To Save Western Capitalism - Look East

The East could have something to offer the mighty West, where we are seeing glimpses into capitalism's true nature. Antara Haldar (The Independent) on the rise and fall of civilisation as we know it

 

Photos Getty


Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a place where peace and prosperity reigned. Let’s call this place the West. These lands had once been ravaged by bloody wars but its rulers had, since, solved the puzzle of perpetual progress and discovered a kind of political and economic elixir of life. Big Problems were relegated to either Somewhere Else (the East) or Another Time (History). The Westerners dutifully sent emissaries far and wide to spread the word that the secret of eternal bliss had been found –and were, themselves, to live happily ever after.

So ran, until very recently, the story of how the West was won.

The formula that had been discovered was simple: the recipe for a bright, shiny new brand of global capitalism based on liberal democracy and something called neoclassical economics. But it was different from previous eras – cleansed of Dickensian grime. The period after the two world wars was in many a Golden Age: the moment of Bretton Woods (that established the international monetary and financial order) and the Beveridge report (the blueprint for the welfare state), feminism and free love.

It was post-colonial, post-racial, post-gendered. It felt like you could have it all, material abundance and the moral revolutions; a world infinitely vulnerable to invention – but all without picking sides, all based on institutional equality of access. That’s how clever the scheme was – truly a brave new world. Fascism and class, slavery and genocide – no one doubted that, in the main, it had been left behind (or at least that we could all agree on its evils); that the wheels of history had permanently been set in motion to propel us towards a better future. The end of history, Francis Fukuyama called it – the zenith of human civilisation. 

Austerity in Athens: the eurozone crisis hit Greece not once but twice (Getty)

While liberal democracy was the part of the programme that got slapped on to the brochure, it was a streamlined paradigm of neoclassical economics that provided the brains behind the enterprise. Neoclassical economics, scarred by war-era ideological acrimony, scrubbed the subject of all the messy stuff: politics, values – all the fluff. To do so it used a new secret weapon: quantitative precision unprecedented in the social sciences.

It didn’t rest on whimsical things like enlightened leadership or invested citizenship or compassionate communities. No, siree. It was pure science: a reliable, universally-applicable maximising equation for society (largely stripped of any contextual or, until recently, even cognitive considerations). Its particular magic trick was to be able to do good without requiring anyone to be good.

And, it was limitless in its capacity to turn boundless individual rationality into endless material wellbeing, to cull out of infinite resources (on a global scale) indefinite global growth. It presumed to definitively replace faltering human touch with the infallible “invisible hand” and, so, discourses of exploitation with those of merit.

When I started as a graduate student in the early 2000s, this model was at the peak of its powers: organised into an intellectual and policy assembly line that more or less ran the world. At the heart of this enterprise, in the unipolar post-Cold War order, was what was known as the Chicago school of law and economics. The Chicago school boiled the message of neoclassical economics down to a simpler formula still: the American Dream available for export – just add private property and enforceable contracts. Anointed with a record number of Nobel prizes, its message went straight to the heart of Washington DC, and from there – via its apostles, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank radiated out to the rest of the globe. 

It was like the social equivalent of the Genome project. Sure the model required the odd tweak, the ironing out of the occasional glitch but, for the most part, the code had been cracked. So, like the ladies who lunch, scholarly attention in the West turned increasingly to good works and the fates of “the other” – spatially and temporally.

One strain led to a thriving industry in development: these were the glory days of tough love, and loan conditionalities. The message was clear: if you want Western-style growth, get with the programme. The polite term for it was structural adjustment and good governance: a strict regime of purging what Max Weber had called mysticism and magic, and swapping it for muscular modernisation. Titles like Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else jostled for space on shelves of bookstores and best-seller lists.

Another led to esoteric islands of scholarship devoted to atonement for past sins. On the US side of the Atlantic, post-colonial scholarship gained a foothold, even if somewhat limp. In America, slavery has been, for a while now, the issue a la mode. A group of Harvard scholars has been taking a keen interest in the “history of capitalism”.

Playing intellectual archaeologists, they’ve excavated the road that led to today’s age of plenty – leaving in its tracks a blood-drenched path of genocide, conquest, and slavery. The interest that this has garnered, for instance Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, is heartening, but it has been limited to history (or worse still, “area studies”) departments rather than economics, and focused on the past not the present. 

