Journal of Contemporary Religion

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The spatial imaginaries of Mujaddidī Sufis

and political integration in the northwestern
borderlands of colonial India

Sana Haroon

To cite this article: Sana Haroon (2021) The spatial imaginaries of Mujaddidī Sufis and political
integration in the northwestern borderlands of colonial India, Journal of Contemporary
Religion, 36:2, 243-263, DOI: 10.1080/13537903.2021.1943901

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2021.1943901

Published online: 08 Sep 2021.

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JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION
2021, VOL. 36, NO. 2, 243–263
https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2021.1943901

The spatial imaginaries of Mujaddidī Sufis and political

integration in the northwestern borderlands of colonial
India
Sana Haroon

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article identifies two comparable teaching and learning Received 2 June 2017
lines of the reformist Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya Sufi order Accepted 29 June 2019
in the Indo-Afghan borderlands in the nineteenth and early KEYWORDS
twentieth centuries. It describes the strategies of social Islam; Reformism; Sufism;
engagement of the mobile mullās of the Akhund Ghaffūr-Haddā frontier; anti-Colonialism;
Mullā line and those of the pīrs of the khānqah (Sufi lodge)- Afghanistan; India; Pakistan;
centered line of Khwājāh Usmān Dāmanī. The concurrent spatial history
establishment of these two Sufi lines in the northwestern
borderlands of colonial India was an important historical
phenomenon inspired by a ‘reformed’ Mujaddidī practice and
the two Sufi lines were comparable because of their roots in
Mujaddidī reformism. I argue, however, that the two Sufi lines
must also be differentiated because of the loci of their
participation in and mediation of the day-to-day affairs of
practising communities. Members of the Haddā Mullā’s line
dispersed among the Pashtun borderland communities to
enforce religious priorities from day to day, while members of
Usmān Dāmanī’s line consciously confined their activities to the
khānqah. The patterns of activity of the members of the two
Mujaddidī lines suggest a new framework for understanding the
relationship between Islam and politics in the Indo-Afghan
borderlands: it was not the ideological approach to Islam, but
the spatial imaginaries employed by the frontier Sufis which
produced their respective political agendas and impact.

Introduction
Interrogation of the Islamic ideological and institutional motivations underlying
Sufi thought and practice does not sufficiently account for differences in the
social impact of Sufism in modern South Asia. Islamic ideology is explicitly
explained in Sufi manuals and hagiographies where pious actions are described
and the manner in which they should be carried out is carefully detailed. Sufism
itself is an institutionalized practice with specific mechanisms and rigors such as
the pledge of allegiance by the disciple at the hand of the Sufi master and the
authorization of the disciple by the Sufi master. Fundamentally similar

CONTACT Sana Haroon Sana.Haroon@umb.edu

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
244 S. HAROON

ideological and institutional foundations can support very different approaches

to social participation by Sufis.
The Haddā Mullā’s and Usmān Dāmanī’s Sufi teaching and learning lines
were established during the period of British colonization of the Punjab
from 1849 to 1893. Until 1893, there was no effective border between
colonial India and Afghanistan, with districts forming the North West
Frontier Province only being carved out of the Punjab in 1901. The
regional dispersal of the two Sufi lines occurred during a period of
frontier building by the British colonial state in that same region.
Members of both the Haddā Mullā’s and Usmān Dāmanī’s line
participated in an institutionalized Sufi and reformist practice, the
Naqshbandiyyā-Mujaddidiyyā silsilā, which they introduced into the
borderlands of nineteenth-century colonial India. Teaching in both the
political Haddā Mullā line and the a-political Dāmanī line of the
Naqshbandiyya-Mujadidīyya silsilā at the northwest frontier was reformist
by virtue of transmission of the Mujaddidī exhortation to observe orthodox
rituals, such as prayer and fasting, and Sufi in their mutual observance of the
sanctity of the Sufi teaching and learning line and mystical devotionalism.
Yet members of the two fraternal orders took very different approaches to
the frontier terrain and communities, with members of one line preferring
the interiority of the khānqah (Sufi lodge) and members of the other
preferring travel among communities and participation in community
affairs. These differing approaches were not perceptibly dictated by their
shared Islamic reformist ideology or the rigors of the institution of Sufism.
The spatiality of participation by members of the two Sufi lines, taking
shape in both discourse and locus of their activities, may be examined as an
imaginary, distinct from their common mystical and reformist impulses.
The divergence of the two Sufi lines prompted by the spatial imaginary
offers an example of the way religious change takes place while the
ideological and devotional underpinnings of the faith remain constant.

The creation of the Indo-Afghan borderland and the extension of

Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya reformism in the region
The British and Afghan states extended control into the highlands inhabited by
Pakhtuns west of Peshawar and Kohat and east of Kabul and Kandahar through
the late nineteenth century. After the second Anglo-Afghan war in 1878, the
efforts of these states to integrate their respective borderlands would rely on
treaties and agreements executed by the political office of the colonial state and
emissaries of the Kabul court rather than the settlement of revenues, extension of
administrative systems, and development of infrastructure that characterize
projects of modern state-building in Afghanistan’s and India’s agricultural and
commercial centers (Noelle 1997; Baha 1978; Haroon 2008). Efforts by the
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION 245

Afghan and Indian colonial states in these borderlands can be broadly described
as attempts at political integration of the region to orient the dispersed
populations toward their respective centers. A map (see Figure 1) from 2008
provides an anachronistic reference to Pakistan but usefully shows the Indo-
Afghan borderland, districts, towns, and cities which were the base for the
activities of the Sufis in the nineteenth century, discussed in this article.
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century regional formation in the
Pashtun area was a historical process that relied on technologies and
institutions as well as ideologies enabling political integration of subject
populations. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi’s study of nineteenth-century Afghan
state-formation identifies the significance of permits, licenses, travel passes,
and officials in re-routing nomadic communities from the Pashtun
highlands in an intensified pattern of trade between Peshawar and Kabul
(Hanifi 2014, 7). Hassan Kakar (1979) had pointed to the military
recruitment practices of Abdur Rahman’s court as a strategy of state
consolidation in the southern and eastern Afghan regions. Outside the
field of Afghan and Indian frontier studies, scholars identified a variety of
practices that knit borderland populations to the state. Michael Eilenberg
(2012) provides evidence of kinship ties linking local élites in border
communities to state institutions in Indonesia as one of many ‘intricate
ways’ in which borderland populations and states are intertwined.

