- Good evening, and welcome to
the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum.
My name is Wesley Whitaker
and I'm one of your Ath Fellows this year.
Before the life-changing combination
of Spotify and an aux cord was invented,
my mother and I used to listen to the radio
whenever we were in the car.
I grew up in Colorado,
so whenever we went up into the mountains,
the terrain created dead spots
where tuning to our favorite radio stations
would only produce static.
At this point I'd start scanning through the channels,
trying to find a strong signal
because I disliked silence almost
as much as the sound of static.
Almost every time this would happen,
I would eventually come to a radio station
that came in loud and clear,
and it was always a Christian devotional station,
Rocking Hymns About Jesus and His Disciples.
When I asked my mom why this was,
she said maybe it's because God has no dead zones.
Now I was not raised a Christian.
In fact, my friend once insisted
that I go to Church with him,
and he got very frustrated with me when I asked him
if this boring man at the front of the room
was gonna be done talking soon.
So it's safe to say I never really
understood what these songs were fully about.
But I did appreciate their lyrical nature.
I felt that it added a layer of excitement and engagement
that listening to sermons did not.
And you don't have to explain this to any believer,
or really any human who's been around this kind of media.
There's something unique about the performative
and recitative elements of expressions of faith
that is essential to understanding the religion behind it.
And tonight our speaker will be
addressing a different tradition of worship,
the Ginans, which are hymns of wisdom
from the South Isma'ili communities.
He will examine how they have been
impacted by various social, political
and religious influences
in colonial and postcolonial South Asia.
Ali Asani is professor of
Indo-Muslim and Islamic religion
and cultures at Harvard University.
After attending high school in his native country of Kenya,
Asani started his career at Harvard
first as a student, where he graduated
with a concentration in the comparative study of religion,
and later received a PhD in 1984
after working for the department
of Near Eastern languages and civilizations.
He has taught at Harvard ever since,
serving as a member of the faculty
for the Sanskrit and Indian studies
and African and African-American studies departments.
In addition, he served as the associate director
of the Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal
Islamic studies program at Harvard
from 2010 to 2016.
His courses and publications
focus primarily on Shia and Sufi devotional traditions
as well as popular forms of Muslim devotional life
and Muslim communities in the West.
Since the attacks on 9/11,
he has been active in improving
the understanding of Islam
for conducting workshops for educators
and speaking at public forums.
For this work, he was awarded with
the Harvard Foundation Medal
for his outstanding contributions
to improving intercultural and race relations.
Professor Asani's Athenaeum presentation
is part of the Devotion in South Asia series,
cosponsored by a curricular development grant
from the Dean of Faculty's office at CMC.
As always, I must remind you
that audio and visual recording is strictly prohibited.
Please silence and put away
your mobile devices at this time,
and please join me in welcoming
Ali Asani into the Athenaeum.
- First things first, I need my notes.
Well, first of all, I am so so pleased to be here.
I've heard about this institution
all the way across the other coast.
And then when I received the invitation to come here,
thanks to Professor Velji over here,
I immediately jumped on it,
said absolutely I want to go there.
So my presentation,
there's gonna be some, you know,
audio-visual songs and things that I'm going to play,
and I'm going to talk about,
but I wanted to just, as to start,
to give you an orientation,
in case you haven't taken any,
if you have no prior knowledge at all
of what I'm talking about.
First, the work Isma'ili.
So most of you are aware that
in Islam, there are two major groups,
denominational groups, the Shia and the Sunni.
And the Shia are a minority group,
so about 10 percent of the world's Muslims are Shia,
and I would say about 90 percent are Sunni.
And depending on the part of the world you're in,
Shia are not always a minority.
So in certain parts of the world,
like Iran, certain parts of Iraq, Pakistan, Central Asia,
there are areas where Shia are a majority
and Sunnis are a minority.
So amongst the Shia there are various groups.
I was going to show you the slide
to show you the number of groups
that are amongst the Shia,
but then I thought it would be too confusing,
so I decided, because even historians
find it confusing to keep track of this.
So basically, so there are two
groups amongst the Shia themselves.
One group is called Ithnā'ashari, Twelver Shias,
meaning they believe in 12 imams
after the death of the prophet Muhammad,
and that the 12th imam went into occultation.
And this is the type of Shi'ism
that you find predominantly in Iran today,
as well as in Iraq.
And then you have another group amongst the Shia
who are called the Isma'ilis.
And the Isma'ilis are a minority within the Shia themselves.
So we are talking about a minority within a minority.
And the Isma'ilis were,
the initial sort of crystallization of this group
happened in 765
when one of the Shia imams, Ja'far al-Sadiq, passed away,
and there were disputes as to which son
was going to inherit this office
of being the imam, the leader of the community.
And those who followed the son Isma'il
eventually became to be called the Isma'ilis.
The Isma'ilis have a long history,
and today there are, you know,
many splinter groups among the Isma'ili.
But the one, there is one group amongst the Isma'ilis
who are called the Nizari Isma'ilis,
who are going to be the subject
of what I'm talking about, who have,
actually, a religious leader, Karim Agha Khan,
who is the 49th Imam.
