Can Sufi Islam be an alternative to Radical Salafism?

Can Sufi Islam counter the Taleban?

Some believe that Pakistan's mystic, non-violent Islam can be used as a defence against extremism (Photos: Kamil Dayan Khan)

a corner of the upper courtyard at the shrine of Baba Shah Jamal in Lahore, famous for its Thursday night drumming sessions.

It's packed with young men, smoking, swaying to the music, and working themselves into a state of ecstasy.

This isn't how most Westerners imagine Pakistan, which has a reputation as a hotspot for Islamist extremism.

Devotional singing

But this popular form of Sufi Islam is far more widespread than the Taleban's version. It's a potent brew of mysticism, folklore and a dose of hedonism.

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Inside the Sufi drumming session at the shrine of Baba Shah Jamal

Now some in the West have begun asking whether Pakistan's Sufism could be mobilised to counter militant Islamist ideology and influence.

Lahore would be the place to start: it's a city rich in Sufi tradition.

At the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh Hajveri, musicians and singers from across the country also gather weekly, to perform qawwali, or Islamic devotional singing.

Qawwali is seen as a key part of the journey to the divine, what Sufis call the continual remembrance of God.

"When you listen to other music, you will listen for a short time, but the qawwali goes straight inside," says Ali Raza, a fourth generation Sufi singer.

"Even if you can't understand the wording, you can feel the magic of the qawwali, this is spiritual music which directly touches your soul and mind as well."

But Sufism is more than music. At a house in an affluent suburb of Lahore a group of women gathers weekly to practise the Sufi disciplines of chanting and meditation, meant to clear the mind and open the heart to God.

One by one the devotees recount how the sessions have helped them deal with problems and achieve greater peace and happiness. This more orthodox Sufism isn't as widespread as the popular variety, but both are seen as native to South Asia.

'Love and harmony'

"Islam came to this part of the world through Sufism," says Ayeda Naqvi, a teacher of Islamic mysticism who's taking part in the chanting.

"It was Sufis who came and spread the religious message of love and harmony and beauty, there were no swords, it was very different from the sharp edged Islam of the Middle East.

"And you can't separate it from our culture, it's in our music, it's in our folklore, it's in our architecture. We are a Sufi country, and yet there's a struggle in Pakistan right now for the soul of Islam."

Sufism is a mixture of music, chanting and meditation

That struggle is between Sufism and hard-line Wahhabism, the strict form of Sunni Islam followed by members of the Taleban and al-Qaeda.

It has gained ground in the tribal north-west, encouraged initially in the 1980s by the US and Saudi Arabia to help recruit Islamist warriors to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

But it's alien to Pakistan's Sufi heartland in the Punjab and Sindh provinces, says Sardar Aseff Ali, a cabinet minister and a Sufi.

"Wahhabism is a tribal form of Islam coming from the desert sands of Saudi Arabia," he says. "This may be very attractive to the tribes in the frontier, but it will never find resonance in the established societies of Pakistan."

So could Pakistan's mystic, non-violent Islam be used as a defence against extremism?

An American think tank, the Rand Corporation, has advocated this, suggesting support for Sufism as an "open, intellectual interpretation of Islam".

There is ample proof that Sufism remains a living tradition.

In the warren of Lahore's back streets, a shrine is being built to a modern saint, Hafiz Iqbal, and his mentor, a mystic called Baba Hassan Din. They attract followers from all classes and walks of life.

'Atrocities'

The architect is Kamil Khan Mumtaz. He describes in loving detail his traditional construction techniques and the spiritual principles they symbolise.

Huge crowds are attracted to Sufi gatherings

He shakes his head at stories of lovely old mosques and shrines pulled down and replaced by structures of concrete and glass at the orders of austere mullahs, and he's horrified at atrocities committed in the name of religion by militant Islamists.

But he doubts that Sufism can be marshalled to resist Wahhabi radicalism, a phenomenon that he insists has political, not religious, roots.

"The American think tanks should think again," he says. "What you see [in Islamic extremism] is a response to what has happened in the modern world.

"There is a frustration, an anger, a rage against invaders, occupiers. Muslims ask themselves, what happened?

"We once ruled the world and now we're enslaved. This is a power struggle, it is the oppressed who want to become the oppressors, this has nothing to do with Islam, and least of all to do with Sufism."

Sufi people are often actively engaged in social welfare programmes

Ayeda Naqvi, on the other hand, believes Sufism could play a political role to strengthen a tolerant Islamic identity in Pakistan. But she warns of the dangers of Western support.

"I think if it's done it has to be done very quietly because a lot of people here are allergic to the West interfering," she says.

"So even if it's something good they're doing, they need to be discreet because you don't want Sufism to be labelled as a movement which is being pushed by the West to drown out the real puritanical Islam."

Back at the Shah Jamal shrine I couldn't feel further from puritanical Islam. The frenzied passion around me suggests that Pakistan's Sufi shrines won't be taken over by the Taleban any time soon.

But whether Sufism can be used to actively resist the spread of extremist Islam, or even whether it should be, is another question.

Life In Kosovo... A duality of worlds

Meti began teaching English part-time in 1992 and went full-time in 1998

In the fourth of five pieces by BBC journalists examining life in Kosovo today, Patrick Jackson meets an Albanian English teacher whose ancestors taught the values of Sufism.

