Thanks for reading this account of my WCMT fellowship travels in 2010.
You can read the full report on my time in Egypt, Sudan and India here (pdf).
I have a new blog for a new set of travels in 2011-2 – Beyond Cairo – which you can read here. Please accompany me and let me know what you think!
I’ve just returned from a two-week trip out of town, starting in Mumbai with a women’s conference on tackling religious extremism, then continuing on to Ranthambore, Jaipur, Ajmer, Pushkar and Agra. I’ll update with bits from the trip as I can, but one of the most fascinating parts was my visit to the shrine of the 12th-century Sufi saint Moinuddin Chisti in Ajmer, Rajasthan. Along with the shrine of his spiritual descendant Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, which I visited a few weeks ago, Moinuddin Chisti’s dargah is the most important Muslim pilgrimage centre in India.
Ajmer is a fairly anonymous bustling modern town – until you get close to the dargah. The shrine is surrounded by a maze of crowded bazaars, all crowded with excited pilgrims and lined with every conceivable means of making money from them/ providing sincere spiritual service. Like Varanasi, it is a great example of religious enterprise. The bazaar above, which leads to the shrine’s outer gate (the white minaretted building in the centre) is full of people selling incense, candles, great heaps of rose petals and marigolds, green-and-gold embroidered cloths (to lay over the saint’s tomb), prayer beads, devotional music and religious books alongside completely secular children’s toys, clothes, fried snacks and beautiful displays of Ajmer’s famous nut-and-sugar sweets.
I wasn’t allowed to take my camera inside the shrine, but it is somewhat similar to the bazaar outside – a huge sprawling complex (far bigger than the Nizamuddin dargah) of stalls, prayer rooms, ablution facilities and accommodation around the central hub of the tomb. Just inside the entrance are two enormous cauldrons donated by Mughal emperors – one cooking food for the poor (over a vast fire below), one for cash donations. The shrine was full of families and groups of men in their best clothes, all lining up to push inside the main tomb chamber. Unlike at Nizamuddin, women are allowed into the chamber – inside, it’s small, intricately decorated and thick with incense. A crush of people circled the green-draped tomb, pushed by the tomb attendants, who also solicited cash offerings for a blessing with the green silk tomb covering, and pushed pilgrims one by one into a cubby hole under the tomb canopy to kiss the stone floor and scatter rose petals – a split second of private communion with the saint. Outside, two groups of qawwali musicians were competing to honour the saint, whose followers are famous for their love of ecstatic music.
Despite the shrine’s popularity, all this devotion (to a human, rather than to the divine) is frowned on by more conservative Muslims such as the Deobandis, who I’m going to visit in their home town of Deoband tomorrow…
It may be snowing and subzero in the UK, but winter has hit Delhi too – ie. the temperature has plummeted below 20C. Heaps of winter coats have appeared on pavement stalls, and people are wrapping up – ladies in lovely shawls and men in an odd array of garments from waxed jackets to blankets to fluffy chenille tank tops. A whole page of the Hindustan Times was given over the other day to pictures of Delhi socialites in wraps and cardigans, holding forth on the change of season (apparently now is the time for polo matches, private views and catered picnics).
The cooler weather has also brought some winter rain, which turns the streets into muddy, gritty, waterlogged obstacle courses – I can’t imagine what they’re like in the monsoon. I splashed out of my hotel on Wednesday expecting the city to look drab – and stumbled straight into the middle of an enormous street festival. Pretty much the whole month has been taken up with celebrations – first Diwali, then Eid al-Adha – and this was the Sikhs’ turn.
The festival was a nagar kirtan commemorating the martyrdom of Guru Teg Bahadur, who was beheaded in Old Delhi in 1675 on the orders of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. But it was anything but a sombre occasion. The streets were lined with brightly coloured tents decorated with streamers, garlands and pictures of the guru, all serving all kinds of food, for free, to passersby. Happy, drenched crowds (no one seems to use umbrellas) filled the bazaar, eating paper plates of daal and sweets and kulfi handed off the back of hymn-broadcasting decorated vans. A family insisted I take a bowl of suji halwa – a semolina sweet with the consistency of stewed apple – not the easiest thing for an unpractised westerner to eat with their hands, but delicious!
Today the sun finally emerged to dry up the pavements. I ventured out to the Lodhi Gardens, a beautiful park left by the urban planners of New Delhi around some tombs & mosques of the Lodhi sultans – who were eventually defeated by Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty.
