Sunday, February 19, 2006

Shahram Nazeri in Concert in Atlanta


Shahram Nazeri, perhaps Iran's best Sufi musician, will be in concert with the Rumi ensemble in Atlanta, Georgia, Saturday March 11, 8 pm at the Atlanta Symphony Hall, Robert Woodruff Art Center, 1293 Peachtree St. Tickets run from $60 to $30 and can be purchased at the Symphony Hall Box office 404-733-5000. For information call 678-357-3572 and 770-205-8051.

See the following for excerpts from an article about him by Michael McDonagh, in Bay Area Reporter, Feb. 16, 2006.
http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=music&article=107

"Where everything is music"

Musicians Shahram (left) and Hafez Nazeri. Photo: Bahram Daneshvar

"The 26-year-old Persian musician Hafez Nazeri, whom we caught on the phone last week when he was in Sacramento, is jazzed about his touring project, which has occupied him for the last three years, and which he brings to town [San Francisco] this Saturday. "My father, Shahram Nazeri, started singing Rumi's poetry 35 years ago," he says quietly yet firmly."

"Nazeri's upcoming concert ...is a very big deal. "In this project, there's a kind of fusion. It's not any more Persian, and not any more classical," but something which Nazeri, who's been singing since the ripe old age of three, and studying and performing on several Persian instruments since he was nine, calls "Modern Persian Classical Music." Like the great Lebanese composer, oud master and UNESCO Artist for Peace honoree Marcel Khalife, Nazeri's intent on pushing the boundaries of his culture's received tradition. At any rate, he will be combining sounds from Eastern and Western musical traditions, and he praises his musicians to the skies. Of his father, Nazeri says, "He developed a new style of singing for traditional Persian music, and he has a very unique style." "

"His father's nephew, Siavash Nazeri, whom Hafez calls "the greatest daf [Persian frame drum] in history," will be on that instrument; Salar Nader, whom he dubs "the greatest student of Zakir Hussein," on tabla; Liuh Wen Ting — "she's one of the best" — on viola; and James Wilson, "one of the top 10 cellists," on cello; and Hafez will be playing the Persian lute, the etar. So the musically adventurous will hear musicians from four different cultures — Indian, Persian, Taiwanese Chinese, and American — together on one stage."

"Nazeri is obviously intelligent, as well as totally committed to the path he's chosen — or maybe it chose him, as Shams chose Rumi, or Rumi chose Shams. Whatever the case, the coupling of Rumi's poems with Hafez's music and his father's singing will probably sound inevitable, even predestined. But how does Hafez feel about the country of his birth as AIPAC, the neocons, the EU, the UN, and the Bush Administration are poised to impose sanctions and probably far worse things to get its oil?"

" 'I think it's very unfortunate, very upsetting. If you forget about yourself, you fight with yourself and others. With our music, let's be in peace, and come back to who we really are. I think that whatever we are doing, we have to love each other and respect each other.' That's hardly a bad place to be as the tired, bloated, desperate West goes its warring way. Let's not forget that Sufi music is one of the finest flowers of Islam. And the Blue Mosque in Istanbul ain't bad, either. We need people like the Nazeris and their musical collaborators, and we certainly need Rumi. Now probably more than ever."

Friday, February 17, 2006

Iran: urgent investigation required into security forces violence against Sufi Muslims in Qom

Public Statement, Amnesty International News Service No: 042 17 February 2006

Amnesty International is calling on the Iranian authorities to order an immediate, independent investigation into the violent suppression of an apparently peaceful demonstration by Nematollahi Sufi Muslims in Qom on 13 February, 2005. Hundreds of demonstrators, including women and children, were injured when police, and the Hojatieh and Fatemiyon groups (organized pro-government groups), broke up the protest, apparently using excessive force, and as many as 1200 are believed to have been arrested. Most have now been released, but some 200 of those detained are still being held. Amnesty International is calling for them to be released immediately and unconditionally unless they are to face recognizably criminal charges and to receive fair and prompt trials in accordance with their rights under international law.

The Nematollahi Sufi, who are also known as dervishes or mystics, are Shi’a Muslims, who emphasise the spirituality of their faith. They had gathered to protest against an order, issued a few days earlier, to evacuate their place of worship– known as a Hosseiniye - in the city of Qom, by February 11. The Hosseiniye is located next to the home of the Sufi group’s principal preacher in Qom and was built three years ago, apparently legally and with the permission of the municipal authorities.

The Sufi are reported to have begun their protest on 9 February, with some members inside the place of worship, and others stationed outside, and they held a mourning and prayer ceremony on 10 February, the day of the Shi’a Muslim festival of Ashoura. This was peaceful but the number of protestors swelled as hundreds of Nematollahi Sufis travelled from other parts of the country to attend. The demonstrators included many woman and children offering white flowers and cake to local residents.

Security forces, including anti-riot police, took up positions around the centre, and at around 3:00 pm on 13 February set a deadline for the Sufi to evacuate it. Members of the Fatemiyon and Hojatieh groups, also reportedly surrounded the centre, shouting slogans such as “death to Sufis” and “Sufi-ism is a British plot”, and distributed leaflets alleging that Sufis are enemies of Islam. In response, some of the Sufi held up photographs of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s Islamic Republic, and photographs of relatives who were killed fighting for their country in the Iran-Iraq war, to show that they were not opposing the government and to emphasise that they are an integral part of Iranian society.

The security forces then moved in at around 4:00 pm, supported by the Hojatieh and Fatemiyon groups, attacked the protestors outside the centre and stormed the building, using tear gas and explosives. They beat many protestors, some so badly that they required hospital treatment and, according to some reports, set light to the centre - eyewitnesses later described the Qom sky as polluted with tear gas, smoke and fire. Some 1200 protestors are reported to have been detained and taken away on buses to unknown locations.

With the Sufi place of worship cleared of protestors, the security forces moved in bulldozers and trucks in the early hours of 14 February and demolished the building and neighbouring houses, including the home of the main Sufi preacher.

Most of those arrested are reported to have been released, though they are said to have been required to sign papers agreeing that that they will not attend any Sufi gatherings in Qom as a condition of their release. Some are reported to have been bussed to a sports stadium for interrogation, including some with serious injuries, and tortured or ill-treated. Families of these who remain detained – said to number about 200 –reportedly have been unable to obtain information about their whereabouts, legal status, health or conditions.

On 15 February, Qom Governor Abbas Mohtaj confirmed to Jomhouri-ye Eslami newspaper that 1,000 people had been arrested and 200 injured but he accused the Sufi of participating in a foreign plot against the Iranian stat, claiming “The arrogant powers are exploiting every opportunity to create insecurity in our country and (the Sufi’s) links to foreign countries are evident.” Another Qom official acknowledged that police had used tear gas but claimed this was necessary to disperse the gathering and that some of the protestors were armed with knives and stones. The same official said that the Sufi’s Hosseiniye was demolished because it had been turned illegally from a residential building to a centre of worship.

Amnesty International is urging the Iranian authorities to initiate an urgent, impartial and independent investigation into the actions taken by security forces and paramilitaries against the Nematollahi Sufi in Qom, and to ensure that any officials or members of paramilitary groups responsible for violating human rights are held to account and brought to justice promptly and fairly. The organization is also calling on the Iranian authorities to ensure that police are fully trained in and at all times comply with international standards governing policing activities, including the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials and the Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, which requires that “Law enforcement officials, in carrying out their duty, shall, as far as possible, apply non-violent means before resorting to the use of force and firearms. They may use force and firearms only if other means remain ineffective or without any promise of achieving the intended result.” Law enforcement officials should receive adequate training on fundamental human rights, in particular those protecting the rights to life and to physical and mental integrity of all individuals, among other rights.

The protest and its repression by the authorities came amid concern about what appears to be increasing “demonization” of the Sufi Muslim group. In September, a religious jurist in Qom, Ayatollah Hossein Nouri-Hamedani, called for a crackdown on Sufi groups in Qom, labelling them a “danger to Islam”. Recent weeks had seen hostile articles published in the Jomhouri-ye Eslami newspaper and the Kayhan newspaper, warning of their popularity, and people’s tendency to follow them.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

1,000 arrested after police and Sufis clash in Iran

15 Feb 2006 13:32:58 GMT

Source: Reuters

TEHRAN, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Iranian police have arrested around 1,000 people in the central seminary city of Qom after violent clashes over the closure of a house of worship used by mystical Sufi Muslims [of the Gonabadi branch of the Ni'matullahi Order (ed.)], city officials said on Wednesday.

Officials and a Qom resident said the police had fired teargas to disperse a crowd of dervishes, or mystics, and those who had gathered to support them. They said the dervishes were armed with knives and stones.

Around 200 people were hurt in the clash, one official said.

The fighting erupted on Monday after the Sufis refused to evacuate a suburban house where they had been congregating for dervish rites, said an official at Qom municipality who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The violence ended and their place was knocked down on Tuesday," he said, adding the municipality had demolished the building because the Sufis had illegally turned their residential building into a centre of worship [which, now in the Gonabadi order in Iran, is called a Husayniye, though formerly such a place was commonly called a khaniqah].

Sufi Muslim spirituality is tolerated under mainly Shi'ite Iran's strict Islamic laws, although some senior religious figures occasionally call for a clampdown on its rites.

The governor-general of Qom accused the dervishes of being part of a foreign plot, but he did not explain this.

"We did not aim to confront them at first, but when we felt that ... a plot was under way, we took steps," Abbas Mohtaj was quoted as saying by the Jomhuri-ye Eslami newspaper.

"The arrogant powers are exploiting every opportunity to create insecurity in our country and (the Sufis') links to foreign countries are evident," he added. Mohtaj said about 200 people had been hurt and around 1,000 arrested.

The Sufis' mystical path to God through dance and music does not go down well with some of the most senior religious figures in the country.

Ayatollah Hossein Nouri-Hamedani in September called for a clampdown on dervish groups in the holy city of Qom, which he called a "danger to Islam".

Some said the tensions with dervishes in Qom were due to the increasing popularity of Sufism there.

"Dervishes were becoming popular in Qom and the officials wanted to crackdown on them," said an employee at one of Qom's reformist seminaries.

Badshah Quadri ‘urs’ to begin at Halkatta today

By Deccan Herald news service, Gulbarga-- Deccan Herald - Bangalore,India, February 13, 2006

The two-day 28th Urs-E-Quadeer of the famous Sufi Saint Hazrath Khwaja Syed Mohammed Badshah Quadri Chisty Yamani Quadeer (RA), who fought for communal harmony throughout his life, would begin on Monday, February 13, at Halkatta near Wadi in Chittapur taluk of the district.

The urs, which will be held for two days until February 14, is expected to attract nearly two lakh devotees all over the country. Different religious observations would be undertaken at the 'Darga Shareef' premises at Halkatta.

The beginning of ‘urs’ would be marked by the ‘Sandal procession’. The Sandal paste to be draped over the tomb of Badshah Quadri Chisty, would be brought from Hyderabad. The ‘Sandal’ would arrive at 3:00 pm from Hyderabad on Monday. On Tuesday, February 14, the ‘Chiraghan’ would be held.

Peethadipathis and other swamijis would be the chief guests at the main function which would be held at Halkatta on Monday at 3:00 pm. The Mehfil-E-Sama will be held at 9:00 pm under the guidance of Hazrath Syed Bahaudeen Husaini Chandpasha Patel, the present Sajjada Nasheen of the Halkatta Darga.

Gulbarga district has been an important Islamic center since ages as the area was under the Muslim rule for centuries, and a few Sufi saints had made Gulbarga their home.

Although these Sufi saints were here mainly to spread Islam, yet they tried their beast to promote universal brotherhood and peace. The most famous among these Holy souls was Sufi Saint Khwaja Bande Nawaz who was based in Gulbarga and fought for communal harmony throughout his life. He had come to Gulbarga around 1397 AD. Lakhs of Hindu and Muslim devotees converge on Gulbarga from different parts of the country, especially from Hyderabad for the famous Khwaja Bande Nawaz Urs.

Another such Holy soul who settled in the district was Hazrath Khwaja Syed Mohammed Badshah Quadri Chisty Yamani Quadeer (RA), who has been immortalised at Halkatta Shareef near Wadi. He led a very simple and low profile life. He practiced, propagated, and expounded the gospel of the Holy Islam, which brought peace and solace to the suffering millions. Born in Raichur on the Bakrid day in 1903 AD (Hijari 1324) to Syed Abdul Rehman Quaderi and Hazratha Amina Bibi, this famous Sufi saint was an outstanding example of saints who believed in the assimilation of the best of character, which made him one of the greatest Islamic saints.

Nothing lay nearer to his heart than to relieving the distress and miseries of people. The saint has lakhs of followers in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, and Gujarat.

Rajnath offers prayers at dargah of Hazrat Qasim Shahid Baba

10 february 2006, Published at NewKerala.com - Ernakulam,Kerala,India

Lucknow: BJP President Rajnath Singh paid obesiance at the dargah of renowned Sufi saint Hazrat Qasim Shahid Baba along with other BJP leaders here.

Singh offered a 'chader' at the Dargah last evening and prayed for peace and prosperity of the nation, a BJP spokesman said here.

The BJP president was offered a traditional shawl and turban during the 'Dasturbandi' ceremony by the dargah caretaker, the spokesman added.

Geoffroy, French scholar of Sufism, Slams West’s Double Standards Over Cartoons

"Geoffroy Slams West’s Double Standards Over Cartoons"

Geoffroy said the West forget the famous philosophical theory that one's freedom ends where other's freedom starts.

By Hadi Yahmid, on IslamOnline.net

PARIS, February 8, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) – The West’s handling of the Danish cartoons crisis with the Muslim world has exposed its double standards when it comes to the freedom of expression, prominent French writer Eric Geoffroy criticized on Tuesday, February 7.

"When it [the West] tackles religious issues or values, then it is freedom of expression but when Muslims do the same then it's a reprehensible conduct," Geoffroy told IslamOnline.net.

"What do you call such an act? It is double standards in the broad sense of the word," said Geoffroy, an expert on Islam and Sufism who teaches Arabic and Islamic studies in the University of Marc Bloch in Strasbourg.

He served some criticism for Arab and Muslim countries over respect of freedom of expression.

"Freedom of expression, no doubt, is not respected in some countries that call themselves ‘Islamic,’" said Geoffroy.

"But the West also does have its own invincible methods of censorship."

Twelve cartoons of a man said to be Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), first published last September by Denmark's mass-circulation Jyllands-Posten and then reprinted by several European dailies, have caused an uproar in the Muslim world.

Several European newspapers entered the fray last week by reprinting some or all of the blasphemous cartoons, including the French daily France-Soir and Germany's Die Welt.

Some said they were printing the cartoons in support of Jyllands-Posten, while others said they were used to illustrate articles on the dispute.

"Insignificant Values"

The author of several books and many articles on Islam, Geoffroy believes that the "unharmonious" secular West is comfortable with violating religious or moral values.

"Some Westerners have no boundaries or criteria when it comes to religions," he added.

"Hence," he added, "we can understand that values have become meaningless in the Western viewpoint as those Westerners question or mock everything of noble or sacred nature."

Geoffroy attributed this largely to nihilism, a philosophy which gained ground after the period during which the Christian current dominated the West.

He said the West should give a second reading to the role of media in circulating stereotypes.

"The media should at least steer clear of inciting hatred, which is considered an offense in France."

“Intolerant West”

The French expert said the West is in no position whatsoever to accuse the Muslims of being intolerant.

"Some newspapers which published the cartoons claimed that they were testing the boundaries of free speech in the Muslim and how tolerant Muslims are," he said.

"The Islamic culture needs no lessons in tolerance from the West and history stands as a witness.

"The truth of the matter is that the West has proved intolerant when it went on publishing frenziedly these cartoons, paying no heed to the sanctity and sublime values of the other," said Geoffroy.

"In contrast, Muslim countries -- though they do have their own shortcomings –- do not attack sacred and religious figures of the West," noted the French intellectual.

He went on: "The West, unfortunately, doesn’t remember the famous philosophy: ‘one's freedom ends where other's freedom starts.’

He asserted that one must respect the other to enjoy his/her right to free speech.

Geoffroy described Prophet Muhammad as a great man, noting that Muslims hold him in high esteem just like other prophets.

He cited, in this respect, a verse from the Noble Qur’an about Prophet Muhammad which reads: "We sent thee not save as a mercy for the peoples."

Sa'adi’s Viewpoints to be Published in Britain

From Pendar: Persian Independant Media, February 6, 2006

One World Publication in Britain will publish a book in March 2007 containing Sa'adi’s viewpoints on love and life.

Tehran, 6 February 2006 -- One World Publication, a private publication in Oxford University, is going to publish a book entitled “Sa'di: The Poet of Loving and Living” on first of March 2007 in English language. It has also published several books on religion, Sufism, philosophy, and psychology.

This 160-page book is written by Homayoun Katouzian, Iranian researcher. Sa'di’s viewpoints on love which depict both human and divine love, as well as the impact of his many years traveling had on his thoughts have been inscribed in this book. Katouzian shed a unique insight on the man he calls “the poet of loving and living”.

Using a philosophical and cultural approach toward Sa'di’s life and literary works, Katouzian has revealed some aspects of love and life hidden in the works of this great poet who lived during the 13th century AD.

In this book, Sa'di has been described as one of the greatest Iranian poets and writers who was highly skilled in classical prose and poetry and had a unique attitude on both human and spiritual love.

