Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan
In general I wish that contemporary scholars of Sufism (or anything else, really) could now all agree to drop the obligatory Big Theory part of their books and theses, the apparently almost ritual genuflections to various Theory heroes of the 1970s, many of them now safely dead. In the last century Theory was fresh and exciting and seemed to promise great things, but by now some of it has become all-too-canonical in Academia, and has begun to seem a bit stale – although not as stale as, say, Logical Positivism, of course.
A lot of recent books on Sufism and Islamic culture have huge wedges of Theory – gender theory, queer theory, phallocentrism, Post-colonialism, anti-Foucaultism – that (I feel) often get in the way of whatever the books are trying to say. Great theory-work is never misted over with jargon. (For example I’m reading François Jullien’s In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics [Zone, 2004], an elegant and multi-dimensional monograph on “tastelessness” and “colorlessness” in Chinese art and religion. Jullien refers only to Chinese texts, not to other European theorists. He comes on light as a Taoist butterfly yet breath-takingly erudite. Above all, he cuts to the chase; he “jumps in”, as my old kendo sensei used to urge us. He gets down to specific paintings, poems, stories, without erecting massive conceptual categories around them. His theory emerges naturally and directly out of his subject, his Gallic intellect and his emotions. The Translator’s Introduction to this book however is farrago of ill-digested Theory crit-speak that ends up actually attacking Jullien for his un-PC-like “glance” at “alterity”, etc, etc., rather than simply introducing the book – which needs no introduction, nor apology.)
Now, Robert Rozehnal is by no means the worst offender in this respect, and I would hate to put anyone off reading Islamic Sufism Unbound by admitting that I almost gave up myself after the first nine or ten pages of “decentering modernity” and “reimagining postcolonial Sufism”. But then at last the writer cuts to the “strange and wonderful way” he came to write the book. In 1996 he was visiting the old Mughal holy town of Uch Sharif with an elderly gent in old fashioned clothes and chatted with him for a while. Rozehnal then snapped a shot of the Sabiri dervish and the white-bearded chap, they left, and he thought no more about it… until the photo was developed. Whereupon the old man was identified by certain Sabiri elders as Shaykh Wahid Sial Rabbani, the head of the Sabiri Chishti Order himself. “This was, to put it mildly, perplexing since the shaykh had been deceased for more than a year when the photograph was taken.” (My italics.)
That story is better than any Theory – and in fact Rozehnal chooses not to theorize the event, no doubt wisely. If he said it was a meaningless coincidence he’d lose the respect of his informants. If he said he believed it he’d lose the respect of his tenure committee.
Thenceforth he carries on more-or-less in this wise vein – stories, exempla, detail, secrets – for the rest of the book, with only occasional forays into theory, some of which are fairly interesting. But SPR readers will want the book just for its prose portrait of Wahid Bakhsh, who really was a major figure of 20th century Sufism. How sad to think I could have met him myself before he “passed out the form”, as they say in the Moorish Science Temple about deceased shaykhs. His dates, 1910-1995, were nearly the same as my own father’s. I suppose there’s still a chance, even post mortem. In that sense a book is like a saint’s tombstone, that is to say, not entirely dead… at least in dreams and imagination.
Still, I have to ask: why didn’t Rozehnal publish the famous photograph in his book? The answer to that question might get us into some real theorizing.
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Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan
Robert Rozehnal
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
ISBN 978-1403975676
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