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This anthology is a collective endeavor of scholars from India and Pakistan devoted to Sufi mystics, literature and shrines with a detailed introduction. The essays explore the methods adopted by the Punjab Sufis to popularize the mystic ideology and praxis in the medieval socio-cultural milieu. These writings also delve into the different genres of Sufi literature, both in the elite and vernacular languages, intending to appreciate the nuances of Punjab Sufism. Apart from the architectural features of the Sufi shrines, the anthology attempts to illumine the organic linkages between these institutions and the Punjabis and, thus, underscore the Sufi non-communitarian devotion as a primary ingredient of the Punjabi cultural fusion. This title is co-published with Aakar Books. Print editions not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)
This book explores the organic lives of popular Sufi shrines in contemporary Northwest India. It traverses the worldview of shrine spaces, rituals and their complex narratives, and provides an insight into their urban and rural landscapes in the post-Partition (Indian) Punjab. What happened to these shrines when attempts were made to dissuade Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus from their veneration of popular saints in the early twentieth century? What was the fate of popular shrines that persisted even when the Muslim population was virtually wiped off as a result of migration during Partition? How did these shrines manifest in the context of the threat posed by militants in the 1980s? How did such popular practices reconfigure themselves when some important centres of Sufism were left behind in the West Punjab (now Pakistan)? This book examines several of these questions and utilizes a combination of analytical tools, new theoretical tropes and an ethnographic approach to understand and situate popular Sufi shrines so that they are both historicized and spatialized. As such, it lays out some crucial contours of the method and practice of understanding popular sacred spaces (within India and elsewhere), bridging the everyday and the metanarratives of power structures and state formation. This book will be useful to scholars, researchers and those engaged in interdisciplinary work in history, social anthropology, historical sociology, cultural studies, historical geography, religion and art history, as well as those interested in Sufism and its shrines in South Asia.
In nineteenth-century Punjab, a cultural tug-of-war ensued as both Sufi mystics and British officials aimed to engage the local artisans as a means of realizing their ideological ambitions. When it came to influence and impact, the Sufi shrines had a huge advantage over the colonial art institutions, such as the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore. The mystically-inspired shrines, built as a statement of Muslim ruling ambitions, were better suited to the task of appealing to local art traditions. By contrast the colonial institutions, rooted in the Positivist Romanticism of the Victorian West, found assimilation to be more of a challenge. In questioning their relative success and failures at influencing local culture, the book explores the extent to which political control translates into cultural influence. Folktales, Sufi shrines, colonial architecture, institutional education methods and museum exhibitions all provide a wealth of sources for revealing the complex dynamic between the Punjabi artisans, the Sufi community and the colonial British. In this unique look at a little-explored aspect of India's history, Hussain Ahmad Khan explores this evidence in order to illuminate this web of cultural influences. Examining the Sufi-artisan relationship within the various contexts of political revolt, the decline of the Mughals and the struggle of the Sufis to establish an Islamic state, this book argues that Sufi shrines were initially constructed with the aim of affirming a distinct 'Muslim' identity. At the same time, art institutions established by colonial officials attempted to promote eclectic architecture representing the 'British Indian empire', as well as to revive the pre-colonial traditions with which they had previously seemed out of touch. This important book sheds new light on the dynamics of power and culture in the British Empire.
This book looks at the study of ideas, practices and institutions in South Asian Islam, commonly identified as ‘Sufism’, and how they relate to politics in South Asia. While the importance of Sufism for the lives of South Asian Muslims has been repeatedly asserted, the specific role played by Sufism in contestations over social and political belonging in South Asia has not yet been fully analysed. Looking at examples from five countries in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan), the book begins with a detailed introduction to political concerns over ‘belonging’ in relation to questions concerning Sufism and Islam in South Asia. This is followed with sections on Producing and Identifying Sufism; Everyday and Public Forms of Belonging; Sufi Belonging, Local and National; and Intellectual History and Narratives of Belonging. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines, the book explores the connection of Islam, Sufism and the Politics of Belonging in South Asia. It is an important contribution to South Asian Studies, Islamic Studies and South Asian Religion.