Figure 1. Map of the Indo-Afghan borderlands (Afghanistan-Pakistan Administrative Divisions,

Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division).
246 S. HAROON

The Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya silsilā is a teacher-to-student

transmission of spiritual knowledge that is traced from the Prophet
Muhammad in the seventh century to the fourteenth-century Central
Asian Bahauddin Naqshband and the seventeenth-century north Indian
Sufi Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindī, also known by his honorific ‘Mujaddid Alf
Sani’. Sirhindī relied on the meaning and method of the silent zikr
(recitation) as taught and practised by Bahauddin Naqshband while
proposing the Quran and Hadith as the central articles of faith and
contemplation. Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya thought presented a means
for confronting the ‘crisis of Islam’, meshing Sufism with a return to the text
of the Quran, Hadith, and authoritative commentaries. Sirhindī sought to
introduce principles of personalized and intellectualized religious practice
and to de-emphasize the role of the pīr as spiritual intercessionary while
relying on the meeting of ‘hearts’ that enabled the transmission of
pedagogies (Buehler 1998, 84–90, 186). Teachings in these lines of
transmission could include the writings and transmitted pedagogies of
foundational sages, in this case Bahauddin Naqshband and Shaikh Ahmad
Sirhindī, the textual and oral explications of scholars and teachers who were
authorized to transmit teachings and manuals describing meditational
practices. Individual membership in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya
Sufi line was denoted through the genealogy (shajarāh) and accompanying
hagiographic commentaries attributed the social priorities and impact of
Sufis to their religious faith and spiritual prowess. Naqshbandiyya-
Mujaddidīyya practitioners received instruction in the teachings of the
Qaderīyya, Suhrawardī, and Chishtīyya Sufi orders as well as other
pedagogies through travel, education, and social and intellectual
exchanges. The practice, like that in other Sufi silsilās, was adaptive and
continually recreated through reference and inference. (Fusfeld 1981, 77)
Mujaddidīyya genealogies consolidated from a variety of sources
(especially Buehler 1998, 86–87; Ranjha 2005, 141–145; Al-Hussaini
[1975] 2003, 49–55) illustrate how a number of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindī’s
devotees developed and extended his message of social reform through their
own teaching and learning lines (see Figure 2). Shah Wali Ullah (1703–
1762), arguably the most well-known of Sirhindī’s spiritual successors,
received his teachings through a dream initiation, then developed and
expounded on principles of personal, social, and spiritual conduct that
were distilled from examples in the Quran and Hadith (Rizvi 1980;
Hermansen 1996). Sirhindī’s deputy Mirzā Mazhar Jān-i Jānan (d. 1781)
and the latter’s deputy Abu Sa’īd Mujaddidī refined the practice of
disciplehood alongside their attention to the Quran and Hadith,
reconciling the two aspects of Mujaddidī practice (Giordani 2012, 397–
401). A variety of other actors, institutions, and ideologues, including Mir
Dard (Khodamoradi 2012) and the Deobandis (Metcalf 1982, 2009; Zaman
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION

Figure 2. The transmission of Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya reformism.

247
248 S. HAROON

2010), popularized reformist principles of Mujaddidī thought. Owing to the

underlying person-to-person system of transmission memorialized in
a variety of histories, biographies, genealogies, and hagiographies, these
should be considered comparable lines of transmission.
By the eighteenth century, the Naqshbandiyyā-Mujaddidiyya order was
anchored in Delhi in the madrassa and at the Khānqah Mirzā Mazhar
Jān-i Jānān (Buehler 1998, 72–73). The city was a vibrant center of Indian
Persianate and Urdu literary cultures. Sufis, poets, and philosophers made it
their home and place of teaching and networking. The Chishtī Sufis of the
region had long maintained connections to the Mughal court and other
major and minor notables, shaping a cosmopolitan culture and space here
(Aquil 2008, 23–24). Reformist ideas and intellectual practices were
developed by a variety of reformist thinkers, among them the Naqshbandi
Sufi Khwāja Mīr Dard (Ziad 2010) and the Mujaddidī Shah Muhammad
Ashiq Phūlati (Hermansen 2012).
A wave of westward Naqshbandiyyā-Mujaddidyyā migrations began after
the Sikh occupation of Sirhind in 1763 (Ziad 2016). Relocations to the
northwest were enabled, possibly even engineered, by Naqshbandiyyā-
Mujaddidyyā pīrs in Delhi. Shah Wali Ullah’s and Mirza Mazhar Jan-
e-Janan’s spiritual successors took adaptations of their methodologies and
practices into the Pashtun frontier region in the nineteenth century. Sayyid
Ahmad Bareilvi (d. 1834), trained briefly at the Delhi Madrassa, based
himself first in Charsadda, in the northeast of Peshawar, then in the hills
north of Peshawar, while Dost Muhammad Kandahari (d. 1868) established
a khānqah at Mūsazai in modern-day Dera Ismail Khan.
Dost Muhammad was a Pakhtun of the Yusufzai tribe from Kandahar. He
had travelled to the Khānqah Mazharīyya in Delhi to study under Shah Abū
Sa‘īd Mujaddidī and remained there for one year and two months after
offering the pledge of discipleship (bay‘at) at Abu Sa‘īd’s hand. This pledge
was the foundation of the Sufi mystical tradition that

involved a person’s taking a vow of spiritual allegiance from another, who in turn had
taken a similar vow from still another, so that an institutionalized “spiritual chain”
linked any Sufi with some earlier master (Eaton 1996, xxvii).