As far back as the fifties ... the economy was driving the society, when it should have been the other way around (Getty)

Indeed, from the perspective of Western scholarship, the epistemic approach to the amalgam of these instances has been singularly inspired by Indiana Jones – dismissed either as curious empirical aberrations or distanced by the buffer of history. By no means the stuff of mainstream economic theory.

Some of us weakly cleared our throats and tried to politely intercede that there were, all around us, petri dishes of living, breathing data on not just development – but capitalism itself. Maybe, just maybe – could it be? – that if the template failed to work in a large majority of cases around the globe that there may be a slight design error. 

My longtime co-author, Nobel Prize winner in Economics and outspoken critic, Joseph Stiglitz, in his 1990 classic Globalisation and Its Discontents chronicled any number of cases of leaching-like brutality of structural adjustment. The best-selling author and my colleague at Cambridge, Ha-Joon Chang, in Kicking Away the Ladder, pointed out that it was a possibility that the West was misremembering the trajectory of its own ascent to power – that perhaps it was just a smidgen more fraught than it remembered, that maybe the State had had a somewhat more active part to play before it retired from the stage.

But a bright red line separated the “us” from the “them” enforcing a system of strict epistemic apartheid. Indeed, as economics retreated further and further into its silo of smugness, economics departments largely stopped teaching economic history or sociology and development economics clung on by operating firmly within the discipline-approved methodology.

So far, so good – a bit like the last night of merriment on the Titanic. Then the iceberg hit.

Suddenly the narratives that were comfortably to do with the there and then became for the Western world a matter of the here and now.

In the last 10 years, what economic historian Robert Skidelsky recently referred to as the “lost decade” for the advanced industrial West, problems that were considered the exclusive preserve of development theory – declining growth, rampant inequality, failing institutions, a fractured political consensus, corruption, mass protests and poverty – started to be experienced on home turf.

The Great Recession starting 2008 should really have been the first hint: foreclosures and evictions, bankruptcies and bailouts, crashed stock markets. Then came the eurozone crisis starting in 2009 (first Greece; then Ireland; then Portugal; then Spain; then Cyprus; oh, and then Greece, again). But after an initial scare, it was largely business as usual – written off as an inevitable blip in the boom-bust logic of capitalist cycles. It was 2016, the year the world went mad, that made the writing on the wall impossible to turn away from – starting with the shock Brexit vote, and then the Trump election. Not everyone understands what a CDO (collateralised debt obligation) is, but the vulgarity of a leader of the free world who governs by tweet and “grabs pussy” is hard to miss.

So how did it happen, this unexpected epilogue to the end of history?

I hate to say I told you so, but some of us had seen this coming – the twist in the tale, foreshadowed by an eerie background score lurking behind the clinking of champagne glasses. Even at the height of the glory days. In the summer before the fall of Lehman Brothers, a group of us “heterodox economists” had gathered at a summer school in the North of England. We felt like the audience at a horror movie – knowing that the gory climax was moments away while the victim remained blissfully impervious.

The plot wasn’t just predictable, it was in the script for anyone to see. You just had to look closely at the fine print.

In particular, you needed to have read your Karl Polanyi, the economic sociologist, who predicted this crisis over 50 years ago. As far back as 1954, The Great Transformation diagnosed the central perversion of the capitalist system, the inversion that makes the person less important than the thing – the economy driving society, rather than the other way around.

Polanyi’s point was simple: if you turned all the things that people hold sacred into grist to the mill of a large impersonal economic machinery (he called this disembedding) there would be a backlash. That the fate of a world where monopoly money reigns supreme and human players are reduced to chessmen at its mercy is doomed. The sociologist Fred Block compares this to the stretching of a giant elastic band – either it reverts to a more rooted position, or it snaps.

It is this tail-wagging-the-dog quality that is driving the current crisis of capitalism. It’s a matter of existential alienation. This problem of artificial abstraction runs through the majority of upheavals of our age – from the financial crisis to Facebook. So cold were the nights in this era of enforced neutrality that the torrid affair between liberal democracy and neoclassical economics resulted in the most surprising love child – populism.