This book examines the history of, and the contestations on, Islam and the nature of religious change in 20th century Pakistan, focusing in particular on movements of Islamic reform and revival. This book is the first to bring the different facets of Islam, particularly Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented traditions, together within the confines of a single study ranging from the colonial to post-colonial era. Using a rich corpus of Urdu and Arabic material including biographical accounts, Sufi discourses (malfuzat), letter collections, polemics and unexplored archival sources, the author investigates how Islamic reformism and shrine-oriented religiosity interacted with one another in the post-colonial state of Pakistan. Focusing on the district of Mianwali in Pakistani northwestern Punjab, the book demonstrates how reformist ideas could only effectively find space to permeate after accommodating Sufi thoughts and practices; the text-based religious identity coalesced with overlapped traditional religious rituals and practices. The book proceeds to show how reformist Islam became the principal determinant of Islamic identity in the post-colonial state of Pakistan and how one of its defining effects was the hardening of religious boundaries. Challenging the approach of viewing the contestation between reformist and shrine-oriented Islam through the lens of binaries modern/traditional and moderate/extremist, this book makes an important contribution to the field of South Asian religion and Islam in modern South Asia.
Sufis created the most extensive Muslim revivalist network in Asia before the twentieth century, generating a vibrant Persianate literary, intellectual, and spiritual culture while tying together a politically fractured world. In a pathbreaking work combining social history, religious studies, and anthropology, Waleed Ziad examines the development across Asia of Muslim revivalist networks from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. At the center of the story are the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufis, who inspired major reformist movements and articulated effective social responses to the fracturing of Muslim political power amid European colonialism. In a time of political upheaval, the Mujaddidis fused Persian, Arabic, Turkic, and Indic literary traditions, mystical virtuosity, popular religious practices, and urban scholasticism in a unified yet flexible expression of Islam. The Mujaddidi ÒHidden Caliphate,Ó as it was known, brought cohesion to diverse Muslim communities from Delhi through Peshawar to the steppes of Central Asia. And the legacy of Mujaddidi Sufis continues to shape the Muslim world, as their institutional structures, pedagogies, and critiques have worked their way into leading social movements from Turkey to Indonesia, and among the Muslims of China. By shifting attention away from court politics, colonial actors, and the standard narrative of the ÒGreat Game,Ó Ziad offers a new vision of Islamic sovereignty. At the same time, he demonstrates the pivotal place of the Afghan Empire in sustaining this vast inter-Asian web of scholastic and economic exchange. Based on extensive fieldwork across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan at madrasas, Sufi monasteries, private libraries, and archives, Hidden Caliphate reveals the long-term influence of Mujaddidi reform and revival in the eastern Muslim world, bringing together seemingly disparate social, political, and intellectual currents from the Indian Ocean to Siberia.
This volume provides a composite of contemporary Sufi involvement in politics using a range of approaches and disciplines. It explores the role of Sufi-related parties where they exist or are emerging. It also examines how parties that condemn Sufism have adopted aspects of Sufi organization and practice. Changes in views within the academy on politics and Sufism are discussed. Perspectives on Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia are included as are overviews of Sufism's political dimension across various regions. Contributions in the volume seek answer questions such as: Where Sufi related parties exist, what policies do they propose, and how do they differ from those of Islamist parties? How would "law" be understood? What is the relationship between secular and Sufi ideas about the role of religion in society? How do Sufi views about how to structure the state in Muslim majority space differ from alternatives? Are Sufis more likely to support democracy?