He's seen as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad,
direct from the Prophet Muhammad's daughter,
Fatima, and son-in-law, Ali.
And this is the only Shia group today
that actually has an Imam who is, well, known.
There are other Shia groups that talk about
Imams who are in hiding or in occultation
and who will manifest themselves
as messiah type of figures.
Anyway, so that's a little bit by way of orientation
of what we are talking about here.
No here's, so this Karim Agha Khan
normally visits the community
in many different parts of the world.
Today, Isma'ilis are scattered in 25 different countries
of South Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and also,
increasingly so, in the United States and Canada and so on.
Especially in Canada, it's a very strong community,
so the Agha Khan was invited, for example,
a couple of years ago,
to address the Canadian Parliament.
And the Agha Khan also has a partnership
with the Canadian government
to create a global center for pluralism.
How do you create pluralism within society.
Anyway, so that's a whole other story.
So in his religious capacity,
he visited Karachi in the 1960s,
and in one of the gatherings that he had with his followers,
who he refers to as his "spiritual children,"
so it's a kind of a certain religious language,
so in this gathering, he says,
"Many a times, I have recommended to my spiritual children
that they should remember Ginans,
that they should understand the meanings of these Ginans,
and that they should carry the meanings in their hearts.
It is most important that my spiritual children
hold to this tradition, which is so special,
so unique and so important."
And these Ginans are these hymns that are sung.
And before he went to Pakistan,
he had gone to Bangladesh,
and there, he talked to the community there
and said basically the same thing about the Ginans,
but he designated the Ginans as a wonderful tradition.
And again, the theme that this is a distinctive heritage
that the community should preserve,
and it's distinctive to Isma'ilis who live in South Asia.
So Isma'ilis in other parts of the world
have other literary traditions.
So where does this word "Ginan" come from?
The common sort of derivation of it
is it's from this word that has a Sanskritic origin,
gyan, which means knowledge.
But what kind of knowledge are we talking about here?
How is it using the term knowledge?
And there is one verse, actually,
from one of these Ginans, which says,
recite the Ginans as they are full of light,
and boundless will be the joy in your hearts.
So what kind of knowledge are we talking about here?
It's not discursive knowledge.
It's not intellectual knowledge.
It is knowledge that comes from
reciting something and hearing something,
and something that gets to your heart.
So it's emotive knowledge.
And some people would say it's also,
as part of the emotions that it invokes,
the emotions can also be transcending,
meaning in the sense that sometimes,
and we will talk about it in a few minutes,
that people feel a sense of transcendence
when they hear this,
and they feel they connect with the divine.
So this is like very powerful poetry
for the people who practice it.
They see this as something
that helps them transcend the material
and connect with the divine.
And just to give you a story
that is repeated within the community many many times over,
of this individual, Ismail Gangji,
and you see his dates here.
He lived in a small, what later on
became a princely state, Junagadh, in Western India.
And the story with him is that he was
really the rogue of his family.
He was the black sheep.
His parents disowned him.
Disreputable character and so on.
So one day he went to the Jamatkhana,
which are the Isma'ili places of,
where they gather for ceremonies,
and he heard a Ginan being recited.
And there were a couple of verses in there
that had such a great impact on him
that he broke down into tears.
And people were really shocked,
because this is like the tough gangster person on the street
and they see him just, you know, sobbing.
And then he sought forgiveness for his sins,
and that was the turning moment for him.
And after that, he so reformed his life
that he actually became the chief minister
of the state of Junagadh.
So he rose to power and fame,
and then he used that position, actually,
to help a lot of people.
But it all comes down to that
one or two verses that he heard.
So this gives you a sense of the power of this poetry.
And we will actually listen to some examples.
Now in terms of, where did these things come from?
The traditional narrative in the community
is that they were composed
starting from the 13th Century
all the way down to the late 19th Century
by various individuals who were either called pirs,
and pir means somebody who,
I guess, I wouldn't call them saint,
but you know, a saint-like figure.
And these were people who were endowed with
spiritual knowledge, enlightenment and experience,
and then, on the basis of this, they composed poetry.
And the poetry was to be sung.
It wasn't just to be read, it had to be sung
in certain melodies and things.
So it connected, in a way, with other
Indian traditions of music and performance,
which is very important, as we'll see later.
And so you have these periods,
the great composers are called the pirs,
and then, you have a period from 1500 to 1850
where you get individuals, at least within this tradition,
who are considered to be
not of a higher status as these pirs,
but at the status of sayyids, which is like a second rank.
But they were also composing.
And in all, there are said to be
about over a thousand pieces of these compositions.
And some of these
I was, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard,
actually, in my sophomore year,
I met a professor who was asking me about these Ginans
and I was familiar with the Ginans
but then realized that nobody had done any work on them.
Very little work had been done on them.
So this is how I started getting into this field
and slowly investigating its history, its impact, and so on.
And you know, much to my surprise,
I ended up actually founding a whole field of studies
that didn't exist before.
So this was a very interesting opportunity for me.
Now, so one of the things that I looked at
was these individuals, like for example,
this individual, this Pir Shams,
who is on the list here.
Let me see if I can hit the pointer.
Yeah, this individual here.
He has a mausoleum in Multan in Pakistan.
