Sufi orders among the Pashtuns: Naqshbandi, Qadiri, Chishti and Roshaniyya

At a glance

• A Sufi order (silsila, "chain") is a line of teaching handed from pir (پیر, spiritual guide) to murid (مرید, disciple). Four orders met in the eastern Pashtun country: Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi, Qadiri, Chishti and Suhrawardi. Sana Haroon found it rare there for the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi way to be practised alone, because Qadiri, Suhrawardi and Chishti teaching mixed with it. [2]

• The Mujaddidi line runs from Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564-1624) to the Hazrats of Shor Bazaar in Kabul, whose head Sibghatullah Mojaddedi became Afghanistan's acting president in 1992. [2, 8]

• Writers give the Akhund of Swat's order differently: Bellew says he took the Naqshbandi way, Edwards calls his pir a Qadiri, and Haroon says he took the oath in both. [1–3]

• Hamza Shinwari, the Khyber poet, took the oath to a pir in 1930 whose line James Caron links to the Chishti order. [6]

• The Roshaniyya was a Sufi order founded among Pashtuns by Bayazid Ansari. His family had ties to a Suhrawardi shrine at Multan. [4]

• At Saidu, the Akhund's kitchen (langar) fed 500 men a day. [2]

• Reformers and Sufis have argued over the pir's place since the nineteenth century, and shrines have been bombed in the twenty-first. [2, 3, 11, 12]

An order is a chain, not a building

An order has a method of remembering God (zikr) and a line of teachers who hold the right to pass it on. Haroon describes the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi method as built on the teaching of Ahmad Sirhindi, called Mujaddid Alf Sani, and carried further by Shah Wali Ullah (1703-1762), who stressed the sharia as the basis of social practice. [2] David Edwards, who interviewed the descendants of the Hadda Mulla's deputies in Peshawar in the 1980s, says a pir completes a sequence of zikrs in one or more orders and is authorised by his teacher to take students of his own. [3]

H. W. Bellew, a British officer who lived among the Yusufzai and wrote in 1864, saw the four methods practised in public. He describes the Naqshbandi way as a "perfectly silent and motionless devotion" with the head bowed on the chest. In the Suhrawardi way the devotee murmurs the word Allah at measured intervals. In the Qadiri way he repeats a declaration for hours, and in the Chishti way he moves and whirls while repeating Allah. [1]

Because the substance of the teaching was kept private, Haroon notes, what outsiders could see was who followed which pir. The line itself mattered as a social institution as much as a body of belief. [2] The lives of the pirs named below are in their own articles: Pir Baba, Kaka Sahib, the Pir of Manki Sharif and the others linked as they appear. The wider setting is in religion among Pashtuns.

The Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi line

Haroon says Ahmad Shah Abdali drew descendants of Mujaddid Alf Sani to Kabul after his march on Delhi in 1748. Under Ahmad Shah, Timur Shah and Shah Zaman they held land in Kabul, Kohistan, Jalalabad, Kandahar and Herat, and the line produced three great houses: the Hazrats of Shor Bazaar in Kabul, the Hazrats of Karrokh in Herat and the Hazrats of Charbagh in Jalalabad. They tied the turban at the succession of an amir. [2] The Library of Congress country study tells it differently: Ahmad al-Faruqi's family moved back to Kabul "sometime during the nineteenth century", where they founded a madrasa and khanqah (خانقاه, a Sufi lodge) in Shor Bazar. [8] The sources do not agree on when. Edwards adds that hazrat is the title of those who claim descent from Umar, the second caliph, and is best known for the Shor Bazaar family. [3]

The same study says the leadership of the Naqshbandi and Qadiri orders in Afghanistan passes by inheritance, not by learning. [8] Sibghatullah Mojaddedi became head of the Mujaddidi order when his predecessor and 79 male relatives were executed in Kabul by the Taraki-Amin government in January 1979, and served two months as acting president from April 1992. [8]

In Peshawar, Waleed Ziad has traced the line of Fazl Ahmad Peshawari, who set up a network of madrasas, khanqahs and mosques from Waziristan to the Ferghana valley in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [7] Ziad says it had roughly 600 deputies, and that a son in Peshawar helped raise resistance when the Sikhs attacked the Peshawar valley. [10] The Chamkani network near Peshawar, the home of Mian Umar, is another he names. Abdullah Jan Faruqi (died 2006) appointed eighty deputies on both sides of the border, from Ghazni and Kabul to Swat, Bannu, Waziristan and Kohat. [10] His lodges at Idak in North Waziristan and Thana in Malakand hold Persian, Pashto, Arabic and Urdu manuscripts, among them notes tracking disciples' progress. [9]

