Anyone who has acquired education in Pakistan cannot escape historical inaccuracies they are forced to study during their academic life. Similar was the case with historian Dr Azfar Moin, son of doctors in the Pakistan Army, who grew up in Jordan and Rawalpindi and studied at Cadet College Hasan Abdal. He sheepishly admits that his initial historical knowledge included watching Naseem Hijazi’s plays on PTV. Trained to be an engineer and running a start-up in the US, Dr Moin took a big gamble when he decided to quit his profession and go through the lengthy and arduous process of pursuing a PhD degree in history from the University of Michigan-Ann Harbor. But before that he had to acquire bachelor’s and master’s degrees in humanities since his entire education until then had been in the sciences.

His book The Millenial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam, which explores the politics of saint shrines in Safavid, Ottoman and Mughal empires, won the Best First Book in the History of Religions Award from the American Academy of Religion and the John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History from the American Historical Association. The associate professor of religious studies at University of Texas, Austin, was in town recently for a lecture in which he spoke about the findings from his book and the new questions he is exploring.

In an interview with Images on Sunday Dr Moin dismantles some of the historical myths that we have been fed with and discusses the evolution of Sufi shrines in the Islamic world. Here are excerpts from the conversation:

Images on Sunday talks to the historian Dr Azfar Moin about Mughals, Sufis and shrine culture...

What made you change gears from engineering to history?

I had been interested in the humanities and particularly intellectual inquiry ever since my college days. However, since I had gone to the US to study engineering and my parents had invested huge amounts in my undergraduate studies over there, I couldn’t really be too adventurous at the time.

But the wish stayed with me. When I was working in the high-tech industry I would often go to bookstores, look up books of history and tried to read them. I would pick up works that were more critical or theoretical in nature, but couldn’t follow them and felt uneducated. About four years before I quit my job and went back to school to study history, I discussed it with my wife and said ‘look this is something I would like to eventually explore and work towards. But if I end up going back then it would mean a long time to pursue a PhD, we have to save up and start planning for it.’ When I did explore it was such a good experience that one thing led to another.

What made you gravitate towards researching history of the pre-modern Islamic world?

I wanted to study something with a bit of distance, which you could separate from everyday polemics. The study of pre-modern Islam requires the study of languages such as Farsi and Arabic, and we have lost that sense of history, especially in Pakistan. It really went before 1857. Before that, it is mythical history. I realised this is where the break is and most of us do not go back to study. While studying history, it was surprising to know that the British abandoned the use of Persian in the 1830s. Before the British Persian was used as a language of administration, culture and bureaucracy across much of northern India which connected it to Iran and Central Asia, much in the same way we use English today. By doing that they broke a link from the past from which we have never managed to recover, not at least in the subcontinent. That fascinated me. What is that past? That past is not far away. It lives on monuments and in stories. I wanted to pursue a question that was purely of an intellectual nature. This seemed like an intellectual problem worth delving into. My goal wasn’t to get a degree and get a job as a policymaker and work in a think tank. I wanted to pose a difficult question and find an intellectually satisfying answer.

You remarked in your talk that a Turkish friend of yours always wondered why we were trying to preserve the Ottoman Khalifa [Caliph] during the Khilafat Movement while they were trying to get rid of him. To which you replied, “Even I don’t know but we did such a good job that we even got Gandhi to support us.” Couldn’t one possible answer be that politicians, kings and emperors appropriate religious figures and symbols to advance their political agenda?

The goal of the Khilafat Movement was to find a symbolic figure around which people would rally to pressure the British and that was a brilliant move at the time. Gandhi was an absolute master at populist politics, that is why he latched on to it. The intellectual question is why the Ottoman Khalifa? If someone had suggested to the Mughal emperor that your khalifa is the Ottoman emperor they would have perhaps laughed at you and, in the worst-case scenario, would have punished you.

So what had happened between the 17th and 18th centuries and the 20th century that that attitude changed, where suddenly there was this severe sense of [identity] deprivation. Muslim nationalists were groping around for symbols that were outside the subcontinent. It showed a severe lack of confidence, severe sense of loss which was not present in the time of Mughals, which was a time of hubris, and claims of sacredness that today we cannot appreciate because we have lost sense of that moment. Something like the Khilafat Movement would not have happened in the 16th century, it would have been considered absurd. Twentieth-century Muslims in India no longer remembered their past.