And so do some of the other figures.
But when I went to visit this place,
to try to find out about who this Pir Shams is,
everyone had a different story.
Some people said, oh, he's the Pir Shams
who influenced Rumi, the great mystic.
He was Rumi's great teacher.
Some people said, oh, he was just, he was a Sufi,
and some people said, no, he was a Sunni Sufi,
and some people said, no, he's a Shia Sufi.
And some people said he's an Isma'ili.
So always contested identities.
And actually, what you see in the entire tradition,
even as we will see with the Ginans,
this tradition itself has developed in such a way,
had such a pluralistic, ecumenical outlook,
that different groups appropriated it
and then claimed it for themselves.
And so like you have this figure of Pir Shams
being claimed by various communities.
Now, while we are calling the Ginans Isma'ili today,
the term Isma'ili does not even appear in the Ginans,
which is a very interesting thing.
When the Ginans talk about what they are preaching,
they call it Satpanth, the true path.
And panth, for those of you who are
familiar with South Asian devotional traditions,
is a very common term
that is used to indicate a group
of people who are following the path
that's preached by a certain guru.
So for example, those who followed
Kabir, this great mystic,
follow the panth Kabirpanth
and they became Kabirpanthis.
Dadu, Dadupanthis.
And then you have these Nanakpanthis.
And Nanak, was again one of these great mystics,
and eventually these Nanakpanthis
evolved and became Sikhs.
So today, Nanakhpanthis actually
is now the name of a religion.
It started out as a following of a particular individual
and then evolved over time and became an -ism.
Sikhism.
And I think the same thing happens with the Satpanthi.
Over time, the identities change
as notions of religion change, it becomes an -ism.
So today, now we identify it as Isma'ilism.
So I've written, actually, a paper
"From Satpanthi to Isma'ili Muslim."
It's showing how identities change over time.
But the literature itself doesn't use the word Isma'ili.
Another very interesting thing about these Satpanthis
is that there are many different groups amongst them.
I just put in some few names here,
Khojas and Momnas and Shamsis.
But what is interesting about these groups
is that they are divided according to caste,
in terms of profession.
Like Shamsis are goldsmiths.
And Khojas are traders, and Momnas are agricultural workers.
So they're sharing this literary tradition,
but they're divided amongst themselves
along the caste system.
So you can see how India's social hierarchy
starts playing itself out even within this particular group.
And then, I'm not gonna go into this later,
but some of these identities get reformulated.
So in the premodern period,
these people are seeing themselves as caste.
In the modern period,
they become religious groups.
So some of these groups, the Satpanthis
become Nizari Isma'ilis, some call themselves Twelver Shia.
Some call themselves Hindus.
Some call themselves devotees of Ramdev, and so on.
So they've splintered their identity
into many religious denominations.
So, now if you look at, what is this Satpanth?
The path that was being preached?
And I've identified sort of four discourses within that.
There is what I would call
an Isma'ili discourse, a Sufi discourse, an Indic discourse,
but also, a Quranic discourse.
So I'll say a little bit about
what I mean by each of these.
Now, the Isma'ili discourse
is trying to connect
So this is the region where the Ginans were composed,
in this area here, Sind, Punjab, Gujarat, Rajasthan.
And they use many of the languages of this region.
And many of the compositions
talk about that there is this,
the Imam, or the spiritual guide
lives to the west in Iran.
And in fact, the story goes that some of these pirs
were sent by this Imam, the religious leader in Iran,
to South Asia to preach to people the Satpanth path.
And so, so by the Isma'ili discourse
I mean this acknowledgement that there is
an Imam somewhere in Iran
who sent messengers or guides,
and to preach a particular path.
And so, all those references about who the guide is,
but this guide has many identities, as we'll see.
He's represented in many different ways.
So in some of the Ginans,
the terminology that is used
to describe what the Satpanth is
is using vocabulary that's totally Sufi.
From Islamic mystical traditions.
So the term pir is also used for a Sufi master.
Murid, a disciple of a Sufi master.
You'll find these Ginans using that term.
One of the goals of the Satpanth tradition
is that it's a tradition of spiritual transformation.
And what do you want at the end
of that spiritual transformation?
You want enlightenment, spiritual enlightenment,
to experience the divine.
And that experience uses the term
didar, which means vision,
but sometimes they also use a Sanskritic term, darshan.
And this notion of light.
And in a way it resonates
with the very famous journey that
the Prophet Muhammad is said to have taken
to the Seven Heavens and had this
face to face meeting with God.
It's allusions to that.
So there's this very strong Sufi type of discourse.
So no wonder people like Pir Shams
would be considered to be Sufi.
And in fact one Russian scholar, Ivanow,
said that some of this poetry that is composed,
he just called it Sufico-Ismaili style.
You just can't distinguish where
Sufism starts and Isma'ilism ends.
So he said it's all confusing, those labels don't work.
Then you have another discourse in here, Indic discourse.
There's a Vaishnavite, the Vaishnavite are followers,
devotees of the Hindu deity Vishnu,
the Sant tradition and the Bhakti tradition.
And I think some of you are already familiar with this,
so I won't go into this in too much detail.