The simple fact is that after decades on promises not delivered on, the system had written just one too many cheques that couldn’t be cashed. And people had had just about enough.

 

The Brexit vote in 2016 followed by the election of Trump ... and the world had finally gone mad (Getty)

The old fault lines of global capitalism, the East versus West dynamics of the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round, turned out to be red herrings. The axis that counts is the system versus the little people. Indeed, the anatomies of annihilation look remarkably similar across the globe – whether it’s the loss of character of a Vanishing New York or Disappearing London, or threatened communities of farmers in India and fishermen in Greece.

Trump voters in the US, Brexiteers in Britain and Modi supporters in India seek identity – any identity, even a made-up call to arms to “return” to mythical past greatness in the face of the hollowing out of meaning of the past 70 years. The rise of populism is, in many ways, the death cry of populations on the verge of extinction – yearning for something to believe in when their gods have died young. It’s a problem of the 1 per cent – poised to control two-thirds of the world economy by 2030 – versus the 99 per cent. But far more pernicious is the Frankenstein’s monster that is the idea of an economic system that is an end in itself.

Not to be too much of a conspiracy theorist about it, but the current system doesn’t work because it wasn’t meant to – it was rigged from the start. Wealth was never actually going to “trickle down”. Thomas Piketty did the maths.

Suddenly, the alarmist calls of the developmentalists objecting to the systemic skews in the process of globalisation don’t seem quite so paranoid.

But this is more than “poco” (what the cool kids call postcolonialism) schadenfreude. My point is a serious one; although I would scarcely have dared articulate it before now. Could Kipling have been wrong, and might the East have something to offer the mighty West? Could the experiences of exotic lands point the way back to the future? Could it be, could it just, that it may even be a source of epistemic wisdom?

Behind the scaffolding of Xi Jinping’s China or Narendra Modi’s India, sites of capitalism under construction, we are offered a glimpse into the system’s true nature. It is not God-given, but the product of highly political choices. Just like Jane Jacobs protesting to save Washington Square Park or Beatrix Potter devoting the bulk of her royalty earnings to conserving the Lake District were choices. But these cases also show that trust and community are important. The incredible resilience of India’s jugaad economy, or the critical role of quanxi in the creation of the structures in what has been for the past decade the world’s fastest-growing nation, China. A little mysticism and magic may be just the thing.

The narrative that we need is less that of Frankenstein’s man-loses-control of monster, and more that of Pinocchio’s toy-becomes-real-boy-by-acquiring-conscience; less technology, and more teleology. The real limit may be our imaginations. Perhaps the challenge is to do for scholarship, what Black Panther has done for Hollywood. You never know. Might be a blockbuster.

Why ‘Sufism’ is not what it is made out to be

Zahra Sabri in The Dawn

In a variety of Islamic political contexts around the world today, we see ‘Sufi’ ideas being invoked as a call to return to a deeper, more inward-directed (and more peaceful) mode of religious experience as compared to the one that results in outward-oriented political engagements that are often seen as negative and violent. A hundred years ago, it would not have been uncommon to hear western or West-influenced native voices condemn Islamic mysticism (often described problematically in English as ‘Sufism’) as one of the major sources of inertia and passivity within Muslim societies. Yet new political contingencies, especially after 9/11, have led to this same phenomenon being described as ‘the soft face of Islam’, with observers such as British writer William Dalrymple referring to a vaguely defined group of people called ‘the Sufis’ as ‘our’ best friends vis-à-vis the danger posed by Taliban-like forces.

We seem to be in a situation where journalistic discourse and policy debates celebrate idealised notions of Islamic mysticism with its enthralling music, inspiring poetry and the transformative/liberating potential of the ‘message’ of the great mystics. These mystics are clearly differentiated from more ‘closed-minded’ and ‘orthodox’ representatives of the faith such as preachers (mullahs), theologians (fuqaha) and other types of ulema.