Shaykh Muslihuddin Sa'di was born in Persia, the city of Shiraz, in 1184 AD. Sa'di’s life may be divided into three distinct periods: Until 1226 he was busy with his studies; from 1226 to 1256, he spent his life as a traveler in different countries of the world; and the last part from 1256-1291 he spent as a Sufi contemplating and admonishing people. That is why he is remembered in Persian literature as a great moralist whose moral advices have been followed by those who heard them. Several pieces of his writings entered the daily life as valuable proverbs, giving precious lessons about life.

Sa'di was reverted in his time as a man of great wisdom and passion. The body of his work was written in the thirteenth century. Filled with extract of the poet’s melodious and insightful writing, and critical analysis thereof, this revealing biography examines why he was so idolized until the 1950’s, and why since then he has fallen into relative obscurity. Homayoun Katouzian is a social scientists, historian, literacy critic and poet. He is the Iran Heritage Research fellow at St. Antony’s College, and a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, as well as an honorary fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter.

A search within: Jasmit Kaur’s Sufiyana Songs

Jasmit Kaur’s Sufiyana renderings are a fulfilling experience for this lady with the golden voice

Ludhiana Newsline - Ludhiana,India, February 5, 2006

FORTUNATE are those who are able to find their calling in life, and can devote themselves entirely to it. Such has been the case with the graceful and winsome Jasmit Kaur, the lady with the golden voice, who is an exponent of the Sufi Kalam.

She started getting accolades since the tender age of three and was a constant winner at all school functions. Her family used to reside at Patna then, and she trained in singing Bangla and Bhojpuri classicals. Jasmit’s family came to Ludhiana after the ’84 riots and she got involved with running a linen business called Honey Craft, which kept her occupied for the next 11 years or so.

Though she never gave up her singing, but it was limited to the precincts of home and hearth. With her family’s support, Jasmit took a tentative step into the outer world three years ago and since then there has been no looking back. Ludhianvis were left astounded when this demure lady sang such soul stirring melodies of the folk and the classical genre.

Consequently, she started getting invites to perform at select functions. Jasmit polished her talent further by taking guidance from Amarjeet Singh Komal of ‘Symphony’ fame and C.L. Bhalla, professor of music at Punjab Agricultural University.

Jasmit realises that her true calling is the Sufi kalam. She confesses, ‘‘I have realised that Sufi renderings have to come totally from within and cannot be imitated or learnt. It is a therapeutic experience for me as well as the listeners’’.

Jasmit has the habit of penning down her thoughts in the form of verses, of which some are in Punjabi and others in Hindi. Her collection is a delight indeed. The hundred odd verses, we hope, will reach the publication stage soon. Very soon a cassette of Shabads sung by her will hit the stands. That rendering Sufi kalam has been a soul stirring experience for her, can be made out by these lines that she had written:

Ek pyaas jo har pal hai mujhe,
Us pyaas ko bhukh main bharne laghi hoon,
Tang lagte hain yeh diwaron, mahlon se ghar mujhe,
Vadion main ruh ke sang wicharne laghi hun,
Ek sabar sa bharta ja raha hai man ke bheetar,
Jab se sirf ibadat main uski karne laghi hun.

Chechen academic and specialist in Sufism slams Muhammad cartoons

"Chechen academic slams Muhammad cartoons" 04 February 2006, published by Interfax (Moscow, Russia)

Grozny, February 4, Interfax - The publication in the Western press of cartoons depicting Muslim prophet Muhammad are an insult not only to Muslims but to the entire civilized world, a Chechen academic argued.

"I don't know a single instance of a disrespectful statement by a Muslim publication about Moses or Jesus Christ. In my view, no civilized person will ever go as far as that," Vakhit Akayev, head of the philosophy department of the Chechen State University, told Interfax.

"When they are citing freedom of speech and press in the West to justify the insult to the religious feelings of hundreds of millions of people, it is an extremely serious delusion. I can never believe that an individual journalist may take such a step at his discretion," Akayev said.

He argued that the cartoons threatened global stability and might have unpredictable consequences.

Akayev is a specialist in Sufism and is the author of works translated into many languages and published in foreign countries. He has also written works on the consequences of religious extremism.

Bauls song: A dilemma in the authentic preservation of Baul songs

By Ershad Kamol in *The Daily Star* January 27, 2006

Baul songs have attracted widespread attention for their mystic approach to humanism as well as their marvelous tunes. Nowadays preservation of the authentic tunes and lyrics of the folk songs has become an oft-discussed topic; quite a few of the urban singers are accused of distorting the folk genres in the name of fusion.
However, a large number of researchers face major obstacles in the course of preserving Baul songs, especially in relation to Lalon's songs because of the continuous blending process of oral folk genres at the grassroots level. It is for this reason that questions arise about the authenticity of numerous songs preserved as "Lalon's compositions".


Mridul Kanti Chakroborti, professor of the Department of Theatre and Music, Dhaka University, has conducted research at the grassroots level. He says, "Two hundred and eighty five of the 2000 (approximately) Lalon compositions are undoubtedly authentic. I have doubts as to whether many of the 'claimed' Lalon songs were composed by Lalon or his devotees."

One of the common problems in the preservation of the oral literature is the lack of written texts of the bards or direct followers. In the case of Lalon Shah's songs -- Kangal Harinath Majumdar (1833-1896), Lalon's direct disciple, inspired Rabindranath Tagore to publish 285 Lalon songs in the monthly Prabasi of Kolkata. The rest of the documentation is based on the rendition of Lalon devotees. Of these documentations -- Banglar Baul by Upendranath Bhattacharjee and Haramoni by Monsur Uddin are the most popular.

In the Baul tradition are many principal gurus such as Lalon Shah, Panju Shah, Delbar Shah, Panchu Shah, and others. Moreover a special section of the Bauls known as Kartabhaja, follow Vaishnava traditions. And each of these traditions is different in devotional rites and music.

In the Lalon Shah tradition, for example, there is a predominance of Sufism, Tantric beliefs and Sahajiya rituals, while in the Panju Shah tradition, Tantric beliefs and Sahajiya practices are absent.

But, for hundreds of years, the followers of these traditions have interwoven the philosophy and music of the principal gurus. Professor Mridul says, "The alarming factor is that many of the rural Bauls deliberately or unwittingly blended the genres. And documentation from these sources can easily misguide people."

Professor Mridul's observation has been reflected at the recent 'Baul Council' arranged by Tariquat-e Ahle Bayeet, an alliance of different organisations of Sufis and Vaisnavas, where the Bauls from different aakhras and mazaars presented mystic songs as well as traditional kirtans as Lalon songs.

Questioned as to how Lalon compositions can be considered authentic, Babul Khan, who sings in an akhra in Faridpur, says "If any song includes the lyric Lalon bole-- (Lalon says), it is enough proof that it is an authentic Lalon composition."

However, Professor Mridul differs. As he says, "Many songs that conclude with Lalon bole are not essentially composed by Lalon Shah. The diction and philosophy delivered in these songs are totally different from that of Lalon's composition published in monthly Probashi. Many Bauls have added Lalon bole at the end of their own compositions to popularise the song, which has made the documentation of authentic Lalon songs more difficult."

Subsequently, Lalon's disciple, Maniruddin Fakir, and his disciple, Khoda Baksh, attempted to put these songs into a particular frame. Khoda Baksh's disciple, Amulya Shah, was a reputed musicologist who set Baul songs, especially Lalon songs, to music. These songs were developed by his disciples: Behal Shah, Shukchand, Dasi Fakirani, Chandar Gauhar, Nimai Shah, Mahendra, Kanai Kshyapa and Moti Fakirani. Mahim Shah, Khoda Baksh Shah, Jhadu Shah, Karim, Bella, Fakirchand, Jomela, Khorshed Fakir, Laily and Yasin Shah further developed these in later years.


Shudhin Das has done the notation of the songs rendered by Khoda Baksh Shain, a disciple of Maniruddin Fakir; the latter was the direct disciple of Lalon Shah. Professor Mridul says, "The tune of the songs rendered by Khoda Baksha is different from that of songs rendered by many rural Bauls as well as Lalon singers, who render for metro audience like Farida Parveen, Kiron Chandra Roy and others."

Farida Parveen claims that her presentation style is different from that of the Bauls at Lalon's akhra. She says, "Fakirs at the akhra sing Lalon songs in their own style. My emphasis is on the classical aspect to give it a more polished form."

The ongoing process of blending of the oral compositions by Lalon Shah and other prominent Bauls has emerged as a dilemma for the authentic preservation of Baul songs.

'Matir Moina', a film conveying message of [ Sufi ] egalitarianism

Published in *The Hindu* Chennai,India

New Delhi, Jan. 26 (PTI): While it was being showered with accolades at the 2002 Cannes film festival, bagging the International Critics Award, backhome, in Bangladesh, Matir Moina (Clay Bird) faced an embargo on its screening. The reason cited was that the film hurt the Islamic sentiments.

"I have not attempted to lambast Islam through the movie. Rather, the film conveys a message of harmony, tolerance and egalitarianism. It reflects the popular salad bowl culture," says Tareque Masud, the Bangladeshi director of the film.

"I was extremely elated when my film was awarded at the Cannes as it was the first Bangladeshi movie to get an honour in the international forum. But I was saddened at the same time as people of my country could not watch it," he says, during an interview here.

"But finally the Film Censor Board of Bangladesh gave its nod to screen the film after over a year's struggle."

An autobiographical first feature, set against the backdrop of the turbulent period of late '60s, Matir Moina reflects Tareque's childghood, his silent suffering.

"It is a part of my life. I was sent to the madrasa at the age of seven by my father, who was very much an Englishman. But he suddenly turned religious and even put my mother in a 'purda'. And this action of my father led to the agony and suffering of my mother who lost her only daughter," Tareque recalls.

The film goes on to show how the boy loses his younger sister because of his father's rigid nature and his close friend. Rokon who becomes a secluded lunatic, sending a poignant message of following religion blindly at the cost of human life and happiness.

About the growing fundalmentalism, Tareque says, "the situation is all the more same throughout the world. In today's context, 'Matir Moina' is extremely relevent as it sends the message of harmony and tolerance."

"In Bangladesh, even commercial movies are not allowed for screening in villages due to extremist threat. But in this film, I have shown how Sufism can act as a protective umbrella for the country to save it from heading towards fundamentalism."

Interestingly, the next venture by the film Producer will be a sequel to 'Matir Moina'.

"Call it a sequel or prequel. It will be on my father - what made him change from an English gentleman to a religious orthodox. I have collected his life history and will give it the shape of a film which will hopefully be ready by next year."

"One great thing that I could achieve through this film was a wonderful communication with my father when he himself watched it," exults Tareque.

The film had a special screening on the occasion of India-Bangladesh dialogue on media and culture. Co-produced by Tareque and Catherine Masud, Tareque's US-based wife, the film is slated to be released in Delhi and Mumbai in the coming days.

Sufi Shaykh Hasan Cisse on the Danish Cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad

In Senegal, Imam Assane Cisse (Hasan Cisse) of the Cheikh Ibrahim Niass [Sufi] brotherhood said the [Danish] cartoons [of the Prophet Muhammad] had "nothing to do with freedom of expression", but simply showed a lack of respect.

February 3, 2006 from "Cartoons furore sparks media debate on freedoms" by Per Bech Thomsen

Republic of the Philippines Hosts Global Interfaith Dialogue

(Blog Editor's note: Sufi Shaykh Hasan Cisse Participates in Global Interfaith Dialogue)

Philippine Headline News Online

MANILA, January 26, 2006 (MALAYA) CHRISTIANS and Muslims will join leaders from other major religions in the Global Interfaith Dialogue to be held this Friday by the Centrist Democrat International (CDI), the same day of the launching of CDI Asia-Pacific, the region’s first political organization envisioned to match the influence and prestige of CDI’s European People’s Party.

The launch of the CDI Asia-Pacific will be attended by leaders of 10 major political parties from eight nations in Asia.

Speaker Jose de Venecia, president of the host Lakas Christian-Muslim Democrats (Lakas CMD), said the global interfaith dialogue seeks to foster multi-cultural and multi-religious understanding and tolerance that could help avert politico-religious tensions in the world’s trouble spots.

"Ultimately, we are laying the foundation for multi-religious and multi-cultural understanding that can be the true basis for enduring peace," De Venecia said.

Organizing committee chairman Francis Manglapus said former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid; Libya’s Dr. Mohamed Sherif, secretary general of the World Islamic Call Society; Saudi Arabia’s Dr. Abdullah bin Abdulmohsin Al-Turki, secretary general of the World Muslim League; and Sen. Mushahid Hussai Seyed, secretary general of the Pakistani Muslim League will attend the CDI launching.

They will be joined by eminent religious personalities Dr. Tong Chan Wah (Taoist); An-Wu Lin (Confucianist); Dr. Hamdi Mohammad Murad Murad, Islamic researcher and scholar; Chief Imam Cheilkh Assane Cisse (Sufi) [i.e. Hasan Cisse], president of the African-American Islamic Institute; Taj Hamad (Sufi), secretary general of the World Association of Non-Government Organizations; Dr. Namdra Jain; Dr. Mohinder Singh (Sikh), director of Bhai Vir Singh Sahitva Sadan; Phra Dhamakosacarva (Buddhist); Yogiratna Ranjeet (Hindu), and Rabbi Itzhak Bar-Dea of Israel.

The Universal Peace Federation is sending Dr. Chung Hwan Kwak, delegation chairman; Dr. Thomas Walsh, secretary-general; and Dr. Christopher Kim and Julia Kim of UPF Asia.

Vice Gov. Mahid Mutilan, president of the Muslim party Ompia; Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, Bishop Efraim Tendero, national director of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches; and El Shaddai leader Bro. Mike Velarde will speak at the dialogue.

The UN General Assembly approved the global interfaith dialogue in November 2004, an initiative proposed by the Philippines through President Arroyo and De Venecia as a mechanism to mediate ethnic and politico-religious conflicts and violence in conflict regions of the world.

The Other Side Of Pakistani Islam

By Yoginder Sikand 26 January, 2006
Countercurrents.org

'The greatest dilemma facing Pakistan is the question of its identity', says Khurshid Kaimkhani, a well-known Pakistani leftist social activist and my host in Sindh during a recent visit to Pakistan. 'There's this constant and never-ending dispute as to whether Pakistan is the eastern-most part of West Asia or the western-most part of South Asia'. 'In short', he says, 'the question is: Are we part of the Arab-Iranian cultural world or the Indic South Asian civilization?'.

Kaimkhani has no doubt as to where Pakistan's roots lie. 'The common heritage that we share with the rest of South Asia, in particular north India, is undeniable', he says. The son of a Chauhan Rajput Muslim migrant from Rajasthan, 72-year old Kaimkhani is a regular visitor to India and insists that the future of South Asia as a whole depends crucially on people-to-people contact between Indians and Pakistanis and a recognition of their common roots and culture despite their religious differences. 'At the popular level,' he tells me, 'religious antagonisms are much less pronounced. Historically, local forms of Islam and Hinduism have borrowed from each other and we need to build on this to critique other forms of religion propagated by political elites and right-wing obscurantist religious groups that are exclusivist and that target people of other faiths'.

Kaimkhani is not romanticizing about an imaginary past, I discover as I travel across Pakistan. At Sehwan Sharif, in interior Sindh, I see large numbers of Hindu Dalits praying along with Muslims at the shrine of the famed Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. I see the same at Bhit Sharif, at the shrine of Sindh's most famous Sufi poet, Hazrat Shah Abdul Latif. At Uderolal I visit a unique shrine complex: the temple-dargah of Sain Jhulelal-a saint venerated as the god of the Indus by Sindhi Hindus and as a Sufi by local Muslims. Intriguingly, the sprawling shrine complex has the saint's Muslim-style grave in the centre, flanked by a temple on one side and a mosque on the other.

Kanha, a Bhil labourer I met in a village just outside Hyderabad, Sindh's second largest city, takes me to his hovel, where he shows me a small mud structure that houses Jogmaya, a Bhil goddess, wrapped up in a bundle of red cloth and a little cradle dedicated to Sufi Sahib, probably one of the innumerable Muslim mystics of Sindh. He introduces me to Lal Sain Sahib, a Jogi, whose caste profession is catching snakes. Lal Sain is a Muslim, but looks and behaves no different from the Hindu Jogis who are also present during our conversation. There are both Hindu and Muslim Jogis in Sindh, Lal Sain tells me, and there is little to distinguish the two. 'We eat with each other and smoke each other's hukkahs', he says, 'because we are children of the same parents'. Bhagto, a Hindu Jogi who joins in our conversation, nods in approval. 'Yes, Ishvar and Allah are one and the same, as all our Sufis have insisted'. That's no empty rhetoric I discover that evening, when we all get together at Kanha's house, and after a meal of thick rotis and meat, the Bhils and the Jogis, Hindus and Muslims, take out their khadtals, dholaks and chimtas, and sing bhajans in praise of Ram, Krishna, Mahadev, the Prophet Muhammad and the Sindhi Sufis.

Sindh is known for its deeply-rooted Sufi traditions, which brought together Sindhi Hindus and Muslims in shared cultural world characterized by reverence of common saints. The situation in Punjab is similar. 'Numerous Punjabi Sufi saints, whose works are still immensely popular, are known for their breath of vision, seeing God's light in every particle of the universe, in the mosque as well as the temple', says Saeeda Diep, my host in Lahore. She takes me to the shrine of Madho Lal Husain in downtown Lahore, a unique Sufi dargah that houses the graves of two male lovers, Madho, a Hindu, and Husain, a Muslim, who were so close that they are today remembered by a single name. She waxes eloquent about the unconventional love relationship between the two that angered the pundits and mullahs but won the hearts of the masses.