But the key to this
is that in the Vaishnavite tradition,
there is a belief that the deity Vishnu
takes on avatars, different forms, and comes into the world.
Always to rescue the world from evil and restore justice.
So there are nine of these avatars,
and the Buddha was one of them,
Krishna was one of them, Rama was one of them.
So they're waiting for the 10th one, the Kalki.
What you find in the Ginans
is this 10th avatar of Vishnu
is identified with the Shiite Imam Ali.
And he's called Nakalanki, the one without any blemish.
So you find a very interesting sort of mixing,
a reframing of theologies there.
And the Quran is identified as a Veda,
using the Indian word for scripture,
of the current time,
the Kali Yuga, which is supposed to be the age of evil.
We live in an age of evil, by the way,
in case you didn't know that.
Previous generation lived in an age of great righteousness.
So in the Ginans, you find an identification
of the Imam as an avatar of Vishnu,
he's a Sufi master, he can lead to enlightenment and so on,
and he lives in Iran.
And he's a descendant of the prophet.
And then, to make things even more complicated,
you have discourses from another Indic tradition,
the Sant tradition, which was basically
a tradition that, as represented by Kabir,
that was against religious hierarchies,
and people claiming authority
on how religion was to be interpreted.
Against the Brahminical, the priestic class.
Against the qazis, people who claimed
authority in the name of religion,
and who claimed that salvation
was only the privilege of a few.
This group said no, salvation, enlightenment
is possible for anyone,
and that the truth is within.
You need to have a guru, a guide
who will guide you on the meditation.
And anyone, regardless of your cast,
if you find the right guru and you meditate,
you will be enlightened.
And naturally, this was seen as a kind of,
some people have seen it as a kind of socialist movement.
But the language of this tradition
you find in the Ginans as well.
And then you have another tradition, the Bhakti tradition,
again the tradition of devotion,
piety to a particular deity,
where you imagine the deity, it's always the soul,
the soul is represented as a woman
longing for the divine beloved.
So one of the most famous of these
was of course the Krishna legend,
where Krishna was the symbol of the divine beloved
whom all these women's souls
were longing to get united with.
And so it uses these longing, yearning expressions of love
to talk about Krishna and other deities.
It's also critiquing caste systems.
But interestingly, in the Ginans
you find this language as well.
And then, you also have references to the Quran
in the Ginans, because the Ginans
are written in these vernaculars.
But I've just given you some examples,
we don't need to go over all of them,
but it talks about, for example, here,
that you know, evidence for what's being taught
in the Ginans is found in the holy scripture,
the ved, the Quran.
And it's using again, the Indian term for scripture.
Another very interesting one,
this one here, this is a Gujarati verse.
And there's a genre of the Ginans, they're called Garbis.
Garbis are, those of you who are
familiar with Diwali and so on,
you know people dance around in circles,
so this was a form of religious dancing.
And some Ginans are composed as if they're Garbis.
So they're meant to be danced.
And one pir, this Pir Shams,
has a whole series of these Garbis,
and here, very interestingly said
the spiritual guide has danced to the Garbi
and narrated the teachings of the Quran.
So here the Ginans that this pir has composed
in the form of Garbi
are seen as in fact the teachings of the Quran.
So there's this very, you find these references
to this Quranic discourse in here,
but always in the vernacular.
And I can go on giving you lots and lots of examples
about Quanic language, metaphor, symbols,
but being expressed in a local form.
Now, you also have things from the Quran,
the story of creation being told in Indian language,
through this poetic discourse of the Ginans.
Now obviously, when you start looking at the Ginans,
so think about all these themes that are in there.
And then you find the connections
with all these other traditions.
With the Bhakti tradition, the Sant tradition,
the way things are recited, sung, so on,
the literary conventions, the symbols, the metaphors.
They're all shared.
But what makes them distinctive
is they are talking about devotion to this Imam.
I'm just going to sort of summarize this,
but the core of this message that is there
is that you need to follow the teachings of the Satpanth
which are, follow a righteous lifestyle,
practice meditation to receive enlightenment,
and participate in the rituals of the congregation.
Stress on interior religion, rituals are useless.
Performing rituals doesn't get you anywhere.
The most important thing is to find the guide,
the Satguru who's the Imam.
And the importance of remembering the name.
And the ultimate reward is enlightenment.
And the Imam is there, referred in so many different terms,
some Indic terms, some Arabic terms, some Persian terms,
some Sufi terms, some Sant terms.
All kinds of vocabularies being used.
Now, when scholars started studying these traditions,
they didn't know what to make out of this.
So just to give you,
I'll highlight one of my favorite characterizations.
Here's Aziz Ahmed.
"This is a syncretistic sect
of indeterminate religious identity,
a curiosity of mushroom religious growth."
We just can't categorize them.
Or Ivanow, "This is a transition
between Ismailism, Sufism and Hinduim."
And you know, when you see Ismailism, Hinduism,
these are Western constructions of religion
as ideology of identity, and it's being imposed on that.
And there are others who say,
well this isn't really a mishmash,
there is actually some sort of synthesis taking place here.
I can talk about this later,
because this does have huge implications
in the age of colonialism and postcolonialism.
