‘Pure’ ideology

Some 35 km from Dera Ghazi Khan on the Punjab-Balochistan border is a shrine for the Sufi saint Hazrat Sakhi Sultan Syed Ahmed. Since mid-March, visitors to the Darbar Hazrat Sakhi Sarwar have been greeted by a banner asking them not to perform dhamaal, a Sufi trance dance performed to the beat of the dhol drum. The request – more an order, actually – was made by the police because extremists had threatened a suicide attack on the shrine if the dhamaal was performed. There was reason to believe that the threat would be acted upon. Two other Sufi shrines, for Rehman Baba (see pic) and Abdul Shakoor Malang Baba, both near the city of Peshawar, were destroyed in March and December, respectively. More ominously, on 13 December a Sufi leader was killed and later exhumed from his grave and hung in the city square in Swat.

Sufis practice a mystical form of Islam that preaches love and inner peace. It exists in the far corners of Southasia, including well-known centres such as Multan and Ajmer. A number of Sufi rituals, such as fateha – the recitation of Quranic versus for the well-being of the dead – and dhamaal, are considered anti-Islamic by Wahhabis, adherents of the ultra-orthodox Sunni school of thought. These hardliners also equate visits to shrines with idol worship, a grave sin.