Notes
This paper is based on research on Sufi cults in Pakistan and their extension into Britain conducted during 1987–91. I wish to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (U.K.) and the Leverhelme Trust for their generous support. A version of this chapter appeared in Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 2, and I would like to thank the journal for permission to republish parts of the article in the present volume. I am deeply indebted to Zindapir, Sufi Abdullah, and all their murids in Manchester, Birmingham, and Ghamkol Sharif for their generosity and interest in the research. I also owe special thanks to Bashir Muhammad, who guided me patiently and selflessly along the path to knowledge, to Rashid Amin, and to Nyla Ahmed, my assistant in Britain, whose support and understanding of Islam have been invaluable. The paper was presented at the SSRC conference on Spatial Expressions of Muslim Identity in the West at the Harvard Middle East Center in November 1990; at the Oxford History Seminar; and at the Department of Anthropology, Queen’s University, Belfast. I would like to thank Judith Brown, Terence Ranger, Hastings Donnan, and the other participants for their perceptive comments. I am also particularly grateful to Barbara Metcalf for her very stimulating editorial comments on an earlier version of this text.
1. This is the Urs of Shaikh Abdul ul-Qadir-Gilani, the great saint of Baghdad (d. 1166).
2. Legends of North African saints’ miracles also evoke the mastery of the wilderness. See Goldziher 1971: 270; and see also Eickelman 1976: 33–34; Meeker 1979: 229–30.
3. Trimingham (1971: 67–104) calls such “regional cults” ta’ifa, but the name does not appear to be commonly used by Pakistanis.
4. The cultural and political significance of public processions varies widely. The display of dominance in official state processions may be contrasted with potentially explosive religious-communal processions, such as those in Northern Ireland. There are pilgrimage processions (see, e.g., Sallnow 1987), annual ritual processions (see Fuller 1980), English miners’ processions, memorial processions, and processions that form part of broader rituals of revitalization, such as carnival processions before Lent. Although all processions may be said to constitute existential displays of power and territorial occupation/demarcation, their significance differs widely in different cultures and localities, and at different historical moments.