When the British are trying to identify,
are you Muslim or are you Hindu?
Which group are you?
And people would say, we're both.
What do you mean, you can't be both.
You have to be one.
And this causes all kinds of issues, as we will see.
Now, just to give you sense,
let's play some recitations.
So I'm going to play you this first one.
This one is in, it says Nara Nakalanki Keri Vaat.
Nakalanki is that 10th avatar of Vishnu.
Ali has come as the 10th.
So only a few people know who
this avatar Nakalanki is, the Imam Ali.
And who knows this?
One who has met the true guru, the guide.
And then, of course, there's a mention of Muhammad,
that the guru is connected with Muhammad.
And then of course the connection with Ali,
and the Shia context.
And then this third verse,
that the Shah, this master,
lives in the West, Paachham.
And he has an Ajami form.
Ajami means Persian form.
He's not Arab, he's Persian, he's Iranian.
And he speaks Farsi.
So just to give you a sense of what this sounds like.
So you have this kind of a discourse.
But here's another, very,
another kind of discourse which is very mystical
and it's talking about the spiritual journey and the quest.
This one says, realize your true identity,
and meditate on the name of your lord.
Renounce selfishness and ward off the five passions,
that is, desire, lust, greed,
all these materialistic things,
and fix your heart on illa'llah.
And this illa'llah is an abbreviation
of the first part of the Muslim Shahada,
the profession of "la ilaha illa 'lla,"
"There is no god but God."
And in a mystical way, the "la ilaha,"
"there is no god" is seen as a negation,
and then "illa'llah" is an affirmation.
What is being negated in the first part? The human ego.
And what is being affirmed is God.
So it's saying that you should go
from being egocentric and selfish
and self-centered, to God-centric,
and cultivate within you godlike qualities.
So here's, I'll play you just this one.
So you see another sort of
All right.
So, this gives you a sense of what this sounds like.
And of course this is a very important part of worship,
so this is, people recite it in the Jamatkhanas.
It's part of the ceremonies.
But also, people have cassettes and CDs,
and you find internet sites.
You can find Ginans everywhere.
So you hear them in the homes, and so on.
And there's a whole industry now
of people, and we'll talk about this in a few minutes,
of Ginans not just as worship, but beyond worship.
And people have written about
the impact this has had on their lives,
how these have been transformative.
I gave you an example of somebody
who was transformed by a Ginan.
Here is this very famous Pakistani
writer and poet Ghulam Ali Allana,
who also talks about how transformative
these Ginan recitations were,
especially those he used to hear from his mother
who used to sing them as lullabies
to him while he was falling asleep.
And how he picked up things.
What is very interesting in these Ginans
is that, the music, the rasa.
So those of you who are familiar with Indian music systems
know that there is a rasa,
that the artist is trying to evoke a certain mood
and emotion in the audience through his art.
And the mood and the emotion that he's trying to evoke
matches, it's supposed to match the content of the poem.
And thus when, you know, you can evoke emotions
of joy, sadness, pain, and so on,
and these subtleties become very important
and people are moved only by
the proportion of their sensitivity to music.
And this is, again, those of you familiar with fine arts,
the different type of moods that can be invoked.
But just to show you that there is a connection
between the text itself, the music, the raga,
and the rasa, the mood that it's trying to evoke.
How are we doing for time?
Ten minutes? Okay, alright, good.
People who sort of worked on the Ginans,
on how they actually work in a performance context,
where you have, you know, the text,
some people memorize the text.
It's interesting, these melodies are not written down.
So there's no notation.
It's transmitted orally.
So if you don't know how to sing it,
it's too bad, you have to learn it from somebody who does.
And this also creates a problem because
different people have different ideas
of what's the official rag of this Ginan.
And if there are two rags there's a competition.
I'm right, you're wrong.
Very interesting things.
So there is this,
the whole act of trying to memorize and sing and so on,
and then, through the process of singing
bringing meaning to the individual,
but also bringing meaning to the whole congregation.
And when you have a whole congregation,
maybe of three, four thousand people
singing the same Ginan,
it can be a very powerful experience for people.
Now, so this was this tradition
as it evolved in the premodern period.
In the 19th and late 20th Century,
major changes took place in the community
and its environment.
Now I can't go into all this, the impact of this,
but this had an impact on the Ginans.
For example, I mentioned, alluded,
when the British come into India
and have a very set idea of what's Hindu and what's Muslim,
and you have groups like this,
and they don't know where to put them.
Where do we classify you?
You've got to belong someplace.
So people are forced into categories.
Then the Imam, who used to live in India,
who used to live in Persia,
came to India in 1840.
That changed the dynamics of the community in India,
and there were splinter groups,
and that started having an impact on these Ginans.
And then, after independence of India and Pakistan,
religiously based nationalism started to have an impact.
So for example, those Isma'ilis who were in Pakistan
and were singing Ginans,
other Muslims would look at them and say,
this thing sounds very Hindu to us.
This isn't Islamic.
And they'll say, well what do you mean it's not Islamic?
It's talking about the Prophet Muhammad,
it's talking about illa'llah.
No, the language itself.
It's too Indian.
The melodies are Indian.
