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Central Asian Survey

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Embodying history: a Naqshbandi shaikh

of Afghanistan
Ken Lizzio
Published online: 03 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Ken Lizzio (2003) Embodying history: a Naqshbandi shaikh of Afghanistan,
Central Asian Survey, 22:2-3, 163-185, DOI: 10.1080/0263493032000157717

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 Central Asian Survey (June/September, 2003)
22(2/3), 163–185

Embodying history: a Naqshbandi

shaikh of Afghanistan
KEN LIZZIO
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Studies of Sufism tend to concentrate on the orders themselves, their historical

and political importance, or on the lives of saints long since deceased. Most such
studies, moreover, concern the North Africa orders to the exclusion of many
other regions of the Islamic world, a legacy in part of French colonial research.
Almost nothing has been written about Sufism in Afghanistan, even though that
country has long been a stronghold of Sufism. Only fairly recently have the
orders attracted attention, chiefly because of the important political/military role
they played in the war against the Soviets.1
This article aims to fill these gaps by examining the life of a leading
Naqshbandiyya/Mujaddidiyya Sufi, Pir Saifur Rahman. The Naqshbandiyya/
Mujaddidiyya is one of the most widespread and important Sufi orders in Asia
and the dominant order in Afghanistan. From its appearance as a revival
movement in 17th-century India, the Mujaddidiyya branch spread rapidly
throughout Central and South Asia, eventually supplanting rival Naqshbandiyya

turuq. From the inception of the Afghan state in the mid 18th century, the
Mujaddidiyya have played a major role in the political and religious life of the
country and continue to do so down to the present time. Although Afghanistan
has never been colonized and has long been immune to modern influences, the
turmoil experienced in the latter half of the 20th century has posed major
challenges to Sufis teachers: How do Afghan Sufi shaikhs propagate the teaching
amid the increasing secularization of society? How have they survived the Soviet
invasion and subsequent Communist pogrom against them? This brief biographi-
cal sketch offers some insight into these questions as it does the mystical
education and career of a contemporary Afghan Sufi.
Akhundzada Saifur Rahman was born in Afghanistan in 1928. The year
marked the eve of the country’s most serious internal crisis since its founding in
1747. The crisis revolved around the threat to the established social and religious
order posed by the modernizing reforms of the state. It was a crisis that had
already overtaken most Islamic countries of Africa and Asia during the preced-
ing century as one country after another succumbed to European colonial
expansion. That Afghanistan had been able to resist foreign domination, even
Ken Lizzio, 3170 Georgetown Place, Dulles, VA 20189, USA (E-mail: [email protected]; Tel.: ⫹ 1–571–214–
5727).

ISSN 0263-4937 print/ISSN 1465-3354 online/03/02/30163-23  2003 Central Asian Survey

DOI: 10.1080/0263493032000157717
 KEN LIZZIO

foreign influence, was due in part to its geographic isolation and rugged,
inaccessible terrain. Right up to the 20th century, the major threats to Afghan
society that did arise, such as the Russian or British advance, were external and
served to unite Afghans against them. So impervious was this country of
mountain and desert that by 1900, Afghanistan was still one of the most isolated
regions of the Muslim world nearly completely cut off from processes of
modernization.2
By the 1920s, however, the modern world was at Afghanistan’s doorstep
in the form of the British presence in India. In the eyes of Afghanistan’s
King Amanullah (r. 1919–1929), the threat loomed large. To counter the British,
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the King decided to undertake a program of reform aimed at strengthening the

state. Unlike his predecessors, whose reforms had been limited, Amanullah
conceived of modernization as an ideology. To meet the state’s needs for a new
cadre of bureaucrats, the King created madrasas to teach secular subjects to the
detriment—though not complete elimination—of religious studies. He also
banned Sufi pirs and their disciples from the army, attempted to replace the
shari‘a with a new secular legal code, emancipated women, and denied the
‘ulama the right to attend the traditional Deoband seminary in India. In short,
the King sought to bring about a complete revolution in Afghan society. From
the very beginning, the driving force behind modernism in Afghanistan was the
state itself.
For their part, the ‘ulama regarded such reforms not as a foil to imperialism,
but a very capitulation to it. Modernization, they argued, inevitably led to
profound changes in the social order, changes that directly undermined the
Islamic conception of life—and their religious authority. Many religious scholars
maintained that the only true defense against the West was to return to strict
adherence to the shari‘a, the principles embodied in the Qur’an and sunna of
the Prophet. Indeed, they believed that it was having strayed from such
fundamentals in the first place that Afghan society now found itself threatened.
Popular discontent, religious and tribal, over the King’s reforms came to a
head in Saifur Rahman’s native province of Nangarhar. In November 1928 the
Shinwari tribe revolted to protest government interference with the badragi or
highway toll system. The revolt sparked a mass uprising that eventually led to
the King’s abdication. The victory would be fleeting, however. For the revol-
ution that coincided with the year of Saifur Rahman’s birth marked the
beginning of a national drama that would dominate the long and eventful
trajectory of his life, one in which he would eventually come to play a major
role.
Akhundzada Saifur Rahman was born in the village of Baba Kilai in southern
Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan. Located in Rohdat district, Baba Kilai forms
a cluster of villages huddled along the left bank of the Papin. The Papin is a
seasonal stream whose headwaters lie in the southern Suleiman Mountains.
Farming is still the major occupation of the region, and the Kot valley where he
grew up continues to be an important agricultural area for the production of rice
and wheat. As early as the 1920s, Baba Kilai was connected to the provincial

164
 NAQSHBANDI SHAIKH OF AFGHANISTAN

capital of Jalalabad by a passable road.3 Produce and other goods from the Kot
valley were thus easily transported to markets in Jalalabad and the region
prospered.
The Akhundzada family belongs to the Musa Khel clan of the Baezai section
of the Mohmand tribe of the Pathan. The Musa Khel have long been known as
successful wood traders, harvesting the trees on the northern slopes of the
Suleiman Range. Neither the kindred hill tribe that inhabits the Mitai and Suran
valleys north of the Kabul River, nor the settled Mohmand of the south-west
plain of Peshawar District, the Kot Mohmand have formed a tiny enclave within
Shinwari territory for four centuries.4 Though bitter enemies historically, today
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the two tribes enjoy good relations and even intermarry.5

Little is known about the family’s origins or Saifur’s father, Qari Sarfaraz
Khan. A small landholder, Qari owned several acres of hilly, stony land on the
Suleiman slopes. From this, he probably eked out a modest living from farming
and lumbering. As a khan, he occupied a seat on the village tribal council or
jirga, indicating he played an integral part in tribal affairs. Perhaps his most
important social role was that of religious scholar or akhund (pl. akhundān). In
Afghanistan the term akhund usually denotes a family descended from several
generations of religious scholars. For this reason, akhundān are highly revered.6
As an ‘alim, Qari’s knowledge of Islam was more extensive than that of the
local mullah. He could recite the entire Qur’an by heart (hence the title qārı̄),
and possessed extensive knowledge of hadith, fiqh, and tafsı̄r (Qur’anic exege-
sis). The Qari led the communal prayer customarily recited before the village
jirga met to discuss tribal issues. His religious position thus allowed him to
transcend tribal affairs, placing him above or outside tribal conflicts.
Qari was also a Sufi, a khalifa of Hajji Sahib Pachir, a prominent Qadiri
shaikh.7 (The Qadiriyya is the dominant order in the Pathan tribal area.) Pachir
lived in sub-district of Pachir Agam and maintained a khānaqāh in Chaparhar
located west of Qari’s village. (Pachir would later be Saifur’s teacher in the
Qadiriyya order.) He also lectured in Islamic sciences at the state-run Najmuddin
Madrasa in Jalalabad. Former residents of the region remember Hajji Pachir as
a colorful, outspoken ‘alim who rode about town on a donkey. When arch
conservative Pakistani Panj Pirs began to proselytize in Nangarhar in the 1950s,
Pachir helped spearhead the opposition to them. He would travel 15 miles on his
donkey to Jalalabad to debate them in the main mosque, his religious books
strapped comically in great heaps on his donkey’s back.8
Saifur, then, grew up in a prominent religious and tribal family of modest
means. In keeping with the family tradition of producing religious scholars, he
and his four brothers, all older than he, embarked on religious careers. Sociolog-
ically, structuralists/functionalists believe those who pursue religious positions
come from poor landless families. Religious education, it is held, affords them
the means to rise to a respected position in society and to escape the narrow
confines of kinship and poverty into which they were born.9 To the contrary, as
scions of an akhund family, Saifur and his brothers were carrying on a family
tradition. It was a career to which his father and most likely his father’s father