On the other hand, when we trace the institutional legacy of these great mystics (walis/shaikhs) and spiritual guides (pirs) down to their present-day spiritual heirs, we find out that they are often all too well-entrenched in the social and political status quo. The degree of their sociopolitical influence has even become electorally quantifiable since the introduction of parliamentary institutions during colonial times. Pirs in Pakistan have been visible as powerful party leaders (Pir Pagara), ministers (Shah Mahmood Qureshi) and even prime ministers (Yousaf Raza Gillani). Even more traditional religious figures, such as Pir Hameeduddin Sialvi (who recently enjoyed media attention for threatening to withdraw support from the ruling party over a religious issue that unites many types of religious leaders), not only exercise considerable indirect influence over the vote but have also served as members of various legislative forums.

It is, therefore, unclear what policymakers mean when they call for investment in the concepts and traditions of ‘Sufi Islam’. Is it an appeal for the promotion of a particular kind of religious ethic through the public education system? Or is it a call for raising the public profile of little known faqirs and dervishes and for strengthening the position of existing sajjada-nishins (hereditary representatives of pirs and mystics and the custodians of their shrines), many of whom already enjoy a high level of social and political prominence and influence? Or are policymakers referring to some notion of Islamic mysticism that has remained very much at the level of poetic utterance or philosophical discourse — that is, at the level of the ideal rather than at the level of reality as lived and experienced by Muslims over centuries?

The salience of idealised notions of Islamic mysticism in various policy circles today makes it interesting to examine the historical relations that mystic groups within Islamic societies have had with the ruling classes and the guardians of religious law. What has the typical relationship among kings, ulema and mystics been, for example, in regions such as Central Asia, Anatolia, Persia and Mughal India that fall in a shared Persianate cultural and intellectual zone? Has tasawwuf (Islamic mysticism) historically been a passive or apolitical force in society, or have prominent mystics engaged with politics and society in ways that are broadly comparable to the way other kinds of religious representatives have done so?

It is instructive to turn first to the life of an Islamic mystic who is perhaps more celebrated and widely recognised than any other: Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi (d. 1273). He lived in Konya in modern-day Turkey. The fame of his mystic verse has travelled far and wide, but what is less widely known is that he had received a thorough training in fiqh (Islamic law).

Historical accounts show that he had studied the Quran and fiqh at a very high level in some of the most famous madrasas in Aleppo and Damascus. Later, he served as a teacher of fiqh at several madrasas. In this, he appears to have followed his father who was a religious scholar at a princely court in Anatolia and taught at an institution that blended the functions of a madrasa and those of a khanqah, demonstrating how fluid the relationship between an Islamic law college and a mystic lodge could be in Islamic societies. Even madrasas built exclusively for training ulema have often been paired with khanqahs since centuries.

Jahangir showing preference to shaikhs over kings | Courtesy purchase, Charles Lang Freer Endowment


Biographers have described how Rumi’s legal opinions were frequently sought on a variety of subjects. As a spiritual guide and preacher, he regularly delivered the Friday sermon (khutba), achieving popularity as an acclaimed speaker and attracting a considerable number of disciples from all parts of society. His followers included merchants and artisans as well as members of the ruling class. His lectures were attended by both women and men in Konya. For much of this while, he was also composing his renowned poetry and becoming identified with his own style of sama’aand dance, which sometimes drew criticism from other ulema, many of whom nevertheless continued to revere him.

It is evident from Rumi’s letters that he also had extremely close relations with several Seljuk rulers, even referring to one of them as ‘son’. It was not rare for him to advise these rulers on various points of statesmanship and make recommendations (for instance, on relations with infidel powers) in light of religious strictures and political expediencies. He is also known to have written letters to introduce his disciples and relatives to men of position and influence who could help them professionally or socially. Unlike his religious sermons and ecstatic poetry, these letters follow the conventions typically associated with correspondence addressed to nobles and state officials.

All this contradicts the idea that mystics (mashaikh) are always firmly resistant to interacting with rulers. The stereotypical image of mystics is one where they are far too caught up in contemplation of the divine to have anything to do with the mundane political affairs of the world. Yet in sharp contrast to this image, many prominent mystics in Islamic history have played eminent roles in society and politics.

This holds true not only for the descendants of prominent mystics who continue to wield considerable sociopolitical influence in Muslim countries such as today’s Egypt and Pakistan but also for the mashaikh in whose names various mystical orders were originally founded. These mashaikh evidently lived very much in the world, not unlike nobles and kings and many classes of the ulema. The offspring of these shaikhs also often became favoured marriage partners for royal princesses, thus becoming merged with the nobility itself.