This isn't Islamic.
And interestingly, in India,
in the early period, where, you know,
the Muslim had become the "other,"
some of the Indian nationalists loved the Isma'ilis
because they said, these are good Muslims
because they are integrated into Indian society.
Look at their songs and look at their music.
It's just like us.
So in different countries, they had very different,
in one, there was this idea of, who are you
and how can you really be Muslim
when you use this kind of language and singing
which we don't recognize.
And in India, you get the total opposite.
But in India, things changed over time.
And then you get this diaspora,
the migration of people from the Subcontinent
to East Africa, to Europe, North America.
And then you have the revolution in media technology.
All of this, as a package,
started to have an impact on this tradition.
Now if I started to talk to you about
all the different ways it's impacted,
you'll be here the rest of the night.
So I'm not going to go into that.
But what I do want to talk about
is this revolution in media technology, and the diaspora.
People moving out of India,
and what happens to this tradition
when it is in Canada, when it is in America,
when it is in Britain, and so on.
And for this I'm actually referring
to a dissertation by Karim Gilani, written in 2012,
where he talks about Sound and Recitation
of Khoja Ismaili Ginans: Traditions and Transformations.
Now, one of the things you see
that has happened to his tradition,
that on the one hand, there is
the traditional sort of use, you know,
in the context of worship, in the Jamatkhana,
people still recite it.
There are certain Ginans that people won't sing.
But this is very much that all tradition
continues with some modification.
But then you have all of the new trends,
where you have all kinds of people
trying to sing Ginans, some of them are Isma'ili,
some of them are non-Isma'ili,
and I'll give you some examples.
The media, the internet, YouTube.
Globalization, new teaching methods,
Sufi and Bollywood influences.
Everything starts influencing this tradition.
And very often it's not within a liturgical context,
but outside contexts that are concert settings,
the setting of New Age music and secular music.
So let me give you an example.
So you find different types of musicians
that are now trying to sing Ginans.
So you have trained professional musicians
who are not Isma'ili, are so captivated by the Ginans.
For example, Abida Parveen, who some of you may know,
is Pakistan's great Sufi singer.
She loves the Ginans and she recites them
as part of her repertoire.
You have this Raageshwari Shri Trilok Lomba,
who is again, a very popular Indian singer
of Bollywood music but also sacred music,
and she's an actress.
She came across the Ginans
and she started to decide to sing the Ginans.
And then you have within the community
people who've been trained in Indian classical music
using new methods.
They are using this Indian classical music
to sing the Ginans, and changing the tradition.
Then you have people who are trained
in Western classical music,
and trying to apply some things
from Western classical music traditions
onto the Ginans.
And then of course you have this New Age,
and I'm gonna give you some examples
of some of these,
so you can see what's happened to this tradition.
Through these revolutions,
it's become part of the world music scene.
What you might think was a small, obscure tradition
of a small, obscure community
has become global.
So, now, just to show you what happens to these texts,
I'm going to take this
two verses, but we'll only play one verse.
This is a very popular Ginan,
which is saying, you know, which is
expressing devotion to Saaheb, the lord.
And we don't know who the lord is.
The lord could be God.
The lord could be the Imam.
It's very ambiguous,
who is the lord that we're talking about?
Which meant that all kinds of people can sing this
and put in their own meaning into it.
So I'm going to play you first
a traditional way it's sung.
This particular piece.
And you'll see that there is
a slight drone in the background,
and this is sung by a singer who now,
who was born and raised in Zanzibar,
where she learned how to sing Ginans,
and now lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Her name is Anar Kanji.
Now, same Ginan, and we're gonna look at
Abida Parveen, who sings Sufi devotional music.
And I have a piece here
where she's singing this Ginan.
And she first starts singing a Sufi poem,
and then in the middle of the poem, she switches
into this Ginan.
And I'll just play you the piece
so you can have a look.
Just remember the words,
but see what she does with the words.
Alright, so, now let's move on
to the next rendition of the same thing,
same Ginan, done Bollywood style.
All right.
Now, we move to Canada,
and these are the last two examples I'm going to give you
of what happens to this tradition in Canada.
So I'm first going to play you
this same piece, done by a group
that's called the Chai Wallahs.
Chai Wallah, you know, people who sell chai,
but it's the name of a group.
It's an Isma'ili group of singers.
And they have created a piece based on this,
which I'm gonna play you now.
So you can have the words again.
Okay, so,
I wanted to play you one more example,
but I think I'm going to stop
so we have time for questions.
But there's even choral music that's developed with Ginans,
and you have a choir that's using Western choral style
music to sing Ginans, you know,
forms to sing Ginans, but I think I'll,
so I think this globalization and localization,
I'll sort of stop there.
But I hope I've given you a sense, here,
for a variety of different things.
How it's very difficult.
Many traditions are so diverse and pluralistic
from the premodern world,
and then when we try to restrict them,
to limit their identities into certain boxes,
we are actually doing very great harm
to the traditions themselves.
And some of these traditions themselves
have a universal appeal and a message
that get appropriated by people
in many different contexts.
And that, in a certain way,
and this goes back to some of my own work,
what I find very interesting,
this is stuff that I've done research on,
but I think also about,
what is most needed in the world today
is the capacity to engage across difference.
