Mirasi Sufisme

Islam has a bad reputation these days. Aside from its associations with political militancy, there have been incidents which challenge Canadian conceptions of tolerance, including the recent high-profile account of an Iranian woman sentenced to stoning for adultery.

Such incidents must be viewed in the proper perspective. Most Canadians would not like to see Christianity judged as a whole simply by the Crusades, or by the separation of children of the First Nations from their families, and their subsequent abuse. If this is so, it is incumbent upon all of us to seek out a larger, more complicated view of Islam. Indeed, the recent debates over the placement of a mosque at ground zero, and the threatened burning of the Quran, have shown how terribly close-minded North Americans can be.

What sensationalist accounts about violence and cultural incommensurability don’t tell us about is how and why Islam is such a powerful positive force in the world, and why so many in our world celebrate it. Such representations threaten to erase the complexity and beauty of Islam from our view, and allow singular acts--and some enduring problems—to speak for the tradition as a whole.

There are many other Islams to learn about. One is accompanied by song. Sufism is the mystical tradition in Islam, and it has played a powerful role in Islam’s history. Music is central to the Sufi approach to the divine as intimate, personal, and ecstatic. It is a celebration of the life of the divine within our world. This is the Islam that scholars have decisively shown was responsible for large numbers of conversions in South Asia over the last millennium. This is the Islam that lives at Sufi shrines all through South Asia—even in areas with small Muslim populations. Even in the Indian Punjab today, which lost most of its Muslim population at partition in 1947, such religious and musical traditions thrive.

Song and performance bring Islam to life throughout South Asia. I will never forget when I visited a tiny shrine in Panipat in Haryana, India, tucked away in a busy bazaar. Inside was a small group of musicians, singing of the grace and glory of God, and the loving compassion of the saint. If only I could bring such an experience to people in North America, I thought, those years ago, to help them understand the beauty and intimacy of such a performance.

This Islam is coming to Vancouver this weekend. Singer Mukthiar Ali—who performs on Saturday and Sunday at the Frederic Wood Theatre at UBC—represents the 26th generation in a family of Mirasi or traditionally nomadic singers of Rajasthan. He sings a wide range of devotional music, including that of the Hindu saints Mira and Brahmanand, the lower caste critique of social and religious conventions, Kabir, and a range of Sufi (Islamic mystical) poets such as Bulle Shah, Baba Sheikh Farid, and Amir Khusro. Ali comes to us as a part of the Virani Lecture Series in Islamic Studies, an annual event made possible by the generous support of Amir and Yasmin Virani. Their vision makes this celebration of culture and knowledge possible.

The visit of Mukhtiar Ali to UBC offers an opportunity to experience this mystical dimension of Islam, sung and experienced by a group of folk singers who have only begun to be heard outside of India. It also demonstrates vividly how the performance of Islam in South Asia has occurred in dynamic conversation with non-Islamic traditions: Ali sings Mira, as well as Baba Sheikh Farid. The divine, through such poets, is accessible to all.

These performances are accompanied by a mini-film festival featuring the films of Ajay Bhardwaj, a Delhi-based documentary filmmaker, with films related to the theme of Islam in Punjab (and others as well), and talks by UBC professor Ken Bryant and University of Alberta professor Regula Qureshi, who is a specialist on Islamic musical performance in South Asia.

If we want to understand our world, we must understand its complexity. Islam is not the one-dimensional ideology all too often portrayed in the media. We invite Vancouver to experience a larger, more representative Islam. Sometimes—as I learned in Panipat—it is necessary to see for yourself.

Anne Murphy is Assistant Professor and Chair, Punjabi Language, Literature and Sikh Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.