His English is flawless, local knowledge near faultless but having him guide you around Pristina can take awfully long.

Mehmed Sezai Shehu, or Meti as he likes to be known, seems barely able to cross a street without running into an acquaintance in the Kosovan capital.

On the two visits I have met him, a simple stroll about the city centre became a wade through handshakes, jokes and banter.

Not a few of the people knew him from across a kitchen table or a classroom desk because for the past decade, apart from the war period, Meti has been teaching his city English full-time.

Yet if his job is to supply Kosovans with the lingua franca of the modern world, he himself is a living link to an old time of religious mystics at risk of disappearing.

Against the clock

Meti launched his own language school this January, putting secondary-school pupils and post-grad students alike through the TOEFL English test.

Pristina today is very much a young person's city

The language is an essential for entering some local colleges, such as the American University of Pristina, and demand is high.

In the downtown classroom, teaching aids other than the course book include DVDs of the latest TV drama series from the UK and US.

His enthusiasm as a teacher is infectious as he works the class - between six and 12 students at a time - with a mixture of erudition and wit.

"I push them to limits they didn't know existed but the satisfaction I get when they come back to thank me for their exam results is priceless," he says.

When we first met last February, he was teaching at a school inside Pristina's giant sports centre by day and, by night, in his modest flat, where he lives with his wife and two school-age children.

Somehow, he also fitted in translation work in a hectic lifestyle that left him with just a few hours' sleep each night.

"My head only has to hit the pillow, and I am out for the count," he says.

I myself always say that I am first Albanian and that my religion is a private thing Meti

He still conducts a busy social life in Pristina's cafes, where it is somehow a pleasure to watch him shake, then rip open, two sachets of sugar at a time to sweeten his tiny cups of black coffee.

His appetite for life is no mere metaphor, either, just to see him devour a pizza at his favourite 24-hour bakery - "this place has never closed its doors since it re-opened after the war", he boasts.

The war saw Meti enduring the first week of the Nato bombing before being expelled from Pristina by Serbian police and plunged into a refugee existence in Macedonia and Austria.

It is a time he is trying to erase from his memory, he says quietly.

To this day, he can smell a decomposing corpse - Albanian, Serb, nobody could tell - which he saw after his return, in a springtime Kosovan field, while working as an interpreter for international investigators.

Another time

A tiny building, a mere speck in the concrete jungle that is modern Pristina, provides a unique relic of its past in more senses than one.

Dervish pilgrims from outside Kosovo come to the Pristina tekke

It is a tekke, a cross between a house of prayer for Sufi Shia Muslims (dervishes) and a funeral vault, which dates back four centuries.

Inside are several coffins of sheikhs, or religious leaders, draped in green shrouds, including that of the tekke's founder.

The remains of the other sheikhs were brought from tekkes destroyed under communism.

Behind the tekke is something more recent but also quite unique in Pristina: a grave in a tiny garden.

Here lies Meti's paternal grandfather, after whom he was named.

Sheikh Mehmed Sezai Shehu died in 1947 and his last request was for the dervishes not to build a tekke for him, but bury him in his garden.

Family history has it that the communist authorities decreed the night before he died that he had to be buried like everyone else outside the city.

Muhedin's friends come every Sunday

However, in what his family thinks was an act of God, they dropped their insistence the next day without explanation.

Once a week, a small group of his grandfather's elderly dervishes assemble in the tekke along with Meti's uncle, 82-year-old Muhedin Shehu, who looks after the building.

There are mats for them to make themselves comfortable and their gatherings seem to be as much social as religious occasions.

"When I come here, I feel serenity and peace," says Meti.

Dervishes are a minority among Kosovo's Muslims, who are mainly orthodox Sunnis, but Meti has encountered no sectarian strife:

"When you come to Kosovo and ask someone their religion, if they say 'Muslim' you cannot tell by looking at them whether they are Shia or Sunni because there is nothing distinctive here, they don't grow beards like in Bosnia, for instance. Islam here is moderate."

He believes that most Kosovo Albanians define themselves by nationality before religion.

"I myself always say that I am first Albanian and that my religion is a private thing," says Meti, whose maternal uncle was also a sheikh and died in communist Albania in the late 1940s (the exact year is not known).

The great healer

Meti is also a proud citizen of the new state declared this year though he finds it hard to think of himself as Kosovan, rather than Albanian:

How the grave was permitted in the city remains a mystery

"I will teach my children to think of themselves as Kosovars [sic] but I am 43 now and I don't think it will be very easy for me to say 'I'm a Kosovar'. I'm Albanian."

His politics do not mean that he cannot still have Serb friends, admire the frescoes in Kosovo's mediaeval churches or, as a linguist, savour the richness of Serbian swearwords.

In the agency he runs in conjunction with the English school, Meti employs seven Serb freelance translators, who live across Kosovo and work by e-mail.

I ask him if he sees a day when Serbs can accept Kosovan independence.

"Time heals all wounds," he begins.

"I think they will see that this is a new reality which some will embrace. Others will still defy it or pack their bags and leave.

"It won't be their country but they will have dual citizenship, Kosovan and Serbian, and this time will come much faster than some sceptics think."

Meti looks forward to Kosovo, Serbia and the whole region joining the EU and the borders disappearing.

Meanwhile, he goes on fine-tuning the English of Pristina's younger generation.