ISIS WAR ON SUFIS
Afghanistan’s Sufis Are Under Attack

Recent bombing of a mosque in Kabul shows the growing security problems facing the Taliban government

Fazelminallah Qazizai     

Afghan followers of Sufism recite poetic verses from the Koran at the Pahlawan Mosque in Kabul, Afghanistan / Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

As I passed through my final years of high school in Kabul, it did not cross my mind that I might be able to go on and study at university. My father had just died from a long illness and, like so many Afghan teenagers, I was already thinking about how I might be able to support my family. We were poor enough that I had only one set of shirt and trousers to wear to my last two years of classes, so I knew I would have to find a job sooner rather than later.

I graduated from school in 2006 and, although times were tough on a personal level, there was a sense of optimism in much of the country back then. It’s true that security was starting to deteriorate, but memories of the 1990s civil war were still fresh in everyone’s minds, and there was a widespread belief that the international community would not abandon Afghanistan again.

After trying and failing to find a job with various NGOs for reasons none of them cared to explain, I was persuaded by one of my younger brothers to visit a local Sufi — “tasawwuf” — mosque in the hope that it might change my luck. I must admit that I initially laughed at his suggestion, not because I disliked Sufis but because I was skeptical of any practices that went against my belief in the more traditional tenets of Islam. I regard myself as a socially progressive Muslim who shows his devotion to God in conventional ways. I could not see how a visit to this particular mosque might be any better for me than praying in my usual mosque or at home. In the end, however, I agreed to go there to boost the morale of my brother and mother.

We cycled to the Khalifa Sahib mosque in Aladdin, a neighborhood in west Kabul near Parliament and the American University, and sat down to talk to one of its scholarly custodians. I remember him being a kind man who listened quietly from under his flat white turban as I explained about my futile search for a job. He then took out some paper talismans and told my brother to burn or smoke one at night. Another one he gave us was to be put in a glass of water, dissolved and drunk the next morning.

We obeyed his instructions and, while my luck didn’t change in the short term, it did eventually. I later found work as a journalist and graduated with a degree in Islamic law from Kabul University. I do not attribute this change in fortune to the Sufi mosque, but I have always looked back on that visit with fondness. I was a young man — a boy, really — going through a hard time, and it meant a lot to me to receive the kindness of a stranger, however eccentric his advice might have been.

Unfortunately, this memory of a more innocent time has taken on a melancholy hue in recent weeks. On April 29 an explosion ripped through that same Sufi mosque after Friday prayers. At least 10 people, and perhaps more than 50, were killed. There is confusion about whether the blast was a suicide attack or the result of a bomb planted at the scene, but it was not an isolated incident. A week earlier, on April 22, the Mawlawi Sekander Sufi mosque in the northern city of Kunduz was hit by a similar attack that killed at least 33 people and wounded dozens more. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for that blast and is also believed to have been behind the bloodshed in Kabul. With Shia Muslims as well as Sufis being increasingly targeted, it is clear that attempts are underway to ignite a sectarian war in Afghanistan. History suggests this will not work, but nothing is certain anymore.

Sufism has roots in this country that are far older than the kind of ideology practiced by the Islamic State. While Afghans are often wary of its more esoteric aspects — such as the way worshipers engage in “dhikr” (chanting) to show their devotion to God — its mysticism has traditionally been a source of comfort for many people here. The sick visit Sufi shrines in search of cures for cancer or depression; infertile women go to them looking for the miracle they need to have a child. This has started to change in recent years and of course it would be better if everyone trusted in science, but it seems churlish to rebuke Afghans for finding hope wherever they can. During times of darkness we occasionally need artificial light.

Sufism is not a sect or a type of jurisprudence but a form of Islamic belief that emphasizes the mystical, peaceful aspects of our religion and prioritizes inner contemplation. As far as the Islamic State is concerned, this is enough to make Sufis idolators. But attacks such as the one on April 29 in Kabul are attacks on the heritage and culture of all Afghans. We do not have to be Sufis to understand and appreciate the role that Sufism has played in our history.

There are four main Sufi orders in Afghanistan and the wider region: the Chishti, the Qadiriyya, the Suhrawardiyya and the Naqshbandi. The Chishti originated near Herat in western Afghanistan, and some of our greatest poets were Sufis. The most famous of them, Jalaluddin Rumi, was born in Balkh in northern Afghanistan in the early 13th century. The United Nations cultural agency (UNESCO) celebrated his work in 2007, the same year I went to the Sufi mosque in Kabul. The U.N. secretary-general at the time, Ban Ki-moon, described Rumi’s work as “timeless” and praised his “humanist philosophy.” We Afghans also claim Abdur Rahman Baba, a 15th- and 16th-century Sufi poet from Peshawar, as one of our own and continue to draw inspiration from his writing.

Afghan Sufis fought against the Soviet occupation of our country in the 1980s, just like more hardline jihadists. Three of the seven Sunni mujahedeen parties during that time were led by Sufis. They may not have been as militarily effective as their rivals, but their followers still made enormous sacrifices in the name of defending Afghanistan and Islam.

Although the Taliban’s relationship with the Sufi community is complex, it is certainly not openly hostile. Afghan Sufi scholars have been vocal in their support for the current government and often refer to Sirajuddin Haqqani, the minister of interior, using the honorific “Khalifa” — a title traditionally given to Sufi disciples who reach scholarly levels of enlightenment. The respect seems both genuine and mutual, and it is arguably a good example of the compromises we Afghans need to make if we want our country to move forward. The shamans who always used to roam around Kabul collecting alms are no longer visible on the streets and seem to have been discouraged from carrying out their rituals in public since the Taliban’s takeover, but that is the only sign I have noticed of the Islamic Emirate possibly acting against Sufism.

This cordial relationship between the government and the Sufi community may be only a small cause for optimism, but it is worth noting. Given the increased activity of the Islamic State of late and the criticisms that have rightly been leveled at some of the Taliban’s more repressive social policies, we need to recognize that there is still some cause for hope. Whether this can be built on may well depend on whether security gets significantly worse.

A month after the attack on the Sufi mosque in Kabul, the Taliban marked the sixth anniversary of the death of their former leader, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in 2016. To honor his memory, several senior officials attended a commemorative event on May 22 in a wedding hall in Kabul, the kind of place that would once have been the scene of raucous late-night parties. Although the atmosphere was measured, the meeting was revolutionary in its own way. The former head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha and current deputy foreign minister, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, used the occasion to call for girls’ schools to be reopened and for women’s rights to be respected. Even that meeting, however, was not allowed to pass peacefully. An explosion hit several vehicles parked outside, causing unknown numbers of casualties. This time a group calling itself the National Liberation Front claimed responsibility. Exactly who they are and what they want is unclear.

These kinds of mysterious attacks took place regularly under the governments of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, and the Taliban will be keen to ensure they do not get out of hand. This spring we have often been without electricity in Kabul because the pylons in the north of the country that supply the city are being routinely targeted in sabotage operations. On the streets here no one is quite sure whether to blame rebel groups linked to the old Northern Alliance or hostile states — or, perhaps, both. Even as I write these lines at home now, I have just heard an explosion in the near distance. I will wait for the sound of ambulance sirens or a call from a friend or relative to find out if anyone was hurt.

Fazelminallah Qazizai is the Afghanistan correspondent at New Lines

June 1, 2022

“Letter from Kabul” is a newsletter in which our contributors provide their own unique glimpses into life on the ground in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan

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 LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for SUFI 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for SUFIS

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for ISIS SUFIS 

 

Inconvenient Truths: The Shia Salah al-Din and 10/7

HE WAS A KURD

by Eric Walberg / October 3rd, 2024

Salah El Din – Salah El Din El Ayoubi – Saladin and Richard the Lionheart

Jerusalem’s hard-fought liberation, now in process, is a recapitulation of the Christian Crusades of the 11th-13th centuries, this time, not by the knight on a white horse of legend, but through the long march of guerilla warfare by the much maligned Shia. This follows on the liberation of Iran from its Judeo-Christian yoke in 1979 and Iraq 25 years later, ironically by the US, forming the second Shia majority state. But it is the Shia minority of Lebanon that holds the keys to Jerusalem. Their 40% of the Lebanese population punches well above their weight in a fractious country split among Christians, and Sunni and Shia Muslims.

Hezbollah was forged in the heat of Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s. The then-rag-tag militia killed over 600 Israeli soldiers, forcing Israel to retreat in humiliation, its first such defeat ever, and by a nonstate actor, a very bad omen, which Israel’s almost daily murder of Palestinians every since cannot erase, and which culminated in 10/7, Israel’s own private 9/11, bringing us to Israel’s carpeting bombing of Lebanon.