Dost Muhammad received the ijāzat (permission to teach) in the

transmission lines of the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya, Qaderīyya,
Chishtīyya, and Suhrawardī traditions. When hostilities between the
British and locals began in Delhi around 1857, Dost Muhammad was sent
away by Abu Sa‘īd in the company of a caravan of traders and entrusted with
the mission of extending the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya teachings in the
Pakhtun northwest.
Dost Muhammad visited Kandahar where he established a khānqah and
conferred the ijāzat on two devotees, Mullā Ghazi Akhunzada and Mullā
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION 249

Amanullah Akhunzada, designating them as his deputies (Ranjha 2002, 23–

25). The area where the khānqah was established is alternately referred to in
the hagiographies of this Sufi line as Khorasan—a swathe of territory which
cuts across modern-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Following the
establishment of the khānqah in Kandahar, Dost Muhammad settled in
Mūsazai near Dera Ismail Khan, choosing this location because both
Punjabi and Pashto were spoken there. Shah Ahmad Sa‘īd left Delhi
during the violence of 1857 and travelled to Mūsazai Sharīf where he
conferred full leadership of the Khānqah Mazhariyya and Khānqah
Ghundan in Kandahar on Dost Muhammad; the latter remained in
Mūsazai until his death in 1868 (Ranjha 2005, 51–52).
Khwājāh Usmān Dāmanī was a local of Mūsazai, belonging to the Looni
tribe. He presented himself to Dost Muhammad in 1850 and took the bay‘at
the same day, spending 18 years in the latter’s service. In 1868, he assumed
control of the Khānqah Mūsazai Sharīf and the custodianship of the
Khānqah Mazhariyya at Delhi and the Khānqah Ghundan at Kandahar,
keeping the three roles until his death in 1897 when they passed to his son
Khwājāh Muhammad Sirājuddīn (1879–1915) (Ranjha 2002, 26–27). In
1922, Abū Saad Ahmad Khan, a devotee of Sirājuddīn, established the
Khānqah Sirajiyya in Kundiyān Mianwali, which is northeast of
D. I. Khan and just across the Indus River and the border with the Punjab
(Ranjha 2003, 69–70).
Dāmanī’s Sufi practice included meditations, recitation of the genealogy
of the teaching and learning line, and recitations of God’s names alongside
the observant practice of orthodox rituals such as prayer and fasting.
Dāmanī’s deputy and devotee Akbar Ali Ghafi began his account of
Dāmanī’s teachings saying,

It should be known that his method . . . established by the grace of God, is the
principles of sunnat observed by the Sunnis and avoidance of distortion [bid‘at],
predicated on the agreed principles of the Hanafīyya, Sh’afiyya, Malikiyya and
Hanbaliyya. (Ali [1899] 2002, 39)

Initiates in Dāmanī’s line were given clear directions for piety and worship
(ibid, 43–46) that included recitations and contemplations but also insisted
upon the observance of sacred rituals such as prayer, fasting, and
pilgrimage.
Sayyid Ahmad Bareilvi’s efforts in the Pashtun region, beginning in the
1820s, were a call to broad social and political reform. He led campaigns
against both the Sikh kingdom and recalcitrant local Pakhtun tribes in order
to create a space in which Shah Wali Ullah’s vision could be realized (Mehr
1956, 336; Ahmad 1966). Shah Ismail, Sayyid Ahmad’s close ally, described
a system of religious practice that he called “Rāh-i Nabuwwat”, the path of
the Prophet, which required simple meditations on Quranic and Hadith
250 S. HAROON

principles and observance of the individualized ritual practices such as

prayer and fasting. Rāh-i Nabuwwat was fundamentally a mystical
practice that included meditations and observation of all things of the
world as manifestations of divinity (Haroon 2011, 185).
During his time in the Pakhtun areas, Sayyid Ahmad struck up a close
relationship with a Qaderīyya Sufi, the Akhund of Swat Abdul Ghaffūr, who
admitted and endorsed his social reformist practices. Akhund Abdul
Ghaffūr took on a number of devotees who pledged their allegiance at his
hand, some of whom were entrusted with extending his social mission of
reform and revitalization of Islam. Such deputies were trusted to represent
their pīr’s authority and spirituality to the layman in his lifetime and
entrusted with taking forward his teachings after his death (Mehr 1956,
90–91). Akhund Ghaffūr still taught his devotees the particulars of Sufi
religious practice, maintaining his commitment to the secrecy and rigor of
the Sufi tarīqa.
The Haddā Mullā Najmuddin arrived in Saidu Sharif after receiving
his training in the Shilgarh and Ghazni area, southwest of Jalalabad, and
instruction from Akhund Ghaffūr in the Qaderīyya silsilā alongside the
Karboghāy Mullā Sāhib and Miyān of Manki Sharif. He was given ijāzat
in the Qaderīyya Sufi line and, in this capacity, during the Akhund’s
lifetime and for ten years after his death, the Haddā Mullā consolidated
and extended the Akhund Ghaffūr’s line of transmission through the
eastern Pakhtun region. Hājī Turangzaī, who was involved in setting up
nationalist primary schools in the North West Frontier Province
administered districts and moved to Mohmand in 1916, was arguably
the best known of the Haddā Mullā’s devotees (Haroon 2008, 53–59). He
took bay‘at at the hand of the Haddā Mullā and received ijāzat in the
Qaderīyya silsilā, which established his religious credentials, but also
helped him to pursue the mission of reform as communicated by
Sayyid Ahmad, receiving this obligation through his bay‘at. The
religious obligation of devotees to the pīr, pledged through bay‘at, and
the ijāzat to teach were the devices through which religious principles
were transmitted. Together, bay‘at and ijāzat unified associations within
the fraternal order and shaped its coherence.
The mystical underpinnings of orthodoxy taught by Sayyid Ahmad in the
early 1800s are suggested in the Risāla-yi Ashghāl, a short manual of
meditations and contemplations in the Qaderīyya, Chishtīyya, and
Naqshbandiyya method, taught by Sayyid Ahmad Shahīd to his disciples.
This manual was published by Sayyid Nafees Al Hussaini of Lahore in 1975
and re-published as part of a collection of his writings in 2003. Al-Hussaini
received Sayyid Ahmad’s teachings through his own teacher Abdul Qādir
Raipurī. Miracle tales recounted by successors in the line of the knowledge
transmission testify to the significance of incantations, recitations,
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION 251

