Sacred Spaces
Posted by Pir Zia Inayat-Khan on March 4, 2009
Dargah is a Persian word meaning “royal court.” In the Indian subcontinent it commonly refers to the tombs of Sufi saints. For nearly a millennium these shrines have formed an integral part of the rural and urban landscapes of South Asia.
The dargah par excellence is the tomb complex of Khwaja Mu’in al-Din Chishti in Ajmer, a shimmering vision in marble accented with gold, silver and mother-of-pearl. The Mughal emperor Akbar showed his devotion to the saint by dismounting his elephant and approaching the tomb on foot across the scorching desert. Today, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims visit the dargah each year. One of the cauldrons from which pilgrims and the needy are fed measures ten feet in diameter.
Dargahs come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Few approach the opulent grandeur of the Ajmer dargah, but each has its own unique “flavor” (zawq). There are dargahs on mountaintops, dargahs on islands, and dargahs in the medians of city streets. Some dargahs have a sober and austere air, while others are magnets for raucous antinomian dervishes.
Whenever I visit India, as I have just done, I make sure to pay my respects to the saints of bygone times. After offering rose petals, incense, and prayers at the tombs of my grandfather and father, I turn to the shrines of their spiritual forebears in the Chishti Order. Namely, in Delhi, Khwaja Qutb al-Din, Khwaja Nizam al-Din, Khwaja Nasir al-Din, and Shah Kalim Allah; and in Ahmedabad, Jamman Shah, Shaykh Hasan Muhammad, and Shaykh Muhammad.
Some limit their salutations to the saints of their own lineage or order. I confess that I do not. Two non-Chishti dargahs where I felt the “glance of grace” on my recent visit were those of Sarmad Shahid and Bava Gor.
Dancing at the dargah of Mai Misra.
Sarmad the Martyr was an Armenian rabbi turned Sufi mystic who translated the Pentateuch into Persian. The puritanical emperor Awrangzib had him tried and executed for heresy, but his legacy has proven immortal. His earthly remains lie in a blood-red tomb facing the Great Mosque in Old Delhi, and his indomitable spirit lives on everywhere a stand is taken for spiritual liberty.
Bava Gor was an Abyssinian shaykh who settled with his sister, a powerful exorcist named Mai Misra, in the wilds of Gujarat. Tended by Sidis (Indianized Africans), the tomb complex is a microcosmic Gondwanaland where African drum rhythms induce ecstatic trances punctuated by calls of “Bava Gor!” and “Ya Bilal!” Local legend holds that a tiger routinely visits in the pre-dawn hour to sweep the sacred precincts with its tail.
The dargahs of Sarmad Shahid and Bava Gor exemplify the capacity of Sufi shrines to bridge the gap between diverse communities. Masjids are for Muslims and mandirs are for Hindus, but dargahs are honored and frequented by all. Dargah culture is ganga-jamni—like the merging of sacred rivers, hybrid, syncretic. The interspiritual ethos of these shrines is reflected in the music one hears there. One moment the qawwals (ritual singers) might be singing Persian verses in praise of the Prophet Muhammad and the next, Braj Bhasha folk songs about Radha’s love for Krishna.
Deeply rooted in Indian culture though they are, the shrines of the Sufi saints face an uncertain future. Many Muslims have been drifting toward Wahhabi-inspired reform movements that reject the cult of saints as an un-Islamic “innovation.” Meanwhile, Hindu reformists are doing all within their power to purge every whiff of Islamic culture from their midst. In the shadow of the Indo-Pak nuclear standoff, as religious communities fall into mutually opposed lock step, the pluralism of dargah culture has little room to flourish.
There are other factors at play as well. India is “developing”—i.e. morphing into a hi-tech industrial juggernaut. The booming middle class is thronging to newly erected gridwork suburbs, instant computer-generated neighborhoods. Saints cannot be born, live their lives, and die fast enough to keep up with the pace of urban sprawl. Even if they could, their bones are meaningless to ambitious developers.
We in North America and Europe are in no position to criticize. After all, we invented suburbia. For us, the challenge now is to restore the place of the hallowed, the beautiful, and the authentically communal in our public spaces.