It is the Shia of Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen we have to thank for preventing Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians from proceeding smoothly. Sunnis will have to wake up if they don’t want to be left behind by their Shia brothers, their self-satisfied Sunni hegemony cracked open, exposed as the ‘sick man’ of the Middle East, i.e., undermined by imperialism, the same compromised role that destroyed the Ottomans, created post-Ottoman puppet Sunni states, and planted in Palestine a cursed tree, the Quran’s poisonous zaqqum, rooted in the center of Hell, aka the Jewish state.

The Saudis long ago were compromised through a voluntary pact with first British then US imperialism but, until the rise of Muhammed Bin Salman (MBS), were at least keeping up the trappings of Islamic ritual, jealously guarding the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The quietist Saudis effectively blackmailed the Palestinians into accepting an interminable Israeli murderous occupation and creeping (now galloping) theft of their lands, financing Palestinian refugees, but with no promise of liberation, effectively working with not against the enemy.

Now MBS has let the westernizers loose in his kingdom, discarding the hijab, promoting concerts of trashy western rock music, buying British football teams (Newcastle United in 2021). Trump’s Abraham Accords were supposed to lead to a new Middle East with Israel and Saudi Arabia as the kingpins. With October 7 (10/7), the bottom fell out of MBS’s fantasy of a Saudi-Isreali hegemony over the Middle East, leaving the Palestinians in permanent limbo or exile. It didn’t seem to matter to the Saudis and Gulf sheikhs, who long ago lost interest in Palestine. In thie face of this complete betrayal of the Palestinians, of Islam itself, the Shia are the only Muslims to resist the sacrilege of permanent Jewish rule over Palestine and the destruction Islam’s holy sites to build a Third Temple.

Orthodox Sunni Muslims have always feared the moral purity which Shiism was founded on, in opposition to the more worldly, pragmatic Sunni majority. This very productive, though at times deadly, stand-off between the two strands of Islam began with Muhammad’s young cousin Ali being the first convert to Islam after the Prophet’s wife Hadija, Ali’s heroic military career defending the religion during the early, perilous battles immortalized in the Quran, through to the murder of him and his family by power-hungry rivals. The draw of idealism and justice has kept Shiism alive, and from what we see today, it is the saving grace of Islam, pushing back today against deadly secularism. Ultimately, the Sunni will have to admit that the Shia are not just an inconvenient footnote (like MBS et al would have liked to make of the Palestinians).

20th century ummah challenges

All Muslims will agree that the unity of the ummah is the first, most urgent, priority. The Shia, though outliers, strive for this even more, as they face hardline Sunnis who consider them apostates and would be happy to cut them loose or wipe them out. The official Sunni position has wavered over the centuries, but generally grudgingly accepts them. The imperialists of course were happy to use ‘divide and rule’, and they quickly turned a peaceful ummah into quarreling sectarians in India, Pakistan, Iraq, wherever they had the chance.¹ This only really worked for post-Ottoman Iraq and Lebanon, both with large Shia communities mixed (peacefully) with Sunni. But the 20th century was one of increasing division, chaos, everywhere in the ummah. It is still on life support, held together now by the Shia thread, the ‘Shia crescent’, the only link the ummah has to Jerusalem and the Palestinians as they face annihilation, their Sunni brothers helpless or unwilling to save them.

The British official who fashioned the new Iraq in the 1920s, Gertrude Bell, had no time for Shia, who were the majority then as now, but Gertrude had no time for democracy for the dark-skinned. I don’t for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil. She knew how the ulama in Iran had defeated the Shah on his westernizing mission, the famous tobacco fatwa of 1890 that forced the shah to cancel the British concession, and supported the constitution movement for democracy in 1905. The British had no interest in creating a radical Shia majority state and put in place a Sunni puppet king.

Iraq’s long and violent history since then finally undid Gertrude’s machiavellian scheming in 2003, bringing to an end a truly disgusting Sunni dictatorship, and the advent of the first Shia-majority state, the positive effects of which are still being discovered. We can thank the US imperialists (even a broken clock is right twice a day) for stumbling on a winning formula for Islam (and for themselves, for the world). By genuinely promoting electoral democracy (along with opening Iraq to foreign exploitation of Iraq’s oil), it started the ball rolling on Sunni-Shia relations everywhere, including US client number one, the Saudi dictator-king, with his truly downtrodden Shia, who sit on Saudi oil and get only repression, disenfranchisement and lots of beheadings as thanks.

The 20th century path that brought us to our present apocalyptic scenario was long and tragic. The Ottoman ‘sick man of Europe’ collapse at the end of WWI, invaded by the British and French (their Russian allies had already collapsed leaving more spoils for the victors). The end of the caliphate? For atheist Turkish dictator Mustafa Kemal that would have been fine. The Muslim ummah, both Sunni and Shia, anticipated this and had already rallied in its defense with the Khilafa Movement in 1919-1920, supported by other anti-imperialists, including Gandhi and India’s Hindus, who saw the British divide-and-rule as the poison that kept Indians subjugated.

Kemal got his way in 1924, accusing Indian Muslim leaders, who came all the way to Ankara to beg the Turkish strongman to maintain the caliphate, of foreign election interference. As if the caliphate was a Turkish plaything The shock wave reverberated around the world culminating in the World Islamic Congress in Jerusalem in 1931 at the behest of Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, bringing together Muslim leaders from around the world. A truly historic moment in the history of the ummah. But the caliphate was already a pipe dream, with growing Jewish immigration to British Palestine, the intent being to create a Jewish state, an imperial outpost to control the Middle East.

Everywhere, the Muslim world was occupied now by nominally Christian world empires, British, American, French, Dutch, the House of War (vs the ummah, the House of Peace), the the financial strings predominantly in Jewish hands, accounting for the plum Palestine being selected as a future Jewish state, purchased by the elite Jews who financed the British empire. Except for Shia Iran, which was never fully occupied and given an imperial make-over. But Iran also had its atheist modernizer, Reza Shah, who, having tricked the ulama into giving him their blessing initially, left them alone though marginalized. Though he weakened the religious establishment, outlawed the veil, and built industry and infrastructure, he was not so fanatically anti-Muslim He was anti-imperialist, and when WWII broke out, he was deposed by the British to prevent the shah from sending oil to the Germans. That occupation wrankled, and all the foreign devils, British, Russia, American were given the boot when the war ended.

It was the Shia ulama of Iran who were the only ulama to resist imperialism,² supporting the first genuinely independent prime minister, Mossadeq, in 1951 in his effort to kick the British out and take control of the economy. The normally quietist, conservative religious elite had been radicalized despite themselves. When the US moved in to foment a coup in 1953, the invaders were able to get a few religious leaders to bless their scheming, but this blatant imperialist act galvanized all Iranians, and eventually led to the overthrow of the second and last Pahlavi shah in 1979. Newly religious Iran was joined by newly religious Turkey with the coming to power of Recep Erdogan in 2000, who refers to his followers as ‘grandchildren of the Ottomans’. Traditional Sunni-Shia rivals, Turkey and Iran are far from bosom buddies, but the current crisis of the ummah means that differences are put aside.

The second stumbling block for Muslims was the secular reaction to imperialism, Arab nationalism, now competing with Turkish and Persian nationalisms, fashioned as secular identities, undermining a united Islamic identity, central to the ummah. Egypt’s Nasser and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein are the two most notorious nationalist leaders, who led their countries in a death spiral of violent repression of Islam, corruption and failed military ventures.

Nationalism was foreign to Muslims, never the defining ideology, and these nationalist movements failed, with chauvinistic Sunni radicals morphing into violent pseudo-Islamic movements – al-Qaeda, ISIS and Islamic State–Khorasan Province.

With the current US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians, the ummah is coming together again, realizing this is the make-or-break moment for Islam, and that these nationalisms are evaporating in the heat of crisis. Even the perfidious MBS casually announced that there would be no Israeli-Saudi new order until the Palestinians have a real state. The ice is cracking, moving, as Palestine’s spring takes shape out of the Israelis’ ashes and rubble.

Turkey and Iran had secular capitalism imposed from the top to keep the imperialists at bay. Egypt had a brutal British occupation until the 1950s, creating the same secular capitalism as Turkey and Iran, but then came socialistic dictator Nasser in 1951, injecting a new political element. Sadly, he too refused to acknowledge Islam as the bedrock of society, a more genuinely socialistic way of life, his secular vision collapsing with Israeli invasion, leaving Egypt, the largest Middle East country, far weaker now than either of its two Middle East rivals. The Arab states have all remained puppets of imperialism and remain cool to, even resentful of the new Shia vitality and presence. But the Arab masses support the Shia defiance of US-Israel, despising their Quisling leaders.