165
 KEN LIZZIO

had dedicated their lives. Its purpose lay not in flight from poverty but in the
meaning and value it conferred on life. A religious career represented a sense of
moral responsibility, a deeply felt social imperative to embody and transmit the
values and institutions of Sunni Islam. From the beginning of the 20th century
on, this mission would be undermined increasingly by government reforms and
outright foreign interference.
Saifur Rahman began his formative religious education with his father and
other maulawiān in Kot valley. When he was seven years old, his father began
to instruct him in the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet. One can imagine the
two seated outside a small, daub and wattle mud house, the young Saifur seated
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cross-legged on the familiar red medallion Turkmen carpet, listening intently to

his father’s instruction. Sarfaraz was so devoted that he was often moved to tears
when recounting the events of the Prophet’s life.
As part of his son’s education, Qari also brought him regularly to local
mosques where he introduced Saifur to religious notables. Saifur particularly
enjoyed there the na‘at khwanı̄ or melodious chanting of passages from the
Qur’an. One day, at one of these recitals, he was introduced to a well-known
Pakistani Naqshbandi shaikh, Hajji Muhammad Amin.10 A Pakistani Pathan
from Charsadda, Hajji Muhammad Amin, was a disciple of a khalifa of the
famous Mullah of Hadda. Upon meeting Saifur, Amin placed his saliva on the
young boy’s mouth, prompting the latter to fall into a state of ecstasy.11 Saifur
also experienced childhood visions in which he saw heaven and hell, jnūn (sing,
jinn) and other invisible creatures. Believing him to be disturbed, Qari instructed
his son to ignore these experiences in the hope they would go away.
Saifur’s father died when he was about ten years old. It was to be the first in
a series of painful losses and sudden upheavals in his life. His mother already
deceased, Saifur was sent off to Peshawar to continue his education. He studied
at several makātib (sing. maktab) in and around the city including, Mashu Khail
near Bara, Shahab Khail, Bala Manai, Mazo Grale, and Takhali Payan.12 The
latter maktab was established in the late 19th century by Hajji Sahib Turangzai
(d.1937) to counter the proliferation of British missionary schools in the region.13
As they do today, private makātib provided room and board at no charge to the
student. Poorly endowed, these schools relied on community donations and
annual tithing (zakāt) to cover operating expenses. Living conditions at these
schools were spartan and the quality of food poor.
At that time, a
tālib was required to read several Persian texts before
undertaking study of the more difficult Qur’an and hadith. Among the Persian
works was Nizami’s Panj Kitāb (Five Treasures), a book of aphorisms, his
Sikandār Nāma on ethics, and Bustān and Gulistān by the mystic poet Sa‘di,
which contains morally edifying fictive tales. After mastering these, a student
would move on to the Qur’an and some of the basic religious subjects. Typically,
a
tālib moved from one school to another to work with a teacher deemed strong
in a particular subject: one for the Qur’an, another for hadith, fiqh, and so on.
This may explain Saifur’s movement from one school to another, each more
prestigious than the previous.

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 NAQSHBANDI SHAIKH OF AFGHANISTAN

Upon completion of primary school at the age of twelve, Saifur moved on to

higher religious studies. Normally, ambitious and gifted students went to the
renowned Deoband seminary in India. After partition in 1947, however,
Afghans, most of them from Nangarhar and Kunar provinces, studied in one of
the numerous Deoband schools in the NWFP. These schools had been estab-
lished in a chain along the tribal frontier by Deoband missionaries in the late
19th and 20th centuries. Saifur attended a madrasa in the village of Babara near
the town of Charsadda where he studied nah
wa (Arabic grammar) mant
iq
(logic), tafsı̄r, hadith, and fiqh. Alternatively, Saifur could have returned to his
own country to attend the new state-run Najmuddin Madrasa in Jalalabad, one
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of the many such madrasas springing up in the country.14 Students who

graduated from a state school were guaranteed a job in the state’s burgeoning
bureaucracy whereas those from traditional schools had to pass entrance exams
to gain employment. That Saifur did not return to his native province to attend
Najmuddin reflects his rejection of secularized education and, by extension, the
secular state. It also underscores the importance he placed on traditional religious
teachings over and above the guarantee of a government job.
Once the capital of the ancient Buddhist Gandhara Kingdom, under Islam
Charsadda continues to be a major center of religious learning down to the
present day. In the 1940s a number of prominent ‘ulama taught there. The most
eminent was Saifur’s own teacher, Muhammad Sandani (d. 1988), known as
Maulawi Babara.15 A Pakistani Pathan, Sandani was regarded as an expert in all
of the religious sciences. He was particularly reputed for his knowledge of fiqh
and hadith. During the 1970s, he was summoned to Islamabad to brief Supreme
Court justices on his interpretation of shūfa, disputes concerning property rights.
The dār al-‘ulūm where Sandani taught sits on the western edge of the largest
cemetery in Asia and quite possibly the world. The school has been greatly
expanded since Sandani’s time with study rooms and student lodging. Students
in the late 1940s had to sleep in the mosque, which served as both classroom and
living quarters for some 60–80 students. For the most part poor, students relied
on the generosity of villagers to support their studies. For this reason, the
madrasa generally did not accept more students than the village could reasonably
support. Each night students would take turns going from door to door canvass-
ing food, clothing, and other items of necessity. A student of Sandani typically
required 10–12 years to obtain a certificate (sanad) authorizing him to teach.
Sandani taught in the highly juristic Deoband tradition, there having been almost
no Brelwi schools in the NWFP at the time.16 The curriculum consisted of 106
books on Ashari theology, hadith, Qur’anic exegisis, fiqh, literature, Greek and
Arab philosophy, medieval geometry, astronomy, yunani or Greek medicine, and
logic. We see here the important role rural schools play in the education of
shaikhs, a tradition Saifur Rahman continues to this day.
Upon completion of formal studies in 1946, Saifur was conscripted into the
army. At that time, young Afghan men without a formal university degree were
required to perform two years of unpaid military service.17 Saifur was assigned
as a private to the district of Chowki in Kunar Province. His service there seems

167
 KEN LIZZIO

to have been uneventful, consisting of the usual routines of a soldier’s life. A

former member of his regiment described him as a quiet soldier, who did not
distinguish himself in any way from his compatriots.
In 1948, his military obligation fulfilled, Saifur went north to Kunduz
Province to join his older brothers, who had already moved there. It was about
this time that he married the first of his four wives.18 A number of considerations
seem to have prompted the family’s move north. Although Turkmen and Uzbeks
originally inhabited the region, Pathans had been living there since the late 19th
century.19 Under Amir ‘Abdur Rahman Khan (r. 1880–1901), the government
had encouraged migration of Pathans to the sparsely populated north as a means
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of attenuating their power in the east while at the same time stimulating
economic development of the north. After World War II, the government enticed
several thousand more Pathan families to relocate there with offers of free land.
Most of those who seized the latter opportunity were Shinwaris. Initially,
Saifur’s brothers may have worked as sharecroppers (deh
qān) while waiting for
title to their land. Between 1948 and 1953 Saifur moved several times around the
province, suggesting he, too, may have been working as a sharecropper. After
six months at an unnamed location in Kunduz, Saifur moved to Qataghan, then
Ludin where he stayed for three years.20
Another reason for the move was that the young ‘alim and his brothers were
probably looking for a place to start a madrasa and mosque in an area not
afflicted by the tribal skirmishes that traditionally plague the eastern border area.
With its rapid influx of Pathans, northern Kunduz was thus a promising place,
as the new immigrants needed places to worship and schools to educate their
children. Another explanation for the move was that, unlike the tribal belt, the
north was a particularly fertile region for those interested in Sufism, the
Naqshbandi being the dominant order there. In some cases, entire villages there
consisted of disciples of a particular shaikh. Moreover, unlike the east where
Qadiri pirs were often intimately linked to the tribes, northern pirs played little
role in tribal affairs. They also shunned relations with the state and were content
to live beyond the reach of an increasingly meddlesome government in Kabul.21
By 1953 Saifur and two of his four brothers obtained enough government land
to start a small farm in Nahr-i Jadid, Dasht-i Archi. Archi is a sub-district of
Kunduz Province on the Amu Darya River. There they set up a mosque and
madrasa, and Saifur began teaching and counseling. In time, a cluster of houses
formed, which they named Sra-Mata (Pushtu: red earth). His congregation was
called qawmiyya or the ‘folk’, a term Sufis use to describe themselves.22
It was in Archi in 1960 that Saifur met his first Sufi teacher, Maulana Sahib
Rasul Taloqani. Taloqani was a native of Hisi-i Tagab in Kohistan. A unique
region of the country, Kohistan is a vast fertile plain consisting of small
agricultural holdings. It is non-tribal and Persian speaking. Religious leaders
there, most of whom were Naqshabandi, enjoyed immense prestige and had
thousands of followers. After completing his formal education there, Taloqani
undertook mystical study with Akhundzada Sahib-i Tagab, who over time
bestowed him with the khalifate in three orders, the Suhwarardiyya, Qadiriyya,