The Akhund of Swat and a chain of several orders

The sources give three answers to the Akhund's order. Bellew, writing in 1864 while the Akhund lived, says he studied under Sahibzada Muhammad Shuaib, a pupil of a pupil of the Buner recluse Bishaunai Sahib, and of the four methods chose the Naqshbandi. He then lived twelve years in a thorn hut on the Indus. [1] Edwards says Shuaib was a pir of the Qadiri order who taught him the zikr. [3] Haroon says Abdul Ghaffur first trained under Hazrat Ji of the Kabul Mujaddidi line in Peshawar, until he was accused of not following the way closely enough. Shuaib, who had taken the oath in the Qadiri order and also in the Naqshbandi, Suhrawardi and Chishti, then taught him all four, and Abdul Ghaffur took the oath in the Naqshbandi and the Qadiri. [2]

Haroon notes that holding several affiliations was common in India, and that the person of the pir joined them together. [2] The Akhund passed the same breadth on. He gave Najmuddin of Hadda leave to teach all four orders. [3] Haroon says Najmuddin took the oath in the Qadiri line, alongside the Karboghay Mulla Sahib and the Miyan of Manki Sharif. [2] His deputies settled across the Mohmand and Shinwari country, Bajaur, Swat, Tirah, Khyber, Orakzai and Waziristan. [2]

The Akhund also kept close to the Kabul Mujaddidis: Haroon says he was in touch with Hafiz Ji, Kabul's head preacher (mir waiz), who shaped Dost Mohammad Khan's religious policy in 1835. [2]

The Qadiri order

The Library of Congress study places the Qadiriya mainly among the eastern Pashtuns of Wardak, Paktia and Nangarhar, including many Ghilzai nomad groups. The Gailani family seat at Jalalabad was set up in the 1920s by Hazrat Naqib Sahib, father of Sayyid Ahmad Gailani, whom the study named as the order's pir in the 1980s. [8] In Peshawar, the project led by Waleed Ziad describes Sayyid Amir Shah Qadiri as the inheritor of the city's oldest surviving mystical and scholarly line, running back to Shah Muhammad Ghawth Peshawari. His lodge houses a library of more than 5,000 volumes, including material on the Akhund of Swat. [9] Bayazid Ansari, whose own order was separate, named Shaykh Abdul Qadir Jilani among the Sufis who shaped him, in the Maqsud al-Muminin. [4]

The Chishti and Suhrawardi lines

The Library of Congress study puts the Chishti order's home in the Hari Rud valley near Herat, and says it kept out of politics. [8] Among Pashtuns the best-known Chishti link is Hamza Shinwari, born in 1907 at Lwargai in the Khyber country. In 1928 he visited the Chishti shrine at Ajmer on his way home from Bombay, and in 1930 he took the oath to a pir, Abd al-Sattar Shah, who encouraged him to write in Pashto. [6] James Caron reads the link to the Chishti order from Hamza's poem Be-Khabara, which names Nizam al-Din Awliya (died 1325) and Mu'in al-Din Chishti (died 1236). He does not state the order of Sattar Shah in so many words. [6] Caron credits Sattar Shah and Hamza with bringing qawwali and the Urdu-style mushaira to the tribal country, and records a second pilgrimage to Ajmer and Delhi in 1931. [6]

The Suhrawardi thread in the sources runs through the Roshaniyya. Himayatullah Yaqubi writes that Bayazid's family had been attached to the shrine of Baha al-Din Zakariyya of Multan, a Suhrawardi saint of the thirteenth century, and that his father urged him to seek guidance from its successor. Bayazid refused, saying salvation did not come in return for a gift. [4]

The Roshaniyya, an order made among Pashtuns

Yaqubi, a historian at Quaid-i-Azam University, argues that Bayazid founded a distinct Sufi order, the Roshaniyya, and that it should be read first as Sufism and only then as politics. [4] Bayazid taught that a seeker needed a perfect guide (pir-i kamil), set out eight stages that begin with the sharia and end in the unity of God, and asked every disciple for a pledge of allegiance. [4] His life is in Pir Roshan, and his poets are in Arzani Khweshki and Mirza Khan Ansari.

