Full Description
The Muslim shrine is at the crossroad of many processes involving society and culture. It is the place where a saint - often a Sufi - is buried, and it works as a main social factor, with the power of integrating or rejecting people and groups, and as a mirror reflecting the intricacies of a society.
The book discusses the role of popular Islam in structuring individual and collective identities in contemporary South Asia. It identifies similarities and differences between the worship of saints and the pattern of religious attendance to tombs and mausoleums in South Asian Sufism and Shi`ism. Inspired by new advances in the field of ritual and pilgrimage studies, the book demonstrates that religious gatherings are spaces of negotiation and redefinitions of religious identity and of the notion of sainthood. Drawing from a large corpus of vernacular and colonial sources, as well as the register of popular literature and ethnographic observation, the authors describe how religious identities are co-constructed through the management of rituals, and are constantly renegotiated through discourses and religious practices.
By enabling students, researchers and academics to critically understand the complexity of religious places within the world of popular and devotional Islam, this geographical re-mapping of Muslim religious gatherings in contemporary South Asia contributes to a new understanding of South Asian and Islamic Studies.
Contents
1. Authority, Shrines and Spaces: Scrutinizing Devotional Islam from South Asia Part I: Authority and the Figures of Sainthood 2. Vagrancy and pilgrimage according to the Sufi Qalandari path: The illusions of anti-structure 3. Qalandars and Ahl-e Haqq 4. Woman [Un] like Woman: The question of spiritual authority among female fakirs of Sehwan Sharīf 5. Negotiating Religious Authority at a Shrine Inhabited by a Living Saint - The dargāh of "Zinda" Shāh Madār 6. How Discourses Construct Figures of Holiness: The Example of the Indo-Muslim Martyr Ghāzī Miyān (Uttar Pradesh, North India) Part II: Shrine and Circulation 7. Meditative Practice, aesthetics and entertainment Music in an Indian Sufi shrine 8. Evolution of the Chishtī Shrine and the Chishtīs in Pakpattan (Pakistan) 9. The Mother and the Other. Tourism and pilgrimage at the shrine of Hinglāj Devī/Bībī Nānī in Baluchistan 10. Sacred Journeys, Worship and reverence: The Sufi legitimation of the ziyarat in Hyderabad 11. An ambiguous and contentious politicization of Sufi shrines and pilgrimages in Pakistan