Puppets and fledging actors

Iran’s revolution in 1979 was bad news for the Saudis, leading to even greater repression of its Shia. Saudi suspicions and fear of Shia have been a terrible ordeal for the 10% of Saudis who are Shia, and a powerful Shia state would naturally push for justice. So instead of making peace with their Shia (and thus, with the new Iran), in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia (and Kuwait) spent $25b (i.e., gave US weapons producers $25b) in support of the brutal, mad thug, Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). When Saddam invaded Kuwait, cashing his US-Saudi IOU for sacrificing half million Iraqi Sunnis-Shia to kill a half million Shia Iranians, Saudi Arabia was unhappy. Not only had Saddam failed to crush Shia Iran, his defeat would mean an angry Shia state next door, which could easily invade and overthrow him.

So King Fahd invited the US forces into the kingdom to invade Iraq and keep the Saudi kingdom as head honcho of the Muslim world. I repeat: King Fahd allowed American and coalition troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian forces were involved both in bombing raids on Iraq and in the land invasion that helped to ‘liberate’ Kuwait, the so-called Gulf War (1990-1991). The ummah, the House of Peace, invaded and occupied by the House of War. MBS’s current free and easy secularism makes sense after all, but not for the ummah.

Why would the US have gone to all the trouble to invade Iraq as part of ‘liberating’ Kuwait, and then leave the (truly odious) dictator Saddam in power? Ask weakling King Fahd, whose fear of a Shia-majority Iraq next door was even greater than his fear of a cowed, murderous Saddam. Pan-Arab nationalism – RIP.

This enduring Sunni-Shia stand-off is the imperialists’ trump card. All the Arab countries are in varying degrees still US puppets, and persecute their Shia because they, the so-called rulers, are weak and fear the implicit critique of their weakness that the morally uncompromised Shia represent. Nigeria, Bahrain, Indonesia, Malaysia have all driven wedges between Sunnis and Shias when it was politically useful. The Sunni masses, looking for a way out of the imperialist straitjacket but educated to despise Shia, looked not to solidarity with all Muslims to fight the looming imperial enemy, but inward to past Sunni experience, the early four Rightly Guided Caliphs, for their inspiration. They downplay the fact that the finally one was Ali, the inspiration of the Shia as sole legitimate caliph of the whole lot. In the 1980s-1990s, frustrated Sunnis coalesced around radical Saudi Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda, various ISIS caliphate dreamers in central Asia, the Caucasus, Africa, internationally, with an unIslamic jihad condoning mass civilian deaths as a key tactic.

This element continues to plague the Sunni world, the whole world. It has undermined the efforts to rebuild Iraq after the 2003 invasion. The Ba’thists were outlawed, leaving the minority Sunni with nothing, so they preferred chaos and road bombs, but Shia long-suffering patience grudgingly brought together ‘good’ Sunni and all the Shia to fight the latest (Sunni) terrorists, ISIS et al.

10/7 was an earthquake, not just for Israel but for Islam, the Sunni-Shia tremors finally syncing on that explosive day, pushing the Sunni establishment into Shia arms. All people of goodwill now rout for the Shia Hezbollah in their battle with Israel to protect the heart and soul of Islam. Paradoxically, this challenge was anticipated by the renewal of relations between the Saudis and Iran in March 2023, anticipating 10/7, an admission that Shia power could not be ignored in the new world order taking shape under China and Russia, quite apart from the central role Iran was now playing in protecting the Palestinians from total annihilation, with the Saudis watching with alarm from the sidelines as their position at the head of the Muslim world was being usurped by events on the ground, including from its own despised 10% Shia, now demanding the same rights as citizens that the Sunnis have.

Democracy really is the answer

It’s finally clear: Arab nationalism has been a flop, as has been Pakistan nationalism, where the 20% Shia must constantly fight Sunni chauvinists. Indian nationalism is worse, following the path of Israel, a racist Zionized Hindutva ideology that exclused all Muslims, Sunni or Shia. Sunni chauvinism under imperialism, taking refuge in nationalism, always undermines the ummah, unless the Shia are a sizable minority or majority, and the government is sufficiently representative. I.e., democratic.

In hindsight, I would argue the road to the liberation of Jerusalem began with Iran’s revoluton in 1979, which put Palestine liberation at the top of its international agenda. The war launched by Iraq was supposed to steamroll through a weakened Iran, as ordered by Saddam’s backers Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, the US and Europe. (What a cynical, bizarre coalition!) Ayatollah Khomeini was brilliant and charismatic, but a poor politician, refusing to end the war when Saddam offered, hoping to liberate Iraq, leading to 100,000s more deaths and seriously weakening and tarnishing the revolution. His hubris was immortalized in telling anecdotes. My favorite: Pakistani dictator Zia had urged the shah in 1977 to crack down even harder on the rebels. When Zia met Khomeini as the shah’s successor a few years later, Khomeini merely asked politely for Zulfikar Bhutto’s life (Zia was Bhutto’s successor) to be spared. No dice. On the contrary, Zia advised Khomeini not to tangle with a superpower. Khomeini retorted he would never do such a thing and in fact always relied in the superpower. Ouch! That only made Zia persecute his Shia even more.

Arab secular states can’t unite when they are headed by dictators like Assad, Nasser, the Jordanian and Saudi king-dictators. Corrupt dictatorships don’t make good allies. The need for democracy is obvious. Iraq hopefully can be the model for Sunni and Shia learning to work together again under a robust electoral democracy. Sunni and Shia lived more or less till Saddam and sons really began their madness.³

The end of Saddam moved the Shia-Sunni ‘battle lines’ 200 miles west, now running through Baghdad, which was precisely what Gertrude Bell, Saddam and the imperialists had all tried to prevent. History takes its revenge. The chauvinistic Sunni hegemony of the Muslim world is finished. The Sunni hegemons tried to overthrow Khomeini and failed. The same battle took place 12 years later in Iraq and failed again due to Shia patience in the face of Sunni-inspired terror. Thousands of Saudi and Jordanian youth went to Iraq after 2003 to fight the occupation (and looming Shia hegemony) and die, just like they did in their misguided jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Their violent self-sacrifice only digging the Sunni world deeper into a state of humiliation. 85% of ISIS in Syria working alongside the US imperialists are Saudi. They are there solely to fight the ‘sons of al-Alqami’, referring to the Shia vizier when the Mongols razed Baghdad in 1258.

Now the Sunni are exposed as helpless in the face of Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, are actually helping ‘protect’ US-Israel from Iranian bombs intended for Israel. The Sunni world is humiliated, betraying Islam, kowtowing to not just the US but US-Israel. To defeat (Sunni-inspired) ISIS, the ‘good’ Iraqi Sunnis even had to welcome help from not just Iraq Shias (the army) but also Iran. It is high time to bury the hatchet of envy and suspicion, and join the Shia, if only because they hold the fate of the ummah in their hands.

The ‘bad’ Sunnis (regime elites) are still supporting the US-led war on terror. Their goal is still to wreck the new, Shia-led Iraqi state and keeping the lid on their own pressure-cookers, looking over their shoulders at the (failed) Arab Spring of 2011. The Sunni elites do US-Israel’s work for it. At the same time, they are angry with the US for complicity in Shia revival, undermining House of Saud, contributing to the decline in its religious legitimacy. MBS’s secular turn is more a parody of soft power, which only undermines (Sunni) Islam. The Saudi treatment of its own Shia mirrors Israeli treatment of Palestinians.⁴ Sadly, it is only because Palestinians have some shred of legal independence as part of the post-WWII internationally agreed policy of decolonization that this instance of apartheid is being fought openly. Anti-Muslim apartheid is actually alive and well but hidden behind national borders (China, Myanmar).

What remains of the insurgency in Iraq today is an alliance of Jordanians, Saudis and Iraqi Ba’thists. Syria and Saudi are both ripe for change, with Iraq and Iran as their models, but especially Iraq, with its more open, competitive elections and its large Shia population. The main legacy of the Iraq invasion was to make the Shia case, which means fighting Sunni extremism and terrorism, exposing the US Global War on Terror (GWOT) as a fraud (produced more (Sunni) terror), cementing Shiism as the adult in the room, holding the Islamic faith secure by a string, open to democracy.

21st century the Shia century?

This is already happening. Islamic Iran from the start allied with all anti-imperialist countries. Its revolution echoes the idealism of the Russia revolution of 1917, both of which were met by invasions by western powers and/or proxies, and both succeeding against all odds, based very much on ideological zeal for the good of mankind. Both also became authoritarian states, with elections but with limited choice. Iran’s elections are much more credible, and the election of reformers like Khatami and now Pezeshkian show there is room for real public debate. As with all countries victim to US ire, survival trumps all finer nuances, which are put on hold. Show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are. Iran’s allies are the anti-imperialist good guys.

