Abstract
In versions of a song popular through three centuries, Sufi poet Bulleh Shah sings of a love that makes him dance with such aban-don that only his beloved can come and heal his agony. That Bulleh Shah, born to a prestigious family, had chosen for his spiritual guide someone from a lower class was disgraceful enough, but what he did next to win his teacher’s heart was outrageous. Annoyed by his arrogance that prevented his disciple from overcoming his ego, his teacher Shah Inayat had banished Bulleh Shah from his company. Bulleh Shah learned the dances and idioms of dancing girls; then, discovering that Shah Inayat would be attending a festival at the shrine of a saint, he dressed himself in women’s clothing and danced and sang before his teacher for forgiveness.2 The woman in his song becomes a symbol of the soul yearning to reach its destination, union with God, and ready to endure any pain to do so. She pines for her beloved, drinking the cup brimful of the poison of separation; regretful, she is willing to give her life for a glimpse of her master at whose bidding she didn’t come; she is willful enough to break away from family and tradition for her love; she is by turns coquettish, “the sun hides, the blush remains,” and, ultimately, content at reaching fulfillment of her desire.
Your love makes me dance wildly, so wildly
Your love has set station in my heart
I have drunk the cup brimful of poison-
Healer, come quick or I’ll die
Your love makes me dance wildly, so wildly
The sun hides, the blush remains
For one glimpse, I would give my life for you
Master, my mistake I didn’t come when you called
Your love makes me dance wildly, so wildly
Mother, don’t keep me from this path of love
Who could turn around boats that have departed?
Foolish me, I went with the boatmen
Your love makes me dance wildly, so wildly
A peacock cries in the thicket of love
Where my dear love lives is Qibla and Kaaba
You wounded me and never asked
Your love makes me dance wildly, so wildly
I, Bulleh Shah, sit at Shah Inayat’s door,
He who dressed me in robes red and green
Where I struck my heel dancing, I found my beloved
Your love makes me dance wildly, so wildly1
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Notes
J. R. Puri and Tilaka Raja Shangari, Bulleh Shah: The Love-Intoxicated Iconoclast (Amritsar: Radha Soami Satsang, Beas, 1986), 24–25.
See Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
Carl Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1997), 26.
William Dalrymple, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (New York: Knopf, 2009), 118.
Also see Nicolas Schmidle, “Pakistan’s Sufis Preach Faith and Ecstasy,” Smithsonian Magazine 39, no. 9 (December 2008): 36–47; Sabrina Tavernise and Waqar Gillani, “Mystical Form of Islam Suits Sufis in Pakistan,” The New York Times, February 26, 2010: 4.
For a history of negative assessments of Sufisms, see Frederick de Jong and Bernd Radtke, Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1999).
For a history of orders, though mostly Middle Eastern and African, see John Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam, foreword by John O. Voll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Ian Almond on the emancipatory project of Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi, of freeing al-hagg and l’ecriture from the shackles of reason and a positive affirmation of multiple interpretations. Ian Almond, Sufism and Deconstruction: A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn Arabi (London: Routledge, 2004), 68–69.
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 224–225.
Pnina Werbner, Pilgrims of Loroe: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 11.
Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 137–138.
Mahmood Jamal, introduction to Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, ed. and trans. Mahmood Jamal (New York: Penguin, 2009): xxviii.
Scott Alan Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007), 181–220. In one of the chapters in this text, “Body Enraptured: The Lips of Shah Hussayn,” Kugle reads Shah Hussayn through queer theory.
Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1995), 343–350.
Najm Hosain Syed, Recurrent Patterns in Punjabi Poetry (Lahore: Justin Group, 2006), 21–28.
Annemarie Schimmel, Pain and Grace: A Study of Two Mystical Writers of Eighteenth-Century Muslim India (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1976), 151–262.
Annemarie Schimmel, My Soul is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam (New York: Continuum, 2003), 118–179.
Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 383–402.
Ten of the thirty romances in Shah Abdul Latif’s Risalo, for instance, are based on female protagonists (Abbas 89), and most of Bulleh Shah’s poetry, especially Heer, is in the voice of the titular heroine. Shemeem Burney Abbas, The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual: Devotional Practices of Pakistan and India (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
Ira Marvin Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2002), 367–368.
Also Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 159–161.
Richard Foltz, “The Central Asian Naqshbandi Connections of the Mughal Emperors,” Journal of Islamic Studies 7, no. 2 (1996): 229–239.
Muzaffar Alam, “The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (2009): 135–174.
See also Gregory Kozlowski, “Imperial Authority, Benefactions and Endowments (Awqaf) in Mughal India,” Journal ofEconomic and Social History of the Orient 38, no. 3 (1995): 355–370.
See John O. Voll, “Renewal and Reform in Islamic History: Tajdid and Islahí” in Voices of Resurgent Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 32–47, for a nuanced analysis of what revival and reform meant in the context of Sufism.
Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, eds., Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 106–107.
Sarah F. D. Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind 1843–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 45.
David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 39–72.
Annemarie Schimmel, Gabriel’s Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal (Leiden, The Netherands: Brill, 1963), 339–76.
For the influence of pirs and sajjada nashins on the sociopolitical scene of Pakistan, see Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 27–30, 33–37; Lieven, Pakistan, 133–148.
Katherine Pratt Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 65–92.
Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, “Show and State in Senegal: Play-acting on the Threshold of Power,” in Staging Politics: Power and Performance in Asia and Africa, ed. Julia C. Strauss and Donal B. Cruise O’Brien (London: I. B. Tauris & Co, 1988), 23.
Oskar Verkaaik, “Reforming Mysticism: Sindhi Separatist Intellectuals in Pakistan,” in Popular Intellectuals and Social Movements: Framing Protest in Asia, Africa and Latin America, ed. Michiel Baud and Rosanne Rutten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 65–86.
Oskar Verkaiik, Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 33–39.
Robert Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Jalaludin Rumi, Yeh Khana-i-Aab o Gul, trans. Fahmida Riaz (Karachi: Scheherzade, 2007).
Fahmida Riaz, Four Walls and a Black Veil, trans. Patricia L. Sharpe, fore-word by Aamer Hussein (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2–3.
William C. Chittick, Sufism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), 35.
Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian, foreword by Edward Said (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), 111–112.
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© 2012 David Joy and Joseph F. Duggan
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Shoaib, M. (2012). Discourses of Learning and Love: Sufi Paths in Pakistan. In: Joy, D., Duggan, J.F. (eds) Decolonizing the Body of Christ. Postcolonialism and Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137021038_9
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