meditations, talismans, pilgrimages to shrines, dream visitations, and

prayers for divine intercession as foundational elements of the practice of
the mullās of the Haddā line (Edwards 1996, 25). Solidarity among the
members, the spread of their fame, and the extension of their influence
were based in the pledge of bay‘at.
The Haddā Mullā, whose khānqah was in Nangarhar, had devotees and
deputies from Bajaur, Mohmand, and Waziristan as well as Kabul,
Kandahar, and Peshawar. Usmān Dāmanī’s fraternal order also spanned
the border region between colonial north India and Afghanistan; there were
khānqahs at Dera Ismail Khan and in Kandahar. Pashtuns from Bajaur (east
of the Durand Line), from the Babbar tribe, dispersed through Nowshera,
Kandahar, and other towns; Pishin in Balochistan and Powindahs were
among his deputies (Ali [1899] 2002, 305–306).1 Like the Akhund
Ghaffūr-Haddā Mullā line, Dāmanī’s network of devotees and deputies
spanned the border region between colonial North India and Afghanistan.
Mullā Muhammad Rasul took bay‘at at Dāmanī’s hand when he was ten
years old and after almost 30 years of service to Dāmanī was given ijāzat and
appointed to reside at the khānqah in Kandahar (Ranjha 2005, 287).
Pashtuns from Bajaur (east of the Durand Line), Babbar (west of the
Durand Line), Pishin in Balochistan, and Powindahs were among his
deputies (Ranjha 2005, 305–306). Dāmanī’s line eventually spread further
southeast: Qazi Abdur Rasul Angvi went to Sehwan in Sindh; Miyān Fāzil,
Mehr Muhammad, and Nūr Khan returned to the Punjab (Ranjha 2005,
287). Members of the different khānqahs maintained active connections
across the colonial borderlands, spanning the new border between
colonial India and Afghanistan.
Both Sufi teaching and learning lines had deep connections to Delhi
which made them both part of a uniquely and self-consciously Indian
reformist Sufi practice. Teaching in both the Haddā Mullā and the
Dāmanī line of the Naqshbandiyya-Mujadidīyya silsilā in the northwest
frontier was reformist by virtue of transmission of the Mujaddidī
exhortation to observe orthodox rituals (e.g. prayer and fasting) and Sufi
in their mutual observance of the sanctity of the Sufi teaching and learning
line and mystical devotionalism. Together with the common commitment
to reformism and continued emphasis on meditational practices, service to
the pīr and pledge made the two teaching and learning lines comparable,
both ideologically and organizationally.
The transmission of Mujaddidī reformist ideas and devotional
practices to the northwestern borderlands and the establishment of the
two Sufi lines were a significant and unified historical phenomenon which
appears to echo a pattern of participation of men of religion in frontier
creation in the northeast of India through the Mughal period, as
described by Richard Eaton (1993). Eaton provides a definition of the
252 S. HAROON

frontier as that space of cultural expansion that precedes the encounter

with geographical barriers such as the ocean or mountain ranges. He
argues that Sufis—Muslim holy men—worked alongside political
authorities to construct the eastern Bengal frontier of medieval India.
Sufis, as “pious mystics or freebooting settlers” (Eaton 1993, 77), caused
mass conversions to Islam. They introduced a culture of Islamic piety that
had the attendant effect of bringing about political integration, even when
there was an undercurrent of friction in the relationships between Sufis
and kings.
The Akhund Abdur Ghaffur, teacher of the Haddā Mullā, received
considerable amounts of land and money from the Afghan King Dost
Muhammad in the 1830s (Haroon 2008, 37–38). The poet Muhammad
Nur of Laghman wrote an elegy for the Haddā Mullā which highlighted
the link between the Sufi and the ordinary man (Caron 2016, 140–144). The
Haddā Mullā Najmuddīn later denounced the Afghan amīr (king) for
supporting the ambitions of the British colonial state in 1897 (Edwards
1996, 28–29). The accounts of local institution building, receipt of land
grants, social outreach, and political intrigue by the Mujaddidī Sufis in the
northwest are corollaries to Eaton’s accounts of religious men of the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bengal frontier as the settled
beneficiaries of land grants who received state patronage to manage
mosques and shrines to allow peasant communities to coalesce (Eaton
1993, 249). Like the Sufis of Bengal, the Sufis of the Mujaddidī order
apparently participated in the project of state formation and political
integration in the northwest frontier region to produce power-sharing
arrangements between political centers and frontier populations.
Prevailing scholarly approaches to the study of Naqshbandiyya-
Mujaddidiyya reformism, Sufism, and frontier building allow us to
compare the two teaching and learning lines, that of Dāmanī and that of
the Haddā Mullā, both ideologically and organizationally. Both lines
introduced the same uniquely and self-consciously Indian reformist Sufi
practice in the Indo-Afghan borderlands.

