Sufi Culture

THE SUFI CULTURE OF SIND

THE STATE OF NEGATION IN SIND

We have seen how Sind for many centuries attracted, and fell under, conqueror after conqueror. Contact with so many religions, with so many nations, with so many civilisations, has had two important results, which form the chief features of this province of India. One is that this province has not been able to build up individuality. Individuality is the result of concentration of forces. For instance, the people of Maharashtra show a clear-cut individuality in matters of race, religion and caste. It is due to circumstances exactly the opposite of those that moulded Sind. Maharashtra being an inland province, surrounded by protecting rocks, was comparatively free from the pressure that bore upon Sind. If these two provinces are compared many important differences appear. Sind, originally Hindu, has been more or less in close contact with the Greek, the Scythian, the Arabian, the Persian and the various sub-nations of Islam; the result has been that it has been flattened into what may be called a state of negation. It is a province which, in the matter of race, is neither Ancient Indo-Aryan nor Arabian Semitic, but is a conglomeration of many elements - Scythian perhaps predominating. In the matter of religion, it is neither prominently Hindu, nor prominently orthodox Muslim. Its population is chiefly Muslim, but its Islamism is quite different, for instance, from that of Malabar. Neither Hindus nor Muslims are orthodox in Sind. Orthodoxy is the result of a concentrated single force. Many conflicting forces result in lack of orthodoxy.

Ancient Hinduism in Sind gave way a good deal to Buddhism because even in those days the population had become floating. But this Hindu-Buddhist religion also was greatly affected by the religion of Arabia. Only one portion of Sind has some Hindu- Buddhist characteristics; and that is Thar, which is adjacent to Rajputana. That too is not rigid, but a mixture of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain. The religion of the Prophet, also, had no orthodox control in Sind, for we have seen how, when the Ummaiyide Khalifs gave way to the Abbasides, the Arabs lost much of their prestige in Sind; and when Ghazni came, he, being antagonistic to the Arabs, still more weakened their influence in Sind. Ghazni, Ghori, Ghengez, Tamerlane, Nadir and Ahmed Shah were Muslims of a different type. Their language was Persian, therefore the source of their culture-whatever culture they had-was also Persian; and the Persian phase of Islam being anything but orthodox, the original Arabic Islam could not keep its own strict form in Sind. No doubt there are some very orthodox groups and ancient families of Islam in Sind, but many have lost their old outlook. Thus we see that both Hindus and Muslims, are very much less orthodox than those in other places in India. Sind is free from the many pernicious social evils, from which other parts of India are suffering. Caste is virtually absent in Sind, the Brahmanas among the Hindus form but a microscopic portion of its population; and, where the priest is not powerful, caste cannot exist. Even the Brahmana in Sind has lost his caste, very few of them are repositories of Hindu culture; they are not much in love with education, and hardly any amongst them are of the Brahmana type in Maharashtra, Madras and Bengal. Caste being absent and the influence of the Brahmana insignificant, the Shastras are more or less little known; the result is that almost all the social evils resulting from religious restrictions and perversity are absent. The problem of the depressed classes is non-existent. It seems strange to Sindhis that, their brethren in India are prohibited by thier scriptures to travel by sea. Widow-marriage is not very frequent in Sind; one reason for this is that child-marriage is not so common. Among those people who marry their children very young, widow-marriage exists.

Sind cannot be said to have no social evils, but they are quite different from those prevalent in other places. One of the chief social evils is purdah, which is a gift from our Muslim brothers. However, the Amils throughout Sind are giving up purdah. But this purdah has kept the women of Sind more or less ignorant. The one great evil from which Sind is suffering is, however, illiteracy. It is an agricultural province, and its peasantry is thoroughly illiterate, as illiterate, in the days of the so-called civilised and enlightened British rule, as it was in the days of the Amirs or of the Scythians. Hence the condition of poverty and degradation among the poor peasants in Sind can only be compared with those of Russia in the past. Even the zemindar is also thoroughly illiterate and therefore more tyrannical than his Russian brother. In a word Sind has been flattened and has been in a state of negation. This is the cause of the many disadvantages from which it suffers; but it has been also the cause of a great blessing, a great advantage of which other places in India cannot boast, something which is priceless in its value, something of which the world, perhaps, is in sore need-Mysticism. The mysticism of Sind is due chiefly to the condition of negation resulting from the causes enumerated above.