Rumi’s life also offers evidence that the two worlds of khanqah and madrasa, often considered vastly different from each other, all too often overlap in terms of their functions. Regardless of the impressions created by mystic poetry’s derogatory allusions to the zahid (zealous ascetic), wa‘iz (preacher) or shaikh (learned religious scholar), there is little practical reason to see mystics on the whole as being fundamentally opposed to other leaders and representatives of religion. In fact, right through until modern times, we have seen ulema and mashaikh work in tandem with each other in the pursuit of shared religio-political objectives, the Khilafat movement in British India being just one such example among many of their collaborations.

Rumi’s activities are indicative of a nearly ubiquitous pattern of political involvement by prominent mystics in various Islamic societies. In Central Asia, support from the mashaikh of the Naqshbandi mystical order (tariqa) seems to have become almost indispensable by the end of the 15th century for anyone aspiring to rule since the order had acquired deep roots within the population at large. The attachment of Timurid and Mughal rulers to the Naqshbandi order is well known. The Shaybanid rulers of Uzbek origin also had deep ties with the order and Naqshbandi mashaikhtended to play a prominent role in mediating between Mughal and Uzbek rulers.

Naqshbandis are somewhat unusual among Sufi orders in their historical inclination towards involving themselves in political affairs, and for favouring fellowship (suhbat) over seclusion (khalwat), yet political interventions are not rare even among other orders.

Shaikh Moeenuddin Chishti Ajmeri | Courtesy trustees of the Chester Beatty library, Dublin



Closer to home, Shaikh Bahauddin Zakariya (d. 1262), a Suhrawardi mystic, is reported to have negotiated the peaceful surrender of Multan to the Mongols, giving 10,000 dinars in cash to the invading army’s commander in return for securing the lives and properties of the citizens. Suhrawardis, indeed, have long believed in making attempts to influence rulers to take religiously correct decisions. Bahauddin Zakariya was very close to Sultan Iltutmish of the Slave Dynasty of Delhi and was given the official post of Shaikhul Islam. He openly sided with the sultan when Nasiruddin Qabacha, the governor of Multan, conspired to overthrow him.

It is widely known that the Mughal king Jahangir was named after Shaikh Salim Chishti (d. 1572) but what is less well known is that his great-grandfather Babar’s name ‘Zahiruddin Muhammad’ was chosen by Naqshbandi shaikh Khwaja Ubaidullah Ahrar (d. 1490), who wielded tremendous political power in Central Asia. The shaikh’s son later asked Babar to defend Samarkand against the Uzbeks. When Babar fell ill in India many years later, he versified one of Khwaja Ahrar’s works in order to earn the shaikh’s blessings for his recovery.

Even after Babar lost control of his Central Asian homeland and India became his new dominion, he and his descendants maintained strong ties with Central Asian Naqshbandi orders such as Ahrars, Juybaris and Dahbidis. This affiliation was not limited to the spiritual level. It also translated into important military and administrative posts at the Mughal court being awarded to generations of descendants of Naqshbandi shaikhs.

The offspring of these shaikhs also often became favoured marriage partners for royal princesses, thus becoming merged with the nobility itself. One of Babar’s daughters as well as one of Humayun’s was given in marriage to the descendants of Naqshbandi shaikhs. The two emperors also married into the family of the shaikhs of Jam in Khurasan. Akbar’s mother, Hamida Banu (Maryam Makani), was descended from the renowned shaikh Ahmad-e-Jam (d. 1141).

In India, Mughal princes and kings also established important relationships with several other mystical orders such as the Chishtis and Qadris. In particular, the Shattari order (that originated in Persia) grew to have significant influence over certain Mughal kings. It seems to have been a common tendency among members of the Mughal household to pen hagiographical tributes to their spiritual guides. Dara Shikoh, for example, wrote tazkirahs (biographies) of his spiritual guide Mian Mir (d. 1635) and other Qadri shaikhs. His sister Jahanara wrote about the Chishti shaikhs of Delhi.