Centered practice and dispersal

The study of Islamic reformism or revivalism, the discursive emphasis on
the Quran, Hadith, and ritual prescriptions in Muslim practice from the
eighteenth century, is a central theme in examining the history of South
Asia. The historical significance of reformism is borne out by overwhelming
evidence of new technologies and new literacies associated with reformist
practice. Scholarly attention has led to the attribution of impulse toward
religiously intoned politics and antipathy toward the colonial state to
reformist thought in general. Yet it is clear from the example of the two
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION 253

lines of the reformist Mujaddidī order in the Indo-Afghan borderlands,

where the Haddā line became engaged in regional politics and the Dāmanī
line did not, that reformist impulses and Sufi institutional rigors did not
necessarily produce a politics of communal representation and social
intervention. What, if not their shared religious ideology, did differentiate
these two reformist Sufi teaching and learning lines?
Despite the many similarities in the pedagogies and regional significance
of Khwājāh Usmān Dāmanī and the Haddā Mullā, the spatial patterns of
social engagement by these lines were quite different. The Haddā Mullā’s
devotees emphasized the significance of community-based practice and
dispersed among the communities of the region to exhort common people
to ‘do good and reject that which is forbidden’. Usmān Dāmanī and his son
Sirājuddīn, on the other hand, imparted an awareness of divine grace
through activities confined within the khānqah. These arenas of religious
service are spatial imaginaries which were of greater political consequence
than the reformed teachings of either line; the political nature of the
activities of the Haddā Mullā line is rooted in the spatial imaginary which
shaped the arena of religious service.
Khānqah complexes, particularly the one at Mūsazai, were the primary
arenas of activities of Dāmanī and his successors. The hagiographer-
historian of Dost Muhammad’s line, Nazir Ranjha, wrote that the
khānqah of Mūsazai was a “center of rashd-o hidāyat [growth and
guidance]”, that it was established so that “all the Farsi, Pashto Punjabi
areas [would be] graced by the recitations and thought taking place at the
Khānqah” (Ranjha 2005, 60). Khānqahs, and the interpretative practices
conducted within, were closely controlled by leading pīrs in the line or by
their explicitly nominated deputies; control of these buildings, defined as
legal trusts, was transferred through legal deeds conferring rights of
supervision of uses and incomes related to the buildings.
Dāmanī’s devotees and deputies gave service to the khānqah as part of
their religious duties. Mullā Muhammad Rasul (d. 1314/1896) was given
ijāzat by Dāmanī and appointed head of the khānqah in Kandahar. He spent
many years there “promoting [understanding of] the blessings and grace
and the hidden nature of the great Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidīyya in the
hearts of the people in the area” (Ali [1899] 2002, 267). Sayyid Amir Shah
Bilawali memorized the Quran and studied recitations. After bay‘at at
Dāmanī’s hand, he spent nine years at the Khānqah Mūsazai doing
building work with clay and stone (ibid, 291–292). The building was
imbued with religious significance in the traditions of the line; it was said
that “there has been so much effort [expended] on Mūsazai Sharīf that if any
wayfarer presented himself there with honesty and sincerity, then they
would receive grace even from the walls of the khānqah” (ibid, 64).
Service to the khānqah was such a significant part of the religious practice
254 S. HAROON

of Dāmanī’s practice that one deputy, a free spirit who felt he could not stay
settled at the khānqah, had to receive special dispensation to go somewhere
else to find students and was given the title qalandar (itinerant) (Ali [1899]
2002, 149).
Reformist teachings and interpretations posed a challenge to the
continued development of and commemorative activities at grave sites in
the khānqah complex. Khwājāh Sirājuddīn, Dāmanī’s son, defended the
grandeur of and epigraphs at the mausoleums in the khānqah against
accusations of distortion of the faith, saying that, like mausoleums in Iran
and Turkey built during the governance by Sunnis, these structures were
justified by the Prophet’s assertion that a grave could be marked by
a headstone to distinguish the site. Buildings with epigraphs protected
these sites against demolition and “so were in keeping with the tradition
of the Prophet, as were all the choices of the luminaries clustered at
Mūsazai” (Mujaddidī [1968] 2000, 225–229).
Mūsazai was described as a “place of refuge” for the exalted members of
the line (Ali [1899] 2002, 62). The lands attached to the khānqah received
regular rains that provided plenty of grass for livestock which thus produced
abundant supplies of milk (letter from Khwājāh Sirājuddīn to Muhammad
Isa Khan, 1326/1908, Mujaddidī [1968] 2000, 172–173). Social engagement
by pīrs of the line was channeled through the khānqah. Such engagement
was premised on the belief that if “anyone comes in search of God and
wanting to learn the holy recitations [zikr], to immediately teach them and
to give them attention” (ibid, 283–284). Those with ijāzat set up their own
or sought employment at established khānqahs which were similarly
inwardly focused. In addition to the Khānqah Sirajiyya in Mianwali,
a deputy of Dāmanī established a khānqah at Sehwan in Sindh. In a letter
to his deputy Sayyid Muhammad Shah, Sirājuddīn recommended that he
seek employment at Khānqah Dandah in the Punjab, established by another
member of Dost Muhammad Kandahari’s fraternal network (Mujaddidī
[1968] 2000, 175). Another of Dāmanī’s deputies from the Punjab was
said to preach in his hometown (Ali [1899] 2002, 284). In addition to
teaching contemplations at the khānqah, the pīrs of the line provided
amulets and recitations for those facing worldly troubles. These included
amulets for love between a man and a wife, soothing a child who cries a great
deal, supporting fertility, and preventing plague (Mujaddidī [1968] 2000,
258–259).
In these accounts, the borderland region around the khānqahs is
presented as a place of danger, difficulty, and hostility. Dost Muhammad
initially established his khānqah at Kandahar in the 1850s but could not
remain because of threats by the “enemies of religion”, which made him fear
for his life (Ranjha 2002, 25). Locals resisted Dost Muhammad’s
encampment at Mūsazai, aggrieved about his use of water from the canal
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION 255