His opponents called his followers tariky, "darkened ones", and Yaqubi says the word is still in use among Pashtuns. [4] The charge was used again in Swat in the nineteenth century. Haroon says the Akhund, in his quarrel with the Kotah Mulla Sayyid Maruf, called his rival a disciple of "the sixteenth-century apostate" Bayazid Roshan Baba, and pressed the Bunerwals until they moved him out. [2] The order's supporters and critics still disagree. Yaqubi warns that nationalist readings, which make Bayazid an anti-Mughal Pashtun hero, hide what the movement said about being and the guide. [4] The orthodox side's case, led by Pir Baba and Akhund Darweza, is told in those articles.

The bond between pir and murid

The act that makes a murid is the oath, bay'at (Haroon writes bait). Haroon says membership of the line is conferred by the oath alone, whatever the murid's means or place, and that this is what kept the Akhund's and Hadda Mulla's deputies together. [2] A trusted few were made khalifa, the pir's representatives who carried his teaching on after his death. [2] Edwards uses mauzun and khalifa as the same rank, and shaykh for the disciples who run the pir's house. [3]

Edwards sets the bond beside the Pashtun idea of fatherhood. In Pashtun belief the father is the true progenitor of his children. In the same way the pir, by giving the zikr, makes the disciple, and the disciple's name is joined to his pir's in the chain like a son's to his father's in a genealogy. [3] Edwards draws this from the stories told about the Hadda Mulla. In one, an old man at the Mahabat Khan mosque in Peshawar sends the young Najmuddin to the Akhund of Swat, who calls him by name on sight. [3]

Many followed in silence. Edwards records an informant from Paktia: "Most disciples do not want to reveal that they are followers of a pir." In his family, he said, a member became a disciple without the rest knowing. [3] Pirs were also asked to keep the peace. Haroon says Pashtun communities gave pirs a mediating role, and that the Yusufzai gave religious families land to hold outright when they settled the Peshawar valley. [2] The Library of Congress study says Sufi leaders were sometimes preferred to mullahs as disinterested mediators in tribal disputes. [8]

Khanqah and langar

Najmuddin built his khanqah at Hadda, a few kilometres from Jalalabad, on the site of an old Buddhist complex, and Edwards says its pagan past was one of its attractions for a pir. [3] Its centre was the langar (لنګر), a dining hall and guest house that Edwards calls "the principal institution through which the pir connected with both the immediate circle of his deputies and disciples and the community at large". [3] The son of a deputy, the Kajuri Mulla, recalled that there were "never less than thirty, forty, or fifty people in my father's langar". Many of them were travellers who ate and went on. [3] Each task, from baking to slaughtering to serving guests, had its own shaykh. [3] Edwards heard of compounds near Sufi Sahib's langars still called the compounds of the shaykhs, where people with nowhere else to go were fed and sometimes married. [3]

The Akhund's langar at Saidu was, in Haroon's words, "a combination of an open community kitchen, entertaining quarters and almshouse". It fed 500 men a day, and Saidu grew into a town around it, paid for in part by the sale of ghee from his herds. [2] Edwards compares the langar to the khan's hujra (see hujra and qala) but says it served a wider public: travellers, tribes in dispute, and the outcast. [3] Edwards says the usual arrangement was for local people to agree together to supply the langar regularly, and the Kajuri Mulla's son listed wheat, money, firewood, dried cheese and oil, often brought once a year after harvest. [3]

Stories show how the pir was expected to give. In one, the Amir Abdur Rahman asks the Hazrat Sahib of Butkhak, a deputy of the Hadda Mulla, where the money for his langar comes from. The Hazrat Sahib answers that this is his alchemy: "I give a piece of bread in the name of God, and He gives me ten in exchange." [3] On the Pakistani side, Edwards says, the largest langar still running is at Pir Baba's tomb in Buner. [3] For the food itself, see Pashtun food and hospitality.