During the Mughal empire, painting flourished. I was wondering how was it utilised in the Ottoman and Safavid empires? Figurative art is against the norms of orthodox Islam, how did these emperors circumvent them?

It was used much in the same way and there are multiple sources for that. The Mongols or the Ilkhanids themselves, even before they converted to Islam, had begun to use painting. Many of them had been interested in Buddhism and had been introduced to Buddhist art. When the first few [Mongol] kings converted to Islam, they actually wanted the same kind of images to appreciate their new religion and one scholar has made the argument that, in fact, we see pictorial art depicting religious history in Islam including paintings of the Prophet [Peace be upon him], that essentially appeared in Mongol times. When they converted to Islam they demanded to see their new religion in art and nobody could deny them. This was definitely considered as breaking the rules of Islamic sharia injunctions. The point is: who was there to enforce those rules against the kings? There was nobody. However, after that, when the empire broke down, critiques of art developed that you know, you can’t do some of these things. But by that time the custom had been established and art was everywhere.

The Pakistani state has become riven with sectarian and ethnic divisions. There is the ever-present threat of the puritanical version of Islam and Sufism is projected as a counter-narrative to this version. But your book busted this myth of Sufis being about peace, love, tolerance and inclusiveness since they were used during the Safavid Empire as a means to capture state power. Was that a surprise for you as well?

It was bit of a surprise that Sufis were used that way but there is, of course, that message embedded in Sufi poetry and there is no denying that. Rumi’s poetry is all about finding truth and there are multiple ways to it. The intellectual Sufism and the Sufism of poetry certainly has that message. However if you ask how was that message spread, it was spread through networks of shrines and it was only when Sufism became embedded in very real material nodes in society, where large numbers of people came to listen to devotional songs, was when that message was permeated.

But because saint shrines became centres of pilgrimage where people donated large amounts of money, where agricultural land was donated as waqf to them, they also became centres of power. The devotion of the people allowed the Sufis to act as kingmakers and sometimes become kings.

That is the argument in my book, which sees the rise of Sufism as networks of shrines become a very popular form of religion. Empires begin to adopt those religious forms for kingship during the Mughal era, the rituals are borrowed from saint shrines. It is about piety and meditation but because these messages are spread through these nodes and shrines become centres of wealth and power, they also become centres of politics, which leads to competition, which leads to war and which leads to violence. It is a different form of violence which has very much to do with land, property and people’s loyalties. It is not based on notions of truth and falsehood or of declaring people outside the pale of religion. So it is not as abstract but very much bound to local politics. And that’s one of the things I discovered.

Generations of Pakistanis have grown up learning there were irreconcilable differences between Muslims and Hindus, which led to the creation of Pakistan. Similarly, even in India leaders said we were two separate entities. But if one goes back in history one sees that both the communities always coexisted. How did your research view this?

All history in South Asia, studied in India and even in the West, is driven by this question and the tragedy of the partition. In some ways it overshadows all writing of South Asian history. The way I approached the history was that the phenomenon is very much a 20th century one. We were looking at the past through the eyes of the British. Our own understanding of history had been broken when we stopped studying Persian.

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was the classic example. He was the last Mughal gentleman who had been traditionally educated. He set up a university where the goal was to Westernise and that approach had its purpose. But he deliberately said that our past is no longer useful to us. In fact, he himself never gave that up. He developed public and private personas. David Lelyveld, who has done wonderful work on Sir Syed [Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India], examined his dream diaries. It showed a very different side than what we think of him, which is as a moderniser. Lelyveld said during a conference that when Hali wrote Sir Syed’s biography, in the first edition he added his dream diaries in the appendix. But in the second edition of the biography the diary was taken out. Because it sort of didn’t fit.

The reason why I bring this up is because my attitude was ‘Okay, a decision was made by many North Indian Muslims who said that the past is no longer useful to us, we cannot use it to make political claims, we have to see it in the [context of the] new British setup in which the new rules were nationalism.’ Nationalism requires you to create a homogeneous idea of culture. And that is what drove many of those tropes, about being different, of Muslims having a separate history and identity.

