Sufis are not all the peaceful types that many in the West assume them to be. They are aiding the Chechen jihad; Hasan Al-Banna of the Muslim Brotherhood was strongly influenced by them; and some of their most revered figures, including Al-Ghazali himself, were quite clear in their espousal of violent jihad and dhimmitude for non-Muslims. Still, none of that spares them from Salafist wrath in Pakistan. The shrines may be targeted because of several ahadith in which Muhammad says that to pray at shrines dedicated to saints is tantamount to idolatry.
"Hard-line militants now targeting Pak's most popular brand of Islam- Sufism," from ANI, January 7 (thanks to Twostellas):
Kasur, Jan 7 : Pakistan's most popular brand of Islam, Sufism, has been condemned as un-Islamic by fundamentalist groups and has repeatedly come under extremists' attacks, as in 2010 alone, minority hard-line militants took responsibility for five shrine attacks that killed 64 people.While attacks in previous years occurred in the middle of the night or when worshipers were not present, apparently in an effort to avoid causalities, in 2010, terrorists carried out suicide bombings when thousands of worshipers were present, and in the nation's largest cities, like Karachi and Lahore.
The increase in attacks, and a direct effort to kill those who practice a more mystical brand of Islam, has torn the fabric of mainstream worship in Pakistan, The New York Times reported.
But as worshipers continue to visit the Sufi shrines and many Sufi festivals continue in the face of threats, it also evidences the perseverance of Pakistan's more moderate brand of Islam, it added.
"It's a very disturbing picture that militants have extended their targets to shrines, which are symbols of popular Islam in Pakistan and are widely visited," Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a professor of political science at Lahore University of Management Sciences, was quoted as saying....
Nothing surprising in this...Islam is in essence a doctrine that gives the sanction of religion to political power, giving its adherents, if they have the power, the freedom to denounce a rival or a potential rival as un-Muslim and kill them without compunction. All Islamic lands are historically marked by relatively orderly times only when ruled by powerful tyrants. On the other hand, any weakening of control and relaxation of central tyranny results in a proliferation of warlords and general anarchy, with different factions at each others' throats, each claiming greater Islamic piety than the other while slitting his throat.
Because of Islam's power fixation, a democracy in an Islamic land is a mirage, a contradiction in terms, it is essentially a temporary interlude,a prelude to mayhem, unless there is a powerful, popular dictator at the helm - like Attaturk in Turkey or Musharraf (in the early days) in Pakistan - or a rich, powerful imperial power willing to chastise the deviants, without compunction.
Sufis are an integral part of Islam's power milieu and are currently facing the onslaught of Wahhabism in Pakistan. The Wahhabis have the advantage of being the first-on-the-draw and the power of rich Saudi funded mosques and madrassa paymasters behind them.
Sufis do not deserve any particular sympathy from us, because they are as arrogant and as contemptuous of the Kuffar as other Muslim hardliners. A classic example is the Indian Sufi "Saint" Sirhindi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Sirhindi
No sympathies for Pakistani sufis or any other sufis. They are no more "peaceful" than sunnis or shias!!!They are just as much jihadi Muslims as sunnis or shias though the former may not regard them Muslims. It were sufi "saints"(some siant, perverted definition of saint) who encouraged Mughal invaders of India to kill Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists if they did not convert to Islam. Kashmiri sufis in last two decades have managed to throw out all the Hindu pundit population with their genocidal zeal. These pundits have been thrown out of their own ancestral land of Kashmir!! Chechan sufis are killing Russians and the sufis in Ujbekistan, etc are doing the same.
So why shed any tears for sufis targeting in Pakistan - live by sword, die by sword.
Telegraph of Dec 24h 2010
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/praveenswami/100069586/the-freaky-fantasies-of-a-former-guantanamo-detainee-explain-why-sufi-islam-wont-defeat-the-jihadists/
The more fantasic revelations of Walid Muhammad Hajj to Al-Jezeera are a more than a bit weird.
From the Telegraph article by Praveen Swami referenced in my previous comment.
I think the cat reference may be to something like the qarinah of arab superstition, but more incubus than succubus.
For some years now, we’ve been hearing about how Sufi folk Islam can defeat the Salafist Islam on which the jihadist movement is purported to be built. Put crudely, Sufism has been cast as a kind of “good Islam” that can take on Osama bin-Laden’s belligerent reading of his faith. Both the UK and the US are spending millions funding organisations to pursue that objective (for obvious reasons, I’m not going to name names here).
This pursuit is about as founded in reality than Mr Hajj’s belief that Jewish practitioners of the dark arts sent a cat to rape him. Islamism – like communism or capitalism – is a system of thought born in response to the real world. Few people embrace capitalism because they happen to read a particular commentary on Adam Smith; fewer still, I suspect, become suicide bombers simply because of a textual encounter. Sales of the Quran are reported to have surged in the weeks after 9/11, as Americans sought to understand bin Laden, but I fear they were looking in the wrong place.
Mr Hajj demonstrated a sharp, rational mind during legal proceedings at Guantánamo – which makes it significant that he chose the language he did during his interview. The audience he was reaching out to is drenched in the folk practice of Islam, suffused with faith in miracles and black magic. Beliefs like these, which predate Islam, continue to have wide currency: a recent Saudi study estimated Arabs spend $ 5 billion a year on magic and sorcery.
Islamist orthodoxy is indeed implacable in its hostility to these folk traditions. In his seminal 1939 lecture Jihad in Islam, the Indian-born ideologue Abul Ala’ Maududi railed against “nonsensical matters such as talismans, incantations, superstitious rituals, supererogatory offerings, and the like.” His fellow-ideologue Syed Qutb, in his manifesto Milestones, complained that “corrupted beliefs and superstitions [had] become mixed with this religion.”
Neither man, I suspect, would have had much patience with tales of the 72 virgins who await martyrs at the gates of Paradise. Some of their followers don’t either: this summer’s hideous bombing at the revered Data Darbar shrine in Pakistan was an assault, foremost, on popular Islam.
But the jihadist movement has mystical traditions of its own. Hassan al-Banna, the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, was profoundly influenced by the work of the 12th century Sufi Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali. The historian Ayesha Jalal’s superb work, Partisans of Allah, points out that figures like Shah Waliullah and Sayyid Ahmad, to whom the roots of modern South Asian neo-fundamentalism can be traced, were grounded in mystical traditions.
Elements of the practices of the Sufi brotherhoods continue to suffuse organisations like al-Qaeda – witness the practice of the swearing of a Bayat, or oath, to its sheikh, Osama bin Laden.
Abdullah Azzam, a founding patriarch of the modern jihadist movement, drew heavily on mystic images in his Afghan jihad memoirs, recounting stories of martyrs whose bodies did not decompose and birds flying beneath Soviet combat jets to protect Islamist guerrillas from falling bombs.
No worries here. I'm sure the 9/11 Mosque's Sufi Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf will take time off from his busy schedule propagandizing Americans to travel to Pakistan and straighten them all out, as well.
The Sufis have an obsession with humiliating the infidels, hence the Ground Zero Victory Mosque.
Sufis = Wolves in sheep's clothing, expert practitioners of taqqiya.
In India, Sufi Islam is peddled to the unsuspecting as benign Islam with Hindu characteristics.
question: was not Tamerlane a sufi?
Islamic black hole of death needing the victim to devour, first the Jews, Christians, polytheists, then those deemed not Muslim enough or wrong kind of Muslim.