Shrines Under Attack

February 18, 2017

Shrines Under Attack

As I write this article, ISIS claims responsibility for the terrorist attack on Lal Shahbaz Qaladar’ Sufi shrine. The attack claimed 83 lives. This was not the first attack on a Sufi shrine. Last year, an attack on Shah Noorani shrine resulted in 54 casualties.

Many Pakistanis see a foreign ‘invisible’ hand orchestrating such attacks. The reality is more insidious: Sufi shrines all over Pakistan have been under attack –physically and ideologically—for well over three decades.

The narrative against Sufi shrine culture reverberates from all nooks and corners of modern urban Pakistan. The case for puritanical Islam keeps getting deafening.

Many well-educated people find it hard to justify terrorist attacks on shrines but they don’t mind verbal assaults on folk-Islam practices. In fact, I personally know several people who have waged a war against Sufism. Organizations like the Tableeghi Jamaat and Jamaat UD Dawa work incessantly to weed-out the remnants of folk-Islam in favor of a much stringent version.

Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan, has been going through several changes lately. Many of these changes are deeply disturbing. Lahore, named after ‘Lava’—the son of Rama, has historically been a city of tolerance and learning. Of late, religious intolerance has taken over the city like an epidemic. Local Sufi shrines have consequently suffered.

Recently, I visited the shrine of Syed Bahauddin Jhoolan Shah Bukhari –also known as “Ghooray Shah”. He was a five years old child saint, who had a great fascination with horses. Legend has it that his devotees offered him horses to ride. For almost 400 years, mud horses were offered to the shrine to please the spirit of the child-saint.

I entered the shrine with the expectation of seeing a lot of mud-horses. In fact, I hoped to see colorful toy horses called ‘Kugu ghooray’(in local parlance).

I was disappointed! The shrine looked like any common shrine you find around any other graveyard in Lahore. There were no toy horses around. As I entered the shrine I saw a sole devotee reciting the Quran. I never want to attract much attention at such places but the shrine looked almost forlorn. It was a great opportunity for me to take some photos uninterrupted, but then there wasn’t much to photograph.

As I packed my camera equipment, a middle-aged man showed up. He told me that his name was Zulfiqar. Zulfiqar was one of the care-takers of the shrine. At first, he was a little hesitant speaking to me, but he galvanized after a bit of a conversation about Sufism. Zulfiqar told me that a few months ago some television channel made a (expose) documentary about the shrine and declared it a bastion of ignorance. Soon after, some local Mullahs attacked the shrine and occupied it for several days. They cleaned all the mud-horses around and harassed the devotees.

“They’ve taken most of the horses and banned the sale of toy-horses” told Zulfiqar. “I can’t understand this… do they follow a new religion or is it the same one our ancestors followed?”

I had no answers to Zulfiqar’s questions. He showed me a couple of old toy-horses from his collection and lit up the earthen lamps for me. I took my photographs and quietly moved out of the shrine, convinced that stringent puritanical Islam had finally taken over the soft folk-Islam which had been our cultural hall-mark for centuries.