Quotes of the Day

What you must understand is this," said Amin, stroking his long, straggly beard. "Sufism is not Islamic. It is jadoo: magic tricks. It is superstition. It has nothing to do with real Islam."

Amin ul-Karim and I were standing outside a kebab restaurant among the medieval lanes of Nizamuddin, my favorite part of New Delhi. Clouds of charcoal smoke wafted into the air, and the scent of grilling meat floated out over streets bustling with pilgrims, madrasah students, sellers of rose petals, little boys playing cricket and beggars seeking alms.

To one side lay the destination to which the crowds of pilgrims were heading: a warren of alleys and bazaars leading toward the shrine of India's most revered Sufi saint, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. Nizamuddin was a 14th century Muslim mystic who withdrew from the world and preached a message of prayer, love and the unity of all things. He promised his followers that if they loosened their ties with the world, they could purge their souls of worries and directly experience God. Rituals and fasting were for the pious, said the saint, but love was everywhere and was much the surest route to the divine.

Yet only a short distance from the shrine towered a very different Islamic institution, one that embodied a quite different face of Islam. The merkaz is a modern, gray, concrete structure seven stories tall that houses the world headquarters of an austere Islamic movement called Tablighism, to which Amin belongs. The Tablighis advocate a return to the basic fundamentals of the Koran, and greatly dislike the mystical Islam of Sufism, which they believe encourages such un-Koranic practices as idolatry, music, dancing and the veneration of dead saints. This was certainly the view of Amin, who, when I met him, had been busy trying to persuade passing pilgrims to turn away from their destination. "I invite these people who come to Nizamuddin to return to the true path of the Koran," he said. "Do not pray to a corpse, I tell them. Go to the mosque, not a grave. Superstition leads to jahannam—hell. True Islam leads to jannah—paradise."

"What sort of paradise?" I asked.

"It is beyond all human imagination," said Amin. "But there will be couches to lie on in the shade, and rivers of milk and honey and, cool, clear springwater."

"What about the Sufi idea that God can also be found in the human heart?" I asked.

"Paradise within us?" said Amin, raising his eyebrows. "No, no, this is emotional talk—a dream only. There is nothing in the Koran about paradise within the body. It is outside. To get there you must follow the commands of the Almighty. Then when you die, insh'allah, that will be where your journey ends."

Here, it seemed to me, lay some sort of crux—a clash of civilizations, not between East and West but within Islam itself. Between the strictly regulated ways of the orthodox Tablighis and the customs of the heterodox Sufis lay not just two different understandings of Islam but two entirely different conceptions of how to live, how to die, and how to make the final and most important, and difficult, journey of all—to paradise.

Six years earlier, I had been sitting in a roadside tea shop amid the desert of Rajasthan when I saw a succession of five bicycle rickshaws appear over the horizon, winding their way through the dusty scrub of the Jaipur highway. Every time a juggernaut thundered past, the fragile rickshaws lurched toward the dirt of the hard shoulder. The desert was level and featureless. So flat was the ground that through the shimmering heat haze you could see the convoy struggling for a full half-hour before it finally drew level with the roadside dhaba. Inside the rickshaws were 12 Sufi dervishes, with wild eyes and long, unkempt beards. The fronts of their shalwars were covered with charms, pieces of tinsel and silver talismans. They were all—drivers and dervishes alike—hot and thirsty, and they pulled into the dhaba calling loudly for water and tea.

The men were braving the desert to attend the death anniversary of the Sufi saint Khwaja Garib Nawaz, who lived in the 13th century, a little before Nizamuddin's time and who belonged to the same mystical tradition. As they shook the desert from their clothes, I asked them about their journey. "We have cycled all the way from Delhi," said one of the drivers.

"Delhi? But that is—what?—400 km away?"

"Garib Nawaz will reward us for our pains," he replied. "It is he who gives us strength." The drivers and their passengers sat together on a charpoy, pouring their tea into tin saucers, then noisily sipping the hot, sweet liquid from the plates. "Anyone who steps through the door of his shrine," said another driver, "will get paradise as his everlasting home."