Based on a critical study of a large number of contemporary Persian texts, court chronicles, epistolary collections, and biographies of sufi mystics, The Mughals and the Sufis examines the complexities in the relationship between Mughal political culture and the two dominant strains of Islam's Sufi traditions in South Asia: one centered around orthodoxy, the other focusing on a more accommodating and mystical spirituality. Muzaffar Alam analyses the interplay of these elements, their negotiation and struggle for resolution via conflict and coordination, and their longer-term outcomes as the empire followed its own political and cultural trajectory as it shifted from the more liberal outlook of Emperor Akbar "The Great" (r. 1556–1605) to the more rigid attitudes of his great-grandson, Aurangzeb 'Alamgir (r. 1658–1701). Alam brings to light many new and underutilized sources relevant to the religious and cultural history of the Mughals and reinterprets well-known sources from a new perspective to provide one of the most detailed and nuanced portraits of Indian Islam under the Mughal Empire available today.
Sufism has long constituted one of the most powerful drawcards to people embracing Islam. This book considers a broad range of questions relating to Sufism, including its history, manifestations in various countries and communities, its expression in poetry, women and Sufism, and expressions among popular spirituality. In addition, the volume challenges the long-held view of Sufism as being necessarily peaceful, through a consideration in one paper of Sufis engaging in violent Jihad. The book works at the interface between the scholarly and the practical, using rigorous methodology to ensure that its findings are reliable, while also giving attention to how Sufi thinking impacts the daily lives of Sufis. This represents an original and important dimension of this study, given the significant role played by Sufis throughout Islamic history in enriching discussion of intellectual and charismatic questions, as well as informing popular practice among “Folk” Muslims.
In the course of time the Punjab and Bengal has become very popular with some of the institutions, libraries and the academicians. In the Punjab, Delhi and Kolkata there has been a constant demand of this book which has necessitated the publication of the second edition. Accordingly the second revised edition is being published in order to meet the demand, which I am sure will fulfill the aspiration of the institutions, libraries, academicians, research scholar and students. PREFACE OF THE FIRST EDITION The Punjab and Bengal have been enamoured of each other from quite a long time ago. They span the country's heartland, like the proverbial elephants on a book-shelf, in two corners of this vast sub-continent. They have shared, through ages, their varied experiences inspite of diversities in their ethos yet echoing each others emotional reverberations, proof of which is found in abundance. It was, perhaps, pre-destined that these two regions should have similar circumstances which should not only bring about a kind of closeness between the two but also necessitated the inter-dependence of one on the other for their proper development. And this process has continued over a long period, in peaceful interludes as well as in turbulent times. The Punjab and Bengal continue to interact emotionally even now like nothing else in the world. It was indeed fate which brought these two regions much closer together at the turn of the century in the struggle for independence and the people of these regions fought shoulder to shoulder for the independence of the motherland as 'comrades-in-arms' and, again, it was an irony of fate that at the time of independence of India in 1947 A.D., the Punjab and Bengal were the two provinces that were truncated - their price paid for the country's freedom. Both the provinces had to suffer untold misery for the consequent arson, bloodshed, rape and other atrocities committed by the frenzied mobs which compelled millions of their people to leave their homes and hearths. The people of the Punjab and Bengal, as a result, became 'comrades-in-suffering" and had to face misery and identical problems for the rehabilitation of their uprooted folks who were forced to migrate. The uprooted people have resettled in the rest of the country and it goes to their credit that they are making useful contribution to the over-all development of the country in an admirable way and are now "comrades-in-progress". While it is a fact that there is a large segment of Bengalis in the Punjab as doctors, engineers and in other professional fields, particularly in the teaching profession, there are nearly one million Punjabis living in West Bengal, fifty percent of whom are in Calcutta alone. Many of the Punjabis are settled in Calcutta for the last several generations. They live here, work here, have friends here and are found in all walks of life, thus lending a unique cosmopolitan character to this great metropolis. It is in this context that an attempt is made in presenting this monograph to trace out the links of Punjabis and Bengalis, through the ages, from historical, religious, social, educational, national and commercial points of view to establish the strong bonds which have continued to exist since time immemorial of Punjabi-Bengali affinity of spirit. I take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to my revered professor, Dr. Pratap Chandra Chunder, a scholar extraordinary, who has favoured me greatly by writing a valuable "Foreword" to this book.