168
 NAQSHBANDI SHAIKH OF AFGHANISTAN

and Chishtiyya.23 Subsequently, he studied the Naqshbandi path under Shams

al-Haq Kohistani Mujaddidi. When Shams first encountered Taloqani, he noticed
that his disciple’s spiritual work was incomplete as he was still working on his
nafs lat
ı̄fa (a spiritual or subtle center). To hasten his development, Shams made
his disciple walk alongside while he rode on a horse, dispensing him baraka
during the long rides. Before he died, Shams conferred him with the exalted rank
of qut
b al-irshād.24 One of Taloqani’s literary contributions to the Naqshbandi
order was to formulate a more complete set of contemplations (murāqabāt),
originally formulated by the branch’s founder Sayyid Ahmad Sirhindi.
Significantly, Taloqani’s appointment marked the first time that the head of
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this branch of the order was not a direct descendant of Sirhindi. The designation
of someone outside the family, even though Shams had several sons, under-
scores the importance placed on moral and spiritual qualifications in the
selection of a successor. At the same time, selection of an individual outside the
family undermined the family’s ability to accumulate wealth and power, which
often produces dynastic lineages eventually leading to the routinization of
baraka.
Indeed, that Taloqani was outside the family led to problems. Taloqani
became so popular that the local inhabitants would applaud him as he passed
through the streets. Angered by this public adulation, a number of individuals
wrote a letter to the Minister of Justice and Hazrat of Shur Bazaar, Nur
al-Mashayakh Mujaddidi, the leading Naqshbandi shaikh in Afghanistan and a
direct descendant of Sirhindi. These unidentified individuals may have been
Shams’s sons or other members of the Mujaddidi family contesting Taloqani’s
appointment. The letter noted that Taloqani had never received formal authoriza-
tion to succeed Shams as his sajjāda nishı̄n.25 Nur responded by publicly
recognizing Taloqani’s appointment. He also sent Taloqani a letter. Although the
contents of the letter are unknown, Nur may have urged him to leave the
family’s khānaqāh in Kohistan. For shortly after the incident, Taloqani migrated
to Bihark near Taloqan, the provincial capital of Takhar. The entire affair
underscores the close ties that still existed between the Hazrat of Shur Bazaar
and this non-lineal northern branch of the Mujaddidiyya. Within a generation
these ties would be severed over differences as to how to counter the secular
influence of the state.
It was on one of his periodic trips to nearby Archi to visit his disciples in 1960
that Taloqani first met Saifur Rahman. During this encounter, Taloqani said he
saw a light (nūr) in Saifur’s forehead, a sign of his spiritual precocity. That same
year, at the age of 32, Saifur took bay’a, the oath of allegiance, in the
Naqshbandiyya order. It is Taloqani whom Saifur credits with opening his heart
lat
ı̄fa.26 Saifur’s spiritual tutelage under Taloqani was all too brief, however.
Within two years of his initiation, Taloqani became gravely ill. Aware that he
was near death, Taloqani sent word to his disciples that he had designated
Maulana Hashim Samangani as his sajjāda nishı̄n. Taloqani died in 1963.
Despite Taloqani’s directive, many of his 30 other khalifas, who were older
than Hashim, refused to accept the latter as pir and a bitter rivalry ensued. Even

169
 KEN LIZZIO

Taloqani’s own son, Ubaidullah Akhundzada, had been passed over in the
succession. Ubaidullah went to see Hashim in Aibek in an attempt to reverse his
father’s decision. When Hashim placed his hand over Ubaidullah’s chest, he
found coldness (sardi) in all five subtle centers. In this encounter, Ubaidullah
seems to have been made aware of his feeble spiritual development, as he
subsequently became Hashim’s and later Saifur’s disciple.
A Turkmen from Ghaznigak village in Samangan Province, Maulana Hashim
would become Saifur’s most important murshid. Known to his disciples as
Maulawi Bozorg (great teacher), Hashim was revered as both an ‘alim and a
Sufi. He began studying the exoteric sciences under Imam Bokhari at the late age
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of 25, but finishing in 14 months. By then, he could recite the Qur’an from
memory in an astonishing 5 hours.27 While a student of Bokhari, he often took
leave to visit the tombs of holy men, especially that of Tagabi, the afore-
mentioned teacher of Taloqani. While visiting Tagabi’s tomb, he had a vision
in which the deceased murshid imparted a vast body of esoteric knowledge to
him.
Maulana Hashim was an unprepossessing character who loved to wear
colorful clothes. His turban, for example, was striped green and black, not the
traditional white worn by Naqshbandis. Spiritually intense, Hashim once ex-
tended his observation of the fasting month of Ramadan for 5 years in order to
hasten his development. His baraka was said to be so powerful as to affect even
animals.28 To his disciples, he dispensed it liberally until his later years when,
weakened by a chronic illness, he limited access only to those who could profit
from being in his physical company.29 He was the author of several books of
instruction, including Kafi ibn-i Hajāb.
Following his master’s instructions, Saifur went on to complete his mystical
education with Maulana Hashim, whom Taloqani praised as a murshid whose
heights few would attain in the centuries to come. When Maulana Hashim first
met Saifur, he noticed that he was wearing a cloak to hide the visible beating of
his heart characteristic of the Naqshbandi dhikr. When asked the reason for his
secrecy, Saifur said it was so as not to arouse the criticism of mullahs and
‘ulama who believed the phenomenon to be the product of witchcraft (jādū).
Citing a verse from the Qur’an, which enjoins Muslims to ‘Show the gifts of
God to the people’, Hashim ordered Saifur to remove the robe and never to wear
it again.30
Under Hashim’s tutelage, Saifur’s spiritual development progressed rapidly.
Hashim initiated him in the Suhrawardiyya, Chishtiyya, and Naqshbandiyya
orders. After sitting only 20 times in s
uh
ba with his murshid, Saifur was
bestowed with the khalifate in each. Saifur subsequently requested permission to
go to Nangarhar for training in the Qadiriyya order with Hajji Pachir, his father’s
murshid.31 In their first sitting, Hajji Pachir gave Saifur ‘all nine lessons’ and
deputized him in that order.32 Pachir also designated him mazūm, one who is
empowered to act on behalf of his pir. When Saifur returned to Archi, he
resumed his education with Hashim, this time studying the Chishti path.
Although they were living over a hundred miles apart, Saifur frequently traveled

170
 NAQSHBANDI SHAIKH OF AFGHANISTAN

to Hashim’s house in Aibek. Maulana Hashim would in turn come to see Saifur
at his house in Dasht-i Archi. As Pir of the silsila, Hashim eventually decided
to open a khānaqāh, not in Aibek, however, but in Zar Kharid, Kunduz.
Ostensibly, this was so that he could be closer to Saifur.
At about this time, Saifur had fallen into dire financial straits, possibly
because of a poor farm harvest. To make ends meet, he began skipping visits to
the khānaqāh in order to work. His absence soon met with Hashim’s dis-
approval. To free his murı̄d to attend the mosque, Hashim began paying the
family bills.33 Saifur did work as an ‘alim in the village mosque, but Hashim
forbade him from receiving emoluments for his work. Eventually, Saifur had to
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sell some of the family’s land in Baba Kilai to pay his debts.
Some time later, somewhat prophetically, Hashim remarked that he would not
always be around to create difficulties conducive to his disciple’s spiritual
development. In 1966, he contracted a debilitating illness, possibly tuberculosis,
which rendered him too weak to perform his functions.34 To assist him in the
education of his murād, Hashim asked Saifur to move into his khānaqāh with
him. His young khalifa readily obliged.
Saifur was not in Zar Kharid very long when a serious problem arose between
him and some of his brothers, who were also Hashim’s disciples. The issue
concerned his brothers’ involvement in politics. As elsewhere in the world,
Afghanistan in the 1960s was undergoing a period of heightened political
activity in the country. There were violent debates in parliament and on the
campus of Kabul University over issues ranging from the liberalism of the
regime and an independent Pushtunistan to the American involvement in
Vietnam. Whereas many religious leaders remained aloof from these and other
political issues, some ‘ulama, especially Islamists, were very much at the
forefront of these debates.
Like most Naqshbandis, Saifur shunned contact with government officials and
other modern forms of political activity. Sufis and the ‘ulama were not con-
cerned with the state but with civil society, which they view as existing apart
from the state. So angered was Saifur by his brothers’ activities that in 1969 he
left Zar Kharid for parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. His first stop was the
village of Pir-i Sabeq in the NWFP. There he consulted with a Naqshbandi pir,
Abdul Salaam, who had probably also been a disciple of Maulana Hashim.35
Then he traveled to eastern Afghanistan, possibly to see his old murshid, Hajji
Pachir. Saifur may have been thinking of returning to his native region to teach.
While in eastern Afghanistan, Saifur received a message from Hashim asking
him to return to run the Zar Kharid khānaqāh so that the latter could seek
treatment for his illness in Kabul. Saifur flatly refused, complaining that his
older brothers ‘met with high ranking officials of the government, so propagation
of the teaching is impossible’. To mollify his murshid, Saifur offered instead to
go to Jalalabad, Mazar-i Sharif, or Faryab Province to teach. Hashim declined
and the stalemate continued. With no resolution in sight, Hashim finally offered
to mediate the conflict between Saifur and his brothers. During the meeting,
Hashim chided the brothers saying:

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 KEN LIZZIO

Don’t know him [Saifur] by his name. Rather, look at him as you look at me. Your brother
has attained a high degree, and darkness retreats from him wherever he goes. If you respect
your brother, you will be respected, and if you treat him with disrespect, you will be
defamed in the other world.36

At the conclusion of the meeting, Hashim instructed the brothers, all of whom
were older, to obtain Saifur’s approval before talking at assemblies (majlishā)
and public gatherings (ijtimāhā).37
Hashim’s mediation was at least partly successful. Saifur returned to Kunduz,
though not to the khānaqāh in Zar Kharid. Perhaps, because two of his brothers
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were still in Zar Kharid, Saifur chose to settle in Archi, a source of some regret
for Hashim. Saifur’s decision occasioned the following letter from Hashim in
March 1971:

My dear brother,
You are in the chain of my perfection and honesty, Akhundzada Sahib. Give my loving
regards to Bachalala [Saifur’s other brother] and all of your relatives. Praise to God, for
now I wear the cloak of health. But the distance from you is very sorrowful, and I don’t
know the reason for it. So cry when you read this letter because I cried very much when
I wrote it.38

So intimate were the master and his khalifa that Hashim wanted to move to
Archi to be closer to Saifur, and when his illness took a turn for the worse,
against the wishes of his disciples, he moved to Saifur’s house and made him his
sajjāda nishı̄n.
If there was any doubt in Hashim’s mind as to whom, among his many
khalifas, to designate, it was dispelled by a number of instructive visions
(mushahādāt) both he and some of his disciples were experiencing at the time.
The first one occurred one evening after Friday prayer when Hashim saw Baha’
al-din Naqshband standing next to Saifur. Saifur also saw the figure but did not
recognize who it was. Hashim interpreted this as a sign (āya) that Saifur was to
be his successor. Shortly after this vision, Saifur and his sons were sitting in the
presence of Hashim when the eldest, Muhammad Haideri, had a vision. Hashim
asked him to describe what he saw.39 Haideri said that he saw a box in the house,
which was divided into two cells. In the right cell was a note that read, ‘Saifur,
son of Qari Faraz Khan, al-mashrāb’ (spiritual character).40 On the left side of
the box the note read ‘Maulana Hashim Samangani, al-mashrāb’. Interpreting
the note, Hashim said the left side represented his own spiritual nature as that
of Moses, or Hebraic mashrāb, indicating righteous anger, and sharpness of
temper. By contrast, the right side was ‘Muhammadan mashrāb’, signifying
Saifur was gentle and compassionate.
In the manner of transmission from the Prophet’s time down through the
lineage of Naqshbandi shaikhs, Maulana Hashim transferred his spiritual power
(baraka) to Saifur. In conferring him as head of the order, Hashim said, ‘What
I have in my body (vujūd), I transfer to the body of Akhundzada in the manner
that has been observed since the first khalifa of our line’.41 Hashim then

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embarked for Noushera to seek treatment, staying at the khānaqāh of Abdul

Salaam in Pir-i Sabeq. The disease had progressed beyond remission, however,
and within a year he died. He was 40 years old.
When informed of his murshid’s death, Saifur and the other disciples traveled
to Pir-i Sabeq where they built a shrine in his honor. A large, green-domed
structure with a small mosque and garden, the ziyāra today sits imposingly in the
middle of the village cemetery. Many of Saifur’s disciples testify as to the
powerful baraka at the tomb. One khalifa, a scholar at a prestigious Pakistani
research academy, claimed that when he approached Hashim’s ziyāra, the
baraka ‘came rushing into my heart like a great wave’.
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Although Maulana Hashim had made Saifur head of the Naqshbandiyya order,
he had not given him formal permission to teach the Chishtiyya
tarı̄qa.
Typically, the shaikh bestows the khalifa with a signed, one-page document
(ijāza nāma) which serves as both formal authorization and recognition of the
khalifa‘s spiritual attainment. To obtain permission, Saifur traveled to Hashim’s
shrine in Pir-i Sabeq, an act Hashim said that he himself was obliged to do the
same when his own murshid died. As he knelt at the foot of his master’s grave,
Saifur beheld a vision of Hashim, but instead of giving his assent, Hashim
instructed him to go to the shrine of Maulana Taloqani in Bihark. When he
arrived, Saifur saw Taloqani in a vision standing near his tomb and smiling.
Saifur interpreted this as the approval he had come so far to seek. At the same
time, Saifur claimed to have received direct spiritual initiation from Hajji Sahib
Pachir, his father‘s teacher, who gave Saifur permission to teach the Qadiriyya

tarı̄qa.
Saifur’s spiritual biographer refers to this incident as an example of the ‘t
arı̄qa
Uwaysi’.42 Uwaysi is a Central Asian mystical tradition involving initiation by
the spirits of deceased saints.43 The term Uwaysi derives from a Yemeni, Uways
Qarani (d. 657), who is said to have visited the Prophet in a similar spiritual
encounter. Of Uways, the Prophet is alleged to have said, ‘I find the Breath of
the Beneficient from the direction of Yemen’. This hadith refers to a form of
telepathic dream communication that transpired between them. The name Uways
means ‘wolf’, which seems to symbolize the solitary nature of such spiritual
encounters. In another mode of instruction, Saifur’s biographer relates the dream
of a disciple in which he saw Hashim approaching. Fearing Hashim was going
to strike him, he became frightened. Hashim told him not to be afraid. He
climbed on his back and told him to run on one foot. The disciple took off
haltingly, but he found himself moving faster. Soon he was running at breakneck
speed. When asked the meaning of the dream, Saifur said it was an example of
‘t
arı̄qa qawmiyya’ (the path of the ‘folk’ or Sufis).44
As Hashim’s sajjāda nishı̄n, Saifur set about to better organize and expand the
order. His success in this endeavor attests as much to his organizational abilities
as to his spiritual power. That many persons came to the hospice in Archi to join
the order was taken as a sign (āya) of Saifur’s spiritual exaltedness. As word of
his baraka spread, Afghans from most of the country’s provinces came to take
initiation from him: Nangrahar, Laghman, Faryab, Qandahar, and Baghlan. The

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‘Pir of Kunduz’, as he came to be known, also attracted ethnic Hazaras and

Persian-speaking Tajiks from neighboring Tajikistan. Saifur’s disciples came
from the entire spectrum of society: teachers, government officials, military
officers, artisans, and peasants. He also won away many disciples of a leading
Qadiri shaikh in Mazar-i Sharif, Lal Baccha.45 Some individuals actually came
to the khānaqāh to discredit Saifur, but ended up taking initiation from him.
Some became khalifas after only one meeting with Saifur.46 These initiates then
returned to their native villages to conduct missionary activities. Miracles
(karāmāt) were attributed to him during this period. On one occasion a disciple
had written a paean to Saifur, which he had planned to recite for him in the
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mosque after the noon prayer. When the time came, however, he became
nervous and decided against it. Turning to the shy devotee, Saifur asked, ‘Why
don’t you recite that poem you wrote for me’.47
It was during this period that Saifur had a dream-vision confirming his
spiritual stature as that of a walı̄.48 It occurred one Friday after noon prayer.
Returning to his house, he performed the supererogatory prayers (du‘ā) one
thousand times and went to bed. Then he had the following dream:
He was standing in an open field next to a close friend. The two of them were facing west
[the direction of Mecca] and noticed a stream flowing from that direction. A small bridge
spanned the stream. On the far side of the bridge was a large river. His friend remarked,
‘I have never seen a flood’. No sooner had he said this than the river surged and a great
wave rushed at them. Some of the local landowners soon appeared, concerned that the flood
would sweep away their livestock. One of the landowners started to approach them angrily.
Saifur turned to his friend and said, ‘It’s all due to you, because you thought about the flood
and created it’. Leaving the scene, Saifur came upon a large crowd. All of the Prophets
were in the crowd. Abraham, the first Prophet, was speaking softly and his face was gentle
and white. Moses by contrast was angry and his face was red. Muhammad was also in the
crowd, but Saifur could not see him. Then a voice addressed Saifur: ‘There’s a walı̄ here
whom you cannot see’. With this, Saifur shook hands with Moses and Abraham, who
received him warmly.49 Saifur then circumambulated Abraham. Abraham said, ‘Let us
leave this world’. Standing under the roof were two persons responsible for the eschatolog-
ical destruction of the world. But before they began their work of destruction, Abraham
instructed Saifur to remove from the wall all of the names of Allah so that they would not
be destroyed. As the destruction began, Saifur became worried that Abraham would
become angry with him because some of the divine names were still affixed to the walls
of his bedroom. Then he awoke.50

The Islamic scholar Jonathan Katz notes that dreams have long played impor-
tant roles-predictive, prophetic, and confirmatory-in the careers of Sufis. Yet
Katz believes the dream of the Prophet is the symptom of a narcissistic
personality who seeks a following. To the contrary, in the mystical context
dreams of the Prophet are essentially creative symbolic events signaling God’s
favor (ni‘ma). Saifur’s circumambulating Abraham symbolizes the circling of
the Ka’ba, which was reconstructed by Abraham. According to Carl Ernst, in
the dream-vision the Ka’ba signifies the mystical experience of contact with
God.51 So, too, do visions of the Prophet and the saints. Ernst points out that,