In Lahore I also meet Pir Syed Chan Shah Qadri, the custodian of the shrine of the sixteenth century Sufi Hazrat Miyan Mir. The saint was the spiritual preceptor of Dara Shikoh, son of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, a renowned mystic in his own right. Dara was the first to translate the Upanishads into Persian and sought to draw parallels between Hindu and Islamic mysticism and thereby bring Hindus and Muslims closer together. Hazrat Miyan Mir was no less of an ecumenist, the Pir tells me. In recognition of his spiritual stature, he was invited by Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth Sikh guru, to lay the foundation stone of the Harminder Sahib or Golden Temple in Amritsar, the most holy shrine of the Sikhs. The Pir informs me that many Punjabi Muslims still look upon Guru Nanak, the first Sikh guru, as a great mystic in the Sufi tradition.

In Syed Chan Shah's home I am introduced to Zahoor Ahmad Khan, seventh generation descendant of two Pathan brothers Ghani Khan and Nabi Khan. When Gobind Singh, the last guru of the Sikhs, was pursued by Aurangzeb's forces, he was sheltered by the brothers. They disguised him as a Muslim saint, the Pir of Ucch Sharif, and, carrying him in a palanquin, they slipped through the Mughal lines. In gratitude, Khan tells me, the Guru presented them with a letter written in his own hand, announcing that, as Khan says, 'Whoever among my followers loves and protects these two brothers loves me, too'. In recognition of the service rendered to the Guru by the brothers, Ranjit Singh, the founder of the Sikh kingdom in Punjab, granted their descendants a large estate in Mandara, a village in present-day Indian Punjab. The family resided in the estate till 1947, when, during the Partition riots, they fled to Pakistan. 'When the whole of Punjab was burning, when Hindus and Sikhs in western Punjab and Muslims in eastern Punjab were being massacred and driven out of their homes, the Sikhs of Mandara pleaded with my father and other relatives not to leave. But we had to, so terrible was the situation then', says Zahoor Khan, who was a young lad of fifteen when he came to Pakistan. Last year he went back to his village for the first time since he and his family had left it, at the invitation of a Sikh organization that seeks to revive and preserve the memory of the two Pathan friends of Guru Gobind Singh. 'I was given an enthusiastic welcome when I arrived in Mandara. The whole village came out to greet me', says Khan, his eyes brimming with tears.

Also present during our conversation is Naim Tahir, a middle-aged, soft-spoken man, who introduces himself as a descendant of Bhai Mardana, Guru Nanak's closest companion, a Muslim of the Mirasi caste. Tahir tells me about the relationship between his ancestor and Guru Nanak. Both Guru Nanak and Bhai Mardana were born in the village of Talwandi, and grew up together as friends. 'Bhai Mardana had a melodious voice and used to play the rabab', and 'when Guru Nanak began his spiritual mission of bringing Hindus and Muslims together in common worship of the one God and denouncing caste and social inequalities, Bhai Mardana joined him. Together they traveled together to various Hindu and Muslim holy places, including even Mecca and Medina. Guru Nanak would compose his mystical verses or shabad and Bhai Mardana would sing them while playing the rabab'.

Tahir tells me that his family tradition of singing the verses of Guru Nanak and other Sikh gurus has been carried down through the generations. 'Yes, we are Muslims,' he says, 'but there is nothing in the teachings of Guru Nanak that is incompatible with Islam. In fact there are many verses in the Guru Granth Sahib written by Muslim Sufis, including the well-known Chishti saint Baba Farid'. Tahir confesses to know little else about Bhai Mardana, other than the fact that after Guru Nanak died he traveled to Afghanistan and is buried somewhere there. 'You should speak to my father Ashiq Ali Bhai Lal about this', he advises. 'He has even sung shabads in the Golden Temple and is regularly invited to sing in gurudwaras and gurumandirs, Sindhi Hindu shrines dedicated to the Sikh gurus, in different places in Pakistan'. Ashiq Ali, unfortunately, is not in town. He is away to Sindh on the invitation of a group of Sindhi Hindus, and I'm leaving the next day back for India. I tell Tahir that meeting his father is good enough excuse to plan a second trip to Pakistan.

Shared religious traditions such as these in what is now Pakistan were extensively commented upon by colonial ethnographers. In pre-colonial times, at the popular level boundaries between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in Punjab and Sindh, the heartland of present-day Pakistan, as in much of north India, were often blurred. 'Colonial policies of divide-and-rule and the political machinations of Sikh, Hindu and Muslim elites, competing with each other for colonial patronage resulted in the creation of notions of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs as neatly-separated communities having little or nothing in common with each other, which is really an inversion of social reality', says Husain Altaf, a Lahore-based social activist. 'In post-colonial Pakistan and India', he adds, 'ruling elites and right-wing Islamist and Hindutva groups patronized by the ruling classes have been actively engaged in magnifying these differences and denouncing shared religious traditions for their own political purposes'.

To substantiate his argument, Altaf shows me some books published by the notorious Wahhabi Pakistani terrorist outfit, Lashkar-e Tayyeba. The books tirelessly repeat the same point: about Hinduism, indeed all religions other than Islam, being 'deviant' and as 'leading their adherents to hell', and exhorting Muslims to be 'hard against all disbelievers'. 'Since non-Muslims don't believe in Islam Muslims should have no love for them', one book declares. Another Lashkar tract claims that the Prophet Muhammad announced that 'he who takes part in the jihad against India will not smell the fire of hell'. In short, as the Lashkar sees it, Islam and other religions have nothing in common. 'That goes against local forms of Islam in Pakistan, particularly Sufi traditions, that have been open to other religions and their adherents', Altaf tells me. He adds that that the particular tradition about India attributed to the Prophet and cited in the Lashkar texts is indeed found in some collections of Hadith, sayings ascribed to the Prophet, but assures me that it is a fabrication. 'It was concocted after the death of the Prophet in order to legitimise the imperialist ambitions and greed of the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphs', he opines.

'This doctrinaire, ideological and exclusivist form of Islam', Altaf carries on, 'has a certain appeal in some circles but it does not have mass acceptance and there is also much resistance to it from various quarters. Projecting Islam as completely distinct from other religions and equating Muslim culture with Arab culture goes completely against our cultural traditions and history'. 'This is an elitist project, which does not reflect the way Islam is lived and practiced by common Pakistanis, who share the same basic cultural universe as most north Indians', he opines. He likens hardliner Islamist groups like the Lashkar to Hindutva chauvinists in India, who uphold an equally exclusivist version of Hinduism, one that is predicated on an unrelenting hatred of non-Hindus, particularly Muslims.


'All religions', Altaf muses, 'can be interpreted in diverse ways. Committed believers, Hindus, Muslims and others, urgently need to rescue our pluralistic religious ethos in order to combat those who spread hatred and violence in their name'. I could hardly agree more, I tell him.

Monsieur Ibrahim And The Flowers Of The Qur'an, Bush Theatre, London

By Paul Taylor
Published in The Independent, Online Edition: 25 January 2006

A great deal of wishful thinking has gone into the making of Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Qur'an, a two-hander by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt that charts the deepening bond between an elderly Sufi grocer and a 13-year-old Jewish boy in 1960s Paris.

The director Peter Brook recently remarked that instead of intervening polemically in the post-September 11 debate, it might be better for theatre to direct its energies into giving us "glimpses of what our lives have lost, a fleeting taste of qualities long forgotten". Monsieur Ibrahim comes across as a well-intentioned travesty of that approach.

Its two characters manage to surmount the barriers of age, race and religion in a tale that is charming and touching - as well as beautifully acted in Patricia Benecke's lovely, spare production - but self-sabotagingly simplistic. Abandoned by his mother shortly after he was born, Moses (Ryan Sampson) lives in a gloomy, book-filled flat with his depressive lawyer-father.

When wrongly accused of stealing money by his father, he decides that he may as well live down to his unjust reputation and starts filching cash to fund his precocious trips to prostitutes. Keeping the theft hidden involves shoplifting food daily from the store run by Monsieur Ibrahim (Nadim Sawalha), and to conquer his shame he focuses on the fact that Ibrahim is an Arab.

But Ibrahim, wise to this dodge, is amused and forgiving. Pointing out that he's not an Arab but a Muslim from the Golden Crescent, he offers the boy the paternal guidance and affection he lacks. When his real father commits suicide, Moses becomes Ibrahim's adoptive son.

Sawalha brings a droll humanity to the role of the old Sufi, and Ryan Sampson, who, as Moses, tells the story, is immensely engaging. But they can't distract you from the glib way the play glides over the realistic obstacles to this alliance; or from the drama's diagrammatic neatness (it's left to the Muslim to explain to Moses that his father suffered from Holocaust-survivor guilt); or from the curiously weightless feel to proceedings as Ibrahim drives the boy to his native Anatolia and the whirling dervishes who help him to shed his anger.

Moses' sentimental education is also sentimental, in the less fortunate sense of the word.

Pakistan, Islam And Indian Media Stereotypes

By Yoginder Sikand

21 January, 2006 Countercurrents.org

Contrary to Indian media representations, the average Pakistani is just about as religious or otherwise as the average Indian. The average Pakistani is certainly not the wild-eyed fanatic baying for non-Muslim blood or waging violent jihad to establish global Islamic hegemony that our media would have us believe. Like the average Indian, he is emotionally attached to and culturally rooted in his religion, but he does not wear it on his sleeve and nor does it dictate every thought or act of his. In fact, the thing that first strikes the Indian visitor to Pakistan is how almost identical the average Pakistani is, looks and behaves to the average north Indian.

Almost all the many people I met in the course of a recent month-long visit to Pakistan that took me to several places in Punjab and Sindh do not even remotely fit the description of the average Pakistani peddled by our media. Islamist radical groups undeniably do have an important presence in parts of Pakistan, but they certainly do not command widespread popular support all over the country. This explains the continual dismal performance of religious parties in every successive Pakistani election. Despite concerted efforts by Islamist and mullah-based parties to establish a theocracy in the country, Pakistani politics are not dominated by religion as much as by economic, ethnic and regional concerns. It is, therefore, crucial not to exaggerate the influence of radical religious outfits in Pakistan, as the Indian media generally does.

Indian media descriptions about Pakistan tend to portray Islam in the country as a seamless monolith. The variety of local expressions of Islam are consistently overlooked so as to to reinforce the image of a single version of Islam that is defined by the most radical of Islamist groups. The fact, however, is, that most Punjabis and Sindhis, that is to say a majority of Pakistanis, ascribe to or are associated with the traditions of the Sufi saints, which are anathema for such Islamists. Popular Sufism is deeply-rooted in Pakistani soil and provides a strong counter to radical Islamist groups and their exclusivist agenda. Many Sufis were folk heroes, radicals in their own right, bitterly critiquing tyrannical rulers as well as Muslim and Hindu priests. This is why they exercised a powerful influence on the masses, irrespective of religion. This explains, in part, why Islamist radicals are so fiercely opposed to the traditions that have developed over the centuries around such figures.

The popular Sufi tradition in large parts of Pakistan thus limits the appeal of radical Islamists, making the chances of an Islamist take-over of the country a remote possibility. In recent years, it is true, these groups have gained particular salience and strength, but this is said to be less a reflection of a growing popular commitment to the Islamist cause than to other factors. One of these is the role of the state. Although the ideological founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, envisaged Pakistan as a secular Muslim state, successive Pakistani regimes governments have used Islam to bolster their own frail support base, exactly in the same manner as the Congress and the BJP have done with Hinduism in the Indian case. Islam has also been used to wield together a number of the country's ethnic groups that have little in common other than their profession of Islam, in the same way in which advocates of both 'soft' Hindutva, such as the Congress, and 'hard' Hindutva, such as the BJP, have sought to invoke Brahminical Hinduism to define the Indian nation-state. Hindutva ideologues propagate a form of Hindu 'nationalism' that has no space for Indians of other faiths, and is, in fact, based on an unrelenting hatred of non-Hindu 'others'. Creating a Hindu identity in this fashion is predicated on excising all elements of culture and tradition that Hindus are seen to share with others. The same has happened with the case of official as well radical versions of Islam in Pakistan. Yet, it is important to remember that this is not the only, and certainly not the dominant, form of Islam in Pakistan, as my interaction with numerous Pakistanis from different walks of life revealed to me.

'Radical Islamist groups are not a true reflection or representative of Pakistani Islam', a social activist friend of mine from Sindh explains. 'State manipulation of religion', he argues, 'has had a major role to play in promoting radical Islamism in Pakistan', which, he says, 'is largely an expression of elite politics and Western imperialist manipulation'. 'To add to state patronage of such groups', he points out, 'is the fact of mounting economic and social inequalities, sustained military rule, the continued stranglehold of feudal lords and the absence of mechanisms for expressing democratic dissent, all of which have enabled radical Islamist groups to assert the claim of representing normative Islam against other competing versions and visions of the faith'. In some parts of Pakistan, such as Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, he says, electoral support for Islamists 'reflects anti-American sentiments rather than popular demands for theocratic rule'. Such groups, he says, have gained added strength from the ongoing conflict in Kashmir by 'tapping into Pakistani nationalist sentiments on this issue in the same way as Hindutva groups used the Kashmir conflict in India, both seeking to present the issue in religious terms'. 'In short', he claims, 'the limited support that radical Islamist groups enjoy in Pakistan reflects less a fierce commitment to their ultimate agenda of strict Islamist rule than a protest against the system which, ironically, has abetted such groups for its own purposes'.

'The task before Indians and Pakistanis seriously concerned about the future of our common subcontinent', says another friend of mine, a journalist from Lahore, 'is to rescue our religious traditions from the monopolistic claims of the radicals. Islamism in Pakistan and Hindutva in India feed on each other while claiming to be vociferous foes. We need to revive popular forms of religion, such as Sufism and Bhakti, that are accepting of other faiths and that at the same time are socially engaged and critique the system of domination that produces radicalism as a reaction while at the same time using it as a means of stifling challenges to it'.

India to extend Khokrapar-Munabao Sind-Rajasthan rail link to Ajmer [the site of the shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti ]

By John C.K. Daly Jan 20, 2006, 17:08 GMT in M and C News (Monsters and Critics.com ; Glasgow, UK)

In a further sign of thawing relations between India and Pakistan on the troublesome issue of Kashmir and Jammu, New Delhi announced that it will extend the Khokrapar-Munabao Sind-Rajasthan rail link to Ajmer to allow Pakistani pilgrims to visit Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti`s tomb.

Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti is a 13th century Muslim Sufi saint, known also as Gharib Nawaz. Chisti is the most famous Sufi saint of southern Asia`s Chisti order, and was a direct descendent of prophet Muhammad. He stablished the Chishtiyya order in Ajmer, India.

The Business Standard reported that India also proposed to Pakistan that no new defense posts be established near the Line of Control dividing India and Pakistani-ruled Kashmir. India`s and Pakistan`s foreign secretaries are currently meeting to review the ongoing peace process and discuss new confidence building measures initiatives.

During the two days of meetings the Indian delegation proposed holding high-level military meetings at the frontier, according to Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna.

Other topics of discussion included terrorism, with Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran expressing New Delhi`s concerns to Pakistani Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan.

For its part Pakistan raised Indian comments on Baluchistan, with the Indian side rejecting as 'unfounded' Pakistani allegations about New Delhi`s involvement in the recent disturbances there.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

Musharraf visits Ajmer [old news]


"I have come with a message of Aman (peace)” [picture caption]

By Syed Afzal Ali Shah

The Milli Gazette Online, May 1-15, 2005

Ajmer: A date which he had missed four years ago, in July 2001, the General finally made it to Ajmer sharif, at the start of his three-day visit to India. Arriving at the Jaipur Sanganer airport, en route to Ajmer, the General was received at the airport by the state chief minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia, and was accorded a warm welcome by her and state ministers. The General left after a short stay in a convoy of four helicopters. After a short flight of 20 minutes, the General landed in Ajmer. It is said that only those come to Ajmer who are called by the great saint, and so finally the wish of the Pakistani President was fullfilled on 16 April.

The President who was dressed in an immaculate white Pathani suit, symbolizing the message of peace which he brought with his visit, came with his wife Begum Sehba and a high level delegation which consisted of external affairs minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, Information Minister Rashid Ahmed, finance minister and the Pakistani High Commisioner to India, Aziz Ahmed Khan and 19 other delegates. The city of Ajmer which was virtually turned into a military cantonment for the visit, wore a deserted look on this day unlike 1987, when the then President of Pakistan General Ziaul Haq had visited Ajmer and was welcomed with open hands by the citizens of the town. President Musharraf drove straight to the holy shirne and went straight to the mousoleum and spent about 18 minutes inside it. Coming outside, the Prez was seen wearing a pink turban which as tradition goes, is put on important visitors’ heads by a khadim of the dargah. Here the khadim was Syed Natiq Chishti who performed the function and presented him with tabarruk of the holy shirne. The President prayed inside and the khadim and the official Anjuman Syedzadgan also prayed for him and for the success of his visit to India.

