Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at contemporary negotiations between narratives of Sufi, national and community space in the work of the early 20th century Urdu writer and icon of Sufism Khwaja Hasan Nizami, highliting the internal and behavioral aspects of Sufi space, as well as its fluctuating geographical expansion.

Paper long abstract:

Based on a close reading of several pamphlets of the late colonial Urdu writer and icon of Sufism Khwaja Hasan Nizami, this paper looks at negotiations between narratives of Sufi, national and community space.

Nizami represents the built architecture of the shrine as an ordered moral universe with a set code of conduct and normative emotions. In the context of the quest for a Muslim and an Indian identity and belonging during the heydays of nationalism Nizami projects the Sufi shrine as a space of continuity and unity capable to encompass the geography and bodies of India, as well as its ethos and self. He imagines the physical territory of the shrine as an internal space of the individual and the community, as well as the material space of the country, thus blurring understandings of the respective scopes of these spaces. At the same time he shapes the etiquette and image of the shrine in accordance with normalizing tendencies in Islamic reformism.

The paper argues that Khwaja Hasan Nizami's fashioning of the multiple aspects of Sufi space helps to understand the complex layers of contemporary mouldings of community and nation. It seeks to highlight the internal and behavioral aspects of Sufi space in its practiced actuality, such as emotions and ethics, as well as its fluctuating geographical expansion. Thus the presentation aims at a localized discussion of Sufi space in its historical and political situatedness questioning conceptualizations of Sufi space that separate its material from the imagined dimension.