. I would also like to extend particular thanks to Jamie Balfour and Julia Weston, who were exceptionally understanding and supportive throughout the lengthy logistical prelude to my journey.

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APPENDIX I: GLOSSARY Balochistān Province in S.W. Pakistan

Biryāni (Hind.) Subcontinental rice dish

Deobandi (Hind.) Subcontinental movement

within Sunni Islam

Dhamāl (Hind.) N. Indian chorus dance form

Dhikr (Ar.) Remembrance

Dhol (Hind.) Type of N. Indian drum

Faqir (Ar.) Sufi and/or poor person

Hāl (Ar.) State of ecstasy

Halwa (Ar.) Sweet popular in Islamic

world

Hujra (Ar.) Guest room in Muslim

household

‘Ilm (Ar.) Knowledge

Jalebi (Hind.) Subcontinental deep-fried

sweet

Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province in N.W. Pakistan

Lāl Shahbaz Qalander Sufi saint of Qalandriya

following

Ma’rifa (Ar.) State of understanding

knowledge

Mastī (Pers.) Ecstasy/drunkenness

Matam (Ar.) Self-flagellation practice

Mela (Hind.) Festival/gathering

Muharram (Ar.) Shia period of mourning

Mullāh (Ar.) Muslim educated in

theology/law

Pandit (Hind.) Hindu priest

Punjāb Province in E. Pakistan

Qalandriya (Ar.) Sufi following

Qawwāli (Hind.) N. Indian chorus song form

Roti (Hind.) Subcontinental flatbread

Rupee (Hind.) Unit of currency

Shalwār kamīz (Hind.) Subcontinental Muslim dress

Sindh Province in S. Pakistan

Tabla (Hind.) Type of N. Indian drum

Urs (Ar.) Death anniversary of Islamic

saint