Coming out of the shirne, the President sat outside the tomb of the daughter of Khawaja Sahib on the marble floor and wrote in the visitor’s book of the Anjuman saying that "I consider it my honour as also of my country’s delegation to have prayed at the shrine of the most revered saint, Hazrat Mohommad Hasan Chishti. Let my own prayers for peace, harmony and amity between Pakistan and India and prosperity of both the countries be answered."
The President then walked out of the mausoleum amidst the shouting of the waiting media but was forced by his security people to move forward, but the Presidnet in his amicable style came back after a few steps to speak to the media, though he did not answer their questions. He said, "I , my wife and the delegation, are happy to visit the holy shirne of Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti and have come with a message of aman (peace).I have prayed for peace and for the prosperity of the people of Pakistan and Hindustan and for the development of both the countries." Smiling with the pink pagri still on his head and flanked by his ever-sombre foreign minister, the President walked towards the exit gate. He was presented tabarruks, sweets and two beautiful chadars for the tombs of Data Ganjbakhsh and Baba Fariduddin Ganjshakar, whose tombs are in Pakistan and both were followers of the great sufi saint of Ajmer, Khawaja Moinuddin Chisty (R.A.).

The two chadars presented by the Anjuman depict a new aspect of spiritual connection between India and Pakistan through the Sufi saint Khawaja sahib who had all his life spread the message of peace, love and harmony in the Indian subcontinent during the 11th century. In another gesture of goodwill and peace, the secretary of the Ajuman Sarwar Chishti presented a bouquet of flowers to Gen Musharraf. Sarwar Chishti said, "A bouquet is a perfect symbol of the blossoming of the frienship between India and Pakistan. It demonstrates that the Ajmer Dargah will always remain a source of peace and harmony not only in this country but at the international level too"

The Prez who had also brought a well-crafted chadar for the Mazar sharif, along with three packets of sweets with the message of peace, presented the gifts to his khadim Natiq Chishti before his departure. «

Hindi Rocks: Hindi rock bands and artistes have come of age

from The Times of India, January 18, 2006

If Sting can do it, so can Strings. If Jethro Tull can do it, so can Jal. If Indus Creed, Pentagram, Parikrama, Zero, et al have had the rockers headbanging to their music, now there are Hindi rock bands and artistes that are grabbing audiences by the gut and refusing to let go.

Once dubbed as noise, rock music is now being embellished with Hindi lyrics and as a result, is garnering a new slice of the audience pie!

Not too long ago, Rabbi Shergill brought the Sufi genre back into the forefront with his Bulla Ki Jaana, with its tilt towards Sufi rock. Then there was Indian Ocean's song Arre Rukja Re Bandey. Junoon and Strings have had aficionados for a long time, as have Fuzon, and now, Jal.

"The listeners now want something new in terms of sound," says Pankaj Awasthi of Khuda Ka Vaasta fame. "It was more difficult to get a label to sign a rock artiste earlier.

But now, things have changed." Even Bollywood is now rocking to the sounds of rock. Case in point: Jal's tracks Woh Lamhey and Aadat and Strings's Yeh Hai Meri Kahaani for Zinda.

Says Ajay Sawant, manager of band Soulfuel, "It's the intense and meaningful lyrics and music of rock that's quite a draw for the audience." Adds Luke Kenny, "Sadly, it has taken Pakistani bands to consolidate the trend of the genre in India.

But as long as Hindi rock bands are getting an acceptance, it doesn't matter who did it first."

Modernity and fundamentalism [in Sind and the Southern Punjab, with some notes on Sufism ]

by Dr Manzur Ejaz
Wednesday, January 18, 2006, in the Daily Times (Lahore, Pakistan)

Under the Raj class transformation in Punjab was rapid. The emergence of an urban trading class and spread of middle/petty peasantry, through the colonisation of western Punjab, ushered in a new era of competition among the various Punjabi communities. The dawn of the 20th century witnessed a diminishing of classical Punjabi Sufi thought and the emergence of Muslim Anjumans, Singh Sabhas and Hindu Mahasabhas

There may not be a technical argument for the construction of Kalabagh Dam (KBD) worth alienating an oppressed nationality or ethnic minority. And the people of Punjab need solidarity with the Sindhi people more than a dam whose benefits may never materialise or trickle-down to them.

However, this does not mean that unanimity of thought among people of various nationalities is a requirement. The Sindhis claim, for example, that while they follow Sufism — a milder and more liberal tradition of Islam — Punjabis are inherently fundamentalists. But such a distinction between Punjabis and Sindhis may not stand the test of history. Religious fundamentalism appears to be a function of social change rather than an inherent characteristic of any society. It was while contemplating this issue that an old discussion with Boota Sain came to my mind.

Returning from my village, I was excitedly describing the modernisation in rural areas that had taken place in the last few decades. I was impressed by the way every modern facility — sewerage, electricity, phone, cable TV, wireless — had reached far off rural areas. Boota Sain, sitting quietly in a corner, innocently asked a rather odd question “Are the Sunnis of your village and family divorcing their Shia wives?”

I felt offended and asked myself why I tolerated such illiterate and abrupt people around me. To keep my cool I said “Bootia, there is no connection between the village making progress and the Shia-Sunni conflict which is mostly a doing of Zia ul Haq and the mullahs.”

Realising my suppressed anger, Boota Sain lowered his eyes, and said “Rab da bhana inj hoya (God willed it this way), that Mullahs’ control of the society was initiated by our beloved Bhutto, followed by Zia ul Haq and their successors. Zia looked like a powerful player but he was just a puppet controlled from behind the scene. The same forces led to Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1947-1984) and his fundamentalist Khalistani movement and Vajpayee and his extreme conservative Hindutva counter-revolution.”

I do not know what metaphysical entity or theory Boota Sain was referring to but I suddenly saw a connection in the simultaneous rise of fundamentalism in Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus in the northern part of the sub-continent. The proximity in geography and time further intrigued me: the emergence of religious extremism in north India (including Pakistan) within a few decades could not be ignored. I also realised that sectarianism and religious intolerance has been much more prevalent in the cities than in the villages. Earlier a Sufi streak of religion was much more common in the Punjab.

In dusty old villages, reading Sufi poetry and qissas (folk tales) was a common pastime. Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah, Maulvi Ghulam Rasool and other Sufi thinkers were popular readings in most Punjabi households. There used to be professional Heer singers along with those who specialised in rendering kafis, dohras and folk tales. Qawalis were the favourite occasion of gathering. And people used to see everything in the Sufi perspective: even the romantic folk tale of Heer Ranjha was understood to be a dialogue between the body and the spirit.

Till the 1960s, the intellectual discourse was predominantly Sufi; the Shia-Sunni conflict was almost non-existent in the villages. Many Sunnis used to visit Imam Bargahs during the first 10 days of Muharram. In cities like Lahore Sunnis used to offer sabeels (drinks) to Shia mourners. Shia-Sunni marriages were common.

However, during my recent visits I have seen both Sunni mosques and Imam Bargahs being protected by police at prayer times. One cannot rule out the possibility that the vice of sectarianism reached the villages along with the instruments of modernity. In some strange manner, sectarian hatred has accompanied tractors, TVs and electricity. It can be postulated that fundamentalism is more closely associated with mechanisation, commercialisation and urbanisation of society than the inherent genius of a nationality. Boota Sain has a point.

Punjab, accused today of supporting religious fundamentalism, produced more Sufi thinkers from the 16th to the 19th century than any other north Indian region. The roots of communalism and sectarianism can be traced back to the British Raj.

It appears that under the Raj class transformation in Punjab was much more rapid than in other north Indian regions. The emergence of an urban trading class and spread of middle/petty peasantry, through the colonisation of western Punjab, ushered in a new era of competition among the various Punjabi communities. The dawn of the 20th century witnessed a diminishing of classical Punjabi Sufi thought and the emergence of Muslim Anjumans, Singh Sabhas and Hindu Mahasabhas. The tragedy of 1947 partition was in the making much earlier before it actually happened.

After 1947, the three-way rivalry among Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs subsided. However, with the Green Revolution in East Punjab, the Sikh-Hindu collision manifested itself in the bloody Khalistan movement. The Green Revolution in Pakistani Punjab, and to an extent in North West Frontier Province, led to similar tensions in the form of the anti-Ahmedi movement and later on in the Shia-Sunni conflict.

Similar socio-economic changes in the rest of northern India gave birth to Hindu fundamentalism in the form of Hindutva. While many other factors may have played a secondary role, modernisation has been the common denominator in the rise of religious fundamentalism in north India.

Sindh and southern Punjab, dominated by a feudalism and tribalism, have not experienced the rise of competitive middle classes; or their size and influence has been quite limited. As a result, the traditional mode of thinking, expressed through Sufism, has maintained its predominance. Of course, the teaching of the mother tongue has helped the Sindhis keep their traditions alive but that has not been the determining factor. Had it been so, Sikh and Hindu fundamentalism could not have emerged because the use of the mother tongue in the respective areas was not disrupted.

The question is: will Sindh and southern Punjab stick to traditional modes of thinking if feudalism is eliminated and competitive middle classes emerge?

The writer can be reached at manzurejaz@yahoo.com

Rock star's activism moves many Muslims

by Omar Sacirbey January 24, 2006 in *The Christian Century*

One of Salman Ahmad's earliest gigs was a talent show at King Edward Medical College in Lahore, Pakistan, where he was studying to be a doctor. Moments after he strummed his first chords, Islamic fundamentalists barged in, smashed Ahmad's guitar and drum set, and broke up the show.

Ahmad quipped that he wasn't scared as much as confused about the incident. "I thought rock musicians were supposed to break their own instruments," he said with a smile.

Little did they know at the time, but those fundamentalists helped spawn the international stardom of a performer whose faith-based music reaches millions of Muslims, prompting comparisons to another do-good rocker, U2's Bono.

Perhaps more important, by promoting interfaith understanding, Ahmad has become a pivotal figure in the war between moderate and extremist Islam.

"That one incident really changed the way I started thinking. I realized that if there are some people who feel threatened by music, and what music means for people, then I should do more of it," Ahmad, a devout Sufi Muslim, said in an interview.

Ahmad, 41, is best known as lead guitarist of Junoon, a Pakistani-American rock band. Wildly popular throughout South Asia and among the South Asian diaspora, the band has sold 25 million albums—as many as Nirvana, ZZ Top and Janet Jackson have sold in the United States. Many of Ahmad's songs have topped MTV India's music charts for weeks on end.

But fame has never been enough for Ahmad, who has parlayed his popularity into lobbying for Third World development and building bridges between the Islamic and Western worlds.

"I can't imagine anybody else out there who as a single person can make a bigger difference than Sal," said Polar Levine, a Jewish-American musician with whom Ahmad has collaborated since the September 11 terrorist attacks. "He's not making music as a sales unit or to get babes. He's got an agenda."

Born in Lahore, Ahmad moved with his family to Tappan, New York, when he was 12. There he grew to love Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and bought his first guitar. He also maintained his Pakistani-Muslim roots, speaking Urdu at home, fasting during Ramadan and perusing the Qur'an. Ahmad returned to Lahore for medical school and after graduating chose music over medicine, figuring that if he failed at rock 'n' roll he could always go back to doctoring.

He never picked up a stethoscope again. Junoon, which Ahmad formed in 1990, created a distinctive sound—electric rock braided with Pakistani folk music and lyrics that draw from the Qur'an and Sufi poets like Rumi and Baba Bulleh Shah. He quickly won a following that has grown over the years.

"My inspiration comes from a lot of these Sufi poets, and the fact that they saw the world as one," Ahmad said. "I'm a believer, and a lot of my music and my life take inspiration from faith. And the Qur'an is a huge source of inspiration."

Consider Ahmad's handling of "Bulleya?" an Urdu poem with a title that means "Who Am I?" It appears on Junoon's fifth album, Parvaaz, the Flight. "It's about this inner quest, which is really the foundation of Sufism, finding out who you are," said Ahmad, referring to the poem put to music. "Before you judge the world, go and find out what you stand for."

Despite Ahmad's deference to Islam, not all Muslims approve of him and Junoon. His group was banned from performing in Pakistan from 1996 to 1999 after referring to government corruption in a song and protesting Pakistan's and India's nuclear testing. After fundamentalists won local elections in Pakistan's northwest Peshawar region in 2002 and outlawed all music as un-Islamic, the BBC, in the documentary The Rock Star and the Mullahs, chronicled how Ahmad challenged fundamentalists to show where in the Qur'an music is forbidden.

They couldn't find the evidence they sought, but they still held to their views.

Yahya Hendi, a Muslim imam and chaplain at Georgetown University and member of the Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) Council of North America, says there is "absolutely nothing" in the Qur'an or Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) that prohibits music.

On the contrary, Islam needs musicians like Ahmad, perhaps even more than it needs religious leaders, Hendi says. "Music is a universal language. Every human being connects with it. Not everyone connects with religious voices. Musicians can put out the message that Islam is a religion of love, compassion and peace better than clergy," he said.

A second BBC documentary, It's My Country Too, follows Ahmad as he visits American Muslims living in post-September 11 America. Ahmad has been showing the film at college campuses across the country to promote discussion about fighting extremism and developing dialogue between people of different faiths. He says the vast majority of Muslims are moderate, but that they need to do a better job of explaining their religion.

"Everybody says, 'It's a religion of peace.' Well, all religions are religions of peace. But what does your identity stand for?" he said.

Ahmad was greatly affected by October's devastating earthquake in the disputed territory of Kashmir. It claimed nearly 90,000 victims, including Ahmad's aunt and cousin. The tragedy has put Ahmad on a fund-raising tour, including a concert in Norway that helped secure a $25 million pledge from that country's government. He was critical of the Pakistani government's hesitancy to accept aid from Israel, a country it doesn't recognize.

"We have to get out of this mind-set of the politics of division," he said. "When there's a tragedy, you've got to do what's required."


Omar Sacirbey writes for Religion News Service

If It's Tuesday It Must Be Lahore: Sufi Music and the "scene" in Lahore

If it’s Thursday it must be Lahore

Mario Rodrigues in Lahore; published in the Statesman (Kolkata, India)

Jan. 15. — Remember that popular Hollywood movie and ditty of 1969, If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium? Well, twist the lyrics around a little bit and you can come up with something appropriate for the local situation: If it’s Thursday, it must be Lahore. This is the day when the rich culture of this historic and mystical city comes alive, drowning it in a vibe of sound and music.

The day kicks off in the afternoon at the shrine of Data Ganj Baksh Hajveri [sic; Hujwiri] (Bestower of Treasures), a 11th century Sufi mystic renowned for his concern for the poor, outside the old city. Some of the best quawwali singers from far and near, including the legendary Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, turned up to pay their dues here. The best qawwalis come onstage later in the evening after the opening acts have warmed things up.

After nightfall, the rhythms explode into a thundering crescendo at the “Sufi nights” staged at the ramshackle shrine of Baba Shah Jamal, a 19th century saint. At the quadrangles adjoining the shrine, some of the most famed Pakistani percussionists, including the famous Gonga and Mithu Saeen brother duo, beat out a frenetic tattoo on their dhols that transports the often doped Sufi devotees, whirling in their ritual reveries, into the seventh heavens. The “spiritual smoke’’ that helps the Sufis on their way to a drumming nirvana in Pakistan is somewhat akin to what the Rastafarians ingest in Jamaica over as they find release in the throbbing rhythms of reggae.

If you somehow miss the action on Thursdays, you can hopefully catch it belatedly at the Regale Internet Inn on The Mall, courtesy its urbane owner, Malik Karamat Shams, a former journalist and press aide of former Pakistani PM Ms Benazir Bhutto. He knows all the best musicians in town and can arrange for them to come over and jam on his terrace at a mere request. The Saeen brothers, the roving minstrel Sain Zahoor and a host of equal or lesser talents have enthralled discerning audiences here.

After Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan conquered the West, Pakistan’s eclectic artistes have come to the attention of global audiences in a big way. India, too, has become a happy stomping ground for the likes of the now waning Junoon, Strings, Ali Zafar, Fuzon, Rahaat Fateh Ali Khan and a few more, some of whom even cross the border for their launches.

Malik’s own story is as fascinating as the many heartwarming tales he can spin out in the course of an extended conversation. Editor of the family owned paper Inquilab, the technologically-inclined Malik began the first internet café in Lahore some ten years ago. When pressed for a name, a ‘Jung’ media group crony suggested that he call it an Internet Inn rather than a café, which people would otherwise mistake for a coffee house.

The first guest he attracted was an American filmmaker, Brad, who stayed for three years making documentaries on the Pakistani film industry, Sufi music and prostitutes in Muslim society. Brad was put up on a bed in Malik’s editor’s cabin. Because of the Internet connection, guests started dropping in one by one — so much so, even while Malik was interviewing some top politicians in his cabin, tourists kept popping in to ask for accommodation. That was when he decided to move his newspaper office and start his guest house catering exclusively to bagpackers.

Malik bemoans the plight of musicians in an Islamic society which does not acknowledge the presence of music in daily life. He cites the example of the renowned music director, Nazir Ali, who provided music for 357 films but was nevertheless so poor that he could not even afford to offer tea to his guests.
Bringing films into the ambit of the discussion, Malik avers, “In the 1970s, we produced some 300 films. Last year we produced only 21,” offering two reasons for the decline of the Pakistani film and music industry. One, domination by Bollywood and two, the rule of General Zia ul Haque who snuffed out popular culture by his orthodoxy.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Shahram Nazeri in Concert in Atlanta
3 comments:

Shahram Nazeri, perhaps Iran's best Sufi musician, will be in concert with the Rumi ensemble in Atlanta, Georgia, Saturday March 11, 8 pm at the Atlanta Symphony Hall, Robert Woodruff Art Center, 1293 Peachtree St. Tickets run from $60 to $30 and can be purchased at the Symphony Hall Box office 404-733-5000. For information call 678-357-3572 and 770-205-8051.

