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154 Conclusion While recent scholarship on Islam has grown increasingly nuanced, much of it continues to presume a binary opposition between legalistic orthodoxy and the mystical tradition of Sufism. There is an underlying presumption that mysticism and legalism, identified respectively with Sufis and the ‘ulama, are essentially two independent and oppositional trends within Islam. In popular discourse, Sufism and Shari‘a (Islamic law) are often deployed as symbolic shorthand for two different visions of Islam: one tolerant, spiritual, and polymorphous, the other uniform, puritanical, and rigid. In this model of Islam, Sufism is closely identified with the first choice, that is, with an Islam more palatable to the tastes of secular modernity and, supposedly, more amenable to the political interests of the West. The other side of the coin is frequently associated with the jumble of isms that have become a familiar part of contemporary journalistic vocabulary: militant Islamism, extremism, fundamentalism, Salafism, and Wahhabism.1 That this is much more than an academic question is demonstrated not only by its appearance in the popular press and public discourse but also by its place in the policy decisions of various state and non-state actors. Thus, the patronage by the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan of Bukhārī’s grandfather’s tomb fits into an overall suggested strategy of support for Sufi institutions—a strategy based on the idea that Sufism and “extremism” are mutually exclusive; to support one is to undermine the other.2 The other side of that coin is the ongoing spate of attacks by militant, Talibanrelated groups on Sufi shrines in Pakistan. Discussions of Islam in South Asia, whether academic or popular, have been especially prone to use Sufism as the label for all that is spiritual, syncretic, nonviolent , poetic, local, heterodox, and apolitical in the religious practices of South Asian Muslims. These elements of Muslim religiosity are thus distinguished and segregated from a putative universal and normative Islam, identified with the Middle East and characterized by a concern for legalistic orthodoxy, scriptural fidelity, scholasticism , and intolerance. Such a binary view of South Asian Islam is most vividly exemplified by stereotyped characterizations of the two seventeenth-century Mughal princely brothers Dārā Shukōh and Awrangzēb—the former a syncretically inclined devotee of Sufi saints and student of Hindu philosophy who lost the imperial throne Conclusion 155 to the latter, a puritanical and intolerant enforcer of Islamic law and Muslim dominance .3 There are several reasons for the potency of this binary approach in the context of South Asia. The millennial history of South Asian Muslims as a minority community identified with imperial power, the visibility of Sufism in the South Asian religious landscape, the partition of the sub-continent on communal lines, and the concomitant rise of historical writing committed to either religious (Hindu and Muslim) or secular nationalist agendas have all resulted in the overuse of Sufism as a catchall category. Sufism, as typified above, is sometimes viewed as “other than Islam,” at other times as “true Islam,” and the choice of labels is a political one. The current crisis of religious extremism in Pakistan and the rise of Hindu nationalism in India have both raised the political stakes in such conceptions of Islam and Sufism. For those Muslims who wish to impose a globally homogeneous variety of Islam, restrict popular religious practices, and exclude marginal groups (especially women) from religious spaces, Sufism—or at least its current manifestation—is “other than Islam.”4 For those who wish to argue that “true Islam” is fundamentally foreign to South Asia and has no place there, Sufism as the catchall category for all Islamic practices that are locally adaptive and cross-culturally attractive is, again, “other than Islam,” a product of the creativity of South Asian culture. On the other hand, for those Muslims who wish to dissociate themselves from a history of Islamic supremacy and domination and from the present vitality of Islamic extremism, Sufism is a useful alternative notion of “true Islam.” Similarly, for those with a stake in furthering the possibility of religious and communal pluralism in South Asia, Sufism, understood as apolitical, tolerant, and locally adaptive, is “true Islam.” The aspects of South Asian Sufism that have attracted the greatest interest from scholars have been precisely those that support the dichotomy between Sufism and Shari‘a-minded Islam: theosophical speculation , poetry and music, syncretic traditions, and the cults of saints and shrines. In contrast, very little scholarship has been done on the...

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