As you travel about Delhi, the history of its Muslim dynasties begins to fit together – these tombs are a link between Firoz Shah Kotla and the Jama Masjid and Red Fort, while the Qutub Minar is older than all of them. Yesterday I was in the Mughals’ Old City (near the site of the execution of Guru Teg Bahadur) in a gridlocked chaos of cyclerickshaws, motorbikes, three-wheeler goods vans, bullock carts and pedestrians packed so tightly the only way to escape was by climbing and vaulting over the vehicles around you. Today it was pleasant to sit in the wide green spaces around the Lodhis’ tombs, amid a few late roses, watching birds bathing in the overflow from irrigation pipes.
On Monday I travelled back down to Jamia Millia University to meet Waris Mazhari, an Islamic scholar and graduate of Dar ul Uloom Deoband who is based at the university.
It was a great pleasure to talk with Waris, who apart from being a prominent scholar in his own right is a thoughtful and articulate critic of aspects of the madrassa system. Here are some of the main points he raised in the discussion:
- The thinking of those running the madrassas has become stagnant. For 150 years there has been little reform of the madrassa curriculum. A large section of madrassas are no longer relevant to the modern world and their graduates, while thoroughly versed in the minutiae of Islamic doctrine, are unaware of modern issues affecting that doctrine.
- Post-9/11 there has been some introspection in the system, in response to huge external pressure (ie. to root out extremism and mindsets that contribute to it). Some madrassas have begun to teach English, Maths and other secular subjects, usually at a basic level. These reforms should go further, but change will necessarily be very slow.
- The ulema (scholars) are largely alienated from the Muslim middle classes and intelligentsia. Many of them believe that intellectuals, non-Muslims (particularly the media) and Hindu activists are overly influenced by the west (ie. ideas ‘harmful to Islam’ originate in the west).
- Lack of fluency in English in the madrassa community is a major problem, sealing it off even further from the outside world. Often maulanas are simply unaware of debates around reform going on in the mainstream press and academic circles. The two spheres are almost entirely separate.
Waris’s comments reinforce a sense I often get when I go into Islamic institutions (in India and elsewhere) – that I am asking the wrong questions. Apart from a literal language barrier, the worldviews of interviewer and interviewee are framed in such different terms that real communication is difficult. Attempting to understand these views and preoccupations as accurately as possible is one of the fascinating and satisfying aspects of this project.
I returned from Jamia on an incredibly (and uncharacteristically) slow and delayed metro train, and had plenty of time to soak up the ambience in the packed ladies’ carriage. We were accompanied by one tall young male soldier (at eye level with me over the sea of petite Delhi ladies) who gallantly pulled the emergency communication alarm every five minutes to ask on a pretty girl’s behalf how much longer the journey would take. Every time, the train would judder to a halt and a guard made a leisurely progress down the carriage to fiddle with and reset the alarm before we crawled onwards.
The metro trains have a bossy and verbose PA system which broadcasts a nonstop mixture of warnings, admonitions and advice in two languages. (Sample: “Any unattended article – like a briefcase, toy, Thermos or transistor – could be a bomb”.) When, after 45 minutes, several girls and I sank to the floor of the carriage, it went into overdrive, shouting “Passengers must not sit on the floor” in English until we all stood up. Who says Delhi is disorganised!
Sorry to dwell on architectural wonders (change of subject tomorrow!) – but I can’t resist mentioning the Qutub Minar. This 73m 12th-century minaret is Delhi’s Eiffel Tower or Big Ben – the single most important symbol of the city. It’s even pictured on my metro smartcard. This afternoon I rode the metro way out of the city centre to visit it – and couldn’t help laughing in amazement and pleasure at my first sight.
The Minar – a victory tower commemorating Muslim Ghorid invaders’ defeat of the Rajputs – is amazing. Its five stories (completed over centuries – with help, for instance, from Firoz Shah Tughlaq of the djinn-infested Firoz Shah Kotla I visited the other day) are covered in intricate, beautiful carvings and Quranic inscriptions.
The tower is surrounded by a complex of ruined mosques, madrassas and tomb buildings that blend Islamic architectural elements with local design – and even some recycled Hindu carvings.
On a Sunday afternoon the ruins were full of young Delhi-ites in mirrored shades posing for Facebook profile pictures – and also, like Humayun’s tomb and Firoz Shah Kotla, with birds. I don’t know who was enjoying themselves more on another beautiful day.
It was an absolutely beautiful day in Delhi today – bright sunshine and a cool breeze (which must have been even more welcome to everyone who “enjoyed” the monsoon here). I happened to be in south Delhi so I stopped in to visit the famous Bahai temple – an enormous concrete lotus designed by an Iranian-Canadian architect and completed in 1986.