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 NAQSHBANDI SHAIKH OF AFGHANISTAN

they constitute a ‘rhetoric of sainthood’ in which grandiose claims and other

forms of hyperbole are encouraged as a means of communicating one’s direct
contact with God.52 All is not glorification in Saifur’s dream, however. In terms
of the dream’s logic, Saifur’s inability to see the Prophet Muhammad, who
symbolizes the highest state of spiritual development, indicates his spiritual
journey is unfinished.
Inwardly, Saifur’s life was deepening. Outwardly he was buffeted by the
growing turmoil in the country’s political affairs. In July 1973, Muhammad
Daoud Khan overthrew King Zahir Shah (1933–1973) in a bloodless coup. The
coup had been carried out with the support of the Parcham faction of the
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Communist Party.53 Although the average Afghan did not view Daoud Khan as
a Communist, both Islamists and ‘ulama were becoming increasingly concerned
over the degree to which Communists were infiltrating the government. Encour-
aged by the favorable turn of events in Kabul, Communists began taking to the
streets to muster support for issues ranging from a free Pushtunistan to the
Daoud regime.
On 22 February 1974, Communists turned out in the Archi bazaar to
demonstrate. The next day, Saifur and several ‘ulama led a group of armed
disciples to break up the demonstration. For two tense days, they marched in the
bazaar, garnering the support of bazaaris and patrons alike. Although armed
demonstrations were illegal, the Kunduz District Governor, Muhammad Hassan,
being sympathetic toward religious leaders, did not intervene. On the morning of
the second day, the Governor of Kunduz phoned Hassan and ordered him to
remove Saifur and his disciples from the bazaar. Hassan went down to the bazaar
and asked Saifur to leave, apologizing that their actions were becoming an
embarrassment to the government. Defying Hassan, he and his disciples contin-
ued to march into the evening. By that time, the Communists, realizing they
were outnumbered and losing support, had begun retreating to their homes.
Some left Archi altogether, fleeing to neighboring Khwaja Ghar in Taloqan
Province. Satisfied that they had driven the Communists from the bazaar for
good, Saifur and his disciples finally withdrew.
In early 1978, Saifur performed the hajj. He was 50. In Mecca, he made the
acquaintance of an Afghan Naqshbandi shaikh from Balkh, Muhammad Muqim
Shah. On his return, he visited Muhammad Muqim while on a lesser pilgrimage
to the shrine of Hazrat ‘Ali in Mazar-i Sharif.54 After stopping off to visit with
his disciples at the Zar Kharid khānaqāh, he returned to Dasht-i Archi. He would
not stay there long, however, for in April 1978, a coup led by Nur Muhammad
Taraki brought the Communists to power for good. The coup would usher in a
period of turmoil that persists to this day.
Taraki spent the first few months of his rule purging his Marxist rivals from
the government. By late summer of 1978, he then proceeded to undertake three
types of reform: land tenure/agrarian, educational, and administrative. The latter
aimed to strengthen the state apparatus. The reforms proved unpopular with all
sectors of the rural population and widespread uprisings ensued. According to
Olivier Roy:

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Those who led the first revolts were religious leaders, people of influence such as village
headmen, or other individuals who were usually elderly. The revolt usually took the form
of a mass uprising preceded by preaching and followed by an attack on the government post
of the principal town of the district, using small arms. The post was usually captured with
heavy causalities on both sides. The communist militants were executed, non-communist
soldiers and officials allowed to go. Then the revolt would spread to the whole area in
which there was tribal solidarity.55

Despite the broad nature of the opposition, the regime viewed the religious
establishment as its most serious threat, and of all the religious groups, the Sufi
orders were considered arch enemy number one. This was not surprising, as
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Sufis had been among the leading opponents of King Amanullah’s reforms in
1929. The Taraki regime was also likely aware of the Soviet experience in
Central Asia. Faced with Communist repression there, the orders had gone
underground, waging a highly effective resistance.56 Sufis in the USSR had also
been less amenable to co-optation than the ‘ulama. Probably for all of these
reasons, in the fall of 1978 the government launched a pre-emptive campaign of
systematic repression and outright extermination of Sufis. That the government
targeted both political and non-political
turuq indicated that ‘it was Sufism as
such that was its objective’.57 Seventy-nine of the males in the Mujaddidi family
were imprisoned in Kabul’s Pul-i Charkhi prison. They were executed in January
1979, along with the Hazrat of Shur Bazaar, Muhammad Ibrahim.
Villages where the orders were particularly strong were shelled outright. In
other villages potential opposition leaders were led away in large numbers by
‘security groups’ from the provincial capitals and were never heard from again.
In Badakhshan Province several dozen pirs and their disciples were bound and
thrown into the Kokcha River to drown. In all, it is estimated that 50,000 to
100,000 persons disappeared during this period.58 That so many pirs allowed
themselves to be taken in this manner indicated that they were not engaged in
anti-government activities and were not anticipating arrest. Those not imprisoned
or killed took refuge in Iran and Pakistan.
Initially, Saifur did not openly oppose the Taraki regime, as he and his murād
were under close government surveillance.59 The Uzbek region from Shibergan
to Kunduz did not take part in the fighting, which may explain why Saifur
remained in the country. By early August 1978, however, he received a tip from
a government official, perhaps a disciple, that his arrest was imminent. Under
cover of darkness, he and his family fled to the NWFP. As Roy notes, to flee a
Muslim land occupied by infidels without fighting, while not actually recom-
mended by the Qur’an, is at least permitted:
Those who believed and left their homes and strove for the cause of Allah. These are the
believers in truth. We were oppressed in the land. [8⬊74] Then the Angels will say: ‘Was
not Allah’s earth spacious that ye could have migrated therein’. [4⬊97]60

In fleeing his homeland, Saifur says he reenacted hijra, the flight of the Prophet
Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. At the same time, he declared jihad against
the Communist government in Kabul.61

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 NAQSHBANDI SHAIKH OF AFGHANISTAN

By spring 1979, the rebellion had spread to all parts of the country, prompting
Soviet intervention in December of that year. The response of the orders to the
invasion was swift, as pirs hitherto quiescent hastened to declare jihad against
the Soviets. Because of its numbers and geographical diffusion, the Naqsh-
bandiyya order became the most active
tarı̄qa in the resistance. According to
Roy, in and around Kabul and Mazar-i Sharif, Naqshbandis tended to acknowl-
edge the leadership of the Mujaddidi family and adhered to Sebghatullah’s
resistance party, the National Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan.62 From
Maymana east, Naqshbandis followed Pir Saifur Rahman.63
In the 19th century, in an attempt to legitimize their efforts to subjugate the
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populace, the British dubbed Sufis who opposed them, ‘mad mullahs’. In a
similarly self-serving manner during the war against the Soviets, the Western
press referred to the Islamic resistance (mujahidin) as ‘freedom fighters’, but it
was not in Western terms of individual democratic freedoms that Sufis and other
Muslims fought. Instead, the concept of jihad needs to be understood in Islamic
terms. Jihad is an armed defense of the Islamic conception of the world against
the imposition of what is perceived to be a corrupt or immoral system. In
rejecting the term ‘freedom fighter’, Robert Canfield emphasizes the religious
element implied in the term jihad:
For the sincere Muslim in Afghanistan takes it for granted that freedom entails the right and
responsibility to command good and oppose evil according to the truth of God as it has
been revealed in Islam. If the quest for freedom is the mujāhid’s motive, it is the freedom
to obey God and direct others to obey God.64

Saifur’s declaration of jihad was thus an expression of his broader social role as
imam of the community. It was incumbent on him to defend Islam against
foreign penetration.65
Roy notes that the hierarchical structure of the orders made them highly
adaptable to the exigencies of resistance warfare. In general, pirs, especially
those who were elderly, fled the country leaving their disciples to fight, as did
Saifur. In such circumstances, the pir delegated his military authority to one of
his older khalifas, some of whom had been senior officers under the King’s
regime. One of Saifur’s disciples, who had served as a general in King Zahir’s
army, became a mujahiddin leader. Although each pir commanded the allegiance
of several hundred or thousands of disciples as the case may be, at times the
wider
tarı̄qa identity provided an overarching framework for resistance activi-
ties. As Roy notes, ‘the khalifa-murı̄d relationship thus carried over easily into
a political-military one’.66 Furthermore, close fraternal ties between disciples
tended to make the orders resistant to penetration by outsiders.
With the invasion of the Soviets, it soon became necessary for religious
leaders to join one of the dozens of political parties springing up in Peshawar in
order to obtain foreign aid and weapons. Saifur joined the Harakat-i Inqilab-i
Islami (HII) (Movement for the Islamic Revolution) headed by one of his
disciples, Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi. The HII was the clerical party of the
resistance, consisting of ‘ulama, mostly Pathan, who had been educated in