And the arts and music are very powerful tools
that have a very very long history
of helping us engage across difference.
And what all these examples you're seeing,
and what's happened to this tradition itself,
how it goes from being an obscure
little tradition in some villages,
and has now become global,
and now connecting with world music traditions,
it actually shows how these Ginans
have actually become bridges between different cultures.
And, I should add that some of these Ginans
have become so popular
that we find Hindu groups are singing them in their temples,
and a Sikh group I know is singing them in their Gurudwaras,
because they say, we can read
our own meaning into this text.
So, with that I will stop
and then open up for questions.
- [Emcee] Thank you so much,
we now have time for questions.
Please raise your hand and either Wesley or I
will come and hand you the mic.
- [Audience Member] Hello Professor, thank you for coming.
I'd just like to know if you could
elaborate a little bit on the connection
between the Nizari Isma'ili Imam
and his role in propagating these Ginans
in kind of a modern context.
Is he offering some sort of
authoritative interpretation of them
in the same way he might with Quranic verse?
Or is he just endorsing them,
like he thinks it's a great thing?
- So, interestingly, when he talks
about them as a wonderful tradition,
his grandfather, who was Imam before him,
because there was a lot of, in the early 20th Century,
when there were all these forces of nationalism,
and is this really Islamic, because it doesn't
follow what people think is Islamic literature,
his grandfather made a very interesting statement.
He told the community that these Ginans
contain the gist of the Quran.
They may be a different form,
the form, the language, the structure
is different from the Quran,
but the Quran is in Arabic.
And what these pirs who composed them,
is that they are actually teaching you
what is the gist and the spirit of the Quran,
in your language, in your vocabulary, using your metaphors.
And of course the Imam is the interpreter of the Quran,
but also giving insight,
so there's this connection that is there.
And I'm actually working on a paper right now
that's talking about how this whole tradition
is being connected with the Quran.
But the tradition itself, the verses that I've talked about,
also talk about the Quran as the ved,
the scripture of the latest age.
So it's not only just
a framework that's being imposed from outside,
but it's something from within as well.
This actually reminds me
of trying to see this tradition as being
connected with the Quran or with Islam.
This is the same phenomenon you see,
for example, with Qawwali.
You know, Qawwali is this very powerful
Sufi music of South Asia.
A lot of singing, a lot of symbols
of wine, intoxicated with the wine of God.
So groups like the Taliban and all these people
have a fit when they hear this,
and say, no, this can't be Islamic, and so on.
So when these people who sing Qawwali
have to get into discourse with these other groups
who think this is not Islamic,
what do they say?
Oh, this is just a local way of propagating Islam.
We are actually doing Islam a great service
by preaching its message in the local vernacular,
using the music.
So we are the guardians of Islam.
We have spread Islam in the Subcontinent
through the Qawwali.
So groups like this that find
their Islamic identity being challenged,
very often they turn the argument around
and say, no, actually, you know,
these traditions have done a great deal of service to Islam
and are preaching the real message of Islam.
So we can't, you know,
discount them.
This same thing, by the way, also happened to Rumi.
Because he wrote this long Persian verse, the Masnavi.
Long poem, and it's written in Persian.
And Jami, the great Persian poet,
called it the Quran in Persian.
Because it's seen as containing the gist of the Quran.
And much of what Rumi writes about
the Islamic experience in the Quran
is personal, it's mystical,
and obviously, some of the people who have
a more legalistic or more philosophical notion of Islam
have issues with the Masnavi.
But it's become, so again, this idea
of using the vernacular as a kind of secondary scripture
between the community and the main scripture, the Quran,
it's a common sort of trope
that you'll find within Muslim literature.
- [Audience Member] Hi, thank you so much for your talk.
I was actually born in Kenya,
and my mom went to Agha Khan High
when she was in high school.
But my question is relating to the Ginans.
Are they sung in like, mosque, as prayer?
Are the more modern versions included in some services?
Or does it depend, like city to city?
- So they are sung.
They are very much part of ritual worship.
So just as you go into a church
and you're gonna hear hymns,
you have this, this is part of the literature.
So they'll have these prayers in Arabic,
the ritual prayers in Arabic.
And in between they will have these,
and sometimes as a prelude to that
they'll sing these Ginans.
Now, what's been interesting in that ritualistic context,
there's been developed a very strict control
of how you can sing it.
So they don't allow musical instruments anymore,
because they'll say, well if you do,
in the past we know that the Ginans
were sung with musical instruments.
But now, if you try to do this,
there are going to be other Muslims
that are going to call you, oh, your kafir
because you're singing this to music.
So outside the ritual context they will sing it to music,
but inside the ritual context they don't.
And then of course there are sort of
self-appointed guardians within the community,
people who just, there's community policing.
Oh you sung this and this sounds like a Bollywood tune.
Don't make this into a Bollywood, and so,
you get that kind of self-control taking place.
But outside, all kinds of experimentation takes place.
- [Audience Member] Hello, thank you so much for your talk.
