Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam - Softcover

Ewing, Katherine Pratt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082232024X ISBN 13: 9780822320241

Publisher: Duke University Press, 1997

Synopsis

In Arguing Sainthood, Katherine Pratt Ewing examines Sufi religious meanings and practices in Pakistan and their relation to the Westernizing influences of modernity and the shaping of the postcolonial self. Using both anthropological fieldwork and psychoanalytic theory to critically reinterpret theories of subjectivity, Ewing examines the production of identity in the context of a complex social field of conflicting ideologies and interests.
Ewing critiques Eurocentric cultural theorists and Orientalist discourse while also taking issue with expatriate postcolonial thinkers Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. She challenges the notion of a monolithic Islamic modernity in order to explore the lived realities of individuals, particularly those of Pakistani saints and their followers. By examining the continuities between current Sufi practices and earlier popular practices in the Muslim world, Ewing identifies in the Sufi tradition a reflexive, critical consciousness that has usually been associated with the modern subject. Drawing on her training in clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis as well as her anthropological fieldwork in Lahore, Pakistan, Ewing argues for the value of Lacan in anthropology as she provides the basis for retheorizing postcolonial studies.

About this title

About the Author

Katherine Pratt Ewing is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

From the Back Cover

""Arguing Sainthood" can and should be used in courses on modernity, postcolonialism, the Middle East, South Asia, and in other courses--cultural studies, religion--where Lacanian ideas are not unfamiliar."--Michael M. J. Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Arguing Sainthood

Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam

By Katherine Pratt Ewing

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-2024-1

Contents

Illustrations, 
Preface, 
1 Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Postcolonial Subject, 
I The Tradition-Modernity Dichotomy as a Hegemonic Discourse, 
2 Sadhus and Faqirs: The Sufi Pir as a Colonial Construct, 
3 The Pir, the State, and the Modern Subject, 
II The Modern Subject and Conflicting Ideologies, 
4 Everyday Arguments, 
5 A Pir's Life Story, 
6 Stories of Desire: Reclaiming the Forgotten Pir, 
III Modern Respectability and Antinomian Desire, 
7 The Qalandar Confronts the Proper Muslim, 
8 The Qalandar as Trope, 
9 The Subject, Desire, and Recognition, 
Afterword, 
Glossary, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Postcolonial Subject

Sufi Ghulam Rasul was a pir, a Sufi "saint" and healer, who now lies buried in a tomb in the Miani Sahib Graveyard in the Pakistani city of Lahore, a modest contribution to Lahore's architectural and historical riches. When I first met him in 1976, he lived in a middle-income neighborhood that borders the graveyard. He was receiving visitors in a large reception room (baithak ) built for the purpose. At our first meeting, unexpected for each of us, his wife ushered me through an interior courtyard to a doorway. Scattered beside the doorway were seven pairs of shoes. We stopped to add our shoes to the pile and then entered a large, dim room. It had no furniture, but there were straw mats on the floor. Sufi Sahib, as he was ordinarily called, was seated facing the doors, cross-legged on a fine Bokhara carpet, his telephone beside him and several large cushions behind him. Four women were sitting in a semicircle around him, and two men sat off to one side, apart from the women.

Sufi Sahib's wife introduced me and the young Pakistani woman with me as students who were interested in studying pirs and Islam. Sufi Sahib invited us to join the small circle around him, and his wife left the room. I asked if he would mind if we sat there for a few minutes to watch him with his followers.

Sufi Sahib's appearance was impressive and conformed to my expectations of the Sufi pir. He was dressed in white and wore a white turban. His white beard was long but neatly trimmed. He sat in a meditative pose, gently smiling, eyes half-closed when he wasn't staring intently into the eyes of the person before him. In front of him was a tray on which were arranged a small pile of newspaper, rock salt, and a tiny hammer. As he sat before his followers, he would gently, almost abstractedly, tap the salt with the hammer while muttering prayers under his breath.

He dealt with his followers one by one, handing each of them a small packet of salt. Finally, I asked him what the salt was for. He explained that sick people come to him and that this is their medicine: "I read prayers over it all night. Whenever I blow over the salt, my followers, wherever they are, feel better." One of the women went up to him, sat before him, and told him that her son was sick. As she spoke, he quickly licked a piece of the salt, wrapped it in paper, and handed it to her, giving her instructions on how to use it. She thanked him, rose, and backed out of the room.

I asked some of his followers where they lived. Though this pir worked in very unassuming quarters (the entry to his home was just a doorway like any other doorway along an unpaved street in a lower-middle-class neighborhood) and was but one out of a couple of dozen pirs in this part of town, he drew a socially and geographically diverse following: one man present that day had come from another city, and the others were from all over Lahore, including the wealthiest part of town. One man was a brigadier general. Another had recently returned from study in England.

