Hijra and the Sacralizing of Space

Sufism is conceived of as a journey along a path (suluk) leading toward God. The central ritual practice on this journey is zikr, the remembrance of God. Those who continuously practice zikr find their lower selves (nafs) and their very bodies transformed. A young khalifa of Sufi Abdullah’s, alluding to complex Naqshandi cosmological theories, explained to me:

There are seven points of energy in our body through which the spiritual power of Allah enters the body. If you do zikr correctly, and in my case it didn’t take long, then your heart starts doing zikr all the time, every moment of the day and night, even when a person is doing other things. Like now, when I’m talking to you.

This merging of body and cosmos are the means of purifying and transcending the vital self, which is recovered as the eternal soul (see also Subhan 1960: 61–71).

But Sufi Islam is not only a journey within the body and person, conceived of as a journey toward God. It is also a journey in space. The sacralizing of space is not, it must be stressed, simply a coincidental feature of Sufi cultic practices. It is a central, essential aspect of Sufi cosmology and of Sufism as a missionizing, purificatory cult. Beyond the transformation of the person, Sufism is a movement in space that Islamizes the universe and transforms it into the space of Allah. This journey or migration (hijra), which evokes the migration of the Prophet to Madina, empowers a saint, just as it empowers the space through which he travels and the place where he establishes his lodge.

The journey is twofold: on the one hand, into the wilderness, the “jungle,” beyond human habitation, a place of capricious jinns and dangerous outlaws, of predatory nature beyond civilization; on the other hand, toward the land of infidels, kufristan, of idolaters, hypocrites, backsliders—the “unbelievers.” It is these dangerous journeys that endow a Muslim saint with his charisma. He who stays home and grows fat on the land may be rich and powerful; he will never be the founder of a Sufi regional cult, he will never be revered and worshipped as one of God’s chosen friends. It is the divine transformation in space that is the ultimate proof of the divine transformation of the person.

About a week after the Urs in Birmingham, Sufi Abdullah came to Manchester to celebrate the gyarvi sharif^[1] with the congregation at the Dar-ul-Uloom there. After the celebration and the shaikh’s final du‘a, he received supplicants with various problems and ailments seeking his advice and blessings. I went in to see the pir with several other women. When my turn came, we talked first of the Urs and Islam and he turned to me and added:

You ask about the julus. It is written in the Qur’an [and here he quoted a qura’nic verse in Arabic] that you must do zikr [remember God] when you are standing, when you are walking, when you are lying down. According to the Hadith, when you walk along saying zikr, then everything, including people and objects and things of nature, will be your witness on the Day of Judgement that you have performed zikr, yes, even the stones and buildings.

Werbner: “Even the earth?”

Yes, it is said in the Hadith that once you have said zikr stamping on the earth, the earth will wait for you to come back again.

Sufi Abdullah came to England in 1962. He had known Zindapir when he was still in the army, when he first became a pir, and he had shared with him some of the arduous experiences of the wilderness of the Kohat hills during his long leaves from the army. In the late 1950s, there were many among the shaikh’s disciples, especially ex-soldiers, who were going to England to seek their fortunes. It is said by some that Sufi Abdullah approached the shaikh and asked him if he could go to England. Reluctantly, the shaikh agreed to part with him, and appointed him to be his first khalifa in England. According to a British Pakistani visitor to the Urs in Ghamkol Sharif, however, when it came to actually leaving his shaikh, Sufi Abdullah had “cried and wanted to stay, but the shaikh told him he must go.”

Zindapir told me that he had sent Sufi Abdullah to England because the people there, the Pakistani labor migrants, did not even know how to pray, they did not celebrate Eid, they did not fast on Ramzan, they did not perform the zikr, they had forgotten Islam. They needed a spiritual guide to lead them on the path of Allah. Before Sufi Abdullah left, Zindapir made him his khalifa. He was one of his earliest khalifas and most trusted companions.

One of the speakers at the Urs in Birmingham talked of this mission fulfilled by Sufi Abdullah and men like him:

It is all because of those God-loving people who started the movement to raise the religious consciousness in you [the people present at the Birmingham mosque gathering] years ago, and enabled you to raise the flags of Islam, not only in the U.K. but all over the world, and especially in kufristan [the land of the infidels] of Europe.

Whether it is to the land of infidels or into the wilderness, the saint’s journey is a lonely journey, filled with hardship. It constitutes the ultimate ordeal. This is why the followers of an “original” saint like Zindapir or Sufi Abdullah speak somewhat dismissively of the gaddi nashin, the descendants of illustrious founding saints and guardians of shrines, whose charisma is derivatory and who are seen to benefit materially from the cults their glorified ancestors founded. They respect them greatly, but they are not “real” saints. A true friend of God is a man who endures incredible hardship. Zindapir told me:

When I first came here, the land was barren and hostile, and it had never witnessed the name of Allah. Yet look at it today, a green and pleasant land [abad—cultivated, populated], all owing to the faith in Allah of one man. No one had ever worshipped here since the creation of the world, it was a wild and dangerous place, a place of lions (my own son saw a lion). Now the earth is richer in religion than many other places. One man is the cause of it all. One man came here and did zikr, and this place became a place of habitation.

In his final sermon on the last day of the Urs, Zindapir elaborated on the transformation of the wilderness and especially on Allah’s favor to the graves of the pious. One of the guest speakers at the Urs in Ghamkol Sharif stressed this relation between the love of God and the sacralizing of space in the course of his sermon:

When a man starts loving Rasul-i Pak [the Pure Messenger, Muhammad] then everything starts loving him. Every part of the universe—the water, the flowers, the morning dawn, the moon, the roses, the green plants—everything starts loving that man. And this is the love of Rasul-i Pak, which has given beauty to the flowers and beauty to the whole of the world. And whatever is present here is due to the love of Rasul-i Pak and the love of Allah.