In contrast to the Arab states, with their muddled Islamo-nationalisms, which have failed to fashion a Sunni identity independent of imperialism, and which still exclude Shia. A shame that Shia find better allies on the secular left, with largely common political, economic and cultural goals, above all peace. Like the Jews at the heart of Bolshevism, Iraq’s Communist Party was full of Shia intellectuals (e.g., poet Muzaffar al-Nawwab). The Iraqi town Shatra in the Shia south was nicknamed Little Moscow. The Shia have a natural affinity for the secular left, supporting the underdog. The Iraqi Communist Party was reorganized after the Iraq war and its leader Hamid Majid Musa was part of the governing body the US set up. The communists wanted peace as do all communists, Islamic Iran and Iraq want peace (salam) more than anything. Neither the communists nor the ummah were/are aggressive, expansionist. Both offer(ed) a way of life that doesn’t have war built in as its engine. The communist alternative was social/state ownership and planning. The Islamic alternative is a mix of state direction/ownership and limited capitalism. There are no billionaires who aren’t emigres already. That kind of money lust is alien to a devout society or a communist one.

Iran and Hezbollah are suffering Israel’s truly Satanic war crimes alongside their Palestinian brothers. Meanwhile the Gulf and Saudi sheikh-dictators, the Egyptian no-pretense-dictator, the Jordanian British-installed-king sit on the sidelines cursing the Palestinians for disturbing their sleep. They actually come to Israel’s aid – Egypt and Jordan are official allies of Israel – when Iran tries to hurt poor little Israel, as they already did in April 2024. The US is well aware that the Jordanian and Egyptian masses are very unhappy, but it relies on its local puppet dictators to keep the lid on the pressure-cooker, and is very cautious about exporting one-man-one-vote after its painful and expensive experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the former once again Taliban, the latter in league with Iran against the Great Satan, which just happens to include itself, US-Israel. So don’t hold your breath for US pressure to make its dictators relinquish power. 2011 was a close call, not to be repeated.

As for the Palestinians, they were completely left out of the negotiations about their future following the 1973 Egypt-Israel war. Sold out by (atheist, Sunni) Sadat with an empty promise. The past half century has been unremitting hell for the Palestinians, who were kicked out of Jordan in the 1970s, many ending up in southern Lebanon, living with the Shia there. This is the origins of Musa al-Sadr’s Amal and after his assassination, Hezbollah. This happened during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, forging of a new force to confront Israel, which was given a huge boost with the Islamic revolution in Iran. Suddenly there was a ‘Shia crescent’, a genuine quasi-state opposition to Israel that functioned outside the imperial constraints.

Musa al-Sadr represented the best of the Shia tradition, an activist cleric engaged in the life of his community, unafraid to speak truth to power. He earned a law degree from (shah-era) Tehran university. His Amal militia ran social services and acted as a political organization, a challenge to the fiction of pan-Arab unity and the unyielding reality of Sunni hegemony. Iran’s IRGC was organized by veterans of Amal training camps. Amal represented a political threat to the Arab and Palestinian establishment, and his assassination by Gaddafi was clearly a Sunni move to quash a Shia upstart.⁵ But he (and Israel’s brutal occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s) inspired the formation Hezbollah, which killed 654 Israeli soldiers in a few years and pushed a humiliated Israel out of Lebanon in 1985.

‘Good’ Sunnism is reviving but more in the emigre communities, largely in the US/Canada, Europe, Australia/ New Zealand, where there are now communities of mainstream Sunni and Shia as well as sects (Ismaili, Yazidi, Ahmadiya, Bahai’s). This young, well educated, assertive diaspora radically challenges the Sunnia world, as a new generation of Muslims takes electoral democracy for granted, and were able to gain equal rights as citizens in the ‘House of War’, which meant fight for Palestine against Israel. Effectively the need for young, educated workers to fuel its capitalist machine ended up importing the ‘enemy’ to the heart of imperialism. As these mostly Sunni Muslims spread their message of ‘goodwill to all men’, colonized, persecuted Palestine has gradually gained the edge over colonizer, persecutor Israel. They are joined by a growing community of converts, as people find out about Islam from friendly, law-abiding neighbors. Islam is the fastest growing religion everywhere.

The Shia are Islam’s ‘wandering Jews’ but without the usury, so they have a presence on all continents, mostly persecuted (or just ignored) by Sunni majorities (but not everywhere). The Sunni too are like the Jews with their world network, a persecuted minority (but not everywhere). In fact, Sunni emigres are free to criticize Israel and their own native Muslim-majority countries in the West, where, say, in Egypt or Pakistan that could land them in jail or worse. As with the Jews, the spread of both Sunni and Shia presence virtually everywhere creates a powerful network for mutual support, to ensure both Shia and Sunni, emigre and domestic, are vital parts of the ummah, all devoted to defending Palestine and liberating Jerusalem. A kind of benign Judaism.⁶ Democracy brings power to Shia majorities and give voice to minorities, resisting Sunni terrorists. The goal remains the liberation of Jerusalem, but the center of gravity has shifted from Saudi Arabia, Egypt to Iran and Iraq, now stretching from Lebanon and Syria along the Shia axis of resistance.

The US allies with the pragmatic Sunni dictators, hates, targets Shia, but they are the best defense against real terrorists (Saudi/ Jordanian ‘jihadists’, ISIS, US-Israel). Standing up to tyranny is never popular with tyrants. By overthrowing Saddam, the US unwittingly paved the way for the Shia revival. Ayatollah Sistani brilliantly used the opening to guarantee democratic Shia hegemony in Iraq as a model for a renewed Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, in short, the Muslim ummah. The Iraqi Shia proved that it is possible to work with the US and not compromise. Sistani refused to meet with US officials: Mr Bremer, you are American I am Iranian. Leave it up to the Iraqis to devise their constitution. He challenged US plans to hand power to Allawi, Chalabi. Insisted on one-person, one-vote. When the US refused, he called for large demos over five consecutive days until the US relented.⁷

Iraqi Shia abandoned the Iraqi nationalism of Saddam. The renewed nationalism is firmly nonsectarian, uniting the ummah. This is a powerful message to the other Arab states. It is fitting that Palestine has brought the Sunni to the Shia-led defense of Jerusalem. Israel can be defeated only by a united ummah which acts wisely, with restraint, indefatigable. It is also a message to Israel and the Palestinians about inventing a new nationalism based on peace and reconciliation.

ENDNOTES:

• 1
  To give the US occupiers of Afghanistan 2001–2022, they made sure Afghan Shia, the Hazars, were given full rights in the new constitution, where the state was carefully dubbed Islamic, reflecting the new identity-politics imperialism.
• 2
  Sunni Sufis resisted imperialism (Algeria, Caucasus) but never the Sunni establishment. Grand Mufti of Egypt Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) was a westernizing reformer. His legendary friend (Shia) Jamal al-Afghani was anti-imperialist but didn’t manage to do much.
• 3
  Democracies are not immune from this as Biden’s pathetic defense of his son shows how family concerns can seriously undermine any legacy of good the leader accomplishes.
• 4
  They have no public voice, all 300 Shia girls’ schools have Sunni headmistresses, they sit on the oil wealth and get only low paid jobs, scholars get their heads chopped off, etc.
• 5
  Probably out of jealousy, as he saw himself as the savior of Palestine. See Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival, 2006, p 113.
• 6
  This could be why Israel so detests Iran. Initially, Israel was admired by Iranian intellectuals. Jalāl Āl-e-Ahmad visited Israel in 1962 and recorded his experiences in The Israeli republic (1962). But when he observed the treatment of Palestinians, he soured and Iranians broadly criticized ‘westoxification’, anticipating the revolution’s clear anti-imperialism. Only Iran really ‘gets’ imperialism.
• 7
  Vali Nasr, op.cit., p175.RedditEmail

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.

Sufis strive to protect their heritage in war-torn Libya



Issued on: 22/08/2021 - 

A 2012 attack forced the Sufi seminary in the Libyan town of Zliten to close, but in recent years it has discreetly reopened to students of the mystical Islamic tradition Mahmud TURKIA AFP

Zliten (Libya) (AFP)

Bullet holes scar the minaret of the Sufi mosque in Libya's Zliten, but followers of the Muslim mystical tradition are working to renovate and preserve their heritage.

A handful of students sit cross-legged on the floor of the mosque in the Asmariya zawiya, transcribing on wooden tablets as their teacher chants Koranic verses.

Elsewhere in the complex, named for its 16th-century founder Abdessalam al-Asmar, scholars pore over old manuscripts on theology and Islamic law.

The zawiya -- an Arabic term for a Sufi institute offering a space for religious gatherings, Koranic education and free accommodation to travellers -- also includes a boarding school and a university.

Historian Fathi al-Zirkhani says the site is the Libyan equivalent of Cairo's prestigious Al-Azhar University, a global authority in Sunni Islam.

But despite Sufism's long history across North Africa, Libya's plunge into chaos after dictator Moamer Kadhafi was ousted in a 2011 revolt gave a free hand to militias.