So great was the royal reverence for mystics that several Mughal emperors, like their counterparts outside India, wanted to be buried beside the graves of prominent shaikhs. Aurangzeb, for example, was buried beside a Chishti shaikh, Zainuddin Shirazi (d. 1369). Muhammad Shah’s grave in Delhi is near that of another Chishti shaikh, Nizamuddin Auliya (d. 1325).

Like several other Mughal and Islamic rulers, Aurangzeb’s life demonstrates a devotion to a number of different mystical orders (Chishtis, Shattaris and Naqshbandis) at various points in his life. The emperor is reported to have sought the blessings of Naqshbandis during his war of succession with his brother Dara Shikoh. Naqshbandi representatives not only committed themselves to stay by his side in the battle but they also vowed to visit Baghdad to pray at the tomb of Ghaus-e-Azam Abdul Qadir Jilani (d. 1166) for his victory. They similarly promised to mobilise the blessings of the ulema and mashaikh living in the holy city of Makkah in his favour.

Mughal prince Parvez talking to a holy man | Courtesy purchase — Charles Lang Freer Endowment



The combined spiritual and temporal power of influential mashaikh across various Islamic societies meant that rulers were eager to seek their political support and spiritual blessings for the stability and longevity of their rule. Benefits accrued to both sides. The mashaikh’s approval and support bolstered the rulers’ political position, and financial patronage by rulers and wealthy nobles, in turn, served to strengthen the social and economic position of mashaikh who often grew to be powerful landowners. The estates and dynasties left behind by these shaikhs frequently outlasted those of their royal patrons.

This is not to say that every prominent mystic had equally intimate ties with rulers. Some mashaikh (particularly among Chishtis) are famous for refusing to meet kings and insisting on remaining aloof from the temptations of worldly power. Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya’s response to Alauddin Khilji’s repeated requests for an audience is well known: “My house has two doors. If the Sultan enters by one, I will make my exit by the other.” In effect, however, even these avowedly aloof mashaikh often benefited from access to the corridors of royal power via their disciples among the royal household and high state officials.

The relationship between sultans and mashaikh was also by no means always smooth. From time to time, there was a real breakdown in their ties. Shaikhs faced the prospect of being exiled, imprisoned or even executed if their words or actions threatened public order or if they appeared to be in a position to take over the throne. The example of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624) is famous. He was imprisoned by Jahangir for a brief period reportedly because his disquietingly elevated claims about his own spiritual rank threatened to disrupt public order. Several centuries earlier, Sidi Maula was executed by Jalaluddin Khilji, who suspected the shaikh of conspiring to seize his throne.

It is not only through influence over kings and statesmen that Islamic mystical orders have historically played a political role. Some of them are known to have launched direct military campaigns. Contrary to a general notion in contemporary popular discourse that ‘Sufism’ somehow automatically means ‘peace’, some Islamic mystical orders have had considerable military recruiting potential.

The Safaviyya mystical order of Ardabil in modern day Iranian Azerbaijan offers a prominent example of this. Over the space of almost two centuries, this originally Sunni mystical order transformed itself into a fighting force. With the help of his army of Qizilbash disciples, the first Safavid ruler Shah Ismail I established an enduring Shia empire in 16th century Iran.

In modern times, Pir Pagara’s Hurs in Sindh during the British period offer another example of a pir’s devotees becoming a trained fighting force. It is not difficult to find other examples in Islamic history of mashaikh who urged sultans to wage wars, accompanied sultans on military expeditions and inspired their disciples to fight in the armies of favoured rulers. Some are believed to have personally participated in armed warfare.

Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi distributing sweetmeats to disciples | Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston



To speak of a persistent difference between the positions of ulema and mystics on the issue of war or jihad would be, thus, a clear mistake. ‘Sufism’ on the whole is hardly outside the mainstream of normative Islam on this issue, as on others.

Another popular misconception is to speak of ‘Sufism’ as something peculiar to the South Asian experience of Islam or deem it to be some indigenously developed, soft ‘variant’ of Islam that is different from the ‘harder’ forms of the religion prevalent elsewhere. Rituals associated with piri-muridi (master-disciple) relationships and visits to dargahs can, indeed, display the influence of local culture and differ significantly from mystical rituals in other countries and regions.

