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.
Embodying Charisma re-examines some basic concepts in the sociology and anthropology of religion and the organization of religious movements.
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 saints 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 familys 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
Pnina Werbner is Reader in Social Anthropology at Keele University. She has published on Sufism as a transnational cult and has a growing reputation among Islamic scholars for her work on the political imaginaries of British Islam. Helene Basu teaches Social Anthropology at the Institut für Ethnologie in Berlin. She has studied spirit possession cults and living goddesses in Gujarat, India, and in Sindh.