Ambela, 1863, and the rising of 1897

Local writers call the Ambela campaign of 1863 the Ambela Jihad or Ghaza. The British column entered the pass on 18 October, and the Akhund reached it on 26 October. Local writers say he came with 4,000 men on foot and 120 on horse under a hundred standards. General Chamberlain wrote on 31 October of a hundred standards of 30 to 40 men each, and had telegraphed that the Akhund's joining made the coalition serious because his influence reached as far as Kohat. [5] Local accounts differ on why he came. Several local writers say he proclaimed jihad when British soldiers appeared at Surkawi. Ishtiaq Ahmad, a historian at Jahanzeb College in Saidu Sharif, notes that he arrived about a week after the pass was entered, and concludes that the local people and the mujahidin asked him to come. [5] A Pashto tappa that Sultan-i-Rome recorded, in Ahmad's English, puts him at the head of the army: "O English! If you want to escape, you have to run away; as the Akhund is mounting on his horse followed by the Akuzi". [5] The campaign is also told in Buner and in the Akhund's article.

The rising of 1897 drew on the same line. Haroon says the Hadda Mulla spoke against the railways and cantonments pushed beyond Peshawar, and started mobilisations in 1893, 1897 and 1899. [2] In 1897 the Sartor Faqir Saadullah Khan, "black-headed faqir" in Edwards's gloss and a murid of the Hadda Mulla, took part in the attack on Chakdara and Malakand, where Edwards counts some five thousand followers at Chakdara. [2, 3] The British called him the Mad Fakir. Edwards points out that the Pashto word lewanai for "mad" means a man overcome by nearness to God, not a man of impaired mind. [3] In a letter to the mullas and elders of the Afridis and Orakzais the Hadda Mulla wrote: "I have myself informed the people of Laghman and Kunar and the Mohmands, Ningraharis and Shinwaris and they are all prepared to take part in the fighting." [2] Abdul Karim Chamarkandi, whose account of the mujahidin Haroon quotes, wrote that because the Hadda Mulla was an enemy of the unbelievers, all his murids were enemies of the farangi, the foreigner. [2]

Haroon argues the Mulla was doing more than reacting to the British. He was keeping together the Akhund's network in the autonomous country from Swat to Waziristan, which is why in 1897 he sent the Sartor Faqir to take over Pir Baba's shrine in Upper Swat. [2] The Amir Abdur Rahman saw it as a threat to himself. In a letter of 1897 to the British superintendent at Peshawar he complained that for fourteen years the mullas had raised every part of Afghanistan against him. [2] The Mulla's own life is told in the Hadda Mulla.

Critics and defenders

By the end of the nineteenth century the Sufi line carried a reform message of its own. Haroon says the Akhund taught his murids to promote the Quran and sound hadith over reliance on the pir as go-between. [2] The Deoband school, set up by men who were themselves initiated in the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi way, sent students such as Abdul Aziz, the Pakhli Maulvi, back to the frontier. [2] Miangul Abdul Khaliq, the Akhund's younger son, paid zakat and supported sharia-trained shaykhs but kept his father's langar. His great-grandson Miangul Jahanzeb said the religious tradition of the Akhund "was lost", though the influence of descent from such a saint continued. [2] Under Haji Turangzai, murids could take the oath and the duty to promote simple revivalist principles without long training in the Sufi way. [2]

Edwards sets out the objections. Those who follow what he calls a more orthodox view of ritual hold that acts such as eating bread from the langar for blessing, or taking dust from a saint's tomb, turn the believer's attention from God to the pir and so are shirk, the sin of joining something to God. Many orthodox Pashtuns, he adds, object less on religious grounds than because such acts demean the individual and go against the independent spirit of Pashtun culture. [3] The argument also ran inside the Akhund's own line. The Pir of Manki Sharif opposed the Hadda Mulla's method, and the line split. Miangul Abdul Wudud, the Akhund's grandson, turned to Manki Sharif and put a murid of its pir in charge of the Pir Baba shrine. [2] Accounts of the Akhund's own stand are mixed. In one Ishtiaq Ahmad records, the mujahidin leader Maulvi Abdullah came to Saidu to explain his beliefs because the two had differences, and left with the Akhund's support. [5]

The Library of Congress study found "little hostility between the ulama and the Sufi orders" in Afghanistan, many leaders being both. [8] Some of the strain is newer. Militants bombed Kaka Sahib's shrine at Nowshera on 28 October 2012, killing at least four, and AP reported that such militants claim visiting shrines is not allowed. [11] The shrine of Mian Umar at Chamkani was bombed on 21 June 2010. A case was registered against unknown militants, and analysts saw an attempt to create a new identity for the militants. [12] Ziad's project reports resistance to "puritanical militancy" from within the Sufi community. [9]