See the following for excerpts from an article about him by Michael McDonagh, in Bay Area Reporter, Feb. 16, 2006.
http://www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=music&article=107

"Where everything is music"

Musicians Shahram (left) and Hafez Nazeri. Photo: Bahram Daneshvar

"The 26-year-old Persian musician Hafez Nazeri, whom we caught on the phone last week when he was in Sacramento, is jazzed about his touring project, which has occupied him for the last three years, and which he brings to town [San Francisco] this Saturday. "My father, Shahram Nazeri, started singing Rumi's poetry 35 years ago," he says quietly yet firmly."

"Nazeri's upcoming concert ...is a very big deal. "In this project, there's a kind of fusion. It's not any more Persian, and not any more classical," but something which Nazeri, who's been singing since the ripe old age of three, and studying and performing on several Persian instruments since he was nine, calls "Modern Persian Classical Music." Like the great Lebanese composer, oud master and UNESCO Artist for Peace honoree Marcel Khalife, Nazeri's intent on pushing the boundaries of his culture's received tradition. At any rate, he will be combining sounds from Eastern and Western musical traditions, and he praises his musicians to the skies. Of his father, Nazeri says, "He developed a new style of singing for traditional Persian music, and he has a very unique style." "

"His father's nephew, Siavash Nazeri, whom Hafez calls "the greatest daf [Persian frame drum] in history," will be on that instrument; Salar Nader, whom he dubs "the greatest student of Zakir Hussein," on tabla; Liuh Wen Ting — "she's one of the best" — on viola; and James Wilson, "one of the top 10 cellists," on cello; and Hafez will be playing the Persian lute, the etar. So the musically adventurous will hear musicians from four different cultures — Indian, Persian, Taiwanese Chinese, and American — together on one stage."

"Nazeri is obviously intelligent, as well as totally committed to the path he's chosen — or maybe it chose him, as Shams chose Rumi, or Rumi chose Shams. Whatever the case, the coupling of Rumi's poems with Hafez's music and his father's singing will probably sound inevitable, even predestined. But how does Hafez feel about the country of his birth as AIPAC, the neocons, the EU, the UN, and the Bush Administration are poised to impose sanctions and probably far worse things to get its oil?"

" 'I think it's very unfortunate, very upsetting. If you forget about yourself, you fight with yourself and others. With our music, let's be in peace, and come back to who we really are. I think that whatever we are doing, we have to love each other and respect each other.' That's hardly a bad place to be as the tired, bloated, desperate West goes its warring way. Let's not forget that Sufi music is one of the finest flowers of Islam. And the Blue Mosque in Istanbul ain't bad, either. We need people like the Nazeris and their musical collaborators, and we certainly need Rumi. Now probably more than ever."
Read More

Friday, February 17, 2006

Iran: urgent investigation required into security forces violence against Sufi Muslims in Qom
2 comments:
Public Statement, Amnesty International News Service No: 042 17 February 2006

Amnesty International is calling on the Iranian authorities to order an immediate, independent investigation into the violent suppression of an apparently peaceful demonstration by Nematollahi Sufi Muslims in Qom on 13 February, 2005. Hundreds of demonstrators, including women and children, were injured when police, and the Hojatieh and Fatemiyon groups (organized pro-government groups), broke up the protest, apparently using excessive force, and as many as 1200 are believed to have been arrested. Most have now been released, but some 200 of those detained are still being held. Amnesty International is calling for them to be released immediately and unconditionally unless they are to face recognizably criminal charges and to receive fair and prompt trials in accordance with their rights under international law.

The Nematollahi Sufi, who are also known as dervishes or mystics, are Shi’a Muslims, who emphasise the spirituality of their faith. They had gathered to protest against an order, issued a few days earlier, to evacuate their place of worship– known as a Hosseiniye - in the city of Qom, by February 11. The Hosseiniye is located next to the home of the Sufi group’s principal preacher in Qom and was built three years ago, apparently legally and with the permission of the municipal authorities.

The Sufi are reported to have begun their protest on 9 February, with some members inside the place of worship, and others stationed outside, and they held a mourning and prayer ceremony on 10 February, the day of the Shi’a Muslim festival of Ashoura. This was peaceful but the number of protestors swelled as hundreds of Nematollahi Sufis travelled from other parts of the country to attend. The demonstrators included many woman and children offering white flowers and cake to local residents.

Security forces, including anti-riot police, took up positions around the centre, and at around 3:00 pm on 13 February set a deadline for the Sufi to evacuate it. Members of the Fatemiyon and Hojatieh groups, also reportedly surrounded the centre, shouting slogans such as “death to Sufis” and “Sufi-ism is a British plot”, and distributed leaflets alleging that Sufis are enemies of Islam. In response, some of the Sufi held up photographs of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s Islamic Republic, and photographs of relatives who were killed fighting for their country in the Iran-Iraq war, to show that they were not opposing the government and to emphasise that they are an integral part of Iranian society.

The security forces then moved in at around 4:00 pm, supported by the Hojatieh and Fatemiyon groups, attacked the protestors outside the centre and stormed the building, using tear gas and explosives. They beat many protestors, some so badly that they required hospital treatment and, according to some reports, set light to the centre - eyewitnesses later described the Qom sky as polluted with tear gas, smoke and fire. Some 1200 protestors are reported to have been detained and taken away on buses to unknown locations.

With the Sufi place of worship cleared of protestors, the security forces moved in bulldozers and trucks in the early hours of 14 February and demolished the building and neighbouring houses, including the home of the main Sufi preacher.

Most of those arrested are reported to have been released, though they are said to have been required to sign papers agreeing that that they will not attend any Sufi gatherings in Qom as a condition of their release. Some are reported to have been bussed to a sports stadium for interrogation, including some with serious injuries, and tortured or ill-treated. Families of these who remain detained – said to number about 200 –reportedly have been unable to obtain information about their whereabouts, legal status, health or conditions.

On 15 February, Qom Governor Abbas Mohtaj confirmed to Jomhouri-ye Eslami newspaper that 1,000 people had been arrested and 200 injured but he accused the Sufi of participating in a foreign plot against the Iranian stat, claiming “The arrogant powers are exploiting every opportunity to create insecurity in our country and (the Sufi’s) links to foreign countries are evident.” Another Qom official acknowledged that police had used tear gas but claimed this was necessary to disperse the gathering and that some of the protestors were armed with knives and stones. The same official said that the Sufi’s Hosseiniye was demolished because it had been turned illegally from a residential building to a centre of worship.

Amnesty International is urging the Iranian authorities to initiate an urgent, impartial and independent investigation into the actions taken by security forces and paramilitaries against the Nematollahi Sufi in Qom, and to ensure that any officials or members of paramilitary groups responsible for violating human rights are held to account and brought to justice promptly and fairly. The organization is also calling on the Iranian authorities to ensure that police are fully trained in and at all times comply with international standards governing policing activities, including the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials and the Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, which requires that “Law enforcement officials, in carrying out their duty, shall, as far as possible, apply non-violent means before resorting to the use of force and firearms. They may use force and firearms only if other means remain ineffective or without any promise of achieving the intended result.” Law enforcement officials should receive adequate training on fundamental human rights, in particular those protecting the rights to life and to physical and mental integrity of all individuals, among other rights.

The protest and its repression by the authorities came amid concern about what appears to be increasing “demonization” of the Sufi Muslim group. In September, a religious jurist in Qom, Ayatollah Hossein Nouri-Hamedani, called for a crackdown on Sufi groups in Qom, labelling them a “danger to Islam”. Recent weeks had seen hostile articles published in the Jomhouri-ye Eslami newspaper and the Kayhan newspaper, warning of their popularity, and people’s tendency to follow them.
Read More

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

1,000 arrested after police and Sufis clash in Iran
2 comments:
15 Feb 2006 13:32:58 GMT

Source: Reuters

TEHRAN, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Iranian police have arrested around 1,000 people in the central seminary city of Qom after violent clashes over the closure of a house of worship used by mystical Sufi Muslims [of the Gonabadi branch of the Ni'matullahi Order (ed.)], city officials said on Wednesday.

Officials and a Qom resident said the police had fired teargas to disperse a crowd of dervishes, or mystics, and those who had gathered to support them. They said the dervishes were armed with knives and stones.

Around 200 people were hurt in the clash, one official said.

The fighting erupted on Monday after the Sufis refused to evacuate a suburban house where they had been congregating for dervish rites, said an official at Qom municipality who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The violence ended and their place was knocked down on Tuesday," he said, adding the municipality had demolished the building because the Sufis had illegally turned their residential building into a centre of worship [which, now in the Gonabadi order in Iran, is called a Husayniye, though formerly such a place was commonly called a khaniqah].

Sufi Muslim spirituality is tolerated under mainly Shi'ite Iran's strict Islamic laws, although some senior religious figures occasionally call for a clampdown on its rites.

The governor-general of Qom accused the dervishes of being part of a foreign plot, but he did not explain this.

"We did not aim to confront them at first, but when we felt that ... a plot was under way, we took steps," Abbas Mohtaj was quoted as saying by the Jomhuri-ye Eslami newspaper.

"The arrogant powers are exploiting every opportunity to create insecurity in our country and (the Sufis') links to foreign countries are evident," he added. Mohtaj said about 200 people had been hurt and around 1,000 arrested.

The Sufis' mystical path to God through dance and music does not go down well with some of the most senior religious figures in the country.

Ayatollah Hossein Nouri-Hamedani in September called for a clampdown on dervish groups in the holy city of Qom, which he called a "danger to Islam".

Some said the tensions with dervishes in Qom were due to the increasing popularity of Sufism there.

"Dervishes were becoming popular in Qom and the officials wanted to crackdown on them," said an employee at one of Qom's reformist seminaries.
Read More
Badshah Quadri ‘urs’ to begin at Halkatta today
No comments:
By Deccan Herald news service, Gulbarga-- Deccan Herald - Bangalore,India, February 13, 2006

The two-day 28th Urs-E-Quadeer of the famous Sufi Saint Hazrath Khwaja Syed Mohammed Badshah Quadri Chisty Yamani Quadeer (RA), who fought for communal harmony throughout his life, would begin on Monday, February 13, at Halkatta near Wadi in Chittapur taluk of the district.

The urs, which will be held for two days until February 14, is expected to attract nearly two lakh devotees all over the country. Different religious observations would be undertaken at the 'Darga Shareef' premises at Halkatta.

The beginning of ‘urs’ would be marked by the ‘Sandal procession’. The Sandal paste to be draped over the tomb of Badshah Quadri Chisty, would be brought from Hyderabad. The ‘Sandal’ would arrive at 3:00 pm from Hyderabad on Monday. On Tuesday, February 14, the ‘Chiraghan’ would be held.

Peethadipathis and other swamijis would be the chief guests at the main function which would be held at Halkatta on Monday at 3:00 pm. The Mehfil-E-Sama will be held at 9:00 pm under the guidance of Hazrath Syed Bahaudeen Husaini Chandpasha Patel, the present Sajjada Nasheen of the Halkatta Darga.

Gulbarga district has been an important Islamic center since ages as the area was under the Muslim rule for centuries, and a few Sufi saints had made Gulbarga their home.

Although these Sufi saints were here mainly to spread Islam, yet they tried their beast to promote universal brotherhood and peace. The most famous among these Holy souls was Sufi Saint Khwaja Bande Nawaz who was based in Gulbarga and fought for communal harmony throughout his life. He had come to Gulbarga around 1397 AD. Lakhs of Hindu and Muslim devotees converge on Gulbarga from different parts of the country, especially from Hyderabad for the famous Khwaja Bande Nawaz Urs.

Another such Holy soul who settled in the district was Hazrath Khwaja Syed Mohammed Badshah Quadri Chisty Yamani Quadeer (RA), who has been immortalised at Halkatta Shareef near Wadi. He led a very simple and low profile life. He practiced, propagated, and expounded the gospel of the Holy Islam, which brought peace and solace to the suffering millions. Born in Raichur on the Bakrid day in 1903 AD (Hijari 1324) to Syed Abdul Rehman Quaderi and Hazratha Amina Bibi, this famous Sufi saint was an outstanding example of saints who believed in the assimilation of the best of character, which made him one of the greatest Islamic saints.

Nothing lay nearer to his heart than to relieving the distress and miseries of people. The saint has lakhs of followers in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, and Gujarat.
Read More
Rajnath offers prayers at dargah of Hazrat Qasim Shahid Baba
No comments:
10 february 2006, Published at NewKerala.com - Ernakulam,Kerala,India

Lucknow: BJP President Rajnath Singh paid obesiance at the dargah of renowned Sufi saint Hazrat Qasim Shahid Baba along with other BJP leaders here.

Singh offered a 'chader' at the Dargah last evening and prayed for peace and prosperity of the nation, a BJP spokesman said here.

The BJP president was offered a traditional shawl and turban during the 'Dasturbandi' ceremony by the dargah caretaker, the spokesman added.
Read More
Geoffroy, French scholar of Sufism, Slams West’s Double Standards Over Cartoons
No comments:
"Geoffroy Slams West’s Double Standards Over Cartoons"

Geoffroy said the West forget the famous philosophical theory that one's freedom ends where other's freedom starts.

By Hadi Yahmid, on IslamOnline.net

PARIS, February 8, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) – The West’s handling of the Danish cartoons crisis with the Muslim world has exposed its double standards when it comes to the freedom of expression, prominent French writer Eric Geoffroy criticized on Tuesday, February 7.

"When it [the West] tackles religious issues or values, then it is freedom of expression but when Muslims do the same then it's a reprehensible conduct," Geoffroy told IslamOnline.net.

"What do you call such an act? It is double standards in the broad sense of the word," said Geoffroy, an expert on Islam and Sufism who teaches Arabic and Islamic studies in the University of Marc Bloch in Strasbourg.

He served some criticism for Arab and Muslim countries over respect of freedom of expression.

"Freedom of expression, no doubt, is not respected in some countries that call themselves ‘Islamic,’" said Geoffroy.

"But the West also does have its own invincible methods of censorship."

Twelve cartoons of a man said to be Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), first published last September by Denmark's mass-circulation Jyllands-Posten and then reprinted by several European dailies, have caused an uproar in the Muslim world.

Several European newspapers entered the fray last week by reprinting some or all of the blasphemous cartoons, including the French daily France-Soir and Germany's Die Welt.

Some said they were printing the cartoons in support of Jyllands-Posten, while others said they were used to illustrate articles on the dispute.

"Insignificant Values"

The author of several books and many articles on Islam, Geoffroy believes that the "unharmonious" secular West is comfortable with violating religious or moral values.

"Some Westerners have no boundaries or criteria when it comes to religions," he added.

"Hence," he added, "we can understand that values have become meaningless in the Western viewpoint as those Westerners question or mock everything of noble or sacred nature."

Geoffroy attributed this largely to nihilism, a philosophy which gained ground after the period during which the Christian current dominated the West.

He said the West should give a second reading to the role of media in circulating stereotypes.

"The media should at least steer clear of inciting hatred, which is considered an offense in France."

“Intolerant West”

The French expert said the West is in no position whatsoever to accuse the Muslims of being intolerant.

"Some newspapers which published the cartoons claimed that they were testing the boundaries of free speech in the Muslim and how tolerant Muslims are," he said.

"The Islamic culture needs no lessons in tolerance from the West and history stands as a witness.

"The truth of the matter is that the West has proved intolerant when it went on publishing frenziedly these cartoons, paying no heed to the sanctity and sublime values of the other," said Geoffroy.

"In contrast, Muslim countries -- though they do have their own shortcomings –- do not attack sacred and religious figures of the West," noted the French intellectual.

He went on: "The West, unfortunately, doesn’t remember the famous philosophy: ‘one's freedom ends where other's freedom starts.’

He asserted that one must respect the other to enjoy his/her right to free speech.

Geoffroy described Prophet Muhammad as a great man, noting that Muslims hold him in high esteem just like other prophets.

He cited, in this respect, a verse from the Noble Qur’an about Prophet Muhammad which reads: "We sent thee not save as a mercy for the peoples."
Read More
Sa'adi’s Viewpoints to be Published in Britain
No comments:
From Pendar: Persian Independant Media, February 6, 2006

One World Publication in Britain will publish a book in March 2007 containing Sa'adi’s viewpoints on love and life.

Tehran, 6 February 2006 -- One World Publication, a private publication in Oxford University, is going to publish a book entitled “Sa'di: The Poet of Loving and Living” on first of March 2007 in English language. It has also published several books on religion, Sufism, philosophy, and psychology.

This 160-page book is written by Homayoun Katouzian, Iranian researcher. Sa'di’s viewpoints on love which depict both human and divine love, as well as the impact of his many years traveling had on his thoughts have been inscribed in this book. Katouzian shed a unique insight on the man he calls “the poet of loving and living”.

Using a philosophical and cultural approach toward Sa'di’s life and literary works, Katouzian has revealed some aspects of love and life hidden in the works of this great poet who lived during the 13th century AD.

In this book, Sa'di has been described as one of the greatest Iranian poets and writers who was highly skilled in classical prose and poetry and had a unique attitude on both human and spiritual love.