I was heading in the same direction, so the following day I went along to the Sufi festival in Ajmer. Virtually overnight the small provincial town was transformed into a heaving, mystic metropolis. Tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over India were milling around the streets, pouring out of buses, unrolling their bedding on the pavement, and cooking their breakfast on portable stoves. From the different encampments on the outskirts—tent cities that resembled the halting place of some medieval army—rivulets of devotees threaded through the bazaars, forming larger streams as they converged on the streets leading to the shrine.

A succession of Mughal mosques, tombs and pavilions were crammed to bursting with ecstatics and madmen, pilgrims and spectators. The entire complex was alive with the intoxicating smell of roses, which the devotees carried in sweet-smelling punnets to pour great fountains of petals onto the saint's grave. The numbers were amazing, but what was even more remarkable in a nation polarized by religious rivalries was the different traditions from which the pilgrims were drawn. Many were Muslim, but there were also Hindus, as well as the odd Sikh and Christian, all queuing to pay their respects to the saint. Here, for once, you saw religion bringing people together, not dividing them. Sufism was not just something mystical, ethereal and otherworldly, I felt, but a balm on India's festering religious wounds. I asked one group of Hindu pilgrims if they were made to feel welcome in a Muslim shrine. "Of course," said their leader, a trader from neighboring Gujarat state. "All Gods are the same."

When I asked why they had made the effort to come all this way, the man replied with the following story: "When our child was young, he became very ill. No medicines from any doctor helped. We tried everything, but our son only got weaker. Then some neighbors said we should come here. We were desperate, so we got on a bus. We brought the boy to the shrine and one of its guardians cured him. What could not be done in 12 months he did in a minute." So now the trader and his family return each year to give thanks.

From the very beginning of Sufism, music, dance, poetry and meditation have been seen as crucial spiritual strides on the path of love, an invaluable aid toward attaining unity with God—true paradise. Music, in particular, enables devotees to focus their whole being on the divine so intensely that the soul is both destroyed and resurrected. At Sufi shrines, devotees are lifted by the music into a state of spiritual ecstasy.

Yet these heterodox methods of worship have divided Sufis from many of their Muslim brethren. Throughout Islamic history, more puritanical Muslims have claimed that Sufi practices were infections from Christianity and Hinduism, quite alien to the original principles of Islam. As Najaf Haider, professor of medieval history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, tells it, such conflicts were inevitable: "In orthodox Islam the object of creation is the worship of God; God is the master and the devotee is the slave. The Sufis argue that God should be worshipped not because he has commanded us to but because he's such a lovable being. The cornerstone of Sufi ideology is love, and all traditions are tolerated because anyone is capable of expressing love for God."

The most formidable of all the anti-Sufi movements was Wahhabism from Arabia, its followers the progenitors of modern Islamic fundamentalists, who on coming to power in the early 19th century destroyed all the Sufi and Shi'a shrines in Arabia and Iraq. Today, the most prominent—and powerful—Wahhabis are the Saudis. Because they dominate media in the Arab world, many contemporary Muslims have been taught a story of Islamic religious tradition from which Sufism is rigorously excluded.

I first came across strongly anti-Sufi sentiments last fall when I visited a shrine just outside Peshawar in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. The Sufi shrine of Rahman Baba has for centuries been a place where Muslim musicians and poets have gathered. It is built around the tomb of a 17th century mystic poet whose Pashtu Sufi verses have led to him being described as the nightingale of Peshawar. A friend who had lived nearby in the 1980s advised me to visit on a Thursday night, when crowds of Afghan refugee musicians sing to their saint by the light of the moon—a sight he described as unforgettable. Since he had left Peshawar, however, much had changed. Two Saudi-funded madrasahs had been built on the road to the shrine, and they had taken it upon themselves to halt what they regarded as the shrine's un-Islamic practices.

