Followers light incense and candles at shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh during the three-day annual Urs in 2016.─AFP/File
Malamati piety inevitably leads to behaviour censured by the norms and prescriptions of the legal discourse. Acting against legal norms serves a deeply Islamic purpose for qalandars .
Qalandars openly display disregard for prescribed ritual worship, violate public norms of decency by adopting minimal clothing or wearing black woolen cloaks (signifying social withdrawal), and use hashish religiously.
As an active rejection of established social customs and norms, qalandars seek the effacement of the individual or self, which forms the constitutive unit of modern society.
Mahmud Shabistari (d. 1337), one of the most celebrated Sufi poets, writes:
To be a haunter of taverns is to be freed from self, Self-regard is paganism, even if it be righteousness.
Contravention of legal norms, in such a context, acquires positive meaning while retaining its disrespectability.
It reinforces the separation between society with its worldly concerns and Qalandari mysticism with its Malamati piety.
Historian Nile Green observes that hashish “was lent religious value as evidence for renouncing the world and as an instrument for reaching the other world.” It was “attributed with moral value and epistemological meaning.”
Hashish turned the seeker away from the lower passions related to this world, and elevated his concerns to matters of spiritual importance.
It purified the seeker’s devotion, by turning away from this world to prepare for the inner flight to the Divine.
A verse by a medieval poet, Al-Is’irdi (d. 1222-1258), on the spiritual meaning of hashish puts it as:
It is the secret. In it, the spirit ascends to the highest Spots on a heavenly ascent (mira’j) of disembodied understanding
Modernity and transformation of hashish In Pakistan, Qalandariyya traces its roots to the 13th century saint, Sayyid Uthman Marwandi (d. 1274), popularly revered as Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.
Qalandars , faqirs and malangs , as “holy men,” operated in relative autonomy from the norms of social institutions.
Such radical embodiment of asceticism and renunciation came increasingly under attack with the advent of modernity through European colonialism.
Nile Green notes that through colonial laws, moral and scientific discourses, modernity displaced the foundations of Qalandariyya as constitutive and representative of Islamic values.
The capitalist ethos of the colonialists could not accommodate the values of asceticism, and in turn, sought to de-emphasise Islamic valourisation and understanding of “voluntary poverty” and homelessness.
Next: Why ‘Sufism’ is not what it is made out to be
Reducing it to its material aspect, poverty was characterised, not as symbolic of spiritual wealth, but as evidence of the downfall of Muslim societies.
Victorian morality denigrated hashish as “profane,” opposed to “religion.” It conveniently conflated Islam with colonial conception of religion.
Colonial critics criticised faqirs’ drug use, and explained the behaviour as “not the result of devotion to and absorption in God, but instead as the voluntary degradation of the work-shy addict.”
Scientific discourse was instrumental in associating drug use with criminality and insanity, through efforts such as the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893-1894.
Colonial construction and representation of qalandars and faqirs as symptomatic of the decay of Muslim society was, in turn, fundamental in justifying the moral authority of the colonial order.
Muslim reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries — troubled by the eclipse of Muslim rule in the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere — embraced colonial criticism against Muslims practicing corrupted and denigrated forms of Islam.
The decay of Muslim political rule was explained through the anti-work ethic, antinomian practices, and other-worldly piety of qalandars and faqirs .
Seeking to re-form Islam to bring it in harmony with the modernist values of progress, reason, and law, Muslim reformers marginalised those modes of religiosity and piety which protested against such a worldview.
—Haseeb Amjad
In terms of Qalandari mysticism, hashish was meaningful and instrumental in dissolving the self (fa’na ) through detachment and antagonism towards the “World of Exile” (i.e. material world).
It represents a radical interpretation of Islamic themes such as salvation, poverty, fa’na and tawwakul .
Orientalist and reformist categorisation of hashish as profane demarcated it from religion proper, rendering it meaningless in the constitution of modern Islam.
For Muslims of Pakistan, the transition from the colonial order to the post-colonial was marked by the insistence upon an Islamic identity of state. Islam was defined through the state as primarily law.
Katherine Ewing notes that the relationship between traditional Sufi shrines and saints attached to them, and the state of Pakistan has been geared towards reforming the image of the Sufi saints as “originally” ulema, reflecting the stress on conformity with Sharia.
Up next: Sufi saints and their descendants: part of the solution?
Hashish as a ritual, as performed in the Sufi shrines associated with the Qalandari path of Islamic mysticism, represents “pockets and currents of resistance” to the modern conceptualisation of Islam, with its unprecedented privileging of legal and prescriptive discourses as primarily and exclusively definitive of Islamic values and meaning.
Liberal reframing of cannabis against its legal prohibition in terms of its medicinal and economic benefits, as recently echoed by Shashi Tharoor, merely reinforces the secularisation of hashish, despite noting the traditional use of cannabis in Hindu rituals.
In the context of such loss of meaning of bi-shar mysticism in modern Islam, Pakistani academic Hasan Ali Khan notes that the spiritual centre of the Qalandariyya , Sehwan in Sindh, represents its “last remaining bastion in this world.”
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