Abstract
The seventh chapter continues by highlighting the decisive main actors involved in the making of the Sufi paradigm. It focuses on a Shia Muslim who belonged to a “social downgraded” group: Mirza Qalich Beg (1853–1929). Mirza Qalich Beg, who worked for the British administration his entire life, perfectly embodied the growing contradiction between the traditional and modern conceptions of Sufism, that is Sufism conceived as a path imposing total submission to a master, who was also most of the time a feudal landowner, and Sufism as a paradigm on which a modern, multi-religious, and liberal society can be founded. He was indeed constantly wavering between highlighting a vernacular Sindhi Sufism that produced key values for the society based on tolerance/shared religious legacy and the continuity of vernacular Sufism with Arabic and Persian Sufism as if they were the sole relevant pattern for anything related to Sufism. In the early twentieth century, its main “continuator” was Jethmal Parsram (1886–1948), a young Hindu scholar. In 1924, Parsram published Sind and Its Sufis, the first book devoted to the Sufi paradigm in English, which is still regularly republished both in Pakistan and in India. This chapter uses unknown data, namely unpublished works authored by Mirza Qalich Beg, which were generously provided by Mirza Aijaz Ali Beg, Mirza Qalich Beg’s grandson.
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Notes
- 1.
I warmly thank Mirza Aijaz Ali Beg for allowing me to have a look at the catalogue, and to arrange a copy of it. For a biography of Mirza Qalich Beg, see Joyo and Laghari (1997).
- 2.
On the understudied issue of the circulation of Sikh patterns in Sindh, see the section devoted to the Hinduization of the Nanakpanth in the ninth chapter.
- 3.
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was a very influential historian of Victorian England. In his book published in 1841 titled On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History, he states that every period is incarnated by a hero.
- 4.
Several dates are given for this book, as often. Here, I follow the British Library online catalogue.
- 5.
I use the expression classical Sufism as an intellectual construction which was completed around the thirteenth-century and which serves as accepted norms of later Sufism. In his book, Mirza Qalich addressed all these core issues.
- 6.
The concept of insan kamil was borrowed from a hadith and developed by Ibn Arabi. The person who has reached perfection was later on elaborated by Abd al-Karim Jili (1365–1409), who composed a whole treatise on the issue, the Al-insan al-kamil fi-l-marifa, The Perfect Man in the esoteric knowledge.
- 7.
Mira Bai (1498–1546) was a poet from the Bhakti who authored many bhajans .
- 8.
Qutub Ali Shah (1810–1910) was a Sufi master from Tando Jahaniyya, now in Hyderabad, Sindh. He had many followers, Muslims as well as Hindus. He was a wujudi and his poetry is dotted with references to Hindu concepts and characters. For instance, he uses the word darshan for vision as much as didar (q.v.). One of his most important followers was Rai Rochaldas whose darbar is located in Ulhasnagar, Maharashtra (Boivin 2019).
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Boivin, M. (2020). Sufi Knowledge (Ilm Tasawuf), Sufi Culture, and the Sufi Paradigm. In: The Sufi Paradigm and the Makings of a Vernacular Knowledge in Colonial India. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41991-2_7
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