Shaykh Muslihuddin Sa'di was born in Persia, the city of Shiraz, in 1184 AD. Sa'di’s life may be divided into three distinct periods: Until 1226 he was busy with his studies; from 1226 to 1256, he spent his life as a traveler in different countries of the world; and the last part from 1256-1291 he spent as a Sufi contemplating and admonishing people. That is why he is remembered in Persian literature as a great moralist whose moral advices have been followed by those who heard them. Several pieces of his writings entered the daily life as valuable proverbs, giving precious lessons about life.

Sa'di was reverted in his time as a man of great wisdom and passion. The body of his work was written in the thirteenth century. Filled with extract of the poet’s melodious and insightful writing, and critical analysis thereof, this revealing biography examines why he was so idolized until the 1950’s, and why since then he has fallen into relative obscurity. Homayoun Katouzian is a social scientists, historian, literacy critic and poet. He is the Iran Heritage Research fellow at St. Antony’s College, and a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, as well as an honorary fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter.
Read More
A search within: Jasmit Kaur’s Sufiyana Songs
No comments:
Jasmit Kaur’s Sufiyana renderings are a fulfilling experience for this lady with the golden voice

Ludhiana Newsline - Ludhiana,India, February 5, 2006

FORTUNATE are those who are able to find their calling in life, and can devote themselves entirely to it. Such has been the case with the graceful and winsome Jasmit Kaur, the lady with the golden voice, who is an exponent of the Sufi Kalam.

She started getting accolades since the tender age of three and was a constant winner at all school functions. Her family used to reside at Patna then, and she trained in singing Bangla and Bhojpuri classicals. Jasmit’s family came to Ludhiana after the ’84 riots and she got involved with running a linen business called Honey Craft, which kept her occupied for the next 11 years or so.

Though she never gave up her singing, but it was limited to the precincts of home and hearth. With her family’s support, Jasmit took a tentative step into the outer world three years ago and since then there has been no looking back. Ludhianvis were left astounded when this demure lady sang such soul stirring melodies of the folk and the classical genre.

Consequently, she started getting invites to perform at select functions. Jasmit polished her talent further by taking guidance from Amarjeet Singh Komal of ‘Symphony’ fame and C.L. Bhalla, professor of music at Punjab Agricultural University.

Jasmit realises that her true calling is the Sufi kalam. She confesses, ‘‘I have realised that Sufi renderings have to come totally from within and cannot be imitated or learnt. It is a therapeutic experience for me as well as the listeners’’.

Jasmit has the habit of penning down her thoughts in the form of verses, of which some are in Punjabi and others in Hindi. Her collection is a delight indeed. The hundred odd verses, we hope, will reach the publication stage soon. Very soon a cassette of Shabads sung by her will hit the stands. That rendering Sufi kalam has been a soul stirring experience for her, can be made out by these lines that she had written:

Ek pyaas jo har pal hai mujhe,
Us pyaas ko bhukh main bharne laghi hoon,
Tang lagte hain yeh diwaron, mahlon se ghar mujhe,
Vadion main ruh ke sang wicharne laghi hun,
Ek sabar sa bharta ja raha hai man ke bheetar,
Jab se sirf ibadat main uski karne laghi hun.
Read More
Chechen academic and specialist in Sufism slams Muhammad cartoons
No comments:
"Chechen academic slams Muhammad cartoons" 04 February 2006, published by Interfax (Moscow, Russia)

Grozny, February 4, Interfax - The publication in the Western press of cartoons depicting Muslim prophet Muhammad are an insult not only to Muslims but to the entire civilized world, a Chechen academic argued.

"I don't know a single instance of a disrespectful statement by a Muslim publication about Moses or Jesus Christ. In my view, no civilized person will ever go as far as that," Vakhit Akayev, head of the philosophy department of the Chechen State University, told Interfax.

"When they are citing freedom of speech and press in the West to justify the insult to the religious feelings of hundreds of millions of people, it is an extremely serious delusion. I can never believe that an individual journalist may take such a step at his discretion," Akayev said.

He argued that the cartoons threatened global stability and might have unpredictable consequences.

Akayev is a specialist in Sufism and is the author of works translated into many languages and published in foreign countries. He has also written works on the consequences of religious extremism.
Read More
Bauls song: A dilemma in the authentic preservation of Baul songs
No comments:
By Ershad Kamol in *The Daily Star* January 27, 2006

Baul songs have attracted widespread attention for their mystic approach to humanism as well as their marvelous tunes. Nowadays preservation of the authentic tunes and lyrics of the folk songs has become an oft-discussed topic; quite a few of the urban singers are accused of distorting the folk genres in the name of fusion.
However, a large number of researchers face major obstacles in the course of preserving Baul songs, especially in relation to Lalon's songs because of the continuous blending process of oral folk genres at the grassroots level. It is for this reason that questions arise about the authenticity of numerous songs preserved as "Lalon's compositions".


Mridul Kanti Chakroborti, professor of the Department of Theatre and Music, Dhaka University, has conducted research at the grassroots level. He says, "Two hundred and eighty five of the 2000 (approximately) Lalon compositions are undoubtedly authentic. I have doubts as to whether many of the 'claimed' Lalon songs were composed by Lalon or his devotees."

One of the common problems in the preservation of the oral literature is the lack of written texts of the bards or direct followers. In the case of Lalon Shah's songs -- Kangal Harinath Majumdar (1833-1896), Lalon's direct disciple, inspired Rabindranath Tagore to publish 285 Lalon songs in the monthly Prabasi of Kolkata. The rest of the documentation is based on the rendition of Lalon devotees. Of these documentations -- Banglar Baul by Upendranath Bhattacharjee and Haramoni by Monsur Uddin are the most popular.

In the Baul tradition are many principal gurus such as Lalon Shah, Panju Shah, Delbar Shah, Panchu Shah, and others. Moreover a special section of the Bauls known as Kartabhaja, follow Vaishnava traditions. And each of these traditions is different in devotional rites and music.

In the Lalon Shah tradition, for example, there is a predominance of Sufism, Tantric beliefs and Sahajiya rituals, while in the Panju Shah tradition, Tantric beliefs and Sahajiya practices are absent.

But, for hundreds of years, the followers of these traditions have interwoven the philosophy and music of the principal gurus. Professor Mridul says, "The alarming factor is that many of the rural Bauls deliberately or unwittingly blended the genres. And documentation from these sources can easily misguide people."

Professor Mridul's observation has been reflected at the recent 'Baul Council' arranged by Tariquat-e Ahle Bayeet, an alliance of different organisations of Sufis and Vaisnavas, where the Bauls from different aakhras and mazaars presented mystic songs as well as traditional kirtans as Lalon songs.

Questioned as to how Lalon compositions can be considered authentic, Babul Khan, who sings in an akhra in Faridpur, says "If any song includes the lyric Lalon bole-- (Lalon says), it is enough proof that it is an authentic Lalon composition."

However, Professor Mridul differs. As he says, "Many songs that conclude with Lalon bole are not essentially composed by Lalon Shah. The diction and philosophy delivered in these songs are totally different from that of Lalon's composition published in monthly Probashi. Many Bauls have added Lalon bole at the end of their own compositions to popularise the song, which has made the documentation of authentic Lalon songs more difficult."

Subsequently, Lalon's disciple, Maniruddin Fakir, and his disciple, Khoda Baksh, attempted to put these songs into a particular frame. Khoda Baksh's disciple, Amulya Shah, was a reputed musicologist who set Baul songs, especially Lalon songs, to music. These songs were developed by his disciples: Behal Shah, Shukchand, Dasi Fakirani, Chandar Gauhar, Nimai Shah, Mahendra, Kanai Kshyapa and Moti Fakirani. Mahim Shah, Khoda Baksh Shah, Jhadu Shah, Karim, Bella, Fakirchand, Jomela, Khorshed Fakir, Laily and Yasin Shah further developed these in later years.


Shudhin Das has done the notation of the songs rendered by Khoda Baksh Shain, a disciple of Maniruddin Fakir; the latter was the direct disciple of Lalon Shah. Professor Mridul says, "The tune of the songs rendered by Khoda Baksha is different from that of songs rendered by many rural Bauls as well as Lalon singers, who render for metro audience like Farida Parveen, Kiron Chandra Roy and others."

Farida Parveen claims that her presentation style is different from that of the Bauls at Lalon's akhra. She says, "Fakirs at the akhra sing Lalon songs in their own style. My emphasis is on the classical aspect to give it a more polished form."

The ongoing process of blending of the oral compositions by Lalon Shah and other prominent Bauls has emerged as a dilemma for the authentic preservation of Baul songs.
Read More
'Matir Moina', a film conveying message of [ Sufi ] egalitarianism
No comments:
Published in *The Hindu* Chennai,India

New Delhi, Jan. 26 (PTI): While it was being showered with accolades at the 2002 Cannes film festival, bagging the International Critics Award, backhome, in Bangladesh, Matir Moina (Clay Bird) faced an embargo on its screening. The reason cited was that the film hurt the Islamic sentiments.

"I have not attempted to lambast Islam through the movie. Rather, the film conveys a message of harmony, tolerance and egalitarianism. It reflects the popular salad bowl culture," says Tareque Masud, the Bangladeshi director of the film.

"I was extremely elated when my film was awarded at the Cannes as it was the first Bangladeshi movie to get an honour in the international forum. But I was saddened at the same time as people of my country could not watch it," he says, during an interview here.

"But finally the Film Censor Board of Bangladesh gave its nod to screen the film after over a year's struggle."

An autobiographical first feature, set against the backdrop of the turbulent period of late '60s, Matir Moina reflects Tareque's childghood, his silent suffering.

"It is a part of my life. I was sent to the madrasa at the age of seven by my father, who was very much an Englishman. But he suddenly turned religious and even put my mother in a 'purda'. And this action of my father led to the agony and suffering of my mother who lost her only daughter," Tareque recalls.

The film goes on to show how the boy loses his younger sister because of his father's rigid nature and his close friend. Rokon who becomes a secluded lunatic, sending a poignant message of following religion blindly at the cost of human life and happiness.

About the growing fundalmentalism, Tareque says, "the situation is all the more same throughout the world. In today's context, 'Matir Moina' is extremely relevent as it sends the message of harmony and tolerance."

"In Bangladesh, even commercial movies are not allowed for screening in villages due to extremist threat. But in this film, I have shown how Sufism can act as a protective umbrella for the country to save it from heading towards fundamentalism."

Interestingly, the next venture by the film Producer will be a sequel to 'Matir Moina'.

"Call it a sequel or prequel. It will be on my father - what made him change from an English gentleman to a religious orthodox. I have collected his life history and will give it the shape of a film which will hopefully be ready by next year."

"One great thing that I could achieve through this film was a wonderful communication with my father when he himself watched it," exults Tareque.

The film had a special screening on the occasion of India-Bangladesh dialogue on media and culture. Co-produced by Tareque and Catherine Masud, Tareque's US-based wife, the film is slated to be released in Delhi and Mumbai in the coming days.
Read More
Sufi Shaykh Hasan Cisse on the Danish Cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad
1 comment:
In Senegal, Imam Assane Cisse (Hasan Cisse) of the Cheikh Ibrahim Niass [Sufi] brotherhood said the [Danish] cartoons [of the Prophet Muhammad] had "nothing to do with freedom of expression", but simply showed a lack of respect.

February 3, 2006 from "Cartoons furore sparks media debate on freedoms" by Per Bech Thomsen
Read More
Republic of the Philippines Hosts Global Interfaith Dialogue
No comments:
(Blog Editor's note: Sufi Shaykh Hasan Cisse Participates in Global Interfaith Dialogue)

Philippine Headline News Online

MANILA, January 26, 2006 (MALAYA) CHRISTIANS and Muslims will join leaders from other major religions in the Global Interfaith Dialogue to be held this Friday by the Centrist Democrat International (CDI), the same day of the launching of CDI Asia-Pacific, the region’s first political organization envisioned to match the influence and prestige of CDI’s European People’s Party.

The launch of the CDI Asia-Pacific will be attended by leaders of 10 major political parties from eight nations in Asia.

Speaker Jose de Venecia, president of the host Lakas Christian-Muslim Democrats (Lakas CMD), said the global interfaith dialogue seeks to foster multi-cultural and multi-religious understanding and tolerance that could help avert politico-religious tensions in the world’s trouble spots.

"Ultimately, we are laying the foundation for multi-religious and multi-cultural understanding that can be the true basis for enduring peace," De Venecia said.

Organizing committee chairman Francis Manglapus said former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid; Libya’s Dr. Mohamed Sherif, secretary general of the World Islamic Call Society; Saudi Arabia’s Dr. Abdullah bin Abdulmohsin Al-Turki, secretary general of the World Muslim League; and Sen. Mushahid Hussai Seyed, secretary general of the Pakistani Muslim League will attend the CDI launching.

They will be joined by eminent religious personalities Dr. Tong Chan Wah (Taoist); An-Wu Lin (Confucianist); Dr. Hamdi Mohammad Murad Murad, Islamic researcher and scholar; Chief Imam Cheilkh Assane Cisse (Sufi) [i.e. Hasan Cisse], president of the African-American Islamic Institute; Taj Hamad (Sufi), secretary general of the World Association of Non-Government Organizations; Dr. Namdra Jain; Dr. Mohinder Singh (Sikh), director of Bhai Vir Singh Sahitva Sadan; Phra Dhamakosacarva (Buddhist); Yogiratna Ranjeet (Hindu), and Rabbi Itzhak Bar-Dea of Israel.

The Universal Peace Federation is sending Dr. Chung Hwan Kwak, delegation chairman; Dr. Thomas Walsh, secretary-general; and Dr. Christopher Kim and Julia Kim of UPF Asia.

Vice Gov. Mahid Mutilan, president of the Muslim party Ompia; Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, Bishop Efraim Tendero, national director of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches; and El Shaddai leader Bro. Mike Velarde will speak at the dialogue.

The UN General Assembly approved the global interfaith dialogue in November 2004, an initiative proposed by the Philippines through President Arroyo and De Venecia as a mechanism to mediate ethnic and politico-religious conflicts and violence in conflict regions of the world.
Read More
The Other Side Of Pakistani Islam
1 comment:
By Yoginder Sikand 26 January, 2006
Countercurrents.org

'The greatest dilemma facing Pakistan is the question of its identity', says Khurshid Kaimkhani, a well-known Pakistani leftist social activist and my host in Sindh during a recent visit to Pakistan. 'There's this constant and never-ending dispute as to whether Pakistan is the eastern-most part of West Asia or the western-most part of South Asia'. 'In short', he says, 'the question is: Are we part of the Arab-Iranian cultural world or the Indic South Asian civilization?'.

Kaimkhani has no doubt as to where Pakistan's roots lie. 'The common heritage that we share with the rest of South Asia, in particular north India, is undeniable', he says. The son of a Chauhan Rajput Muslim migrant from Rajasthan, 72-year old Kaimkhani is a regular visitor to India and insists that the future of South Asia as a whole depends crucially on people-to-people contact between Indians and Pakistanis and a recognition of their common roots and culture despite their religious differences. 'At the popular level,' he tells me, 'religious antagonisms are much less pronounced. Historically, local forms of Islam and Hinduism have borrowed from each other and we need to build on this to critique other forms of religion propagated by political elites and right-wing obscurantist religious groups that are exclusivist and that target people of other faiths'.

Kaimkhani is not romanticizing about an imaginary past, I discover as I travel across Pakistan. At Sehwan Sharif, in interior Sindh, I see large numbers of Hindu Dalits praying along with Muslims at the shrine of the famed Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. I see the same at Bhit Sharif, at the shrine of Sindh's most famous Sufi poet, Hazrat Shah Abdul Latif. At Uderolal I visit a unique shrine complex: the temple-dargah of Sain Jhulelal-a saint venerated as the god of the Indus by Sindhi Hindus and as a Sufi by local Muslims. Intriguingly, the sprawling shrine complex has the saint's Muslim-style grave in the centre, flanked by a temple on one side and a mosque on the other.

Kanha, a Bhil labourer I met in a village just outside Hyderabad, Sindh's second largest city, takes me to his hovel, where he shows me a small mud structure that houses Jogmaya, a Bhil goddess, wrapped up in a bundle of red cloth and a little cradle dedicated to Sufi Sahib, probably one of the innumerable Muslim mystics of Sindh. He introduces me to Lal Sain Sahib, a Jogi, whose caste profession is catching snakes. Lal Sain is a Muslim, but looks and behaves no different from the Hindu Jogis who are also present during our conversation. There are both Hindu and Muslim Jogis in Sindh, Lal Sain tells me, and there is little to distinguish the two. 'We eat with each other and smoke each other's hukkahs', he says, 'because we are children of the same parents'. Bhagto, a Hindu Jogi who joins in our conversation, nods in approval. 'Yes, Ishvar and Allah are one and the same, as all our Sufis have insisted'. That's no empty rhetoric I discover that evening, when we all get together at Kanha's house, and after a meal of thick rotis and meat, the Bhils and the Jogis, Hindus and Muslims, take out their khadtals, dholaks and chimtas, and sing bhajans in praise of Ram, Krishna, Mahadev, the Prophet Muhammad and the Sindhi Sufis.

Sindh is known for its deeply-rooted Sufi traditions, which brought together Sindhi Hindus and Muslims in shared cultural world characterized by reverence of common saints. The situation in Punjab is similar. 'Numerous Punjabi Sufi saints, whose works are still immensely popular, are known for their breath of vision, seeing God's light in every particle of the universe, in the mosque as well as the temple', says Saeeda Diep, my host in Lahore. She takes me to the shrine of Madho Lal Husain in downtown Lahore, a unique Sufi dargah that houses the graves of two male lovers, Madho, a Hindu, and Husain, a Muslim, who were so close that they are today remembered by a single name. She waxes eloquent about the unconventional love relationship between the two that angered the pundits and mullahs but won the hearts of the masses.

