Rezensionen
259
^uthropos 94.1999
the pïr indirectly claims to control when addressing a
popular audience, while he pretends not to resort to
them in front of more educated lot. Listening to the
pir’s redefinitions of his past and to diverging views and
testimonies about his person, K. Ewing is able to assess
the importance of crucial events in his youth, such as
an accusation of theft by his uncle and his rebellious
(and not uncommon) practice of black magic, the latter
working as a signifier of an aspiration to power. She
also notices that his narratives are modelled, regarding
the religious discourse, on the classical Sufi collection
of letters and advices (malfüzât), and on the traditional
Sufi hagiographies (tazkarat) as far as the pTr’s spiritual
training is concerned.
The author’s approach is also interestingly reflexive.
Dealing with the power of the pTri’s narratives, she
first presents the case of an educated young woman
convinced of the powers of the pïr while listening to
him telling how he had renounced his control over
the mu’akkals in favour of a loving devotion for his
own master. She then questions her own ethnographer’s
subject position, telling how the pïr had begun to have
an effect on her (160-162). He had once told her that
he would come to her during her sleep, and indeed, she
once was so startled from a dream that she sat upright: a
white horse had approached her and touched her thumb.
The meaning of that dream was clear for all the people
to whom she spoke, and K. Ewing was even more jolted
When an England-trained Pakistani psychiatrist became
very interested in the pïr after hearing her story.
Challenges to the author’s orientation and identity
become still more serious in the stories of desire and
fear told in the next chapter (163-197). One story tells
of a Pakistani professional settled in North Carolina
who was drawn to Sufism because of the changes he
bad perceived in his father after the latter had become
mvolved in Sufi practice. This man followed his “desire”
a t the possible cost of a dramatic change in his percep
tion by others: taking on a new identity is a socially
disorienting process. In another story, the author turns
With a rare courage to her own case, telling how she
°nce was subtly attracted into Sufi reality through her
‘desire for and fear of recognition and relationship”
with a practicing Sufi in a most ambiguous encounter,
during which she experienced the Other’s fantasy of
domination. Her conclusion of the chapter is then on
love, which is the answer of a true pïr to his disciple,
" a true pïr being the one who precisely has renounced
a desire for control of others, in much the same way
as Kristeva sees as one aspect of the culmination of
die psychoanalytic process a renunciation of the will to
dominate.
The last section of the book is devoted to the qa-
ndar. Exploring his confrontation with the self-styled
Proper Muslim” (201-229), K. Ewing speaks of a
double rhetoric of scorn, the wordly people appearing as
^°rrupt hypocrites to the qalandar whom they reject as
a wless. Enacting the middle-class fantasy of abolition
. e tween the public and the private, appearing as an
lrtl possible possibility, the qalandar embodies a subal
tern resistance to the dominant social and political order.
An attempt at breaking this resistance consists, for the
nation-state of Pakistan, in assimilating the qalandars to
the category “shelterless.” The author exemplifies this
attitude by relating an encounter between her Pakista
ni research assistant and a qalandar. But confronted
with the latter’s resistance to social integration, the
student declares that he deserves his destitute condition.
Exploring then her relationship with an aging female
qalandar (209-217), K. Ewing shows how her own
physical presence reactivates in the woman paradigms
of resistance to colonialism. She also uses her discourse
to reconstruct the process leading one to become a
qalandar. renunciation is usually attributed to an order
from God or from a dead saint, received directly or
in a dream. Then, the orders keep on coming as to
where to go and what to do, the condition for such
injunctions to structure one’s life being a complete
withdrawal from the social and material life of ordinary
people. The qalandar hence operates outside or at the
margins of the hegemonic modernizing discourse and as
an “other” within the Muslim discourse of community.
Rejected, he is what Kristeva has labeled “the abject”
(218). K. Ewing characterizes him as an embodiment of
liminality, an anomaly, betwixt between the dichotomies
which organize the social world: man and woman, saint
and criminal, sublime and abominable ... But because
such practices as caste indifference, black magic, or
open sexuality are no taboo for him, the abject is an
object of desire and temptation as well as of fear and
revulsion.
But whatever their rejection of the living qalandars,
the wordly people often praise the ascetics of a mythic
past. Similarly, a view of the ancient qalandar as a
hidden saint, as the “perfect man” (al-insdn al-kamil)
of classical Sufism is not uncommon in Muslim literary
traditions. Studying the qalandar as a trope, K. Ewing
explores how, using the vehicle of the qalandar image,
writers either problematized the process of identity
formation or sought to render the issue of subject
position unproblematic. She first deals with Persian Sufi
poetry (233-252) in which the qalandar marks a space
for cultural relativity and, as a sign, expresses the anti-
nomian, that which violates the sharl'at. Located outside
the sectarian and legalistic disputations, he signifies
a counter to the excesses of formalism, a withdrawal
from gaining identity in a competition with the other.
Transcending the artificial limits of socially organized
knowledge and reality, he works as a vehicle of the
message that God must be experienced directly, but also
as a reminder of al-GhazzalT s stress upon the secret as a
way of maintaining a split between the exoteric and the
esoteric, and as a trope for a fantasy of a basic violation
of the principles that order pleasure, the self, and society.
As a corollary, the strict law abiding Muslims who
attack the qalandar in their writings reveal the structure
of their own desire and shape the fears born out of these
desires: traces of this old Persian discourse are still at
work in Pakistan today, against the living qalandars as
agents of ideological protest.