The temple has a slightly strange sinister-70s-utopia/Epcot Center/suburban church feel – helped along by the extremely strict crowd control (guards with whistles every 20m) and American-accented wardens who provide an introduction to the Bahai faith – but inside is cool and peaceful… except for the parakeet who had roosted in a ledge and whose squawks echoed around the famous lotus dome.
I’m busy planning my next activities in India – trips to interview reformers in Deoband and Mumbai. Watch this space!
Just returned from an afternoon visit to the green-parakeet-and-palm-filled gardens of the Mughal emperor Humayun’s tomb – no djinns this time, but extraordinarily beautiful buildings and grounds that provided the inspiration for the Taj Mahal. Some elements of the architecture and landscaping, particularly their rigorous symmetry and harmony, are very similar to the Moorish palaces of Seville and Granada… remnants of the “lost” Muslim kingdom of al-Andalus, which was referred to in the speech welcoming me to the madrassa in Aligarh (“Muslims must reform and educate ourselves or we will be driven out of India like we were driven out of Europe.”). Al-Andalus is considered a golden age by many Muslims worldwide, as Mughal reign in India is by the Muslim community here…
It’s Thursday afternoon – which means Sufi time (it was two weeks ago that I went to see the qawwali at the Nizamuddin dargah). At about 3pm I set off to explore Firoz Shah Kotla, the ruins of a former Delhi – Firozabad – which was built by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, Sultan of Delhi, in about 1354.
The remains of Firoz Shah’s capital are now in east-central Delhi, and to get to them I passed through the Bengali area – just like being in Brick Lane! I dropped in to an enormous Bengali cafe and sweet shop for some tea and kesar raj bhog, a super-super-sugary sweet that turned up the same unearthly sunshine yellow as the formica tabletop:
To reach Firoz Shah Kotla you walk up a long avenue lined with people selling the usual snacks and drinks – along with devotional paraphernalia: rose petals, marigold garlands, incense, rosewater, candles and gold-embroidered green cloth. The ruins are set in a park which was filled with Muslim families, many in their best Eid clothes.
On the right is the Jama Masjid, Firozabad’s mosque (still in use – more on that in a minute). On the left is an extraordinary pyramid-type structure Firoz Shah built to support the pillar at its apex – a 300BC Buddhist stone monument the sultan had transported over 200km from its original location using elephants, ropes-and-pulleys, galleys, horses and thousands of men.
The pillar, renamed the Minar e-Zarreen (Golden Tower), is now believed to be the home of Laat Wale Baba, the chief of the djinn that live in the ruins of Firozabad! In Muslim cosmology djinn – genies – are beings created from smokeless fire who like to inhabit remote shadowy places and may be benevolent or malicious.
This afternoon Firoz Shah Kotla was full of people making offerings to the djinn and leaving petitions for their help. At the edge of the well people had left candles and flowers:
Stranger still, in the corner of the mosque women were lighting candles and making reverences to the djinn.
The mosque (which oddly overlooks a flyover and sports stadium on its other side) was peaceful and beautiful – at prayer time the muezzin stood under a ruined arch and called with no amplification. Underneath the mosque was another surprise – a labyrinth of tiny dark cells swirling with incense smoke, lit by candles and crammed with men and women praying and petitioning the djinn.
This is all considered totally unorthodox and superstitious by Islamic scholars such as the maulanas I visited in Lucknow – and it has little to do with orthodox Islam. Many of the trappings are similar to the prayers and petitions I saw people making in Varanasi than to anything that goes on in a madrassa…
Perhaps because of scenes like the one above, when I was walking around Varanasi I kept thinking of Geoff Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (which I haven’t read, but my friend Alice says is quite good despite the title). With its stairs and water and boatmen and mists and crumbling palaces (and tourists) Varanasi can look a little like Venice…
…But is actually nothing like it at all. The morning after I arrived I walked up to the old city along the ghats (the stepped riverside terraces where people famously come to bathe, make offerings, do laundry or be cremated). Some were still submerged in metres of “mud” (actually a thick puffy composite of indescribable substances) from the monsoon floods, which small boys were ineffectually trying to remove with low-pressure hoses.