One Thursday I drove out of Peshawar, passed the two madrasahs, and found the tarmac road giving way to a mud track, down which herds of sheep were throwing up huge clouds of dust as they were driven back to their village compounds for the night. Past the village was a well-irrigated enclosure sheltered by a windbreak of date palms. Beyond lay the glistening white dome of the shrine, and facing it a mosque and a new mud-brick library. Tamarind, neem trees and a great, spreading banyan grew beside a bubbling spring. But there were no musicians there that evening, only a small crowd of beggars, a man selling chick peas and dates from a trolley, and a couple of Sufi holy men carrying green flags. Watching suspiciously a short distance away were two young men wearing full beards, white robes and checked red-and-white Saudi ghuttras, or head scarves.

I asked one of the shrine's guardians, Tila Mohammed, why there were not more pilgrims and what had happened to the musicians for which his shrine was once famous. He motioned for me to come into his room beside the library, out of the earshot of the two men in ghuttras.

"My family has been singing here for generations," said Tila Mohammed. "But now these Arab madrasah students come here and create trouble. They tell us that what we do is wrong. They ask people who are singing to stop. Sometimes arguments break out—even fistfights. This used to be a place where people came for peace of mind. Now they just encounter more problems, so gradually people have stopped coming."

"We pray that Baba will work a miracle," Tila Mohammed continued, "that good will overcome evil. But our way is pacifist. We love. We never fight. When these Arabs come here, I just don't know what to do to stop them."

The tablighis in Nizamuddin are not Wahhabi, but their beliefs are derived from similar theological traditions. They share the Wahhabis' suspicion of the Sufis, and their effect on the Nizamuddin shrine is the same, as they slowly attempt to undermine Islam's most tolerant and syncretic incarnation just when that face of Islam is most needed in healing the growing breach between Islam and other religions. After leaving Amin at the doors of his Tablighi headquarters, I headed on down into the alleys of Nizamuddin. Taking off my sandals at the entrance of the shrine, I spoke with Hussein, the old man who looks after the shoes of the pilgrims. I asked what he thought of the Tablighis. Hussein's response was passionate: "These people are so extreme and intolerant. Look around you. Everyone in Delhi knows about the power of Nizamuddin. Everyone knows that if your heart is pure and you ask him something, that he cannot refuse you. I have felt his power in my own life. I lost my hut in a slum clearance 10 years ago. I was hungry and I had nothing. But I prayed to the saint, and through him I found a place to stay and a way of supporting my family. I tell you: if anybody abuses Nizamuddin Auliya, I will be the first to defend him—with my knife if need be."

It was a Thursday evening when, during the singing of the qawwalis, the mesmerizing love songs of the Indian Sufis, the spiritual life of the shrine was to reach its climax. Huge crowds of pilgrims were already sitting cross-legged in the forecourt in front of the tomb, and the first qawwali singers were beginning to strike up their music. Around them was a press of excited onlookers. Most pilgrims had come with their families—groups of little boys with eyes wonderfully darkened with kohl, little girls who perhaps had been ill and had been brought for healing. At the shrine itself there were young women trying to tie small threads through the lattices of its screens, each one of them with some prayer or petition, usually a plea for marriage or children.

To one side was a huge cauldron of biryani that had just been carried in to feed the poor. On another was a gathering of women who had come to learn to read Arabic in the simple school that operated from the back of the shrine. There were Muslim grandmothers in black chadors from Bengal, Punjabi Sikhs in their blue turbans, Hindu women from South India with the large red bindis on their foreheads, all coming to pray to the saint, all coming to use Nizamuddin as their intermediary to God.

The crowds thickened. The tempo of the music quickened, and some of the pilgrims began to sink into a trance. Old men were swaying now, arms extended, hands cupped in supplication, lost to the world; women were tossing their hair from side to side; and the first of a succession of dervishes rose to their feet to dance. The atmosphere, already heavy with the rich scent of rose petals, grew heavier still, filled with the softly mouthed and murmured prayers, and with the passionate incantations and expectations of 10,000 pilgrims.

I left them there, with their prayers and petitions, still seeking paradise in that most elusive of all destinations, the human heart.

• William Dalrymple
• The Sufis seek paradise in the most elusive of places: the human heart