Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Postcolonial Subject

Sufi Ghulam Rasul was a pir, a Sufi "saint" and healer, who now lies buried in a tomb in the Miani Sahib Graveyard in the Pakistani city of Lahore, a modest contribution to Lahore's architectural and historical riches. When I first met him in 1976, he lived in a middle-income neighborhood that borders the graveyard. He was receiving visitors in a large reception room (baithak ) built for the purpose. At our first meeting, unexpected for each of us, his wife ushered me through an interior courtyard to a doorway. Scattered beside the doorway were seven pairs of shoes. We stopped to add our shoes to the pile and then entered a large, dim room. It had no furniture, but there were straw mats on the floor. Sufi Sahib, as he was ordinarily called, was seated facing the doors, cross-legged on a fine Bokhara carpet, his telephone beside him and several large cushions behind him. Four women were sitting in a semicircle around him, and two men sat off to one side, apart from the women.

Sufi Sahib's wife introduced me and the young Pakistani woman with me as students who were interested in studying pirs and Islam. Sufi Sahib invited us to join the small circle around him, and his wife left the room. I asked if he would mind if we sat there for a few minutes to watch him with his followers.

Sufi Sahib's appearance was impressive and conformed to my expectations of the Sufi pir. He was dressed in white and wore a white turban. His white beard was long but neatly trimmed. He sat in a meditative pose, gently smiling, eyes half-closed when he wasn't staring intently into the eyes of the person before him. In front of him was a tray on which were arranged a small pile of newspaper, rock salt, and a tiny hammer. As he sat before his followers, he would gently, almost abstractedly, tap the salt with the hammer while muttering prayers under his breath.

He dealt with his followers one by one, handing each of them a small packet of salt. Finally, I asked him what the salt was for. He explained that sick people come to him and that this is their medicine: "I read prayers over it all night. Whenever I blow over the salt, my followers, wherever they are, feel better." One of the women went up to him, sat before him, and told him that her son was sick. As she spoke, he quickly licked a piece of the salt, wrapped it in paper, and handed it to her, giving her instructions on how to use it. She thanked him, rose, and backed out of the room.

I asked some of his followers where they lived. Though this pir worked in very unassuming quarters (the entry to his home was just a doorway like any other doorway along an unpaved street in a lower-middle-class neighborhood) and was but one out of a couple of dozen pirs in this part of town, he drew a socially and geographically diverse following: one man present that day had come from another city, and the others were from all over Lahore, including the wealthiest part of town. One man was a brigadier general. Another had recently returned from study in England.

The presence of followers such as these illustrates how modernity, whatever it may be, has not created a population of the sort of secularized, rational subjects envisioned by many nation-builders and policymakers in the early days of Pakistan's independence. The Lahore District Census Report for 1961, for instance, described pirs in the following terms:

Pirs are held in great esteem and respect by villagers who pay quarterly, half-yearly or annual visits to their Mureeds [disciples] and get Nazranas [offerings] in the form of cash, or clothes according to the economic status of the follower. Besides the living Pirs, the people have great faith in the Pirs who died centuries ago and attend their shrines at the time of their annual Urs [death anniversary festival]. The hold of the Pirs is gradually dying away. (Population Census of Pakistan: Lahore District 1961:22)

This passage is a manifestation of a modernizing discourse that has pervaded most public policy within the "developing" countries in the postcolonial period. It sets up a series of dichotomies in what today appears a naive celebration of modernization: tradition versus modernity, rural versus urban, and (implicitly) wasted economic resources versus economic rationality. These dichotomies formed the basis for the construction of a range of ideologies that articulated what administrators and politicians saw as the task ahead for the consolidation of Pakistan as a modern nation. In this particular passage from the census, the pirs were depicted as a part of the dying "traditional" that still stood between the population and the modern development of Pakistan. The passage expresses, apparently unselfconsciously, the Enlightenment view of human history as a single trajectory of Progress. More specifically, it is a manifestation of the Orientalist discourse sketched out by Said (1979), in which an imagined passive, traditional Oriental stands unfavorably contrasted with the active, modern, rational Western self. It is also a vision of the future that has since crumbled into the uncertainties of what has been called Postmodernity or late capitalism (Harvey 1989), a time when the premises of this modernizing discourse and the Eurocentric notion of history that such premises presuppose have been exposed and challenged.

When modernization is assumed to be an unstoppable force shaping the future in a predetermined way, it is likely that contemporary Sufi practice will be interpreted in either of two ways: (1) as a watered-down version of liberal democracy dressed up in local symbols that have been propagated in state ideological formations to modernize the general population (see chapter 3 below), or (2) as a form of resistance to the hegemony of a secularized Western discourse, a Sufism therefore thoroughly penetrated by the hegemonic order that it stands against. These two interpretations do describe two ideologies that have been constructed out of signs drawn from Sufism and from other aspects of Islam: they are positions that are publicly articulated in Pakistan and play a role in the politics of Sufism. Nevertheless, they do not adequately capture the ways in which aspects of the modern have been taken up into Sufi practice.

Both of these interpretations of Sufi practice presume that the force of Western-invented technologies, Western epistemologies, Western political ideologies such as liberal democracy, and Western modes of domination — industrial capitalism and colonial empire — have been so utterly transforming of an...