The continued vitality of Sufism as a living embodied postcolonial reality challenges the argument that Sufism has 'died' in recent times. Throughout India and Bangladesh, Sufi shrines exist in both the rural and urban areas, from the remotest wilderness to the modern Asian city, lying opposite banks and skyscrapers.This book illuminates the remarkable resilience of South Asian Sufi saints and their cults in the face of radical economic and political dislocations and breaks new ground in current research. It addresses the most recent debates on the encounter between Islam and modernity and presents important new comparative ethnographic material.Embodying Charisma re-examines some basic concepts in the sociology and anthropology of religion and the organization of religious movements.

PART 1 Introduction 1 The embodiment of charisma PART 2 Embodying locality 2 The hardware of sanctity: anthropomorphic objects in Bangladeshi Sufism 3 A 'festival of flags': Hindu-Muslim devotion and the sacralising of localism at the shrine of Nagore-e-Sharif in Tamil Nadu 4 'The saint who disappeared': saints of the wilderness in Pakistani village shrines PART 3 The performance of emotion 5 Langar: pilgrimage, sacred exchange and perpetual sacrifice in a Sufi saint's lodge 6 Hierarchy and emotion: love, joy and sorrow in a cult of black saints in Gujarat, India 7 The majzub Mama Ji Sarkar: 'a friend of God moves from one house to another' 8 A majzub and his mother: the place of sainthood in a family's emotional memory PART 4 Charisma and modernity 9 The literary critique of Islamic popular religion in the guise of traditional mysticism, or the abused woman 10 Prophets and pirs: charismatic Islam in the Middle East and South Asia