They included hardline Islamists, who are deeply hostile to Sufi "heretics" and their mystical nighttime ceremonies aimed at coming closer to the divine.

"(Previously) dormant ideological currents, with backing from abroad, took advantage of the security vacuum to attack the zawiyas," Zirkhani said.

In August 2012, dozens of Islamist militants raided the site, blowing up part of the sanctuary, stealing or burning books and damaging Asmar's tomb.

But today, craftsmen are busily restoring terracotta tiles and repairing damage caused by the extremists.

Students at the Asmariya zawiya come from all corners of the Islamic world to study the Sufi tradition, which has a long history in North Africa 

Mahmud TURKIA AFP

The tomb is surrounded by scaffolding but still bears its green silk cover, delicately embroidered with gold.

The zawiya hosts several hundred students, including many from overseas, who enjoy free food and lodging.

"I came to Libya to learn Koran here," said Thai student, Abderrahim bin Ismail, in faltering Arabic.

Houssein Abdellah Aoch, a 17-year-old from Chad wearing a long blue tunic, said he was working hard to commit verses to memory.

"I'm hoping to memorise the entire Koran then go home and become a religious teacher," he said.

- 'Fear and mistrust' -

When the call to prayer rings out, all rise and head through an arcaded courtyard to the mosque for noon prayers.

Libya's longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi viewed the Sufis with suspicion but after his 2011 overthrow, Sunni extremists posed a greater threat to the mystics 

Mahmud TURKIA AFP

It is a scene repeated daily for hundreds of years, but the zawiya has had a turbulent few decades.

Kadhafi, who ruled Libya with an iron fist for four decades after seizing power in a 1969 coup, was suspicious of the Sufis.

"He infiltrated the zawiya with his secret services, creating a climate of fear and mistrust," said an employee, who asked to remain anonymous.

"Kadhafi chose to divide the Sufis to control them better."

But Kadhafi's authorities "loosened the stranglehold in the mid-1990s, which allowed the zawiyas to regain their autonomy," he added.

After Kadhafi's overthrow in 2011, another danger emerged. The attack in Zliten, on the Mediterranean coast east of Tripoli, was echoed across the country.

Islamist militants used diggers and pneumatic drills to destroy numerous Sufi sites across Libya -- attacks echoed in Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere.

Zirkhani says the people who attacked the complex in Zliten were "extremists known to the state".

But in the chaos of post-revolt Libya, they have never been held to account.

The zawiya has also suffered from a lack of funds as it seeks to rebuild and restore its treasures.

Zirkhani showed AFP dusty old manuscripts he wants to preserve for posterity.

The seminary has a large collection of old Islamic manuscripts that historian Fathi al-Zirkhani is eager to preserve for posterity

 Mahmud TURKIA AFP

"We have neither the means nor the know-how to restore them," Zirkhani said. "We need help from (UN cultural agency) UNESCO and European institutions."

But there are some signs of hope for Sufis in Libya.

The zawiya was closed for six years following the 2012 attack. But in 2018 it discreetly reopened, and Sufis have been able to exercise their customs more publicly.

Last October in Tripoli, they took to the streets of the old city to celebrate the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed -- a festival frowned upon by more austere currents of Islam.

© 2021 AFP

Afghanistan on the Verge of Religious Terrorism and Sectarian Warfare

July 22, 2022
By Ajmal Sohail



In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s position towards the Salafists has become punitive and ruthless once again. Albeit followers of numerous religious Sects live in Afghanistan, such as Ismailia, Shia, Jafri, Ahle-Hadith/Wahhabis, and Sunni-Hanafi. The position of the Taliban militants concerning the Sunni-Hanafi religion is soft and the level of danger to its followers is very low and even zero, compared to followers of other religions. Nevertheless, there are three religious sects, whose followers are utmost risk, and are under the greatest threat and danger.

These three religious groups are particularly tarnished in Afghanistan, since they are assumed to be the elements of foreign intelligence organizations and are used for a common intelligence goal. The first category is the Shias, whose lives are currently under threat in the country, and there are always deadly attacks on their religious ceremonies. Even the Taliban militants intervene in their rites, while disrupting their religious rituals and beating them up. Meantime, attacks against the Shia religions by the Daesh group or using the name of this group have been intensified, while slaying them, are tactics of foreign intelligence especially CIA.

Steering an intelligence war tactics in the name of religion between Daesh/Salafi and Shia religions in Afghanistan, like Mosul and other parts of Iraq, which will in turn strain the relations between the new administration of the Taliban of Afghanistan and Iran, is part of the CIA’s policy. Because it will force Iran to use the Fatimun proxy group to defend the right of the Shia religion’s followers in Afghanistan. Thus, the practice of anti-Taliban armed forces and fronts against the Taliban to indirectly control the Taliban in Afghanistan is a special part of the US foreign policy. Nonetheless, if the US wants to directly control the Taliban, then they are supposed to intervene militarily, or apply tremendous external pressure on the Taliban, to get them abide by the US policy.

However, after August 15, the United States used some methods to directly control the Taliban, but the result was deleterious. Because the relationship between America and the Taliban has strained and the United States almost lost control over, this organized and faith-based armed militia. Consequently, the United States, with the help of the Daesh group or using its name, incited the followers of the Shiite religion against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

As they want to create such anti-Taliban fronts against the Taliban in Afghanistan letting other countries support them financially, providing them with training centers and sanctuaries, and on the international level, they will be defamed, while benefiting America indirectly. The United States will keep the Taliban amused by claiming to defend the Taliban against those groups, and in some cases, the United States will conduct airstrikes to defend the Taliban against the anti-Taliban fronts. Actually, the US tries to wage a religious and ethnic war in Afghanistan, by means of the Daesh group to multiply the heat of the civil war in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the first juncture of the civil war, is the use of the Daesh group against the Shia religions in Afghanistan, and for the defense of Shia sects, Iran will deploy its proxy-armed groups, namely Fatimiun fighters. Keeping the ethnic war upward in Afghanistan, the main victims are supposedly Tajiks, Hazaras and other non-Pashtun tribes, but the likely victims of this war will be Pashtuns as well.

The second sect’s follower whose lives are under severe threat and danger, are Ahle-Hadith/ Wahhabis/Salafis. The Wahhabi religion has many followers in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In Afghanistan, Wahhabis are called by the Taliban as Khariji and the pedigrees of ISIS. Henceforth, its followers have been either killed, missing or persecuted.

Wahhabis, whose financial supporters are said to be the Gulf countries, customarily some of their citizens are active members of Daesh.

The third sect of which followers’ lives are currently under threat in Afghanistan are the Ahle-tasawuf/ Sufis, whose followers were targeted and their worship places have been blown up recently.

Subsequently, a new phase of intelligence warfare between the US’ CIA and Iran’s VAJA, thru their proxies will begin, and Afghanistan will turn into a hotbed of state sponsored Jihadi terrorism, which will in turn extensively divide Afghanistan into numerous fronts. Moreover, the contemporary values such as democracy, peace, political stability, republicanism and social-market economy will remain vague and unachievable.



Ajmal Sohail



Ajmal Sohail is Co-founder and Co-president of Counter Narco-terrorism Alliance Germany and he is National Security and counter terrorism analyst. He is active member of Christian Democratic Union (CDU)as well.

HISTORY: PUNJAB IN JERUSALEM

Muhammad Huzaifa Nizam 

DAWN

Published October 15, 2023 U

The Indian hospice in 1945 | Photo courtesy Ahmad Al-Ansari

To the average observer looking from a distance, the Islamic history of modern Pakistan appears to be a kaleidoscopic mesh of ever-shifting empires, forever-marching armies, and a saga of never-ending imperial objectives.

Upon closer inspection, one finds the nature of Islamic history in the Indus Valley is intertwined with pious men, known as preachers, Sufis, saints, and by other names, who traversed the region and introduced Islam to the locals. The nature of their wanderings connected people, cultures and languages, but also sought to connect distant lands.

One such connection, laid down around 800 years ago, has survived into our modern day. It is in the form of a building in the heart of Jerusalem, established by one of Punjab’s greatest saints and poets: Baba Farid.

The fall of Jerusalem

In the year 1187, soon after Crusader forces were annihilated on the plains of Hattin in Palestine, the gates of Jerusalem looked upon a victor who stood before them: Saladin. The Kurdish leader, by routing the Christian forces and annexing a large part of the Crusader state in Palestine, had fulfilled his long-term ambition of liberating the Holy Land.

But even with the physical liberation, much work was yet to be done in the spiritual domain. Decades of Crusader rule had led to many Islamic monuments being used for all kinds of purposes except for which they were made.

Hence, one of the first acts committed by Muslim forces was a ‘cleansing’ of the city, whereby Muslim monuments such as the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock (amongst many others) were rid of any remnants of Crusader rule.