A ghat emerges from the monsoon deposit
Apart from this the ghats are criss-crossed with rivulets of waste water (and sewage) so walking is hazardous! Each ghat has its own character – this is the Krishna temple at Kedar Ghat:
– and most of them are noisy and crowded for most of the day with locals and pilgrims. Roughly amplified chanting blares from buildings perched high above the ghats – retreats for sadhus (holy people). “They are all waiting to die in there” one local told me – Hindus believe that if you die in Varanasi, you achieve instant moksha, liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. It is also, famously, a preferred place for cremation and as you walk up the river you pass two “burning ghats” with neat stacks of logs and blazing funeral pyres. The cremations are macabre spectacles, thronged with foreign tourists crowding near the pyre or taking (illicit) pictures with their big DSLRs.
At dawn people come down to the Ganges to bathe, pray and light floating candles – men even take constitutional swims right out into the middle of the soupy brown water. People with diseases, especially leprosy and other skin conditions, submerse themselves in the water in the hope of a cure.
Fishermen on the Ganges at dawn. I was assured the fish are good to eat...
At night, they attend the Ganga Aarti ceremony at Dasaswarmedh Ghat, with chanting, hymns, fire, dance and prayer. Everyone from the guidebooks to every tourist I’ve met here has insisted how “totally spiritual” Varanasi is… but I didn’t find it so at all. Just squalid and exploitative (the rapacious tourist industry definitely so, and I imagine the “religion industry” also…)
Anyway, thanks to the mighty overnight KV Express, the longest train I have ever seen, I am now back in Delhi and ready to get on with the research. I had a great time (and some truly wonderful food) out of the city, thanks in Aligarh to the lovely Farrukh and Faizana and in Lucknow to the kindness of Ifra and family and Hisam.
The maulanas (Islamic scholars) of north India will soon be tired of me. For the last two days I’ve been in Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh and a historic centre of Islamic learning and culture. I haven’t seen a great deal of the city – which is famous for its poetry, dance and delicious kebabs and biryanis – because I’ve been busy meeting maulanas and being ill (it had to happen.)
The streets of Lucknow’s old city are full of goats being sold for sacrifice on Eid al-Adha. The festival celebrating the end of the Hajj season falls on 16/17 November this year depending on geographical location, sectarian preference and sighting of the moon (a surprisingly controversial art). The goats are happily unconcerned (so far) – even while being carried on motorbike riders’ laps!
The approach of Eid means that many Islamic institutions are closed – so I was fortunate to meet maulanas at the city’s two top centres of Islamic learning, Nadwat ul Ulema and Firangi Mahal.
Students playing cricket in front of the main mosque at Nadwat ul Ulema
“Nadwa” is a sprawling institution founded in 1894 to counter the challenge of secular education, though it has always included subjects such as English in its curriculum. I met a gathering of senior maulanas including Nadwa’s vice-principal, who emphasised that Nadwa had no opposition to modern subjects because “science has already been explained in the Quran” and “it is important for Muslims to be prepared for the modern world”. Many of the maulanas’ educational arguments were expressed in Islamic terms – they spoke of the need to avoid shirk (polytheism) and to “repose complete trust in Allah” when preparing students for later life.
I asked what could be done to dispel the west’s “misconceptions about Islam”, a complaint I’ve encountered again and again on this trip. The maulanas said “We have tried through our publications and work” – Nadwa has very extensive journalism, publishing & PR departments devoted to Islamic publishing and polemical texts – “but the remaining problems are caused by a global Jewish conspiracy in reaction to the growth of Islam in the west”.
The same argument was made when I met Maulana Khalid Rashid of Firangi Mahal, an old and influential institution founded during the reign of Aurangzeb. 35-year-old Rashid was educated at a prestigious Christian school in Lucknow and speaks fluent, polished English. He is known for his moderate views on education and women’s rights. He made a strong defence of madrassa education in India, telling me that “Indian madrassas have never produced either beggars or anyone involved in anti-nationalist or anti-social activities” – aka terrorism. He pointed out that in West Bengal, Hindu children also attend madrassas because the standard of education they offer is superior to that provided by the state. He quoted the Prophet’s teaching that “All humanity is one divine family”.
Rashid also argued that “western misconceptions of Islam are created by the Jewish lobby because Islam is spreading very fast” and that “Islamic terrorism” had been created to satisfy US political/economic ends (ie provide an excuse for military – or economic – intervention). “After this latest Obama visit, you will see, the number of terrorist incidents in India will go down,” he said.
I don’t want to editorialise on these views at the moment – it’s just instructive to see the range of positions that can be adopted by a single individual/institution.
I’m now heading to Varanasi for a couple of days to study, take photographs and give the maulanas a break!