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private madrasas.67 The HII lacked a rigid structure or ideology, tending to view
itself as a ‘clerical association’. It favored a return to the shari‘a but without an
Islamic Republic as did the Islamists. It thus viewed the former monarchy as
compatible with Islam.68 It was strong in the north where it employed madrasa
networks in the guerrilla campaign.
Saifur assigned one of his brothers, Fazalul Rahman, the task of organizing
and recruiting disciples in Afghanistan for the HII. For the next several months
Fazalul and an ‘alim, Maulawi Abdul Hai Zafarani Sahib, the regional HII
director, secretly shuttled between Peshawar and the eight northern provinces to
recruit members and distribute membership cards. In the autumn of 1980, 64 of
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Saifur’s disciples including Maulana Hashim’s brother, Juma Gul, were at the
Hotel Babur in Qala-i Zal, Baghlan Province.69 Government forces stormed the
hotel and arrested all 64 of Saifur’s disciples. They were never heard from again.
Another major figure who disappeared at that time was Rahmatullah Taloqani,
the khalifa of Taloqan Province. Later, several more of Saifur’s khalifas in
Mazar-i Sharif disappeared, including his own brother, Fazalul. A list of some
of Saifur’s other khalifas who disappeared at that time shows the geographic
extent of his following as it does the extent of the government purge against
Sufis: Malawi Abdul Ghaffur, Faryab; Muhammad Amin, Laghman; Malawi
Abdul Khaliq, Kunduz; Mulla Sayyid Habib, Nangrahar; Malawi Khan Gul,
Qandahar.
For the first three years of the war, the HII was the leading resistance party,
but by 1983, it had begun to unravel. Non-Pathan clerics in the HII, especially
Tajiks, were complaining that the bulk of weapons, which the HII was obtaining
on credit, was going to Pathans. Another complaint of party members was that
many of these weapons were being sold for profit on the black market.70
Disgruntled, many Tajiks in the HII began to defect to the leading Islamist party,
the Jami‘at-i Islami (JI).71
What had initially been HII’s chief appeal in time proved to be its chief
liability: the lack of strong leadership and a clear organizational structure. These
weaknesses eventually made it possible for both Maoists and Afghan govern-
ment intelligence agents (KhAD) to infiltrate the party. A Naqshbandi pir,
Ghulam Mahiddin, known as the Pir of Obe, had created a dissident movement
within the HII. Known as the Jami‘at-i ‘Ulama, it quickly became the rallying
point for former Maoists. Disputes with other parties became so sharp that one
of the Maoists betrayed the leaders of the JU to the government, prompting the
party’s collapse. Subsequently, Saifur and several other Naqshbandi shaikhs
switched allegiance to the JI. The JI was on the ascendancy for it lay at the
confluence of three religious traditions in Afghanistan: the ‘ulama, Sufi, and
Islamist. Yet, because most of its members were Persian-speaking Tajiks from
the north, the JI never achieved wide acceptance among the Pathan.
When Saifur fled Afghanistan, he first went to stay at Pir Abdul Salaam’s
khānaqāh in Pir-i Sabeq. Saifur continued to teach there, attracting not only his
Afghan disciples but an increasing number of Pakistani ones as well. His baraka
was so powerful that Abdul Salaam soon became jealous, claiming that the

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dramatic physical reactions of the murād in the presence of the two pirs was due
not to Saifur but to himself.72 Within 18 months, relations between the two
became so strained that Saifur was forced to leave. In 1980 he accepted an
invitation to become Imam of the Del Aram mosque in Noushera, 20 kilometers
north of Pir-i Sabeq. Before taking up his new position, he made a lesser
pilgrimage to India to seek inspiration at the shrine of Ahmad Sirhindi. It was
no doubt a time of great trials for him. He had already lost a brother and
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of disciples. Other disciples continued to perish in
the war or come to the khānaqāh dismembered and disfigured by the millions of
land mines planted by the Soviets. ‘These were my moral offspring’, he later
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lamented. ‘How much I have suffered for their martyrdom, for the loss of the
Harakat-i Inqilab, broken into pieces, and all the disunity among the mu-
jahidin.’73 His country overrun by Communists, he was now without a permanent
home or place to teach.
Indeed, in Noushera Saifur once again experienced difficulties stemming from
his baraka. This time tribal elders had become upset with the behavior of his
disciples in the mosque during the dhikr ceremony. They complained that
running, shouting, and laughing in the mosque was sheer blasphemy. So in 1982
three of his Afridi disciples, Sultan Muhammad Khan, Hajji Mir Ashghar, and
the latter’s nephew, Hajji Muhammad Yusuf, offered Saifur a house and 30 acres
of land on which he could start his own khānaqāh. The land was in the Bara
district in the Khyber Tribal Agency, his present location. Saifur dubbed it
Murshid Abad, ‘abode of the master’.

Conclusion
From the perspective of Naqshbandis, the 20th century was one of profound
social and political crisis for Afghanistan. The attempts to convert Afghanistan
from a tribal federation to a modern nation-state, the gradual secularization of
society, the growth of militant anti-Sufi movements, and the devastating Soviet
invasion of 1979 are events that at times challenged their very existence. In the
face of these crises, Naqshbandi shaikhs were forced time and again to define
their role vis-à-vis political authorities and society while struggling to maintain
their essential function as spiritual educators.
For most of his life, Saifur Rahman remained immune to many crises by
remaining culturally and spatially outside the modern sectors of society. His
early education took place in private Pakistani madrasas whose spartan condi-
tions contrasted sharply with more secular, state-sponsored madrasas springing
up in Afghanistan’s urban areas. His higher religious education in the Deoband
tradition, predominant in Pakistan’s rural areas, was based almost exclusively on
the positive accumulated wisdom gained in the first 10 centuries of Islam. As a
spiritual disciple and teacher, Saifur chose to live in northern Afghanistan.
Living in the hinterlands placed him beyond the reach of the state and other
secular influences. It also placed him outside the sphere of the powerful Pathan
tribes. Though born Pathan, he has shunned the role of tribal arbiter often played

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by Qadiriyya Sufis, including his own father. During the relatively halcyon days
in Afghanistan after World War II, the parameters he imposed on his social and
political life went unchallenged from without, and he was free to pursue his own
spiritual development and the development of others in the traditional manner of
Naqshbandi/Mujaddidi shaikh.
By the 1960s, however, the outside world began to encroach on the relatively
stable society of northern Afghanistan. At first, Saifur seems to have been
uncertain as to how to respond to the sudden intrusion on his spiritual life. When
he discovered his brothers’ involvement in local politics, he absconded, seeking
counselling first from another Naqshbandi, Abdul Salaam. A shaikh in more
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secular Pakistan, Salaam may have advised Saifur on how to deal with his
brothers’ activities and the growing influence of the state. When he returned to
Kunduz, Saifur continued to follow a policy, not of outright opposition to the
state but simply of turning his back to it. In other words, while he was deeply
concerned by the social and political changes taking place all around him, he
chose not to oppose the tide.
By the late 1970s, however, the evolving national crisis he struggled to avoid
for so long came to find him for good, as Communists, first from within
Afghanistan, then from without, threatened the very existence of Islam, and by
extension his religious authority. In response to this direct threat, Saifur assumed
the more active role of mujahidin leader, joining two Afghan political parties.
These parties were not parties in the modern sense of the term: they lacked a
clear political ideology and their organization and affiliation tended to follow
old religious lines. They were thus extensions of his religious authority and
philosophically in keeping with it.
Today, very much like the Mulla of Hadda a century ago, a teacher in his own
Qadiri line, Saifur Rahman has taken refuge in the liminal region of the tribal
agencies in order to survive and to teach. Betwixt and between Afghanistan on
the one hand, still reeling from a protracted civil war, and religiously conserva-
tive Pakistan on the other, he continues to preach and to pray, and to serve as
a living fount of grace to his disciples.

Notes and references

1. See the works of Olivier Roy cited in the bibliography of this paper.
2. Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969),
p 3.
3. Ludwig Adamec, Gazetteer of Afghanistan, Vol 4 (Graz: Akademesche Druck v. Verlagsanstalt, 1975),
p 724.
4. According to Mohmand oral history, the Mohmand originally settled in the Kot valley during the reign of
Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998–1030). Tirahis, who themselves had migrated there from the area south
of the Sulaiman Range, offered the hill Mohmand land in Kot in return for protection against harassment
by Shinwaris. In pushtunwali, this practice of obtaining tribal protection in return for payment is called
lokhai.
5. About 60,000 Mohmand live in the Kot valley today. North of the Kabul River relations between the
Mohmand and Shinwari are quite different: In the summer of 1996 a number of Mohmand and Shinwari
were killed over a land dispute.
6. The Akhundzada family, however, does not claim sayyid status, that is, descent from the Prophet
Muhammad.