THE SIKH AND THE SUFI

In the latter part of the fourteen century, a great movement came into existence in India. It was a movement that later made the political achievements of Akbar possible. This political upheaval was preceded by a wave of religious revival, headed in the north of India by such immortal saints as Kabir and Nanak. National movements always seem to arise out of some such religious revival. Kabir was a Muslim, Nanak was a Hindu; but Nanak was claimed by the Muslims as their leader, being called by them Nanak Shah; and Kabir is claimed by the Hindus as one of their great teachers, his chief Gadi being in holy Benares. This was a movement that was intended to unite Hindu and Muslim; and the two great masters, Kabir and Nanak, typified in themselves this ideal of unity. About the same period there came, with liberalising forces, a movement that afterwards went by the name of the Sufi Movement. The religion of Sind is Sikhism and Sufism. The Hindus in Sind are chiefly Sikh, the followers of the teaching of Nanak. Guru Nanak himself visited the north of Sind. The Sikhs of Sind are chiefly Hindu Sikhs, and have very little in common with the Punjabi Singhs. Sikhism found a strong foothold in Sind, perhaps because of the Buddhist influence there; the Sikhism of Guru Nanak contains in itself the original spirit of Hinduism, minus all the accretions of latter-day Brahmanism. So Sikhism has given back to the Sindhi the spirit of th eold religion which he had lost to some extent owing to the causes mentioned above.

But the influence of Sufism in Sind both on the Hindus and Muslims has been tremendous. Many of the great original Islamic families in Sind accepted Sufism. Shah Latif, the greatest poet and mystic of Sind, was a Kureshi of the family of the Prophet, and a lineal descendant of the Mughal House of Herat near Afghanistan. Sachal, the next great poet and mystic of Sind, belonged to the House of Khalif Umar, whose very near descendant, Shahabuddin, came with the Arabs and became the ruler of Sehwan. These great families have been the real repositories of the best that is in Islam; they have kept intact its culture.

Sufism is the mysticism of Islam; and Ali, the lion of God and son-in-law of the Prophet, is said to have been the first initiator and organiser of the mystic school of the Sufis; but later on the Sufi Movement took on special colour as in Persia. The great Sufis of Persia, the immortal Rumi, Jami, Hafiz and many other resplendent mystic lights, have shed their effulgent and glorious spiritual rays on Inida; to this day they are the beloved teachers of Muslims as well as of Hindus. Sind has had a full share of this bread of life from the Persian Sufis. Afghanistan also claims to be the birth-place of one of the greatest of Sufis, Senai, whose influence even to-day is not insignificant.

When Sufism as such first came into India cannot be ascertained. Of course the spirit and teaching of Sufism are completely found in the Vedanta, and in the latter-day saints of India; but the comparatively fresher flowers from Persia added a charm, a beauty, a fragrance, that enriched the mystic treasure. The Sufis of Sind are peculiar in the sense that the garment of their mysticism is neither specially Islamic nor Persian, but it contains in its warp and woof the threads of both the Indo-Aryan Sanatana Dharma and the Arabic-Persian mystic culture. In fact there is hardly a country in the whole of Asia, including India, in which the mystic thought of two great civilisations, the Indian and the Arabic-Iranian, is seen in so beautiful a union as in Sind. There is a good deal of Sufism in the Punjab, and Punjab too has had some very great Sufis, such as Bulashah and Mian Bahu; but many of the Sufis of Punjab were in close touch with Sind, as till comparatively lately Multan was a part of Sind, whose boundaries extended even as far as Cashmere. The Punjab has even now many Sufis, but Sind being singularly free from religious orthodoxy has absorbed more of Sufism than Punjab where, on account of different political conditions, social and religious restrictions are more manifest than in Sind. In Sind ant the present moment, there are numerous Hindus and amongst them some of the best brains of Sind, old and new, who are Sufis by religion. In fact, throughout Sind, the Hindu Amils are at ached to the chief centres of the Sufis, and are the main supporters and advisers of the holders of the Gadi.

This Hindu-Muslim union is a marvellous phenomenon in Sind. This does not mean that there are no political dissensions in Sind between the Hindu and Muslim, and that religious bigotry is altogether absent in Hindus and Mahommedans. As a matter of fact there has been enough of it, and it still exists in many forms and is bound to exist in some form or another while the present political policy, that divides race from race, religion from religion, caste from caste, Hindu from Hindu, Muslim from Muslim, exists. Of course these conditions are not due only to the present political policy; it is in a good measure due to other, deeper, causes that exist in human nature; and also to the very fact of the variety of religion and sects. But in Sind, owing to its history and other causes, there is less of religious bigotry; and the experiment of the union of religions is to some degree successful and can be witnessed with the physical eye, not merely in the imagination. If one goes round to the various important centres of the Sufis, especially on the chief days of celebrations, he will be agreeably surprised to see the marriage of Islam with the older Religion. It is the fundmental basis of Sufism that the Truth is one. As the Koran says : "There is nothing new that I give unto you, what I give is as old as the ages." Thus while the Islam of the Arab is old as the hills, as they say, the religion of the Hindu is old as the snows of the Himalayas - even older. Sufism found a congenial soil in Sind, and seems to have spread into every nook and corner.