and complaining that the encampment encroached on village lands (Ranjha

2005, 58). Dost Muhammad and his devotees resisted threats of removal
with intimations of resistance and were eventually allowed to remain by the
officer appointed by the government (ibid, 58–59). On his visits to Khorasan
after 1857, Dāmanī was accompanied by his armed deputies; his personal
guard Beg Muhammad rode ahead of Dāmanī’s mount throughout the
entire journey (Mujaddidī [1968] 2000, 286). A deputy of Dost
Muhammad based at the khānqah near Kandahar wrote in the early
twentieth century that the local clan was untrustworthy (ibid, 116).
Devotees of Dost Muhammad from the Shādikhel clan had their own
blood feud with other tribes (Ali [1899] 2002, 230–232). Khwājāh
Sirājuddīn built up a stockpile of weaponry, but had trouble getting
licenses for the guns and faced the additional problem of separate licenses
in different provinces. He appealed for help to Malik Mubāriz Khān, asking
him to apply for Frontier and Punjab provincial licenses on his behalf
(Mujaddidī [1968] 2000, 176–177). In a letter in 1902, Sirājuddīn inquired
with someone in Bannu whether the gun acquired had been licensed (ibid,
193-195). Recourse to arms and preparedness for conflict were seen as
critical for protecting the khānqah in the region.
Regional social and political circumstances gave rise to fear among
members of the Dāmanī line; consequently, their religious practice and
participation centered on the khānqah which drew students and devotees
(tālibān) who “would come to receive grace” (Ranjha 2005, 63). Those who
sought education and induction in the line spent varying amounts of times
—days, months or years—at the khānqah studying books and methods in
Sufi practice. All of them returned regularly to receive contemplations from
the pīr (ibid, 283–287). The settlement around Mūsazai and the khānqah
complex grew over time. Akbar Ali, Dāmanī’s disciple (murīd), told an
anecdote that Dāmanī added guesthouses (hujrās) and residences for
travelers seeking grace, students seeking instruction, and pīrs coming to
live permanently in the khānqah (Ali [1899] 2002, 66). A network of
khānqah associates came to reside in the area; in the early twentieth
century, the then pīr Sirājuddīn wrote to a local of Mūsazai, Maulvi Ata
Muhammad, asking him to provide accommodation to two gentlemen of an
exalted family who had come to study at the khānqah (Mujaddidī [1968]
2000, 224). The spatial pattern of associations and relationships created by
khānqah practice was dense, localized, and introverted.
A pilgrimage route created a single linear avenue across the mountains
from Kandahar, through the Koh-i Kosak of the Sulaiman range to Mūsazai,
the site of Dost Muhammad Kandahari’s mausoleum, and another from
Mūsazai to Sirhind, the site of Shaikh Ahmad’s grave (Ali [1899] 2002, 86).
Pilgrimages were dramatic in the numbers who took the passage together;
on one occasion, a caravan of 30 mounted and 100 men on foot, all from the
256 S. HAROON

Shadikhel tribe and devotees of Dost Muhammad Khan Kandahari,

accompanied Dāmanī from the Khānqah Ghandan in Kandahar to the
mausoleum of Dost Muhammad at Mūsazai (ibid, 230–232). Khwājāh
Sirājuddīn made the pilgrimage to Sirhind with a number of close
associates, purchasing their return tickets from Bombay at the cost of
Rs15.00 each (Mujaddidī [1968] 2000, 202). Like khānqah practice,
passage across the region was undertaken with piety and a sense of
spiritual purpose. When, in the early days of Damanī’s leadership, Shah
Ahmad Sa‘īd of Delhi learned about Dāmanī’s difficulties making the
crossing to Kandahar, he sent Dāmanī a letter promising that “the Shah’s
eyes and heart are with you” and two prayers written in Arabic (Ali [1899]
2002, 86–87).
Despite their willingness to take up arms and mobilize, the pīrs of the
Dāmanī line did not intervene in local politics and offered their devotees few
discernible suggestions for social conduct. Letters carried recommendations
for prayers, recitations, and patience in response to queries about contending
with enemies, debt, and illness (Mujaddidī [1968] 2000, 196–197, 205). When
asked in 1915 to intervene in a court case concerning the fate of two women,
Sirājuddīn declined to testify and asserted that the religious experts
nominated by the court, who would adjudicate the case under customary
Muslim law, were fully competent to make a decision (ibid, 171). By refusing
to offer interventions in worldly, legal or political matters through their efforts
and activities, the pīrs of the Dāmanī line did not have an impact on political
organization or official discourses.
David Edwards states that the Haddā Mullā’s base was a complex in
a sparsely populated part of eastern Ningrahar; it included a langar khana
where everyone gathered to eat, a library, a khānqah where disciples lived
and spiritual exercises were conducted, a mosque, and a space for isolated
meditation (Edwards 1986, 280–281). The Haddā Mullā taught and led
spiritual practices at the khānqah complex, demonstrating miraculous
powers that attracted students and travelers. Unlike the pīrs of the
Dāmanī line, the religious activities of initiates in the Haddā line did not
center in the khānqah. The arena of the religious service was expansive and
the objective was islah-ul mu’ashirah (the improvement of society) (Javed
1981, 57).
The pattern of religious training and religious service by mullās of the
Haddā line is illustrated by the life of Hājī Turangzaī who travelled to study
under the Haddā Mullā Najmuddin in the late nineteenth century. The
Hājī’s biographer Aziz Javed (1981) carefully put together his story based on
interviews with the Hājī’s deputies conducted in the 1970s. This
hagiography (in Urdu) offers some unique insights. After some time at
Haddā, this devotee travelled to Deoband, likely with the encouragement
of the Haddā Mullā, to study under the luminaries there, then accompanied
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION 257