A residential lodge in the holy city of Jerusalem is known by the name of Punjab’s most beloved poet, Baba Farid. How did this come to be?

With a new Muslim administration in place, the city of Jerusalem appears to have reclaimed its position among what can be considered a triad of sacred cities in Islamic history. The notion of a reunion of these holy cities, promoted by the Ayyubid monarchs, soon translated to the city becoming a place frequented by groups of Muslim pilgrims on their way to Mecca.

In addition, it became an important destination for many significant scholars, preachers and holy men of the time, who all wished to simply spend time in the holy city. While the Ayyubid administration was busy reviving Jerusalem, one such preacher whose feet would wander across the old city was still busy as a young man being tutored in the city of Multan.

A lithograph of Jerusalem in 1839 by Scottish painter David Roberts

The Saint from Kothewal

Born in the small village of Kothewal near Multan around 1173 CE, Farid al-Din Masud came from a family which had once enjoyed a significant position in the environs of Kabul, but which had migrated to Punjab generations ago owing to a fear of the increasing power of the nomadic Ghuzz tribes of Central Asia.

Raised in a deeply Islamic household, with a mother intent on cultivating a religious character in her son, Farid got his early Islamic education in a madrassa attached to a mosque in Multan where, amongst many things, he became proficient in Arabic and Persian.

But it was the language of the land where he lived which brought to him eternal prominence. Farid is amongst the very first people to have used the vernacular of Punjab to spread his message, which led to it travelling farther than the messages of those before him. He is, as a result, considered amongst the earliest poets of the Punjabi language.

It was in the same madrassa in southern Punjab that he came across the acclaimed Sufi Bakhtiyar Kaki, and was enrolled in the Chishti order. His unchallenged devotion towards his order and unparalleled proficiency in theological matters is said to have attracted many of the then non-Muslim groups of Punjab towards him and his message.

It was somewhere between his wanderings in Punjab and beyond to spread his message and his eventual settling down in the small town of Ajodhan (now Pakpattan) that it appears he arrived in the recently liberated city of Jerusalem.

Baba Farid and Jerusalem

Early sources on the life of Baba Farid are more or less silent on any visits or wanderings of the saint beyond his own region, which makes it difficult to reconstruct the occurrences of his stay in Jerusalem.

According to folk memory, much of the duration of the revered saint’s stay in the holy land was spent in the state of fasting and a good deal of his day would be spent praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque or engaging in acts of devotion.

It is also said that he devoted some of his time to writing new verses of his own, which later became the bedrock of Punjabi poetry for centuries. On the few occasions he would not be occupied with praying or writing, Farid could be found meditating around one of the gates of Old Jerusalem known to the Muslims as Bab-az-Zahra and to the Christians as Herod’s Gate.

It was around this very Herod’s Gate that Baba Farid found a lodge inside a small khanqah. Also known as zawiyas, khanqahs were structures dedicated to Sufi orders, which served both as seminaries for the people associated with the order and as hospices for travellers. The immediate fall of Jerusalem saw the confiscation of many buildings belonging to the exiled Franks and turned into khanqahs, which further attracted Sufis and preachers towards Jerusalem.

It was a khanqah belonging to the Rifai order and present on a small hillock inside Herod’s Gate where Baba Farid found himself resting — unbeknownst to both him and the owners of the khanqah that his brief sojourn would completely alter the fate of this khanqah.

The current entrance to the Indian hospice | Photo by Satdeep Gill

The Zawiya Al-Faridiya

Soon after the departure of Baba Farid, the khanqah — previously occupied by the Rifai order as a hub for their activities — quickly transformed into a hospice and a lodge for all travellers from South Asia who entered Jerusalem.

This lodge was now known locally by two names: the Zawiya Al-Faridiya (the Lodge of Farid) and the Zawiya Al-Hindiya (the Lodge of Hind). Much like its two popular names, there are two popular tales which have survived to narrate how this change of association came to be, with one tale emphasising how the Chishti order of Sufism, to which Baba Farid belonged, eventually went on to buy the khanqah in the name of the saint.

The other speaks of how the then Ayyubid authorities of Jerusalem recognised the spiritual standing of the saint and, in this regard, decided to grant the zawiya either to Baba Farid directly or to some of his disciples who later visited the city.

With the turn of the centuries, the region saw much political upheaval, but the lodge appears to have managed to survive it all. It possibly remained a witness to the various later Crusades launched by the Europeans, to the Mongol horsemen galloping towards their ultimate doom in the plains of Ain Jalut at the hands of the Mamluks, and to the later march of the Ottomans who eventually defeated the Mamluks and established Ottoman rule in Palestine for centuries.

Despite all the conflicts and turmoil, the lodge finds itself in the small list of structures which, albeit in a decrepit state, managed to stay erect till the very end of direct Muslim control of the region.

Not much knowledge exists about the sheikhs and heads of the lodge during the many intervening centuries, but some documents from the Ottoman era which have survived down to our time point towards a connection of the lodge to Punjab in particular.

A document from 1681, revealed to an Indian researcher Navtej Sarna by the current sheikh, reveals details of a dispute about the leadership of the lodge between a Muslim carrying the nisbah Al-Hindi and a Muslim from Multan in southern Punjab.

Another document related by the same source provides a reference towards another Muslim from Punjab, as it speaks of a certain sheikh named Ghulam Mohammad Al-Lahori who is credited to have engaged with the Ottoman administration in 1824 and successfully conducted a transfer of properties, which resulted in the addition of seven rooms, two water tanks, and a courtyard to the original lodge.

It seems the lodge enjoyed prominence and stability under sheikhs from across South Asia during the many centuries of Ottoman rule, but the story takes a drastic turn when the Ottoman empire itself finally gave way in 1919.

Sheikh Nazir Hasan Ansari of Saharanpur | Photo courtesy Anis Ansari


A turbulent change of owners

The Ottoman Empire, which at the time was known as ‘the sick man of Europe’, was eventually dismembered by the end of World War I, with much of its former territories in the Middle East becoming occupied by European forces.

Palestine remained under the watchful shadow of the Union Jack and, thus, so did Jerusalem and the lodge of Farid. As the British occupation of Palestine set in, with time, the position of the Grand Mufti of Palestine was established by the Europeans, who also greatly strengthened it in pursuit of effective management.

By 1921, the position had come down to the hands of one Amin Al-Husayni, who undertook massive rebuilding projects and renovations in Jerusalem to bring it once again to the centre stage of the Muslim world. To accumulate funds for these projects, the Grand Mufti sent envoys to any and every possible Muslim patron across the world, many of whom at the time could be found in the form of Muslim rulers of princely states in British India.

It was during this very visit that the envoys from Jerusalem informed the leaders of the Indian Khilafat Movement of the existence of an ‘Indian Lodge’, which was in a decrepit state and desperately required a capable Indian person to look after it.

This Indian lodge was, in fact, the same lodge of Farid, and chosen by the Indian Muslim leaders to breathe a new life into it was a young man from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, named Khwaja Nazir Hasan Ansari.

Thus, the lodge came under the administration of the Ansari family of Uttar Pradesh, who still look after it. Nazir Ansari got a hold of the lodge in 1924 and, in a brief time, managed to completely renovate it and brought it to such a credible state that, for the next 15 years, it gave sanctuary to thousands of travellers and pilgrims from British India.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the lodge, which was housing pilgrims, now offered sanctuary to Muslim and non-Muslim soldiers of British India alike fighting in North Africa. It would later resume its duties towards pilgrims in the post-war period, until the British withdrew and the frenzy of war began once again.

A British soldier standing guarding at the Dome of the Rock during WWI

Conclusion

The end of the Second World War in 1945 was soon followed by the withdrawal of British authorities from both British India and the British Mandate of Palestine, with ironically two new states forming in both regions that immediately went to war.

With the exodus of the Palestinians, the war with the nascent Israeli state, and the refugees pouring in from West Jerusalem, the lodge eventually could not run on its own and help was sought. For this, Nazir Ansari reached out to the Indian embassy in Egypt and established an official relationship between the lodge of Farid and the newly independent Indian state.

Today, many decades later, the lodge proudly displays two Indian flags at its entrance, with a nameplate reading ‘Indian Hospice’. And though one could debate if the state of Pakistan has much more of a right to a connection with the lodge — owing to Baba Farid’s ancestry being in this country — it cannot be so, amongst a plethora of reasons, simply because Pakistan has no official ties with the state of Israel.

Perhaps, in the future, a shift in the circumstances of the Palestinians could lead to a linkage being established between the lodge and the homeland of the person who established it. For now, it suffices to know that there does exist in the heart of one of the world’s most important cities, a corner occupied by a piece of Punjab.