I was just wondering, considering that
Islam is a monotheistic religion
and Hinduism has many many gods,
how do the Isma'ili Muslims feel about
the Vaishnavites making Ali and basically their prophet
a part of a cycle of many many gods.
Like how do they feel about that?
- Okay, it's a very interesting question.
So one interesting aspect of Isma'ili thought,
and this goes back to many centuries,
the Isma'ilis in their thought
make a distinction between
what they call the exoteric and the esoteric.
The Arabic term is the zahir and the batin.
And they, in their thinking, the world view
is that when you look with the eye, the physical eye,
and you're looking at the material world,
you see plurality and multiplicity and you see difference.
But underlying all that material difference,
if you are able to look beyond the physical,
beyond the exoteric into the esoteric, into the batin,
you will find that there is an existential unity.
And the Isma'ilis are sort of,
where renowned for this notion of the batin.
In everything there's a batin.
There's a batin of the Quran, which the Imam knows.
There's a batin of nature,
there's a batin behind all kinds of stories.
So because they thought about the batin in everything,
they were called the Batiniyya, the people of the batin.
But this had interesting consequences of their theology.
So in different regions, different parts of the world,
for example, in the 10th, 11th Century in Egypt,
you find Isma'ili writers trying to
explain the notion of the Imam
using, on the one hand, Neoplatonic thought,
Gnostic thought, Zoroastrian thought,
and then they also were looking at the traditional
sort of legal systems that the Sunnis had developed,
like you know, the pillars of Islam,
and developed their own version,
and they used that framework as well.
So one of the things that you find in this tradition,
because of its view,
is that there is an underlying existential unity,
if only you're able to see with the heart.
With the eye you see multiplicity
but if you see with the heart,
if you have that insight, you will recognize that unity.
That has meant that they are,
they have this ability to be able to
express their ideas and thoughts in multiple discourses.
So what happened in India,
if you look at the larger history,
yeah, it makes total sense.
And the fact that the tradition could use
Sufi discourse, Vaishnavite discourse, Quranic discourse,
Bhakti discourse, Sant discourse,
to explain similar sets of ideas
from a point of view of Isma'ili thought,
yeah, this is what it is.
But if you look at it from the outside,
people say, oh, this is,
I gave you some quotes, right, from scholars.
It's just a question of how you look at things.
So this is, I would say,
one of the interesting things
about this tradition within Islam.
It's a minority tradition, but it's been able
to think about the connection
between the material and the spiritual
in a very open way.
And part of it is to do with
because it resists ritualization,
or thinking that rituals are important.
It's resisted, in a certain way,
even legalistic, that Islam, they don't see Islam as law.
Islam is about the intellect.
So it's a whole different framework.
And that would explain how they could look at this
and say that there's nothing wrong in saying
that Krishna and Rama and so on and so forth
were predecessors of Ali.
It's just in that, it's a different framework.
So this is kind of a general question,
but with Halloween coming up,
cultural appropriation is kind of,
it's on the minds of a lot of college students.
And me personally, as a Japanese American,
I've always kind of viewed
cultural appropriation as a good thing.
It led to the integration of Japanese-American people.
But I was wondering, and you've shown us
that cultural appropriation can be constructive.
I was wondering, you personally,
where do you draw the line between
destructive cultural appropriation
and constructive cultural appropriation?
- Yeah, interesting.
So this is a big debate, I mean within the community,
because you know, there was a,
a tendency to use Bollywood music to sing Ginans.
So people would totally discard
what the traditional things were,
and they would use
And people felt that that was going a little bit too far,
because some of the examples that I gave you,
they more or less,
they might change the musical framework a little bit,
but the rag, the melody, even the Chai Wallahs,
you know, when they sang the Ginans,
they still sang it to the rag.
Maybe the quickened the beat,
but they still kept that.
So there is this kind of sense that
so long as you're keeping some of the basics there,
then you're allowed experimentation.
But if the basic rag is distorted,
then people start saying, well,
then you're going too far.
And why are they so concerned with that?
Because I mentioned the connection with the melody
with the rasa, the mood.
So because this connection with poetry,
the message of the poetry, the rag
and the mood it's supposed to evoke is so close,
some people put boundaries to this appropriation.
But I think, you know, for things like this,
when you see this,
I think it's inevitable when a religious tradition
travels in different cultural contexts
that necessarily parts of it are going to be reinterpreted.
Because religion is embedded
in political, economic, literary, artistic context.
And it's always going to respond.
That's the nature of religion, it's going to be dynamic.
And you can try to hold on to, okay, the past,
but then you'll find the younger generation,
you know, is gonna have a hard time relating to this.
So in some cases, I think in the case of religion,
and appropriation of cultural things,
that if they are done with sensitivity,
which I think some of these groups are,
even the Chai Wallahs,
I've interviewed them and they're very religious,
and when you listen to what they're actually rapping about,
it has a very deep religious context,
so then people say also that's fine.
But I think that it's, for me, it's inevitable
that you're going to find this.
And I think when you look at Christian musics,
or even Jewish musics and so on,
you find this adaptation taking place.
It's only natural.
Okay.
Any other questions?
- [Wesley] Okay, please join me
in one more time thanking our speaker, Ali Asani.
- Thank you so much.
Thank you, thank you.
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