COMMENT: The saints evil men fear —Zaair Hussain

The Taliban have recognised, in their own perverse way, that the sufis are the rightful spiritual guides of the nation and so they try to accomplish by might what they could not possibly do by right

The horrors inflicted upon Pakistan by the enemy within can be likened to the eastern masterwork swords known as the katanas; impossibly sharp, cutting to the bone, and created in layers, one folded atop another.

That Data Darbar was forced to close for the first time in nearly a thousand years is a horror.

That a place of perpetual worship and a house of munificent generosity was defiled is a horror.

That so many lives were ended and shattered is a horror that absolutely no one who is blissfully innocent to the violent loss of a loved one can possibly understand.

But folded atop all these is yet another layer: this was no isolated barbarism, but an attempt at systematic extermination. The bombing continued not only the pattern of attacking ‘soft’ targets — hospitals and Ahmedi worship places, for example — but the pattern of attacking sufi culture. It joins the foul ranks of the murder of shrine caretakers in Sindh, the lockdown of Pir Baba’s shrine in Buner and the bombing of Rehman Baba’s shrine in Peshawar. And the reason for it is manifestly plain.

The Taliban, who poison the land with every step, are terrified by sufism. And well they should be.

Ali Hajveri went to his eternal slumber at the end of the 11th century in Lahore. Before the two nations tore themselves into two states, before the British acquired their jewel in the crown, before the first Mughal had taken his first step into South Asia, Ali Hajveri rested in that tomb. Data Darbar, for nearly a thousand years, has been a place of spiritualism and charity.

Sufism resonates with the human heart in a way that no fascist can ever hope to replicate. It espouses inner strength, acceptance, charity, humility and the joy of the divine. It finds its converts through love and not coercion, through charity rather than bribery. It boasts a truly equitable tradition. From its inception, peoples of all faiths were welcome to pray and contemplate at Data Darbar. Predating even Ali Hajveri was the bold and brilliant Rabia Basri, a female sufi, great amongst her peers and venerated by her contemporaries, men and women alike, more than 1,100 years before the Taliban set forth to cast women in a social prison so deep that not even their voices could escape.

Sufi tradition is resplendent with poetry and philosophy — considered amongst the most sublime in the regions it flourished in — minds and souls and pens and voices aflame with the love for the divine. It is a profundity that extremists will never possess, will always fear. It breathes a living truth into the claim that Islam is a religion of peace, of tolerance, of love and learning, of devotion and the divine. It is everything the Taliban are not.

The militants are modern monsters created by shortsighted Frankensteins, carelessly discarded tools created for a war long passe. Their pretensions to any sort of religious tradition or just ideology are empty; they boast and threaten and declare but never persuade, never debate, never even preach. Their apologists do, to be sure, and badly. But the militants themselves seem to know they have no justification worth expounding.

Our establishment and the US forces have been forced to tilt against them on their own terms, forced to respond to their increasingly audacious attacks with the belching thunder of artillery and lightning from the sky. However justified, these counterattacks strike a terrifying chord in the public imagination. To a man who fears for his home, family, and his own life and limb, the intention behind destruction matters little.

Certainly, military and paramilitary operations against the Taliban are necessary — though some defter subtlety would not be amiss — but so long as the Taliban can force physical conflict in populated areas, they ensure that civilian blood will stain our streets and further erode public confidence. Our government, whatever its sins and salvations, whatever its actual vices and virtues, enjoys at the best of times the tenuous trust of the people. As for public opinion about the US forces, scathing volumes could be written on the matter but little needs to be said.

But the sufis have neither self-interested ends nor martial means. They feed the poor, praise the divine and welcome the outsider. From the point of view of the Taliban, they simply do not play by the rules. Their message of love and tolerance and devotion — their message, in fact, of Islam — must surely be alien and terrifying to these upstart usurpers. The Taliban have recognised, in their own perverse way, that the sufis are the rightful spiritual guides of the nation and so they try to accomplish by might what they could not possibly do by right.

Across our northern borders lies our sternest warning. Afghanistan and its surrounding region that produced such sufi masters and poets as Ansari and Jami of Herat, Sanayi of Ghazni and Rumi of Balkh — whose Mathnawi is considered by many to be the greatest poem ever written in Persian — had its soul torn out by the Taliban who placed in its stead a jagged stone, small and dangerous and utterly lifeless. The people of Afghanistan had no choice in the matter. In this time, in this place, we do.

We can choose to defend the message espoused by the sufi culture, and be unwavering in our support. We can choose to recognise — completely, and forever — that the path of the extremists cuts so deeply against the grain of universal human nature that their hold anywhere relies utterly on fear and bribery.

We must abandon our penchant for conspiracy, and recognise that a local cancer is far more dangerous to us than a foreign hand. We must not allow an ideological Stockholm syndrome to stay our voices against the militants. We must reject wherever we find the absurd fiction that fascists are the guardians of our faith.

Choose well, Pakistan.

Zaair Hussain is a Lahore-based freelance writer. He can be reached at zaairhussain@gmail.com