In Lahore I also meet Pir Syed Chan Shah Qadri, the custodian of the shrine of the sixteenth century Sufi Hazrat Miyan Mir. The saint was the spiritual preceptor of Dara Shikoh, son of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, a renowned mystic in his own right. Dara was the first to translate the Upanishads into Persian and sought to draw parallels between Hindu and Islamic mysticism and thereby bring Hindus and Muslims closer together. Hazrat Miyan Mir was no less of an ecumenist, the Pir tells me. In recognition of his spiritual stature, he was invited by Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth Sikh guru, to lay the foundation stone of the Harminder Sahib or Golden Temple in Amritsar, the most holy shrine of the Sikhs. The Pir informs me that many Punjabi Muslims still look upon Guru Nanak, the first Sikh guru, as a great mystic in the Sufi tradition.

In Syed Chan Shah's home I am introduced to Zahoor Ahmad Khan, seventh generation descendant of two Pathan brothers Ghani Khan and Nabi Khan. When Gobind Singh, the last guru of the Sikhs, was pursued by Aurangzeb's forces, he was sheltered by the brothers. They disguised him as a Muslim saint, the Pir of Ucch Sharif, and, carrying him in a palanquin, they slipped through the Mughal lines. In gratitude, Khan tells me, the Guru presented them with a letter written in his own hand, announcing that, as Khan says, 'Whoever among my followers loves and protects these two brothers loves me, too'. In recognition of the service rendered to the Guru by the brothers, Ranjit Singh, the founder of the Sikh kingdom in Punjab, granted their descendants a large estate in Mandara, a village in present-day Indian Punjab. The family resided in the estate till 1947, when, during the Partition riots, they fled to Pakistan. 'When the whole of Punjab was burning, when Hindus and Sikhs in western Punjab and Muslims in eastern Punjab were being massacred and driven out of their homes, the Sikhs of Mandara pleaded with my father and other relatives not to leave. But we had to, so terrible was the situation then', says Zahoor Khan, who was a young lad of fifteen when he came to Pakistan. Last year he went back to his village for the first time since he and his family had left it, at the invitation of a Sikh organization that seeks to revive and preserve the memory of the two Pathan friends of Guru Gobind Singh. 'I was given an enthusiastic welcome when I arrived in Mandara. The whole village came out to greet me', says Khan, his eyes brimming with tears.

Also present during our conversation is Naim Tahir, a middle-aged, soft-spoken man, who introduces himself as a descendant of Bhai Mardana, Guru Nanak's closest companion, a Muslim of the Mirasi caste. Tahir tells me about the relationship between his ancestor and Guru Nanak. Both Guru Nanak and Bhai Mardana were born in the village of Talwandi, and grew up together as friends. 'Bhai Mardana had a melodious voice and used to play the rabab', and 'when Guru Nanak began his spiritual mission of bringing Hindus and Muslims together in common worship of the one God and denouncing caste and social inequalities, Bhai Mardana joined him. Together they traveled together to various Hindu and Muslim holy places, including even Mecca and Medina. Guru Nanak would compose his mystical verses or shabad and Bhai Mardana would sing them while playing the rabab'.

Tahir tells me that his family tradition of singing the verses of Guru Nanak and other Sikh gurus has been carried down through the generations. 'Yes, we are Muslims,' he says, 'but there is nothing in the teachings of Guru Nanak that is incompatible with Islam. In fact there are many verses in the Guru Granth Sahib written by Muslim Sufis, including the well-known Chishti saint Baba Farid'. Tahir confesses to know little else about Bhai Mardana, other than the fact that after Guru Nanak died he traveled to Afghanistan and is buried somewhere there. 'You should speak to my father Ashiq Ali Bhai Lal about this', he advises. 'He has even sung shabads in the Golden Temple and is regularly invited to sing in gurudwaras and gurumandirs, Sindhi Hindu shrines dedicated to the Sikh gurus, in different places in Pakistan'. Ashiq Ali, unfortunately, is not in town. He is away to Sindh on the invitation of a group of Sindhi Hindus, and I'm leaving the next day back for India. I tell Tahir that meeting his father is good enough excuse to plan a second trip to Pakistan.

Shared religious traditions such as these in what is now Pakistan were extensively commented upon by colonial ethnographers. In pre-colonial times, at the popular level boundaries between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in Punjab and Sindh, the heartland of present-day Pakistan, as in much of north India, were often blurred. 'Colonial policies of divide-and-rule and the political machinations of Sikh, Hindu and Muslim elites, competing with each other for colonial patronage resulted in the creation of notions of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs as neatly-separated communities having little or nothing in common with each other, which is really an inversion of social reality', says Husain Altaf, a Lahore-based social activist. 'In post-colonial Pakistan and India', he adds, 'ruling elites and right-wing Islamist and Hindutva groups patronized by the ruling classes have been actively engaged in magnifying these differences and denouncing shared religious traditions for their own political purposes'.

To substantiate his argument, Altaf shows me some books published by the notorious Wahhabi Pakistani terrorist outfit, Lashkar-e Tayyeba. The books tirelessly repeat the same point: about Hinduism, indeed all religions other than Islam, being 'deviant' and as 'leading their adherents to hell', and exhorting Muslims to be 'hard against all disbelievers'. 'Since non-Muslims don't believe in Islam Muslims should have no love for them', one book declares. Another Lashkar tract claims that the Prophet Muhammad announced that 'he who takes part in the jihad against India will not smell the fire of hell'. In short, as the Lashkar sees it, Islam and other religions have nothing in common. 'That goes against local forms of Islam in Pakistan, particularly Sufi traditions, that have been open to other religions and their adherents', Altaf tells me. He adds that that the particular tradition about India attributed to the Prophet and cited in the Lashkar texts is indeed found in some collections of Hadith, sayings ascribed to the Prophet, but assures me that it is a fabrication. 'It was concocted after the death of the Prophet in order to legitimise the imperialist ambitions and greed of the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphs', he opines.

'This doctrinaire, ideological and exclusivist form of Islam', Altaf carries on, 'has a certain appeal in some circles but it does not have mass acceptance and there is also much resistance to it from various quarters. Projecting Islam as completely distinct from other religions and equating Muslim culture with Arab culture goes completely against our cultural traditions and history'. 'This is an elitist project, which does not reflect the way Islam is lived and practiced by common Pakistanis, who share the same basic cultural universe as most north Indians', he opines. He likens hardliner Islamist groups like the Lashkar to Hindutva chauvinists in India, who uphold an equally exclusivist version of Hinduism, one that is predicated on an unrelenting hatred of non-Hindus, particularly Muslims.


'All religions', Altaf muses, 'can be interpreted in diverse ways. Committed believers, Hindus, Muslims and others, urgently need to rescue our pluralistic religious ethos in order to combat those who spread hatred and violence in their name'. I could hardly agree more, I tell him.
Read More
Monsieur Ibrahim And The Flowers Of The Qur'an, Bush Theatre, London
No comments:
By Paul Taylor
Published in The Independent, Online Edition: 25 January 2006

A great deal of wishful thinking has gone into the making of Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Qur'an, a two-hander by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt that charts the deepening bond between an elderly Sufi grocer and a 13-year-old Jewish boy in 1960s Paris.

The director Peter Brook recently remarked that instead of intervening polemically in the post-September 11 debate, it might be better for theatre to direct its energies into giving us "glimpses of what our lives have lost, a fleeting taste of qualities long forgotten". Monsieur Ibrahim comes across as a well-intentioned travesty of that approach.

Its two characters manage to surmount the barriers of age, race and religion in a tale that is charming and touching - as well as beautifully acted in Patricia Benecke's lovely, spare production - but self-sabotagingly simplistic. Abandoned by his mother shortly after he was born, Moses (Ryan Sampson) lives in a gloomy, book-filled flat with his depressive lawyer-father.

When wrongly accused of stealing money by his father, he decides that he may as well live down to his unjust reputation and starts filching cash to fund his precocious trips to prostitutes. Keeping the theft hidden involves shoplifting food daily from the store run by Monsieur Ibrahim (Nadim Sawalha), and to conquer his shame he focuses on the fact that Ibrahim is an Arab.

But Ibrahim, wise to this dodge, is amused and forgiving. Pointing out that he's not an Arab but a Muslim from the Golden Crescent, he offers the boy the paternal guidance and affection he lacks. When his real father commits suicide, Moses becomes Ibrahim's adoptive son.

Sawalha brings a droll humanity to the role of the old Sufi, and Ryan Sampson, who, as Moses, tells the story, is immensely engaging. But they can't distract you from the glib way the play glides over the realistic obstacles to this alliance; or from the drama's diagrammatic neatness (it's left to the Muslim to explain to Moses that his father suffered from Holocaust-survivor guilt); or from the curiously weightless feel to proceedings as Ibrahim drives the boy to his native Anatolia and the whirling dervishes who help him to shed his anger.

Moses' sentimental education is also sentimental, in the less fortunate sense of the word.
Read More
Pakistan, Islam And Indian Media Stereotypes
No comments:
By Yoginder Sikand

21 January, 2006 Countercurrents.org

Contrary to Indian media representations, the average Pakistani is just about as religious or otherwise as the average Indian. The average Pakistani is certainly not the wild-eyed fanatic baying for non-Muslim blood or waging violent jihad to establish global Islamic hegemony that our media would have us believe. Like the average Indian, he is emotionally attached to and culturally rooted in his religion, but he does not wear it on his sleeve and nor does it dictate every thought or act of his. In fact, the thing that first strikes the Indian visitor to Pakistan is how almost identical the average Pakistani is, looks and behaves to the average north Indian.

Almost all the many people I met in the course of a recent month-long visit to Pakistan that took me to several places in Punjab and Sindh do not even remotely fit the description of the average Pakistani peddled by our media. Islamist radical groups undeniably do have an important presence in parts of Pakistan, but they certainly do not command widespread popular support all over the country. This explains the continual dismal performance of religious parties in every successive Pakistani election. Despite concerted efforts by Islamist and mullah-based parties to establish a theocracy in the country, Pakistani politics are not dominated by religion as much as by economic, ethnic and regional concerns. It is, therefore, crucial not to exaggerate the influence of radical religious outfits in Pakistan, as the Indian media generally does.

Indian media descriptions about Pakistan tend to portray Islam in the country as a seamless monolith. The variety of local expressions of Islam are consistently overlooked so as to to reinforce the image of a single version of Islam that is defined by the most radical of Islamist groups. The fact, however, is, that most Punjabis and Sindhis, that is to say a majority of Pakistanis, ascribe to or are associated with the traditions of the Sufi saints, which are anathema for such Islamists. Popular Sufism is deeply-rooted in Pakistani soil and provides a strong counter to radical Islamist groups and their exclusivist agenda. Many Sufis were folk heroes, radicals in their own right, bitterly critiquing tyrannical rulers as well as Muslim and Hindu priests. This is why they exercised a powerful influence on the masses, irrespective of religion. This explains, in part, why Islamist radicals are so fiercely opposed to the traditions that have developed over the centuries around such figures.

The popular Sufi tradition in large parts of Pakistan thus limits the appeal of radical Islamists, making the chances of an Islamist take-over of the country a remote possibility. In recent years, it is true, these groups have gained particular salience and strength, but this is said to be less a reflection of a growing popular commitment to the Islamist cause than to other factors. One of these is the role of the state. Although the ideological founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, envisaged Pakistan as a secular Muslim state, successive Pakistani regimes governments have used Islam to bolster their own frail support base, exactly in the same manner as the Congress and the BJP have done with Hinduism in the Indian case. Islam has also been used to wield together a number of the country's ethnic groups that have little in common other than their profession of Islam, in the same way in which advocates of both 'soft' Hindutva, such as the Congress, and 'hard' Hindutva, such as the BJP, have sought to invoke Brahminical Hinduism to define the Indian nation-state. Hindutva ideologues propagate a form of Hindu 'nationalism' that has no space for Indians of other faiths, and is, in fact, based on an unrelenting hatred of non-Hindu 'others'. Creating a Hindu identity in this fashion is predicated on excising all elements of culture and tradition that Hindus are seen to share with others. The same has happened with the case of official as well radical versions of Islam in Pakistan. Yet, it is important to remember that this is not the only, and certainly not the dominant, form of Islam in Pakistan, as my interaction with numerous Pakistanis from different walks of life revealed to me.

'Radical Islamist groups are not a true reflection or representative of Pakistani Islam', a social activist friend of mine from Sindh explains. 'State manipulation of religion', he argues, 'has had a major role to play in promoting radical Islamism in Pakistan', which, he says, 'is largely an expression of elite politics and Western imperialist manipulation'. 'To add to state patronage of such groups', he points out, 'is the fact of mounting economic and social inequalities, sustained military rule, the continued stranglehold of feudal lords and the absence of mechanisms for expressing democratic dissent, all of which have enabled radical Islamist groups to assert the claim of representing normative Islam against other competing versions and visions of the faith'. In some parts of Pakistan, such as Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, he says, electoral support for Islamists 'reflects anti-American sentiments rather than popular demands for theocratic rule'. Such groups, he says, have gained added strength from the ongoing conflict in Kashmir by 'tapping into Pakistani nationalist sentiments on this issue in the same way as Hindutva groups used the Kashmir conflict in India, both seeking to present the issue in religious terms'. 'In short', he claims, 'the limited support that radical Islamist groups enjoy in Pakistan reflects less a fierce commitment to their ultimate agenda of strict Islamist rule than a protest against the system which, ironically, has abetted such groups for its own purposes'.

'The task before Indians and Pakistanis seriously concerned about the future of our common subcontinent', says another friend of mine, a journalist from Lahore, 'is to rescue our religious traditions from the monopolistic claims of the radicals. Islamism in Pakistan and Hindutva in India feed on each other while claiming to be vociferous foes. We need to revive popular forms of religion, such as Sufism and Bhakti, that are accepting of other faiths and that at the same time are socially engaged and critique the system of domination that produces radicalism as a reaction while at the same time using it as a means of stifling challenges to it'.
Read More
India to extend Khokrapar-Munabao Sind-Rajasthan rail link to Ajmer [the site of the shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti ]
No comments:
By John C.K. Daly Jan 20, 2006, 17:08 GMT in M and C News (Monsters and Critics.com ; Glasgow, UK)

In a further sign of thawing relations between India and Pakistan on the troublesome issue of Kashmir and Jammu, New Delhi announced that it will extend the Khokrapar-Munabao Sind-Rajasthan rail link to Ajmer to allow Pakistani pilgrims to visit Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti`s tomb.

Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti is a 13th century Muslim Sufi saint, known also as Gharib Nawaz. Chisti is the most famous Sufi saint of southern Asia`s Chisti order, and was a direct descendent of prophet Muhammad. He stablished the Chishtiyya order in Ajmer, India.

The Business Standard reported that India also proposed to Pakistan that no new defense posts be established near the Line of Control dividing India and Pakistani-ruled Kashmir. India`s and Pakistan`s foreign secretaries are currently meeting to review the ongoing peace process and discuss new confidence building measures initiatives.

During the two days of meetings the Indian delegation proposed holding high-level military meetings at the frontier, according to Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna.

Other topics of discussion included terrorism, with Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran expressing New Delhi`s concerns to Pakistani Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan.

For its part Pakistan raised Indian comments on Baluchistan, with the Indian side rejecting as 'unfounded' Pakistani allegations about New Delhi`s involvement in the recent disturbances there.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International
Read More
Musharraf visits Ajmer [old news]
No comments:

"I have come with a message of Aman (peace)” [picture caption]

By Syed Afzal Ali Shah

The Milli Gazette Online, May 1-15, 2005

Ajmer: A date which he had missed four years ago, in July 2001, the General finally made it to Ajmer sharif, at the start of his three-day visit to India. Arriving at the Jaipur Sanganer airport, en route to Ajmer, the General was received at the airport by the state chief minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia, and was accorded a warm welcome by her and state ministers. The General left after a short stay in a convoy of four helicopters. After a short flight of 20 minutes, the General landed in Ajmer. It is said that only those come to Ajmer who are called by the great saint, and so finally the wish of the Pakistani President was fullfilled on 16 April.

The President who was dressed in an immaculate white Pathani suit, symbolizing the message of peace which he brought with his visit, came with his wife Begum Sehba and a high level delegation which consisted of external affairs minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, Information Minister Rashid Ahmed, finance minister and the Pakistani High Commisioner to India, Aziz Ahmed Khan and 19 other delegates. The city of Ajmer which was virtually turned into a military cantonment for the visit, wore a deserted look on this day unlike 1987, when the then President of Pakistan General Ziaul Haq had visited Ajmer and was welcomed with open hands by the citizens of the town. President Musharraf drove straight to the holy shirne and went straight to the mousoleum and spent about 18 minutes inside it. Coming outside, the Prez was seen wearing a pink turban which as tradition goes, is put on important visitors’ heads by a khadim of the dargah. Here the khadim was Syed Natiq Chishti who performed the function and presented him with tabarruk of the holy shirne. The President prayed inside and the khadim and the official Anjuman Syedzadgan also prayed for him and for the success of his visit to India.