The writer’s areas of interest are Pakistan’s lesser known history and folklore. He is a Chitrali based in Peshawar. X:MHuzaifaNizam

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 15th, 2023

The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?

Caffeine makes us more energetic, efficient and faster. But we have become so dependent that we need it just to get to our baseline

Photograph: Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images

The long read

by Michael Pollan
Tue 6 Jul 2021

After years of starting the day with a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea at intervals, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not something that I particularly wanted to do, but I had come to the reluctant conclusion that the story I was writing demanded it. Several of the experts I was interviewing had suggested that I really couldn’t understand the role of caffeine in my life – its invisible yet pervasive power – without getting off it and then, presumably, getting back on. Roland Griffiths, one of the world’s leading researchers of mood-altering drugs, and the man most responsible for getting the diagnosis of “caffeine withdrawal” included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, told me he hadn’t begun to understand his own relationship with caffeine until he stopped using it and conducted a series of self-experiments. He urged me to do the same.

For most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness. Something like 90% of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, and the only one we routinely give to children (commonly in the form of fizzy drinks). Few of us even think of it as a drug, much less our daily use of it as an addiction. It’s so pervasive that it’s easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness but, in fact, an altered state. It just happens to be a state that virtually all of us share, rendering it invisible.

The scientists have spelled out, and I had duly noted, the predictable symptoms of caffeine withdrawal: headache, fatigue, lethargy, difficulty concentrating, decreased motivation, irritability, intense distress, loss of confidence and dysphoria. But beneath that deceptively mild rubric of “difficulty concentrating” hides nothing short of an existential threat to the work of the writer. How can you possibly expect to write anything when you can’t concentrate?

I postponed it as long as I could, but finally the dark day arrived. According to the researchers I’d interviewed, the process of withdrawal had actually begun overnight, while I was sleeping, during the “trough” in the graph of caffeine’s diurnal effects. The day’s first cup of tea or coffee acquires most of its power – its joy! – not so much from its euphoric and stimulating properties than from the fact that it is suppressing the emerging symptoms of withdrawal. This is part of the insidiousness of caffeine. Its mode of action, or “pharmacodynamics”, mesh so perfectly with the rhythms of the human body that the morning cup of coffee arrives just in time to head off the looming mental distress set in motion by yesterday’s cup of coffee. Daily, caffeine proposes itself as the optimal solution to the problem caffeine creates.

At the coffee shop, instead of my usual “half caff”, I ordered a cup of mint tea. And on this morning, that lovely dispersal of the mental fog that the first hit of caffeine ushers into consciousness never arrived. The fog settled over me and would not budge. It’s not that I felt terrible – I never got a serious headache – but all day long I felt a certain muzziness, as if a veil had descended in the space between me and reality, a kind of filter that absorbed certain wavelengths of light and sound.

I was able to do some work, but distractedly. “I feel like an unsharpened pencil,” I wrote in my notebook. “Things on the periphery intrude, and won’t be ignored. I can’t focus for more than a minute.”

Over the course of the next few days, I began to feel better, the veil lifted, yet I was still not quite myself, and neither, quite, was the world. In this new normal, the world seemed duller to me. I seemed duller, too. Mornings were the worst. I came to see how integral caffeine is to the daily work of knitting ourselves back together after the fraying of consciousness during sleep. That reconsolidation of self took much longer than usual, and never quite felt complete.

Humanity’s acquaintance with caffeine is surprisingly recent. But it is hardly an exaggeration to say that this molecule remade the world. The changes wrought by coffee and tea occurred at a fundamental level – the level of the human mind. Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.

By the 15th century, coffee was being cultivated in east Africa and traded across the Arabian peninsula. Initially, the new drink was regarded as an aide to concentration and used by Sufis in Yemen to keep them from dozing off during their religious observances. (Tea, too, started out as a little helper for Buddhist monks striving to stay awake through long stretches of meditation.) Within a century, coffeehouses had sprung up in cities across the Arab world. In 1570 there were more than 600 of them in Constantinople alone, and they spread north and west with the Ottoman empire.

The Islamic world at this time was in many respects more advanced than Europe, in science and technology, and in learning. Whether this mental flourishing had anything to do with the prevalence of coffee (and prohibition of alcohol) is difficult to prove, but as the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued, the beverage “seemed to be tailor-​made for a culture that forbade alcohol consumption and gave birth to modern mathematics”.

A coffee house in 17th-century London. Photograph: Lordprice Collection/Alamy


In 1629 the first coffeehouses in Europe, styled on the Arab model, popped up in Venice, and the first such establishment in England was opened in Oxford in 1650 by a Jewish immigrant. They arrived in London shortly thereafter, and proliferated: within a few decades there were thousands of coffeehouses in London; at their peak, one for every 200 Londoners.

To call the English coffeehouse a new kind of public space doesn’t quite do it justice. You paid a penny for the coffee, but the information – in the form of newspapers, books, magazines and conversation – was free. (Coffeehouses were often referred to as “penny universities”.) After visiting London coffeehouses, a French writer named Maximilien Misson wrote, “You have all Manner of News there; You have a good fire, which you may sit by as long as you please: You have a Dish of Coffee; you meet your Friends for the Transaction of Business, and all for a Penny, if you don’t care to spend more.”

London’s coffeehouses were distinguished one from another by the professional or intellectual interests of their patrons, which eventually gave them specific institutional identities. So, for example, merchants and men with interests in shipping gathered at Lloyd’s Coffee House. Here you could learn what ships were arriving and departing, and buy an insurance policy on your cargo. Lloyd’s Coffee House eventually became the insurance brokerage Lloyd’s of London. Learned types and scientists – known then as “natural philosophers” – gathered at the Grecian, which became closely associated with the Royal Society; Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley debated physics and mathematics here, and supposedly once dissected a dolphin on the premises.

The conversation in London’s coffee houses frequently turned to politics, in vigorous exercises of free speech that drew the ire of the government, especially after the monarchy was restored in 1660. Charles II, worried that plots were being hatched in coffeehouses, decided that the places were dangerous fomenters of rebellion that the crown needed to suppress. In 1675 the king moved to close down the coffeehouses, on the grounds that the “false, malicious and scandalous Reports” emanating therefrom were a “Disturbance of the Quiet and Peace of the Realm”. Like so many other compounds that change the qualities of consciousness in individuals, caffeine was regarded as a threat to institutional power, which moved to suppress it, in a foreshadowing of the wars against drugs to come.

But the king’s war against coffee lasted only 11 days. Charles discovered that it was too late to turn back the tide of caffeine. By then the coffeehouse was such a fixture of English culture and daily life – and so many eminent Londoners had become addicted to caffeine – that everyone simply ignored the king’s order and blithely went on drinking coffee. Afraid to test his authority and find it lacking, the king quietly backed down, issuing a second proclamation rolling back the first “out of princely consideration and royal compassion”.

It’s hard to imagine that the sort of political, cultural and intellectual ferment that bubbled up in the coffeehouses of both France and England in the 17th century would ever have developed in a tavern. The kind of magical thinking that alcohol sponsored in the medieval mind began to yield to a new spirit of rationalism and, a bit later, Enlightenment thinking. French historian Jules Michelet wrote: “Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illumines the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”

To see, lucidly, “the reality of things”: this was, in a nutshell, the rationalist project. Coffee became, along with the microscope, telescope and the pen, one of its indispensable tools.

After a few weeks, the mental impairments of withdrawal had subsided, and I could once again think in a straight line, hold an abstraction in my head for more than two minutes, and shut peripheral thoughts out of my field of attention. Yet I continued to feel as though I was mentally just slightly behind the curve, especially when in the company of drinkers of coffee and tea, which, of course, was all the time and everywhere.

Here’s what I was missing: I missed the way caffeine and its rituals used to order my day, especially in the morning. Herbal teas – which are barely, if at all, psychoactive – lack the power of coffee and tea to organise the day into a rhythm of energetic peaks and valleys, as the mental tide of caffeine ebbs and flows. The morning surge is a blessing, obviously, but there is also something comforting in the ebb tide of afternoon, which a cup of tea can gently reverse.

At some point I began to wonder if perhaps it was all in my head, this sense that I had lost a mental step since getting off coffee and tea. So I decided to look at the science, to learn what, if any, cognitive enhancement can actually be attributed to caffeine. I found numerous studies conducted over the years reporting that caffeine improves performance on a range of cognitive measures – of memory, focus, alertness, vigilance, attention and learning. An experiment done in the 1930s found that chess players on caffeine performed significantly better than players who abstained. In another study, caffeine users completed a variety of mental tasks more quickly, though they made more errors; as one paper put it in its title, people on caffeine are “faster, but not smarter”. In a 2014 experiment, subjects given caffeine immediately after learning new material remembered it better than subjects who received a placebo. Tests of psychomotor abilities also suggest that caffeine gives us an edge: in simulated driving exercises, caffeine improves performance, especially when the subject is tired. It also enhances physical performance on such metrics as time trials, muscle strength and endurance.

