Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India

2. Piri-Muridi

. 2 . Piri-Muridi Piri-muridi, which refers to the relationship between spiritual master ( pir, shaikh)1 and disciple (murid ), evokes a wider range of associations than most of the academic literature on Sufism would suggest. In fact the didactic and historical literature produced by Sufis and their observers since the eleventh century suggests that a variety of models of piri-muridi has long existed, and that pirs have always incorporated two interconnected roles, tailored to different types of disciples at varying levels of spiritual development .2 Perhaps because until fairly recently in scholarship piri-muridi has been examined primarily through the lens of institutional, formal, and male-centered Sufism, the presence of women—not only as pilgrims and devotees, but also as pirs in their own right—has been largely overlooked. Beginning in the 1970s, a number of studies on devotion to pirs of South Asia—including those by Rafiuddin Ahmed, Asim Roy, Richard Eaton, Catherine Champion, and Tony Stewart in Bengal, Bihar, and the Deccan; Joyce Flueckiger in Hyderabad, India; Sarah F. D. Ansari and Katherine Ewing in Pakistan; Victor C. de Munck in Sri Lanka; Katy Gardner in Bangladesh; Jackie Assayag in South India; Marc Gaborieau in Nepal; and Pnina Werbner among Pakistani Muslims in Britain—began to demonstrate the often fluid nature of pir-murid relationships, as well as the difficulties in placing these relationships squarely within or entirely outside the institutional framework of the establishment Sufi orders.3 Historical Models of the Pir-Murid Relationship The historical, historiographic, and ethnographic evidence for piri-muridi in its South Asian context suggests a tension between classical Sufi formulations of religious authority and local “micronarratives” of spiritual power. This tension is often couched in the language of “Islamic orthodoxy ” by those among the establishment Sufis and their supporters who 68 Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India seek to articulate what anthropologist Talal Asad has referred to as “relation [s] of discursive dominance” with rival claimants to authority in the realm of Sufi belief and praxis. It is hard to overestimate the importance of hierarchies of knowledge and experience in classical Indo-Muslim formulations of spiritual authority—measured in part by an emphasis on comprehension of the extrinsic and “inner” meanings of Islamic foundational teachings and values and in part by a number of other moral and spiritual qualities that are seen to demonstrate the shaikh’s possession of divine grace. In many of the classical didactic texts of Indian Sufism,4 religious authority as represented in the person of the perfected shaikh is underscored by a number of qualifications, some of which have been identified by the Indo-Islamic historians Annemarie Schimmel and Simon Digby. These include control of the lower soul; piety; knowledge of Islamic foundational and Sufi canonical texts; adherence to Shari‘a,5 consanguine descent from the Prophet Muhammad or one of his companions; participation in a lineage of recognized spiritual masters from one of the establishment Sufi orders (represented in part by the genealogical tree, or shajara); understanding of the unseen world, al-ghaib; control over states of ecstasy (in that the shaikh should not be frequently prone to such states); an ability to work miracles and the perspicacity not to showcase them; devotion to the service of ordinary people; and possession of ijaza, or the sanction of prior shaikhs (which, among other things, functions as a testament to the shaikh’s training and spiritual development).6 These qualifications operate as a kind of “script” or “blueprint” for constructing relationships of spiritual exchange and also for recognizing spiritual greatness.7 They are rooted in a fundamental belief in the pir-murid relationship as one based on the power and authority of the pir and the subordination and obedience of the murid, the immediate goal of the relationship being the destruction of the individual ego and the spiritual “awakening” of the murid to the infinite possibilities of the divine. While some of these qualifications have worked discursively to exclude women from exercising authority as recognized pirs of an establishment order, they also serve as a mechanism for constructing new internal configurations that enable the individual believer, regardless of gender, to self-identify on a number of different levels. In this regard they have provided some women with the means to wield spiritual authority and influence within and outside of the establishment Sufi orders, despite a lack of “official” sanction. An...