the principal of the Darul Ulum to Mecca for hajj, returning in 1295/1878.
After a second hajj in 1896, Hājī Turangzaī received ijāzat from the Haddā
Mullā, then returned to Charsadda to participate in the effort to set up
schools in the Peshawar district, as alternatives to the colonial primary
school system. In 1915, he moved to Mohmand, in the tribal territories
just east of the Durand Line (Javed 1981, 38–40). Like him, other disciples of
the Haddā Mullā based themselves in villages in the Indo-Afghan
borderlands, west of Peshawar and Kohat and east of Kabul and Kandahar
(Quddusi 1966, 584–591).2 Service to society was a shared pious endeavor,
a pattern of religious service that was derived from Shah Waliullah’s thought
(Javed 1981, 47).
The mullās of the Haddā line shaped and enabled a contiguous ethical
practice within the borderlands and among borderland communities. Hājī
Turangzaī, Mullā Chaknawar, and Mullā Bābra formed preaching networks,
traveling regularly from village to village within tribal areas, settled frontier,
and Afghanistan.3 The son of Hājī Sāhib Turangzaī’s deputy stated in an
interview in the late 1970s that much of Hājī Turangzaī’s time was spent
either going on preaching missions or receiving travelers on preaching
missions (Javed 1981, 514). Hājī Turangzaī’s preaching produced a self-
conscious declaration of commitment to normative Islamic ethical values by
the ulama, the tribal leaders, and the ordinary men and women of the village
of Gujjar Garhi, northeast of Peshawar, in 1322/1904. The community
presented a written declaration to the Hājī Sāhib, reproduced in the
original and translated in Javed’s biography, stating that “as people of
Islam” the community would refrain from un-Islamic activities such as
paying bride prices and allowing professional men and women to dance,
henceforth offer prayers in congregation five times a day, give charity, desist
from taking interest on loans, and abstain from any activity prohibited by
Islamic law (Javed 1981, 57–58).
Mullās of the Haddā line used their positions in the tribal council (jirgā) to
reinforce adherence to values derived from Shari’a law. These religious leaders,
to whom Fredrik Barth refers as saints in his groundbreaking study of social
organization in the Pashtun region, fully participated in the village politics
(Barth 1965, 101–102). They read prayers before a jirgā and approved the
decisions at the conclusion of a meeting. They affected the decision-making
process by offering advice according to their assessment. The mullās could call
on tribal heads and councils to ostracize individuals or take military action
against clans whom they accused of violating Islamic norms. Mullās of the
Haddā line worked closely together while serving in village forums (interview
with Mullā Chaknawar, 3 February 2002). On one occasion, the Babrā Mullā
was unable to attend a large jirgā meeting of Mohmands at Bagh. He sent Hājī
Turangzaī in his stead with a letter bearing his seal, which authorized Hājī to
258 S. HAROON

hear and decide the grievances of the Mohmand clans (Deputy Commissioner’s
Office Peshawar 1915–1940: Confidential Mohmand Reports 19154).
In situations where sporadic fighting occurred between two rival factions,
the mullās of the Haddā line favored a slightly different role: brokering cease-
fires. They elicited consensus on contentious matters, such as boundaries
between villages and access to shared resources such as water, then fixed
a fine payable by either party undermining agreements. The political agent in
Mohmand noted during a period of conflict between tribes that cease-fires
had a limited life and thus had to be reviewed, renewed, and patched up
periodically, demanding the mullā’s long-term engagement and familiarity
with local politics (Deputy Commissioner’s Office Peshawar 1915–1940:
Political Diaries Mohmand 1926, 55). Hājī Sāhib Turangzaī, along with the
Mullā Sāhib Chaknawar, Mullā Bābra, and Mullā Sayyid Akbar, was one of the
mullās described as having brokered most truces in the Mohmand, Bajaur,
and Khyber regions. The Provincial Diaries of the North West Frontier
Province for the years 1915–1930 and summaries of intelligence reports
from the tribal areas compiled by the Deputy Commissioner’s Office
Peshawar specifically note the diplomatic initiatives of Mullā Mahmūd
Akhunzāda and Mullā Sayyid Akbar among the Afridis, Mullā Fazal Dīn in
Waziristan, and the Bābra Mullā, Mullā Chaknawar, Sandaki Mullā, and Hājī
Sāhib Turangzaī in Malakand Bajaur and Mohmand. Mention is also made of
several lesser known mullās (Deputy Commissioner’s Office Peshawar 1915–
1940: Miscellaneous Reports 1915–1930). The mullās’ participation in jirgās
and their work and collaboration to resolve conflicts between different tribes
created rapport and bridges between communities, extending and enabling an
ethical contiguity among and between the dispersed settlements of the
borderlands (Haroon 2008, 76–80).
Hājī Turangzaī and others of his fraternal network called on the
communities to the east of the Durand Line to rise in jihad against the
British and in support of claimants to the Afghan throne during periodic
mobilizations between 1915 and 1935. Individually, they also raised militias
within clans and brought them together into formidable armies to advance
on the border with the administered districts to support nationalist political
agendas in the North West Frontier Province. They were guided and funded
in many of these campaigns by emissaries from Kabul and anti-colonial
nationalists from India, encouraging community participation in
conversations and debates about political alliances in both langar khana
and mosque. In 1915, an Indian nationalist came to the tribal areas and was
invited to give a wāz (sermon) on the occasion of Eid prayers. People came
“in great numbers, walking many miles” to hear him speak, because they
knew he was going to bring “news of the situation in India and with the war”
(Kasuri, n.d., 48). The efforts by the mullās of the Haddā line aligned local
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION 259

borderland politics with Afghan politics in the west and Indian nationalist
efforts in the east.
Hājī Turangzaī’s commitment to the social and political improvement
of society was a pious endeavor, a religious service that was derived from
Shah Waliullah’s thought and hence comparable to the objectives of
khānqah-centered pīrs of the Dāmanī line. Institutionally, the dispersed
network of mullās of Haddā Mullā’s line extended an apparatus of
political and ethical orientation into terrains and communities that
were at a great distance from the centers of political organization,
governance, and cultural exchange. Such evidence shows how much
Haddā Mullā’s line was at variance with Dāmanī’s. Attention to
ideologies of Islamic reformism or Sufism to provide a basis for
understanding religious change in South Asia is therefore inadequate as
it conflates diverse and dissimilar approaches to the landscape of social
intervention and politics. While the religious institutional and ideological
underpinnings of Haddā Mullā’s line are critically important to
understand the motivations and ambitions of its members, these
cannot alone account for the political influence of this line. A spatial
imaginary also underlay the actions and impact of the mullās of the
Haddā line. This spatial imaginary was implied in their strategies of
social engagement and becomes more distinctly evident and unique in
comparison with the khānqah-centered discourse and activities of the
pīrs of the Dāmanī line.

