Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults

by Basu,Helene; Basu,Helene

• ISBN13: 9780415150996
• ISBN10: 041515099X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-06-26
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The continued vitality of Sufism as a living embodied postcolonial reality challenges the argument that Sufism has "died" in recent times. Throughout India and Bangladesh, Sufi shrines exist in both the rural and urban areas, from the remotest wilderness to the modern Asian city, lying opposite banks and skyscrapers. This book illuminates the remarkable resilience of South Asian Sufi saints and their cults in the face of radical economic and political dislocations and breaks new ground in current research. It addresses the most recent debates on the encounter between Islam and modernity and presents important new comparative ethnographic material.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	viii	(1)
List of contributors	ix
PART 1 Introduction	1	(30)
1 The embodiment of charisma	3	(28)
PNINA WERBNER
HELENE BASU
PART 2 Embodying locality	31	(64)
2 The hardware of sanctity: anthropomorphic objects in Bangladeshi Sufism	31	(24)
SAMUEL LANDELL MILLS
3 A `festival of flags': Hindu-Muslim devotion and the sacralising of localism at the shrine of Nagore-e-Sharif in Tamil Nadu	55	(22)
S.A.A. SAHEB
4 `The saint who disappeared': saints of the wilderness in Pakistani village shrines	77	(18)
LUKAS WERTH
PART 3 The performance of emotion	95	(92)
5 Langar: pilgrimage, sacred exchange and perpetual sacrifice in a Sufi saint's lodge	95	(22)
PNINA WERBNER
6 Hierarchy and emotion: love, joy and sorrow in a cult of black saints in Gujarat, India	117	(23)
HELENE BASU
7 The majzub Mama Ji Sarkar: `a friend of God moves from one house to another'	140	(20)
JURGEN WASIM FREMBGEN
8 A majzub and his mother: the place of sainthood in a family's emotional memory	160	(27)
KATHERINE P. EWING
PART 4 Charisma and modernity	187	(47)
9 The literary critique of Islamic popular religion in the guise of traditional mysticism, or the abused woman	187	(22)
JAMAL MALIK
10 Prophets and pirs: charismatic Islam in the Middle East and South Asia	209	(25)
CHARLES LINDHOLM
Name index	234	(4)
Subject index	238