I wanted to study a period of South Asian history where obviously there was no nationalism. So how did people of different sectarian, religious and linguistic backgrounds dealt with each other and create a common polity in which to live in. There was no Islam-based nationalism then but then there was [also] no such thing as India. Much of Mughal historiography is driven by whether Mughals were good Indians or not. And the argument is often made that they were Muslims but they were also good Indians. Akbar was a Muslim but he was a good Indian and this is a part of the Nehruvian narrative but even in secular, Western scholarship that thing continues because there is huge sympathy for the liberal, secular view.

My point is: even that view is not historically correct because, yes he did all those things, but it wasn’t because he was a good Indian. He wanted to create an empire that was strong and stable and that could not have been built without the incorporation of local groups. It was a strategic and pragmatic move but it was based on the notion of empire and not of the nation. The difference between an empire and nation is that an empire is a hierarchal entity and there is no requirement to treat everyone the same. The requirement is loyalty to the emperor. So the Rajputs gained because they were a warrior group. They came from states that did not have good agricultural land and they saw the advantage of joining with a central Asian Turkic empire and that by becoming salaried employees of the Mughal emperor they could gain more wealth and fame than they ever could by remaining local Rajput rajas. The Mughal-Rajput alliance was used to conquer the rest of India. It was not a Hindu-Muslim alliance. The whole idea of Muslim and Hindu doesn’t quite work there.

How do you see the shifting Sufi culture in South Asia, especially with the rise of Hindutva, Taliban and now the IS?

Historically there were different elements to the Sufi culture. Part of it was ritualistic, located in shrine culture, festivals and pilgrimage. Another aspect was it supported a literate culture that created philosophy, metaphysics, rationalised the place of humanity in the cosmos and thought about how to deal with religious difference. And another aspect of it was it connected to imperial power and notions of kingship and sovereignty.

Slowly, as the empire dissolved, we stopped writing those books and studying those traditions in the 19th century. All that was left was the shrine cults. In the 20th century, whether it was a secular modernist who said all this is rubbish or the Taliban and the IS who started to critique shrine culture saying they are local people and are illiterate, the political and intellectual backing that Sufism had enjoyed for hundreds of years was, and is, no longer there. There is nobody to argue back. In some ways the inevitability of today’s critique of Sufism comes from the fact that in the 18th and 19th century, Sufism retreated into particularist local devotional form of religion. Today it is a relic of the past, we pine for it but it is not a living culture anymore.

But one could say the same thing about the madressah culture. According to historian Barbara Metcalfe, the Deobandi madressah, which becomes the model of the madressah across South Asia, was, in fact, a modern institution. The people who set up Deoband were the ones who participated in the short-lived experiment of Delhi College. Now this is the same Delhi College where poet Mirza Ghalib was offered a job by the British to teach Farsi and turned it down because he expected the principal to receive him. Delhi College was where the British wanted to give education to the ‘natives’ in their language, but modern education. The people who were involved in it were the ones who set up Deoband. And Deoband had an admissions policy, an admissions test, parents’ days and graduations. The Mughal-era madressah used to focus on uloom-e-aqalia, the rationalist sciences such as mathematics, astronomy and logic. They were training ulema to be of service to the British Empire. And it was supported by the royalty, it was part of the state. Deoband was supported by donations from ordinary Muslims where the emphasis was on uloom-e-naqalia, scriptural sciences, the hadith traditions. Deoband also showed a reorientation of the ulema who had to reorient themselves to the ordinary people. So there was a break in tradition there too. Just like there was a break in the tradition of Sufism. In contemporary South Asia we are dealing with these institutions that changed radically in the 19th and 20th centuries but we have forgotten what they changed from. We primordially think Sufis were always singing and dancing at shrines and ulema were always wagging their fingers at us.

What are you working on these days?

I am looking at a number of things: one of them is violence against shrines in pre-modern times, where the shrines were attacked not by people who considered shrine culture to be heretical or innovative but rather by other Sufis. I am trying to understand why there was violence in the age of Sufism, how was it tied to politics, what lessons can be drawn from that and the relationship between religion and politics at the time.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 18th, 2016