True, there is reason to take these findings with a pinch of salt, if only because this kind of research is difficult to do well. The problem is finding a good control group in a society in which virtually everyone is addicted to caffeine. But the consensus seems to be that caffeine does improve mental (and physical) performance to some degree.

Whether caffeine also enhances creativity is a different question, however, and there’s some reason to doubt that it does. Caffeine improves our focus and ability to concentrate, which surely enhances linear and abstract thinking, but creativity works very differently. It may depend on the loss of a certain kind of focus, and the freedom to let the mind off the leash of linear thought.

Cognitive psychologists sometimes talk in terms of two distinct types of consciousness: spotlight consciousness, which illuminates a single focal point of attention, making it very good for reasoning, and lantern consciousness, in which attention is less focused yet illuminates a broader field of attention. Young children tend to exhibit lantern consciousness; so do many people on psychedelics. This more diffuse form of attention lends itself to mind wandering, free association, and the making of novel connections – all of which can nourish creativity. By comparison, caffeine’s big contribution to human progress has been to intensify spotlight consciousness – the focused, linear, abstract and efficient cognitive processing more closely associated with mental work than play. This, more than anything else, is what made caffeine the perfect drug not only for the age of reason and the Enlightenment, but for the rise of capitalism, too.

The power of caffeine to keep us awake and alert, to stem the natural tide of exhaustion, freed us from the circadian rhythms of our biology and so, along with the advent of artificial light, opened the frontier of night to the possibilities of work.

What coffee did for clerks and intellectuals, tea would soon do for the English working class. Indeed, it was tea from the East Indies – heavily sweetened with sugar from the West Indies – that fuelled the Industrial Revolution. We think of England as a tea culture, but coffee, initially the cheaper beverage by far, dominated at first.

Soon after the British East India Company began trading with China, cheap tea flooded England. A beverage that only the well-to-do could afford to drink in 1700 was by 1800 consumed by virtually everyone, from the society matron to the factory worker.

Tea pickers in Assam, India. Photograph: AFP/Getty

To supply this demand required an imperialist enterprise of enormous scale and brutality, especially after the British decided it would be more profitable to turn India, its colony, into a tea producer, than to buy tea from the Chinese. This required first stealing the secrets of tea production from the Chinese (a mission accomplished by the renowned Scots botanist and plant explorer Robert Fortune, disguised as a mandarin); seizing land from peasant farmers in Assam (where tea grew wild), and then forcing the farmers into servitude, picking tea leaves from dawn to dusk. The introduction of tea to the west was all about exploitation – the extraction of surplus value from labour, not only in its production in India, but in its consumption by the British as well.

Tea allowed the British working class to endure long shifts, brutal working conditions and more or less constant hunger; the caffeine helped quiet the hunger pangs, and the sugar in it became a crucial source of calories. (From a strictly nutritional standpoint, workers would have been better off sticking with beer.) The caffeine in tea helped create a new kind of worker, one better adapted to the rule of the machine. It is difficult to imagine an Industrial Revolution without it.

So how exactly does coffee, and caffeine more generally, make us more energetic, efficient and faster? How could this little molecule possibly supply the human body energy without calories? Could caffeine be the proverbial free lunch, or do we pay a price for the mental and physical energy – the alertness, focus and stamina – that caffeine gives us?

Alas, there is no free lunch. It turns out that caffeine only appears to give us energy. Caffeine works by blocking the action of adenosine, a molecule that gradually accumulates in the brain over the course of the day, preparing the body to rest. Caffeine molecules interfere with this process, keeping adenosine from doing its job – and keeping us feeling alert. But adenosine levels continue to rise, so that when the caffeine is eventually metabolised, the adenosine floods the body’s receptors and tiredness returns. So the energy that caffeine gives us is borrowed, in effect, and eventually the debt must be paid back.

For as long as people have been drinking coffee and tea, medical authorities have warned about the dangers of caffeine. But until now, caffeine has been cleared of the most serious charges against it. The current scientific consensus is more than reassuring – in fact, the research suggests that coffee and tea, far from being deleterious to our health, may offer some important benefits, as long as they aren’t consumed to excess. Regular coffee consumption is associated with a decreased risk of several cancers (including breast, prostate, colorectal and endometrial), cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, dementia and possibly depression and suicide. (Though high doses can produce nervousness and anxiety, and rates of suicide climb among those who drink eight or more cups a day.)

My review of the medical literature on coffee and tea made me wonder if my abstention might be compromising not only my mental function but my physical health, as well. However, that was before I spoke to Matt Walker.

An English neuroscientist on the faculty at University of California, Berkeley, Walker, author of Why We Sleep, is single-minded in his mission: to alert the world to an invisible public-health crisis, which is that we are not getting nearly enough sleep, the sleep we are getting is of poor quality, and a principal culprit in this crime against body and mind is caffeine. Caffeine itself might not be bad for you, but the sleep it’s stealing from you may have a price. According to Walker, research suggests that insufficient sleep may be a key factor in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, arteriosclerosis, stroke, heart failure, depression, anxiety, suicide and obesity. “The shorter you sleep,” he bluntly concludes, “the shorter your lifespan.”

Walker grew up in England drinking copious amounts of black tea, morning, noon and night. He no longer consumes caffeine, save for the small amounts in his occasional cup of decaf. In fact, none of the sleep researchers or experts on circadian rhythms I interviewed for this story use caffeine.

Walker explained that, for most people, the “quarter life” of caffeine is usually about 12 hours, meaning that 25% of the caffeine in a cup of coffee consumed at noon is still circulating in your brain when you go to bed at midnight. That could well be enough to completely wreck your deep sleep.

I thought of myself as a pretty good sleeper before I met Walker. At lunch he probed me about my sleep habits. I told him I usually get a solid seven hours, fall asleep easily, dream most nights.

“How many times a night do you wake up?” he asked. I’m up three or four times a night (usually to pee), but I almost always fall right back to sleep.

He nodded gravely. “That’s really not good, all those interruptions. Sleep quality is just as important as sleep quantity.” The interruptions were undermining the amount of “deep” or “slow wave” sleep I was getting, something above and beyond the REM sleep I had always thought was the measure of a good night’s rest. But it seems that deep sleep is just as important to our health, and the amount we get tends to decline with age.

Caffeine is not the sole cause of our sleep crisis; screens, alcohol (which is as hard on REM sleep as caffeine is on deep sleep), pharmaceuticals, work schedules, noise and light pollution, and anxiety can all play a role in undermining both the duration and quality of our sleep. But here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes – which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates.

The time came to wrap up my experiment in caffeine deprivation. I was eager to see what a body that had been innocent of caffeine for three months would experience when subjected to a couple of shots of espresso. I had thought long and hard about what kind of coffee I would get, and where. I opted for a “special”, my local coffee shop’s term for a double-​shot espresso made with less steamed milk than a typical cappuccino; it’s more commonly known as a flat white.

My special was unbelievably good, a ringing reminder of what a poor counterfeit decaf is; here were whole dimensions and depths of flavour that I had completely forgotten about. Everything in my visual field seemed pleasantly italicised, filmic, and I wondered if all these people with their cardboard-sleeve-swaddled cups had any idea what a powerful drug they were sipping. But how could they?

They had long ago become habituated to caffeine, and were now using it for another purpose entirely. Baseline maintenance, that is, plus a welcome little lift. I felt lucky that this more powerful experience was available to me. This – along with the stellar sleeps – was the wonderful dividend of my investment in abstention.
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And yet in a few days’ time I would be them, caffeine-tolerant and addicted all over again. I wondered: was there any way to preserve the power of this drug? Could I devise a new relationship with caffeine? Maybe treat it more like a psychedelic – say, something to be taken only on occasion, and with a greater degree of ceremony and intention. Maybe just drink coffee on Saturdays? Just the one.


How Nespresso's coffee revolution got ground down


When I got home I tackled my to-do list with unaccustomed fervour, harnessing the surge of energy – of focus! – coursing through me, and put it to good use. I compulsively cleared and decluttered – on the computer, in my closet, in the garden and the shed. I raked, I weeded, I put things in order, as if I were possessed. Whatever I focused on, I focused on zealously and single-mindedly.

Around noon, my compulsiveness began to subside, and I felt ready for a change of scene. I had yanked a few plants out of the vegetable garden that were not pulling their weight, and decided to go to the garden centre to buy some replacements. It was during the drive that I realised the true reason I was heading to this particular garden centre: it had this Airstream trailer parked out front that served really good espresso.

This is an edited extract from This Is Your Mind on Plants: Opium-Caffeine-Mescaline by Michael Pollan, published by Allen Lane on 8 July and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk

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