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 NAQSHBANDI SHAIKH OF AFGHANISTAN

7. Hajji Pachir was a disciple of a khalifa of Hadda-i Sahib, who in turn was a khalifa of the infamous
Akhund of Swat. After he was deputized in 1835, Hadda moved to the village of Hadda in Nangarhar
where he started a mosque and khānaqāh on the site of an ancient Buddhist monastery. He soon became
the most famous Afghan pir of his time largely because of his reputation for miracle working. Hadda was
known for having opposed the reforms of Amir Abdur Rahman, refusing government attempts to co-opt
him with offers of a stipend. Eventually his conflict with the government forced Hadda and his disciples
to seek refuge in the Mohmand Agency, an act that Saifur himself would repeat in the Khyber a hundred
years later. In the Mohmand Agency, Hadda mobilized popular opposition to the growing influence of the
British in the tribal areas. In 1897 he and several other Sufi pirs led a short-lived uprising against the
British involving Pathan tribes on both sides of the border. Hadda deputized many khalifas, one of whom
became the murshid of Hajji Pachir. For more on the life of Hadda, see David Edwards, Heroes of the
Age: Moral Fault Lines on the Afghan Frontier (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
8. Hajji Pachir’s son now runs the khānaqāh in Chaparhar, though his following today is much reduced in
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size.
9. David Edwards, for example, attributes the religious career of Najmuddin of Hadda to just such
socio-economic imperatives. Edwards, op cit, Ref 7, p 134.
10. When Hajji Amin visited Nangarhar, he usually stayed at the hospice in Hadda. The hospice has since been
converted into a government school.
11. ‘Ali Muhhamad Balkhi, Tārı̄kh-i awliyā‘ (Mazar-i Sharif: n.p., 1983), p 160. Lings gives a similar account
of transmission of baraka by mouth from a shaikh to his disciple. On his deathbed, the shaikh stuck out
his tongue and asked his disciple to suck it as a means of conferring him with succession of the
tarı̄qa.
Martin Lings, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Shaikh Ahmad al-‘Alawi (Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press, 1961).
12. Afqar ‘Aibadila, Darrat al-bayān (n.p., 1992), pp 15–16.
13. A khalifa of the Mullah of Hadda, Hajji Sahib Turangzai was a co-leader in Hadda‘s struggle against the
British. He traveled widely in the border areas, attempting to counter the influence of a pro-British Sufi,
Mulla Manki and unite the tribes in jihad.
14. In the 1930s, the Afghan government resurrected former King Amanullah’s (r. 1919–1929) policy of
establishing state-run madrasas to provide trained cadre for work in the government. By the late 1940s,
there was a state madrasa in virtually every province in the country. Amanullah had designed their
curricula after the modernist College of Aligarh in India, which had been modeled in the 1920s along lines
of the French lycée. The curricula in these state schools were more secular and centered around modern
subjects such as math and physics to the detriment of religious subjects. Moreover, whereas in private
schools the tālib proceeded individually with a subject at a time, state schools employed modern methods
such as teaching plans and standardized curricula. Graduates of public madrasas were eligible for
government employment, while those from private madrasas had to obtain certification in order to become
eligible.
15. Two other ‘ulama of the area were Abdul Ghaffur (d. 1968) and Nasruddin (d. 1947).
16. Brelwi Sufism is a late 19th-century religious movement that grew out of debates on the nature of God.
These debates eventually crystallized around a Sufi shaikh, Ahmad Reza Khan Barlewi (d. 1921). The son
of Afghan immigrants to the Punjab, Reza Khan was a Qadiri who spent much of his life attacking
Wahabis and the excessive legalism of the Deoband school. His teaching found fertile ground in Sind and
the Punjab, areas permeated with Hindu bhakti devotionalism. Brelwis dispense with personal responsi-
bility, stressing enlightenment through intercession of pirs rather than rigorous spiritual education. In
Pakistan today, many madrasas are Brelwi, and armed conflict between its students and those of the
scripturalist Ahl-i Hadith is not uncommon. For more on the origins of Brelwis, see Barbara Metcalf,
Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982),
pp 307–310.
17. Before promulgation of a constitutional law in 1954, the government employed a draft system first
introduced by Amir Habibullah. Dubbed hasht nafri (eighth person), one out of eight men between the
ages of 20 and 40 was called up for service from village lists maintained yearly by the government. The
ratio seems to have varied depending on the army’s needs in a given year. In some cases, families wishing
to spare their sons military service would pool finances and pay the equivalent of two years’ salary in
advance to someone willing to enlist. That Saifur was recruited somewhat prematurely at the age of 18
or 19 may be explained by the imprecision of birth records in Afghanistan.
18. His biographers differ as to the year of his first marriage. Balkhi states that he was still single and used
his free time to frequent the shrines of saints. ‘Aibadila, on the other hand, says he married after his
military discharge. While Saifur may well have been frequenting saints’ tombs at that time, he probably
married shortly after his discharge as is common among Pathan males around the age of 21. Furthermore,
marriage in Kunduz seems unlikely, as few eligible brides were available there at the time.

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19. Between 1882 and 1892, several thousand of the eastern and southern Ghilzai Pathans migrated to the
northern, principally Turkmen areas along the border. Initially, Amir ‘Abdur Rahman had forcibly
relocated them in an attempt to strengthen the state and to halt the advance of Russian settlers already in
Marw and Sarakh. As the Turks were demoralized by defeat at the hands of the Russians, the Amir
believed the Pathan the tribe most likely to thwart the Russian advance. After 1885 in an effort to hasten
economic development of the region, the Amir encouraged Pathans to take up migration voluntarily. One
of the richest agricultural areas of the country, the lands along the Amu Darya River were nonetheless
sparsely populated as a result of famine and Turkmen raids in the late 19th century. The government
offered those willing to relocate financial incentives such as tax relief and free land. The relatively high
population density in the tribal belt made Pathans particularly eager for land. By 1907 several thousand
Pathan families had taken up residence there. At first, Pathans settled in villages apart from their Uzbek
and Tajik neighbors. In time, however, the scarcity of eligible Pathan brides led men to marry into Tajik
and Uzbek households. (Pathans, however, seldom reciprocated by allowing their own women to marry
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non-Pathan men.) As a result of these intermarriages, the clan system evolved into a smaller, nuclear or
extended family called a sib. The sib was not only smaller but lacked territorial unity. Later, the Amir’s
governors moved these extended families from their territorial base, further attenuating the clan system.
Nevertheless, Pathans quickly rose to prominence in the region, serving as maliks or heads of inter-tribal
councils. In the 1920s, a wave of entrepreneurial activity further boosted the development of the area. The
lowlands along the Amu Darya River had long been little more than malarial swamps. One of the country’s
leading entrepreneurs, Abdul ‘Aziz Londoni initially purchased one thousand acres of swampland, drained
the swamps and began raising cotton for sale to the Russians. A further impetus to the region was given
in 1929–1930 when King Nadir Shah forced wealthy merchants and landholders to purchase additional
land in order to raise money for a national treasury depleted by years of civil war and corruption. Later,
‘Aziz built a cotton gin there, the Kunduz Cotton Company, which was nationalized in 1953. See Nancy
Tapper, “Abd al-Rahman’s North-West Frontier: the Pushtun colonization of Afghan Turkistan’, in
Richard Tapper, ed, The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (London: Croom Helm, 1983),
pp 233–261; Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p 188, pp 471–474.
20. ‘Aibadila, op cit, Ref 12, p 19.
21. Anthropologist Nasif Shahrani, who conducted fieldwork in the region in 1980, says of the pirs for the
most part Naqshbandi: ‘unlike historically militant movements to the north of the Amu Darya, the Sufi
orders … have been neither militant nor political … these pirs do not dabble in mediation or power
brokerage, and as a rule political problems are not taken to them’. M. Nasif Shahrani, ‘Causes and context
of responses to the Saur revolution in Badakhshan’, in M Nasif Shahrani and Robert L. Canfield, eds,
Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropological Perspectives (Berkeley, CA: Institute of
International Studies, 1984), p 151.
22. ‘Aibadila, op cit, Ref 12, p 19. The Sufis are known as al-qawm by virture of hadiths such as the
following: ‘Then they say: “Lord, amongst them sitting with them is a sinner”, and He saith: Him also I
have forgiven, for he is among a folk (qawm) whose fellow, that sittith with them, shall not be
confounded’. See Lings, op cit, Ref 11, p 50n.
23. Typically, in Afghanistan a Sufi teacher will have mastered two or more
turuq. In the Naqshbandiyya
order, a student is enjoined to study the other three orders once the basics of Naqshbandi practice are
mastered to benefit from the different dhikrāt used and to participate in the baraka inherent in each silsila.
Whether a similar practice is encouraged by the other orders is uncertain.
24. According to Sirhindi (Letter No. 260), the qutb al-irshād or ‘pole of the masters’ is the highest living Sufi
master of his time who appears once every few centuries. Sayyid Ahmad Sirhindi, Maktūbāt-i Imām-i
Rabbānı̄, ed Nur Ahmad (Peshawar: University Book Agency, 1984), Vol 6, pp 84–94.
25. Literally, ‘the master of the prayer rug’, the present head of an order.
26. Saifur Rahman, Bā vujūd-i Saifiyya (Peshawar, n.p., 1996), p 5.
27. Balkhi, op cit, Ref 11, p 155.
28. Usually this implies an ability to calm wild or aggressive animals.
29. This refers to the spiritual practice of s
uh
ba.
30. ‘Aibadila, op cit, Ref 12, p 46.
31. In Central Asia the Naqshbandiyya and Qadiriyya orders are very closely linked because of their strict
adherence to the shari‘a and emphasis on sobriety in mystical experience. In addition, Qadiris believe that
Baha’ al-Din Naqshband was aided spiritually by ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani. Hamid Algar, ‘Some notes on
the Naqshbandi T
arı̄qa’, Die Welt des Islams, Vol 134, 1971, p 190.
32. The nine lessons referred to here are most likely the specific dhikr practices used in the order, some of
which are used by the Naqshbandiyya.
33. ‘Aibadila, op cit, Ref 12, p 50. ‘Aibadila says that the monthly debt was six thousand Afghanis, a rather
large sum. Hyperbole aside, such a large sum might indicate Saifur’s brothers were also in debt.