The presence of followers such as these illustrates how modernity, whatever it may be, has not created a population of the sort of secularized, rational subjects envisioned by many nation-builders and policymakers in the early days of Pakistan's independence. The Lahore District Census Report for 1961, for instance, described pirs in the following terms:

Pirs are held in great esteem and respect by villagers who pay quarterly, half-yearly or annual visits to their Mureeds [disciples] and get Nazranas [offerings] in the form of cash, or clothes according to the economic status of the follower. Besides the living Pirs, the people have great faith in the Pirs who died centuries ago and attend their shrines at the time of their annual Urs [death anniversary festival]. The hold of the Pirs is gradually dying away. (Population Census of Pakistan: Lahore District 1961:22)

This passage is a manifestation of a modernizing discourse that has pervaded most public policy within the "developing" countries in the postcolonial period. It sets up a series of dichotomies in what today appears a naive celebration of modernization: tradition versus modernity, rural versus urban, and (implicitly) wasted economic resources versus economic rationality. These dichotomies formed the basis for the construction of a range of ideologies that articulated what administrators and politicians saw as the task ahead for the consolidation of Pakistan as a modern nation. In this particular passage from the census, the pirs were depicted as a part of the dying "traditional" that still stood between the population and the modern development of Pakistan. The passage expresses, apparently unselfconsciously, the Enlightenment view of human history as a single trajectory of Progress. More specifically, it is a manifestation of the Orientalist discourse sketched out by Said (1979), in which an imagined passive, traditional Oriental stands unfavorably contrasted with the active, modern, rational Western self. It is also a vision of the future that has since crumbled into the uncertainties of what has been called Postmodernity or late capitalism (Harvey 1989), a time when the premises of this modernizing discourse and the Eurocentric notion of history that such premises presuppose have been exposed and challenged.

When modernization is assumed to be an unstoppable force shaping the future in a predetermined way, it is likely that contemporary Sufi practice will be interpreted in either of two ways: (1) as a watered-down version of liberal democracy dressed up in local symbols that have been propagated in state ideological formations to modernize the general population (see chapter 3 below), or (2) as a form of resistance to the hegemony of a secularized Western discourse, a Sufism therefore thoroughly penetrated by the hegemonic order that it stands against. These two interpretations do describe two ideologies that have been constructed out of signs drawn from Sufism and from other aspects of Islam: they are positions that are publicly articulated in Pakistan and play a role in the politics of Sufism. Nevertheless, they do not adequately capture the ways in which aspects of the modern have been taken up into Sufi practice.

Both of these interpretations of Sufi practice presume that the force of Western-invented technologies, Western epistemologies, Western political ideologies such as liberal democracy, and Western modes of domination — industrial capitalism and colonial empire — have been so utterly transforming of an entity that we have constructed and labeled "traditional" society as to create a fundamental rupture with the past. It implies, in other words, that this master narrative of the project of modernization within the historical period of modernity has been hegemonic, that it forms the basis of the subjective experience of the postcolonial, even when resisted. This argument has been made even by scholars who have sought to disrupt the presumed equation of modernity with progress. My argument is organized in reaction to this presumption of hegemony.

One source of distortion in our perception of the power of modernity and the processes of modernization is the way modernity is seen as a single entity that bears an overwhelming discursive and material force. In order to avoid exaggerating its power, it is important to recognize that modernity itself is not a single force but rather the temporary conjunction of practices and ideologies that have diverse sources and divergent trajectories (see Reddy 1987, 1993). Current technologies are, of course, taken up into Sufi practice, but they are transformed and encompassed in local circles of meaning. Sufism, itself a diverse phenomenon, thus has a historical trajectory that has been affected but not determined by the composite of forces that we call modernity. An example of the transformation of a fragment of "modernity" in the context of Sufi practice is Sufi Sahib's placement of his telephone alongside his rock salt: it enables him to listen to the problems of his more distant followers and to blow them blessings through the phone line, but it does not in itself transform the discourse through which he operates. I use evidence from Sufi practice in Pakistan to demonstrate that in most aspects of social life, the practices associated with modernity contribute fragments to individual experience. But these fragments are taken up and rearticulated in ways quite different from the discursive monolith that has figured so prominently in theories focused on deconstructing it, so that they come to bear meanings not predictable from a modernizing, secularist, or other Western discourse. These fragments also leave diverse traces in individuals, who themselves are historically specific conjunctions shaped by multiple others, of which the Western other is only one.

Using the pir as a focus of inquiry, this study realigns a triad of concepts — hegemony, consciousness, and the subject — that have appeared in a number of recent writings on the postcolonial subject. I challenge the premise that a hegemonic discourse is naturalized as "consciousness" by distinguishing the experiencing subject as a historically located, embodied, and psychologically organized individual from the discursive subject positions that such an individual may occupy. Breaking with the tendency of many recent writers to assume a determined relationship between hegemonic discourse and consciousness, I return to an older usage of the concept of hegemony as a control over public discursive space, a phenomenon that must be distinguished from consciousness. Discourses constitute subject positions, but the experiencing subject is a nonunitary agent (perhaps better described as a bundle of agencies) who — in part through the experience of competing ideologies and alternative discourses — operates with a potential for critical distance from any one discourse or subject position, including a discourse of modernity. I thereby create a theoretical space for a desiring, experiencing subjectivity that stands at a nexus of discourses. It is this space, which enables a critically conscious center of experience, that I demonstrate and explore in this book.