However, the main trends and features defining Islamic mysticism in South Asia remain pointedly similar to those characterising Islamic mysticism in the Middle East and Central Asia. As British scholar Nile Green points out, “What is often seen as being in some way a typically South Asian characteristic of Islam – the emphasis on a cult of Sufi shrines – was in fact one of the key practices and institutions of a wider Islamic cultural system to be introduced to South Asia at an early period ... It is difficult to understand the history of Sufism in South Asia without reference to the several lengthy and distinct patterns of immigration into South Asia of holy men from different regions of the wider Muslim world, chiefly from Arabia, the fertile crescent, Iran and Central Asia.”

It is a fact that all the major mystical orders in South Asia have their origins outside this region. Even the Chishti order, which has come to be associated more closely with South Asia than with any other region, originated in Chisht near Herat in modern-day Afghanistan. These interregional connections have consistently been noted and celebrated by masters and disciples connected with mystic orders over time. Shaikh Ali al-Hujweri (d. circa 1072-77), who migrated from Ghazna in Afghanistan to settle in Lahore, is known and revered as Data Ganj Bakhsh. Yet this does not mean that the status of high ranking shaikhs who lived far away from the Subcontinent is lower than his in any way. Even today, the cult of Ghaus-e-Azam of Baghdad continues to be popular in South Asia.
The third myth is that mystics across the board are intrinsically ‘peaceful’ and opposed to armed jihad or warfare.

For anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with Muslim history outside the Subcontinent, it would be difficult to defend the assertion – one that we hear astoundingly often in both lay and academic settings in South Asia – that ‘Sufi Islam’ is somehow particular to Sindh or Punjab in specific or to the Indian subcontinent more broadly. It is simply not possible to understand the various strands of Islamic mysticism in our region without reference to their continual interactions with the broader Islamic world.

What is mystical experience, after all? The renowned Iranian scholar Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub defines it as an “attempt to attain direct and personal communication with the godhead” and argues that mysticism is as old as humanity itself and cannot be confined to any race or religion.

It would, therefore, be quite puzzling if Islamic mysticism had flowered only in the Indian subcontinent and in no other Muslim region, as some of our intellectuals seem to assert. Islamic mysticism in South Asia owes as much to influences from Persia, Central Asia and the Arab lands as do most other aspects of Islam in our region. These influences are impossible to ignore when we study the lives and works of the mystics themselves.

As Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (Mujaddid-e-Alf-e-Sani) wrote in the 16th-17th century: “We ... Muslims of India ... are so much indebted to the ulema and Sufis (mashaikh) of Transoxiana (Mawara un-Nahr) that it cannot be conveyed in words. It was the ulema of the region who strove to correct the beliefs [of Muslims] to make them consistent with the sound beliefs and opinions of the followers of the Prophet’s tradition and the community (Ahl-e-Sunna wa’l-Jama’a). It was they who reformed the religious practices [of the Muslims] according to Hanafi law. The travels of the great Sufis (may their graves be hallowed) on the path of this sublime Sufi order have been introduced to India by this blessed region.” *

These influences were not entirely one-way. We see that the Mujaddidi order (developed in India by Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi as an offshoot of the Naqshbandi order) went on to exert a considerable influence in Central Asia and Anatolia. This demonstrates once again how interconnected these regions had been at the intellectual, literary and commercial levels before the advent of colonialism.

Dancing dervishes | Courtesy purchase, Rogers Fund and the Kevorkian Foundation Gift, 1955



This essay has been an attempt to dispel four myths about Islamic mysticism. The first myth is that there is a wide gap between the activities of the mystic khanqah and those of the scholarly madrasa (and that there is, thus, a vast difference between ‘Sufi’ Islam and normative/mainstream Sunni Islam). The second myth is that mystics are ‘passive’, apolitical and withdrawn from the political affairs of their time. The third myth is that mystics across the board are intrinsically ‘peaceful’ and opposed to armed jihad or warfare. The last myth is that Islamic mysticism is a phenomenon particular to, or intrinsically more suited to, the South Asian environment as compared to other Islamic lands.

All these four points are worth taking into consideration in any meaningful policy discussion of the limits and possibilities of harnessing Islamic mysticism for political interventions in Muslim societies such as today’s Pakistan. It is important to be conscious of the fact that when we make an argument for promoting mystical Islam in this region, we are in effect making an argument for the promotion of mainstream Sunni (mostly Hanafi) Islam in its historically normative form.