A spatial approach to religious practice in the borderlands

Where the Sufis of the Dāmanī line retreated from political and social affairs
unrelated to spirituality, those of the Haddā line conceptualized an arena of
religious service that spanned the frontier region, fashioning both a geo-
political and an ethical contiguity across difficult terrain. The localized
khānqah practice in Mūsazai was carved out through occupation of land
and reinforced through strategies of religious practice, management, and
succession at the site. Practice at the locale and the pilgrimage routes to
Kandahar and Delhi were reinforced through reference to the Mujaddidī
tradition of Sirhind and assertions of sanctity and piety, constituting an
ephemeral Persianate and Islamic cultural continuum. The line was
preserved and extended, but with a sense of being threatened by the
politics and tensions of the region. In comparison, the dispersed practice
of the mullās of the Haddā line was reinforced by funds and political support
from Afghanistan and nationalists in India. These mullās worked to connect
the people of the borderlands to those in India by extending the practice of
normative Islamic ethics and providing a system of adjudication based on
those precepts. They also disseminated the politics of the urban centers of
260 S. HAROON

Kabul and Delhi in the borderlands. They overcame the political

fragmentation of the region in a manner that the pīrs of the Dāmanī line
were not able to achieve through devotional and khānqah- and pilgrimage-
based practice.
The Haddā Mullā line stimulated and enabled the internal political
integration of the borderland and awareness of the region’s ethical and
political contiguity with administered and settled districts. Mullās of the
Haddā line brought an old cultural practice of Sufi devotionalism and
fraternal organization to serve a political end by imagining a dispersed
arena of religious service. This imaginary emerges through comparison of
the spatiality of activities of the religious practice of the two reformed
branches of their Sufi line. Identification of the imaginary decouples, or at
least introduces distance between, the ideological and institutional
underpinnings of Islamic faith and practice and the motivations of faith-
driven Muslim leaders.

Notes
1. A list of deputies of Hazrat Dāmanī: Hājī Gul Sāhib Afghāni Bājauri; Maulvī Sher
Muhammad Sāhib Marhūm; Maulvī Ghulām Hassan Sāhib Marhūm; Miyān Fazal Ali
Sāhib Marhūm; Hāfiz Muhammad Yar Sāhib; Mullā Qatar Akhundzadah Sāhib
Sherani; Hājī Mahakmuddin Sāhib; Ata Muhammad Akhunzadah Sāhib; Mullā pīr
Muhammad Akhunzadah; Mullā Ata Muhammad Sāhib Akhunzadah Marhūm; Mullā
Dost Muhammad Kundi; Mullā Naseem Gul Akhunzadah Sāhib; Mullā Abdul Haq
Akhunzadah Sāhib Harpal Marhūm; Miyān Mullā Muhammad Rasul Sāhib Paiwindah
Marhūm; Mullā Abdul Jabbar Akhunzadah Sāhib Marhūm; Maulvī Abdul Ghaffar
Sāhib Babar Salam Allah Talah; Khuda Yar Akhundzadah Babar Saknah Chodhwan
Marhūm; Ghalib Ali Khan Hindustani Marhūm; Maulvī Fatah Muhammad Sāhib
Istranah Marhūm; Ali Muhammad Sāhib Babar Marhūm; Amir Khan Sāhib
Bābraskanah Khangarh, Salam Allah Tala; Faqir Abdullah Sāhib Marhūm Dera Wala.
2. Mullā Najmuddin in Haddā Sharif (d. 1901); the Sartor Faqir Saadullah Khan (1824–
1914) from Buner who was involved in Swat politics; Mullā Atkar of Khost (active in
1888); Mullā Bābra in Bajaur (active in 1882); the Hazrat Abdul Wahab of Manki
Sharif (d. 1904); Mullā Khalil (active in 1888) and the Hājī Sāhib Bedmani (d. 1883) in
Mohmand; Wali Muhammad Khan in Tirah (d. 1887) and Sayyid Akbar (1793-1856),
the ruler of Swat. (Quddusi 1966, 584-591)
3. The discussion presented in the following four paragraphs is based on research
carried out between 2002 and 2005, which forms the basis for the chapter
“Religious Authority and the Pakhtun Clans” in Haroon 2008. The argument which
follows, that the activities of the mullās of the Haddā line imply the existence of
a spatial imaginary which differentiates them from other reformist Mujaddidi pīrs, is
new and has not been previously published.
4. These are archival government records, deposited in the Deputy Commissioner’s
Office Peshawar according to year, often without page numbers.
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION 261

Acknowledgments
This article was conceived in conversation with Dr Marta Dominguez Diaz, Senior Lecturer
in Islamic Studies at the University St Gallen, Switzerland, and Senior Research Fellow in the
Department of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. The article benefited
from comments by the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion,
Robert Nichols, and participants of the St Petersburg Conference of Afghan Studies in 2017.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Sana Haroon is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies in the Department of
History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA. CORRESPONDENCE:
Department of History, University of Massachusetts, Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd, Boston,
MA 02125, USA.

ORCID
Sana Haroon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2065-5907

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