Coming out of the shirne, the President sat outside the tomb of the daughter of Khawaja Sahib on the marble floor and wrote in the visitor’s book of the Anjuman saying that "I consider it my honour as also of my country’s delegation to have prayed at the shrine of the most revered saint, Hazrat Mohommad Hasan Chishti. Let my own prayers for peace, harmony and amity between Pakistan and India and prosperity of both the countries be answered."
The President then walked out of the mausoleum amidst the shouting of the waiting media but was forced by his security people to move forward, but the Presidnet in his amicable style came back after a few steps to speak to the media, though he did not answer their questions. He said, "I , my wife and the delegation, are happy to visit the holy shirne of Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti and have come with a message of aman (peace).I have prayed for peace and for the prosperity of the people of Pakistan and Hindustan and for the development of both the countries." Smiling with the pink pagri still on his head and flanked by his ever-sombre foreign minister, the President walked towards the exit gate. He was presented tabarruks, sweets and two beautiful chadars for the tombs of Data Ganjbakhsh and Baba Fariduddin Ganjshakar, whose tombs are in Pakistan and both were followers of the great sufi saint of Ajmer, Khawaja Moinuddin Chisty (R.A.).

The two chadars presented by the Anjuman depict a new aspect of spiritual connection between India and Pakistan through the Sufi saint Khawaja sahib who had all his life spread the message of peace, love and harmony in the Indian subcontinent during the 11th century. In another gesture of goodwill and peace, the secretary of the Ajuman Sarwar Chishti presented a bouquet of flowers to Gen Musharraf. Sarwar Chishti said, "A bouquet is a perfect symbol of the blossoming of the frienship between India and Pakistan. It demonstrates that the Ajmer Dargah will always remain a source of peace and harmony not only in this country but at the international level too"

The Prez who had also brought a well-crafted chadar for the Mazar sharif, along with three packets of sweets with the message of peace, presented the gifts to his khadim Natiq Chishti before his departure. «
Read More
Hindi Rocks: Hindi rock bands and artistes have come of age
No comments:
from The Times of India, January 18, 2006

If Sting can do it, so can Strings. If Jethro Tull can do it, so can Jal. If Indus Creed, Pentagram, Parikrama, Zero, et al have had the rockers headbanging to their music, now there are Hindi rock bands and artistes that are grabbing audiences by the gut and refusing to let go.

Once dubbed as noise, rock music is now being embellished with Hindi lyrics and as a result, is garnering a new slice of the audience pie!

Not too long ago, Rabbi Shergill brought the Sufi genre back into the forefront with his Bulla Ki Jaana, with its tilt towards Sufi rock. Then there was Indian Ocean's song Arre Rukja Re Bandey. Junoon and Strings have had aficionados for a long time, as have Fuzon, and now, Jal.

"The listeners now want something new in terms of sound," says Pankaj Awasthi of Khuda Ka Vaasta fame. "It was more difficult to get a label to sign a rock artiste earlier.

But now, things have changed." Even Bollywood is now rocking to the sounds of rock. Case in point: Jal's tracks Woh Lamhey and Aadat and Strings's Yeh Hai Meri Kahaani for Zinda.

Says Ajay Sawant, manager of band Soulfuel, "It's the intense and meaningful lyrics and music of rock that's quite a draw for the audience." Adds Luke Kenny, "Sadly, it has taken Pakistani bands to consolidate the trend of the genre in India.

But as long as Hindi rock bands are getting an acceptance, it doesn't matter who did it first."
Read More
Modernity and fundamentalism [in Sind and the Southern Punjab, with some notes on Sufism ]
No comments:
by Dr Manzur Ejaz
Wednesday, January 18, 2006, in the Daily Times (Lahore, Pakistan)

Under the Raj class transformation in Punjab was rapid. The emergence of an urban trading class and spread of middle/petty peasantry, through the colonisation of western Punjab, ushered in a new era of competition among the various Punjabi communities. The dawn of the 20th century witnessed a diminishing of classical Punjabi Sufi thought and the emergence of Muslim Anjumans, Singh Sabhas and Hindu Mahasabhas

There may not be a technical argument for the construction of Kalabagh Dam (KBD) worth alienating an oppressed nationality or ethnic minority. And the people of Punjab need solidarity with the Sindhi people more than a dam whose benefits may never materialise or trickle-down to them.

However, this does not mean that unanimity of thought among people of various nationalities is a requirement. The Sindhis claim, for example, that while they follow Sufism — a milder and more liberal tradition of Islam — Punjabis are inherently fundamentalists. But such a distinction between Punjabis and Sindhis may not stand the test of history. Religious fundamentalism appears to be a function of social change rather than an inherent characteristic of any society. It was while contemplating this issue that an old discussion with Boota Sain came to my mind.

Returning from my village, I was excitedly describing the modernisation in rural areas that had taken place in the last few decades. I was impressed by the way every modern facility — sewerage, electricity, phone, cable TV, wireless — had reached far off rural areas. Boota Sain, sitting quietly in a corner, innocently asked a rather odd question “Are the Sunnis of your village and family divorcing their Shia wives?”

I felt offended and asked myself why I tolerated such illiterate and abrupt people around me. To keep my cool I said “Bootia, there is no connection between the village making progress and the Shia-Sunni conflict which is mostly a doing of Zia ul Haq and the mullahs.”

Realising my suppressed anger, Boota Sain lowered his eyes, and said “Rab da bhana inj hoya (God willed it this way), that Mullahs’ control of the society was initiated by our beloved Bhutto, followed by Zia ul Haq and their successors. Zia looked like a powerful player but he was just a puppet controlled from behind the scene. The same forces led to Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1947-1984) and his fundamentalist Khalistani movement and Vajpayee and his extreme conservative Hindutva counter-revolution.”

I do not know what metaphysical entity or theory Boota Sain was referring to but I suddenly saw a connection in the simultaneous rise of fundamentalism in Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus in the northern part of the sub-continent. The proximity in geography and time further intrigued me: the emergence of religious extremism in north India (including Pakistan) within a few decades could not be ignored. I also realised that sectarianism and religious intolerance has been much more prevalent in the cities than in the villages. Earlier a Sufi streak of religion was much more common in the Punjab.

In dusty old villages, reading Sufi poetry and qissas (folk tales) was a common pastime. Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah, Maulvi Ghulam Rasool and other Sufi thinkers were popular readings in most Punjabi households. There used to be professional Heer singers along with those who specialised in rendering kafis, dohras and folk tales. Qawalis were the favourite occasion of gathering. And people used to see everything in the Sufi perspective: even the romantic folk tale of Heer Ranjha was understood to be a dialogue between the body and the spirit.

Till the 1960s, the intellectual discourse was predominantly Sufi; the Shia-Sunni conflict was almost non-existent in the villages. Many Sunnis used to visit Imam Bargahs during the first 10 days of Muharram. In cities like Lahore Sunnis used to offer sabeels (drinks) to Shia mourners. Shia-Sunni marriages were common.

However, during my recent visits I have seen both Sunni mosques and Imam Bargahs being protected by police at prayer times. One cannot rule out the possibility that the vice of sectarianism reached the villages along with the instruments of modernity. In some strange manner, sectarian hatred has accompanied tractors, TVs and electricity. It can be postulated that fundamentalism is more closely associated with mechanisation, commercialisation and urbanisation of society than the inherent genius of a nationality. Boota Sain has a point.

Punjab, accused today of supporting religious fundamentalism, produced more Sufi thinkers from the 16th to the 19th century than any other north Indian region. The roots of communalism and sectarianism can be traced back to the British Raj.

It appears that under the Raj class transformation in Punjab was much more rapid than in other north Indian regions. The emergence of an urban trading class and spread of middle/petty peasantry, through the colonisation of western Punjab, ushered in a new era of competition among the various Punjabi communities. The dawn of the 20th century witnessed a diminishing of classical Punjabi Sufi thought and the emergence of Muslim Anjumans, Singh Sabhas and Hindu Mahasabhas. The tragedy of 1947 partition was in the making much earlier before it actually happened.

After 1947, the three-way rivalry among Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs subsided. However, with the Green Revolution in East Punjab, the Sikh-Hindu collision manifested itself in the bloody Khalistan movement. The Green Revolution in Pakistani Punjab, and to an extent in North West Frontier Province, led to similar tensions in the form of the anti-Ahmedi movement and later on in the Shia-Sunni conflict.

Similar socio-economic changes in the rest of northern India gave birth to Hindu fundamentalism in the form of Hindutva. While many other factors may have played a secondary role, modernisation has been the common denominator in the rise of religious fundamentalism in north India.

Sindh and southern Punjab, dominated by a feudalism and tribalism, have not experienced the rise of competitive middle classes; or their size and influence has been quite limited. As a result, the traditional mode of thinking, expressed through Sufism, has maintained its predominance. Of course, the teaching of the mother tongue has helped the Sindhis keep their traditions alive but that has not been the determining factor. Had it been so, Sikh and Hindu fundamentalism could not have emerged because the use of the mother tongue in the respective areas was not disrupted.

The question is: will Sindh and southern Punjab stick to traditional modes of thinking if feudalism is eliminated and competitive middle classes emerge?

The writer can be reached at manzurejaz@yahoo.com
Read More
Rock star's activism moves many Muslims
No comments:
by Omar Sacirbey January 24, 2006 in *The Christian Century*

One of Salman Ahmad's earliest gigs was a talent show at King Edward Medical College in Lahore, Pakistan, where he was studying to be a doctor. Moments after he strummed his first chords, Islamic fundamentalists barged in, smashed Ahmad's guitar and drum set, and broke up the show.

Ahmad quipped that he wasn't scared as much as confused about the incident. "I thought rock musicians were supposed to break their own instruments," he said with a smile.

Little did they know at the time, but those fundamentalists helped spawn the international stardom of a performer whose faith-based music reaches millions of Muslims, prompting comparisons to another do-good rocker, U2's Bono.

Perhaps more important, by promoting interfaith understanding, Ahmad has become a pivotal figure in the war between moderate and extremist Islam.

"That one incident really changed the way I started thinking. I realized that if there are some people who feel threatened by music, and what music means for people, then I should do more of it," Ahmad, a devout Sufi Muslim, said in an interview.

Ahmad, 41, is best known as lead guitarist of Junoon, a Pakistani-American rock band. Wildly popular throughout South Asia and among the South Asian diaspora, the band has sold 25 million albums—as many as Nirvana, ZZ Top and Janet Jackson have sold in the United States. Many of Ahmad's songs have topped MTV India's music charts for weeks on end.

But fame has never been enough for Ahmad, who has parlayed his popularity into lobbying for Third World development and building bridges between the Islamic and Western worlds.

"I can't imagine anybody else out there who as a single person can make a bigger difference than Sal," said Polar Levine, a Jewish-American musician with whom Ahmad has collaborated since the September 11 terrorist attacks. "He's not making music as a sales unit or to get babes. He's got an agenda."

Born in Lahore, Ahmad moved with his family to Tappan, New York, when he was 12. There he grew to love Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and bought his first guitar. He also maintained his Pakistani-Muslim roots, speaking Urdu at home, fasting during Ramadan and perusing the Qur'an. Ahmad returned to Lahore for medical school and after graduating chose music over medicine, figuring that if he failed at rock 'n' roll he could always go back to doctoring.

He never picked up a stethoscope again. Junoon, which Ahmad formed in 1990, created a distinctive sound—electric rock braided with Pakistani folk music and lyrics that draw from the Qur'an and Sufi poets like Rumi and Baba Bulleh Shah. He quickly won a following that has grown over the years.

"My inspiration comes from a lot of these Sufi poets, and the fact that they saw the world as one," Ahmad said. "I'm a believer, and a lot of my music and my life take inspiration from faith. And the Qur'an is a huge source of inspiration."

Consider Ahmad's handling of "Bulleya?" an Urdu poem with a title that means "Who Am I?" It appears on Junoon's fifth album, Parvaaz, the Flight. "It's about this inner quest, which is really the foundation of Sufism, finding out who you are," said Ahmad, referring to the poem put to music. "Before you judge the world, go and find out what you stand for."

Despite Ahmad's deference to Islam, not all Muslims approve of him and Junoon. His group was banned from performing in Pakistan from 1996 to 1999 after referring to government corruption in a song and protesting Pakistan's and India's nuclear testing. After fundamentalists won local elections in Pakistan's northwest Peshawar region in 2002 and outlawed all music as un-Islamic, the BBC, in the documentary The Rock Star and the Mullahs, chronicled how Ahmad challenged fundamentalists to show where in the Qur'an music is forbidden.

They couldn't find the evidence they sought, but they still held to their views.

Yahya Hendi, a Muslim imam and chaplain at Georgetown University and member of the Islamic Fiqh (Jurisprudence) Council of North America, says there is "absolutely nothing" in the Qur'an or Hadith (the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) that prohibits music.

On the contrary, Islam needs musicians like Ahmad, perhaps even more than it needs religious leaders, Hendi says. "Music is a universal language. Every human being connects with it. Not everyone connects with religious voices. Musicians can put out the message that Islam is a religion of love, compassion and peace better than clergy," he said.

A second BBC documentary, It's My Country Too, follows Ahmad as he visits American Muslims living in post-September 11 America. Ahmad has been showing the film at college campuses across the country to promote discussion about fighting extremism and developing dialogue between people of different faiths. He says the vast majority of Muslims are moderate, but that they need to do a better job of explaining their religion.

"Everybody says, 'It's a religion of peace.' Well, all religions are religions of peace. But what does your identity stand for?" he said.

Ahmad was greatly affected by October's devastating earthquake in the disputed territory of Kashmir. It claimed nearly 90,000 victims, including Ahmad's aunt and cousin. The tragedy has put Ahmad on a fund-raising tour, including a concert in Norway that helped secure a $25 million pledge from that country's government. He was critical of the Pakistani government's hesitancy to accept aid from Israel, a country it doesn't recognize.

"We have to get out of this mind-set of the politics of division," he said. "When there's a tragedy, you've got to do what's required."


Omar Sacirbey writes for Religion News Service
Read More
If It's Tuesday It Must Be Lahore: Sufi Music and the "scene" in Lahore
No comments:
If it’s Thursday it must be Lahore

Mario Rodrigues in Lahore; published in the Statesman (Kolkata, India)

Jan. 15. — Remember that popular Hollywood movie and ditty of 1969, If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium? Well, twist the lyrics around a little bit and you can come up with something appropriate for the local situation: If it’s Thursday, it must be Lahore. This is the day when the rich culture of this historic and mystical city comes alive, drowning it in a vibe of sound and music.

The day kicks off in the afternoon at the shrine of Data Ganj Baksh Hajveri [sic; Hujwiri] (Bestower of Treasures), a 11th century Sufi mystic renowned for his concern for the poor, outside the old city. Some of the best quawwali singers from far and near, including the legendary Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, turned up to pay their dues here. The best qawwalis come onstage later in the evening after the opening acts have warmed things up.

After nightfall, the rhythms explode into a thundering crescendo at the “Sufi nights” staged at the ramshackle shrine of Baba Shah Jamal, a 19th century saint. At the quadrangles adjoining the shrine, some of the most famed Pakistani percussionists, including the famous Gonga and Mithu Saeen brother duo, beat out a frenetic tattoo on their dhols that transports the often doped Sufi devotees, whirling in their ritual reveries, into the seventh heavens. The “spiritual smoke’’ that helps the Sufis on their way to a drumming nirvana in Pakistan is somewhat akin to what the Rastafarians ingest in Jamaica over as they find release in the throbbing rhythms of reggae.

If you somehow miss the action on Thursdays, you can hopefully catch it belatedly at the Regale Internet Inn on The Mall, courtesy its urbane owner, Malik Karamat Shams, a former journalist and press aide of former Pakistani PM Ms Benazir Bhutto. He knows all the best musicians in town and can arrange for them to come over and jam on his terrace at a mere request. The Saeen brothers, the roving minstrel Sain Zahoor and a host of equal or lesser talents have enthralled discerning audiences here.

After Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan conquered the West, Pakistan’s eclectic artistes have come to the attention of global audiences in a big way. India, too, has become a happy stomping ground for the likes of the now waning Junoon, Strings, Ali Zafar, Fuzon, Rahaat Fateh Ali Khan and a few more, some of whom even cross the border for their launches.

Malik’s own story is as fascinating as the many heartwarming tales he can spin out in the course of an extended conversation. Editor of the family owned paper Inquilab, the technologically-inclined Malik began the first internet café in Lahore some ten years ago. When pressed for a name, a ‘Jung’ media group crony suggested that he call it an Internet Inn rather than a café, which people would otherwise mistake for a coffee house.

The first guest he attracted was an American filmmaker, Brad, who stayed for three years making documentaries on the Pakistani film industry, Sufi music and prostitutes in Muslim society. Brad was put up on a bed in Malik’s editor’s cabin. Because of the Internet connection, guests started dropping in one by one — so much so, even while Malik was interviewing some top politicians in his cabin, tourists kept popping in to ask for accommodation. That was when he decided to move his newspaper office and start his guest house catering exclusively to bagpackers.

Malik bemoans the plight of musicians in an Islamic society which does not acknowledge the presence of music in daily life. He cites the example of the renowned music director, Nazir Ali, who provided music for 357 films but was nevertheless so poor that he could not even afford to offer tea to his guests.
Bringing films into the ambit of the discussion, Malik avers, “In the 1970s, we produced some 300 films. Last year we produced only 21,” offering two reasons for the decline of the Pakistani film and music industry. One, domination by Bollywood and two, the rule of General Zia ul Haque who snuffed out popular culture by his orthodoxy.
Read More