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• 
• • Suzanne Moore
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 August 2014 18.00 BST

Marina Abramović uses many techniques of mindfulness – but it’s an exercise guided by ego. Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Guardian

Most of what is wrong in the modern world can be cured by not thinking too much. From psoriasis to depression to giving yourself a "competitive advantage" in the workplace, the answer touted everywhere right now is mindfulness. Just let go for few minutes a day, breathe, observe your thoughts as ripples across a pond, feel every sensation around you. Stop your mind whirring and, lo, miraculously, everything will improve "at a cellular level".

Sorry, it's not working for me because I cannot rid myself of the thought: "Why this, why now?" There is nothing wrong with trying to relax: the problem lies in the "trying". And there is nothing new about meditation, so why has it suddenly gone mainstream?

What was once the province of people who had backpacked across India has been gentrified and repackaged as a great cure-all, legitimated by doctors and scientists. Now everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Lena Dunham and William Hague is giving it a go.

The City is awash with bankers trying to quiet their minds. Schoolchildren are given mindfulness training to help them with their anxieties. Yoga was once a bit countercultural, too, and now it vies with Zumba, rumba and Pilates classes.

We know the west takes hold of eastern mysticism, ignores its history and faith and turns it into a secular and accessible pastime. For mindfulness is Buddhism without the awkward Buddhist bits. A complex philosophy is rendered as self-help. What does freedom from attachment and desire mean in this self-centred world? What is radical acceptance? Why practise non-judgment? Those who have practised meditation all their lives may not say it's to get a promotion or be less stressed. There is a whole history of thought here.

But no, once Arianna Huffington is on the case, you know there is money to be made in commodifying blankness. Indeed, the whole of Silicon Valley has hugged mindfulness close, as have the US marines, who use it as part of "mind fitness" to help soldiers relax and learn "emotional intelligence".

These are basic meditation techniques being sold as a way to function better in an over-connected world. Thus, in the finance sector, companies where bankers are super-stressed – unlike poor people – arrange for their staff to have 10-minute daily meditations. It's all scienced-up with names such as Mind Lab to shake off the hippyish/religious/psychic-adventurer connotations. Keep fit for the brain.

It's even in art galleries. I wandered around Marina Abramović's 512 hours waiting for enlightenment. Or something. She is using many of the techniques of mindfulness, from counting grains of rice to staring at walls to get us to slow down. I like her work because she is a powerful presence, but when she took my hand and guided me to sit down, as ever, I wondered why I must do as I was told and why everyone else was so passive. But they were clearly having spiritual experiences. Or were asleep. This exercise in mindfulness then, was guided by ego – which is fitting, as the art world is the most ego-ridden, sensationalist and utterly mindless spectacle of all.

Much of the cult of mindfulness is a reaction to technology. It speaks the language of detox, of decluttering. There is too much information. We need to clear our minds. Be and not do. The new ascetic is someone who goes for a walk without their phone or takes a week off Twitter to cleanse themselves. This version of meditation requires no more than the faith that we can all be self-improving part-time gurus. It requires no commitment to a community, and it's cheap.

The corporate world sees that it can make its workers more self-reliant, balanced and focused. What could be better? Take your medicine, because the mindfulness movement is symptomatic of what late capitalism requires of us. A contemplative space opens up where religion used to be. We learn techniques to make us more efficient. This neutered, apolitical approach is to help us personally – it has nothing to say on the structural difficulties that we live with. It lets go of the idea that we can change the world; it merely helps us function better in it.

Living in the moment, non-judgmentally, being more self-aware, it's all good. But, actually, more and more people are switching themselves off. They cannot even watch the news because they feel so powerless to do anything about it.

The mindfulness coalition of life coaches, business people and healers cannot – and does not –promise peace, but why are we to think less when we need to think more?

Something here is, well, mindless. Maybe a mantra is all you need and maybe we should all devote more time to changing our minds. But for the time being I am just letting that thought drift right through me.

Take the enemy to lunch

Elizabeth Lesser - Take the Other to Lunch