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34. In having regular contact with so many individuals, a murshid risks higher than normal exposure to
diseases prevalent in the region. Often such diseases go unnoticed or unattended at the hospice. Just before
my arrival in Bara, a case of tuberculosis was discovered at the khānaqāh, but only after the affected murı̄d
had resided there for several weeks.
35. Abdul ran a khānaqāh in Pir-i Sabeq that has since closed.
36. Balkhi, op cit, Ref 11, p 162.
37. The former term in particular has a secular, political connotation.
38. Balkhi, op cit, Ref 11, p 163. In the absence of a formal ijāza nāma, this letter is one of several such
communications cited as written evidence that Hashim had designated Saifur as his successor.
39. In Letter No. 292 of the Maktūbāt, Sirhindi wrote that a disciple is obliged to share visionary experiences
with his pir.
40. The term mashrāb means spiritual disposition or nature.
41. Balkhi, op cit, Ref 11, p 163. Balkhi also cites a hadith of Muhammad: ‘What I have in my heart, I transfer
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to the heart of Abu Bakr’. He notes that most of the disciples accepted Saifur as head of the order.
However, at least one khalifa, Muhammad Lal, refused. Citing Sirhindi’s Letter No. 292, he stated that a
disciple was permitted to disagree with his shaikh if he had achieved a higher degree than the khalifa.
42. Ibid, p 166. Balkhi, who was head of the khānaqāh in Mazar-i Sharif, relates another example of a Uwaysi
phenomenon. One of his own disciples came to him one day to report a vision he had in which Hazrat
Uways appeared. Uways handed the disciple a Qur’an, which the Prophet Muhammad wished him to pass
along to Saifur Rahman.
43. Arthur Buehler believes that Sirhindi’s later ‘reform’ of Naqshbandi Sufism, which emphasized sobriety
in spiritual experience and adherence to the shari‘a, led to invalidation of Uwaysi initiations. However, the
persistence of the Uwaysi phenomenon down to the present time shows this analysis to be incorrect. One
explanation may be that during periods of crisis in the Islamic community, Uwaysi phenomenon are
de-emphasized in order to avoid charges of antinomianism by ‘ulama. Similarly, legal concerns stress
outward sobriety without altering the essentially ecstatic nature of the divine encounter. See Arthur
Buehler, ‘Charisma and exemplar: Naqshbandi spiritual authority in the Punjab, 1847–1947’, PhD
dissertation, Harvard University, 1993, pp 88–91.
44. Balkhi, op cit, Ref 11, p 178.
45. Lal Baccha fled Afghanistan during the war and now resides in Saudi Arabia.
46. Balkhi, op cit, Ref 11, p 164.
47. Ibid, p 169. Attempts to get disciples to talk about miracles attributed to Saifur Rahman were repeatedly
rebuffed. As a rule they never discuss such matters, because such talk is regarded as a distraction from
spiritual work. The exceptions to this are stories concerning the workings of his baraka. On the whole,
Saifur Rahman did not perform miracles perhaps because Sirhindi taught that miracles were not necessary
for the walı̄ and advised Sufis to conceal their activities in this regard. Sirhindi, Maktūbāt, 3: Letter No.
86. This downplaying of the miraculous refutes Gilsenan‘s assertion that the shaikh‘s authority stems from
myths of his miraculous deeds.
48. The term walı̄ (pl. awliyā‘) derives from the Arabic root ‘w-l-y’ meaning ‘to be close to’. In the context
of Sufis it refers to those who are close to God. The Qur’anic verse commonly referred to is, ‘Verily, no
fear shall come upon the friends of Allah (awliyā‘ Allah), neither shall they grieve‘ [10:62]. For a
discussion of the term walı̄, see Michael Chodkiewicz, Le sceau des saints: prophétie et sainteté dans la
doctrine d‘Ibn ‘Arabi (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp 35–39.
49. This probably refers to the ritual handshake (mus
āfah
ā or mushābakā), a common leitmotif in such
dreams. Jonathan Katz speculates that the handshake is the same used by shaikhs during initiation.
Jonathan Katz, Dreams, Sufism, and Sainthood: The Visionary Career of Muhammad al-Zawawi (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1996), p 225.
50. Maulana Aminullah, Hidāyat al-salikı̄n (Peshawar: n.p., 1996), pp 182–183.
51. Carl Ernst, ‘Vertical pilgrimage and interior landscape in the visionary diary of Rūzbihān Baqlı̄ (d. 1209)’,
The Muslim World, Vol 88, No 2, 1998, pp 129–140.
52. In another of Saifur’s dreams he appears in the sky as the sun and ‘Abd al-Qadir al Jilani as the moon
reflecting Saifur’s illuminating presence. Similarly, Ahmad Sirhindi claimed to have surpassed the spiritual
state of such mystical luminaries as Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240) and Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. 874).
53. The Communist Party in Afghanistan was founded at its first Congress on 1 January 1965. Two years later
differences over strategy led to a split into Parcham and Khalq factions. The Parcham (Flag) based its
strategy on control of the state apparatus while the Khalq (People’s) sought to instigate mass uprisings.
54. For an account of this shrine’s history and activities, see R.D. McChesney, Waqf in Central Asia: Four
Hundred Years in the History of a Muslim Shrine, 1480–1889 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991).
55. Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p 106.

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56. Olivier Roy, ‘Sufism in the Afghan resistance’, Central Asian Survey, Vol 2, 1983, p 69. For a discussion
of Sufi resistance activities in the former Soviet Union, see Alexander Bennigsen, Islam in the Soviet
Union (London: Hurst, 1986).
57. Roy, op cit, Ref 56, p 69.
58. Ibid, p 95.
59. Rahman, op cit, Ref 26, p 6. Saifur, who has been attacked by critics for remaining in the country after
Taraki seized power, defends his actions on the grounds that he was temporarily mollified by Taraki’s
public statement, ‘Those who pray two rak‘a previously, may now pray twenty’. Thus, Saifur added, ‘I
was not prohibited from worshipping (ibādat)’.
60. Roy, op cit, Ref 56, p 165, quoted in Muhammad M. Pickthall, trans., The Meaning of the Glorious Koran
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1930).
61. Balkhi, op cit, Ref 11, p 174.
62. Roy, op cit, Ref 56, p 63. Roy‘s assertion that the Mujaddidi family had a strong following in Mazar-i
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Sharif is questionable. A number of Naqshbandis, including two pirs who were living in Mazar at the time,
professed no allegiance to the Mujaddidi family. In fact, these pirs regard the family as politically, not
religiously, prominent.
63. In the east, where maraboutism is strong, the orders were not particularly represented. The exception to
this was the traditional Mujaddidi family tie with the Sulaiman Khel tribe.
64. Robert L. Canfield, ‘Islamic coalitions in Bamyan: a problem in translating Afghan political culture’, in
Robert L. Canfield, ed, Faction and Conversion: Religious Alignments in the Hindu Kush (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan, 1973), p 226.
65. For a discussion of the dual role of the shaikh, see Vincent J. Cornell, ‘Mystical doctrine and political
action,’ Al-Qant
ara, Vol 13, 1992, pp 201–231.
66. Roy, op cit, Ref 56, p 63.
67. Ibid, p 235.
68. Ibid, p 114.
69. Juma Gul was Saifur’s khalifa in Mazar-i Sharif.
70. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International
System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p 213.
71. One of Saifur’s eldest sons, Muhammad Hamid, was involved in this activity. As an HII official, he
received weapons, which he promptly sold in the Bara market for personal enrichment. Several khalifas
alluded to a scandal in the Bara hospice during the 1980s, which may have concerned these unethical
activities. Whatever the precise nature of the scandal, no one has forgotten and some disciples still do not
trust those who were involved.
72. Typically, this involves involuntary movements such as shaking of the limbs, spasms of the torso, or loud
utterances.
73. Rahman, op cit, Ref 26, p 10.

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