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- Title
A Brief Survey of Folk Sufi Poets of India.
- Authors
Siddiqui, Sarah; Shahida
- Abstract
Sufism represents the inward or esoteric side of Islam, often contested as an alternate form of Islam. Studies show that the first Sufi to visit India was Mansur al-Hallaj, but this fact is contested as many believe that al-Hujwiri, commonly known as Data Ganj Baksh, was the first Sufi to visit India in the eleventh century. When the Sufi poets from Central Asia arrived in India, the land was already dominated by Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism. Thus, the Islam practiced in this region had already been colored by the local cultural norms. As Ira Lapidus and Ishaq Khan have mentioned, the foreign Sufis formed a body of ulema representing the "normative" Islam or high tradition, while the masses or the common folk followed the Islam of their venerated Sufis, forming another form of Islam, namely, "popular" Islam or low tradition. This created, as Ishaq Khan mentions, a cleavage between the foreign culture and the indigenous culture, which was later on bridged by lesser known Sufi poets across India singing Sufi ideology in the form of folksongs and folktales. This paper studies these lesser known or indigenous Sufi poets who were very popular among the masses but find little mention in the academia. The paper focuses on the literature produced by these Sufis and how they filled the gap between the normative Islam and the popular Islam prevalent among the common people.
- Subjects
INDIA; SUFISM; HALLAJ, al-Husayn ibn Mansur, 858 or 9-922; TALE (Literary form); ZOROASTRIANISM
- Publication
IUP Journal of English Studies, 2019, Vol 14, Issue 1, p79
- ISSN
0973-3728
- Publication type
Article