From this perspective, I examine the way in which competing ideologies that have emerged in the process of nation-building in Pakistan are played out in individual experience among ordinary Pakistanis. Secularism, versions of Islamic modernism, Islamic reform, fundamentalism, and "traditionalism" are all platforms on which political leaders have sought to mobilize a following and shape government policy. The pir, or Sufi saint, has been a target of much of this ideological conflict about the place of Islam in the Pakistani nation-state. But the pir also plays an important role in the lives of individuals, who often turn to the pir for healing in times of personal crisis and conflict. I, therefore, focus on the pir as a kind of nodal point where these political and personal processes come together. At this intersection, I observe closely the extent to which ordinary people are shaped or determined by a discourse of modernity and by the ideologies that arise out of and in reaction to this discourse.

Two places where the operations of the complex individual subject can be seen are in everyday interpersonal arguments and in the telling of personal narratives. Through each of these phenomena, it is possible to highlight the ways in which the experiencing subject, the individual, moves among discourses, taking different stances, expressing different realities, shifting from moment to moment. The book, therefore, includes a series of arguments and stories: middle-class women, for instance, disagree about whether a neighborhood pir is a fraud. A university student suggests to a wandering beggar ascetic that he should move into a housing project. A pir with a questionable past tells me several versions of his life story, as do various followers, neighbors, and relatives. A psychiatrist who worked for years in England speaks with longing about his own search for a pir who will be a guide and teacher. I find myself in the presence of a Sufi who forces me to confront my own desire and fear. Through arguments and narratives we can observe a series of ideological positionings, which are like snapshots that capture the subject in frozen moments. But narratives in which a subject accounts for its past activities, as in a life history, also display conflicts and inconsistencies as the individual as experiencing subject claims or denies identity with past positionings. Through narratives the subject visibly works to cover over the gaps created by these slippages, thereby indicating its presence while evading capture.

I examine this evidence for the organization of subjectivity to determine (1) to what extent or in what ways modernity has come to be experienced as a set of discursive practices that constitute a common-sense, everyday reality, the focus of parts 1 and 2, and (2) to what extent there is evidence of "Other" spaces that are not organized according to the logic of the modern and retain their radical otherness, based on a foundation in one or more alternative discourses, which I explore in part 3. I seek to preserve and develop a theoretical space for this alterity that does not simply locate it as the unchanging traditional, an essence to be preserved or destroyed in the face of external pressure and change, as happens in essentializing nativist ideologies or in the theoretical stance of cultural relativism. I find this "otherness" in the self as well as in the other: I presume that there is no Cartesian subject that knows itself, but rather a decentered, inconstant agent that often does not recognize its own productions.

Furthermore, I argue, with theorists from Hegel to Lacan, that the constituting experience at the heart of human subjectivity is Recognition by another. But I reexamine and recast the phenomenon of recognition. The concept of recognition that lies at the heart of virtually all current theories of the subject is itself a manifestation of a specific Western ideology of progress that must be deconstructed. It is based on the assumption that recognition is won only through competitive struggle with another who is unwilling to give it, a view that is epitomized in Hegel's myth of the encounter between the master and the slave. Drawing on my own observations of people in action as they negotiate the contested realities surrounding pirs and on insights from Sufi discourse itself, I recast the concept of recognition so that struggle and competition, while still very much present in subjective experience and still constitutive of political hegemony, are located in relationship to mutuality and accommodation in the organization of subjective experience.

To put my position more directly: there is always a potential distance between the individual and his or her beliefs, including those that appear taken for granted and self-constitutive. Or, to put the matter even more starkly in what may for the moment appear to be a non sequitur but is particularly relevant in the context of the Sufi discourse which is the focus of this book: even the most unsophisticated, provincial subject evades but is always aware of the truth of death, which undercuts all human projects and the apparent reality of all ideologies and hegemonies. The knowledge of death forces us to stand in a space between discourses. In the face of death, it is mutuality and connectedness rather than ideology and status that make us human.

Sufism, Modernity, and the Postcolonial Intellectual

Responses to a complex ever-changing social world and their implications for a theory of subjectivity are particularly significant within the context of a postcolonial society, since in theories that posit the past hegemony of an overarching colonial discourse and the ever-tightening hegemony of Modernity, the postcolonial has been identified as the ruptured subject par excellence, survivor of a political domination and supposedly hegemonic order in which the subject was interpellated as a radically subordinate "other" to the Western "self." Such postcolonial subjects — for whom "tradition" has been devalued and frozen — would seem to face a rupture with the past and a slide into a condition of rootless modernity. This postcolonial subject has been characterized as a new, distinctly modern phenomenon, severed from its cultural roots by the behemoth of a global capitalist system, its consciousness sundered by the persuasive power of European, Orientalizing ideologies and hegemonies (Said 1979; Inden 1990), its present goals and identities shaped by a divisive discourse of nationalism that generates newly imagined communities based on supposedly primordial ties of language, religion, and ethnicity (Anderson 1991; Van der Veer 1994).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Arguing Sainthood by Katherine Pratt Ewing. Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082232024X
• ISBN 13: 9780822320241
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328