Chai and Islam

On a cold Thursday evening in January 2023, I accompanied a friend to the Shah Farid graveyard in the Sabzazar Housing Scheme. Located on the western edge of Lahore, right off Multan Road, which is the main traffic artery in this part of the city, Sabzazar is a dense mix of planned middle-class housing, expanding commercial markets, and pockets of working-class neighborhoods. The Shah Farid graveyard takes its name from the eponymous saint entombed here, whose glittering shrine hovers over the area. However, we were not here to visit this shrine but were looking for Sakina Bibi, an acquaintance of my friend, who had invited us to spend the evening with her sangat. Even before we had alighted from our car, we spotted her waving and gesturing toward us. After exchanging warm greetings, Sakina beckoned us to follow her to the baithak of her saint, Syed Shabbir Shah. This was a narrow clearing between graves in a section of this graveyard where a group of men were seated close to a fire. Sakina proudly informed us that this was the place where her Qalandari sarkar, Shabbir Shah, spent many years when he was alive. While his actual grave and tomb are in another part of the city, his local followers had carved out a small space around a replica grave, which they claimed to be imbued with his sacred presence.

A few minutes after I had paid my respects to the saint by bowing and touching this “grave,” I found myself comfortably seated next to the fire, using a grave as a backrest. Sakina proudly introduced the four men present here as members of her Qalandari sangat and fellow devotees of Syed Shabbir Shah. I also noticed another small group of men a few feet away, who all seemed younger and were seated in a row in a narrow crevice between another set of graves. Initially I was under the impression that Pannu, who was seated right across from me, was the leader of this gathering as the others were showing him some deference.