Sehwan Sharif, a Wandering Qalandar's Shrine That Never Stops Dancing

Qalandar, the title Usman Marwandi is remembered by more often than his given name, marks him as belonging to a particular current within Sufism, the wandering mendicant mystics known as Qalandars who deliberately set aside the conventions of settled religious life, sometimes including dress, property and social standing, in favor of an itinerant devotion that scandalized as often as it inspired. He died at Sehwan in the second half of the thirteenth century, and what grew up around his grave is one of the more unusual shrine cultures in South Asian Islam precisely because it kept something of that unruliness rather than smoothing it into conventional piety. The dhamaal performed there nightly is not an occasional festival dance, it is a standing practice, drummers and dancers giving themselves over to trance-like motion in front of the tomb in a ritual open to Muslims and non-Muslims, men and women, alike, a breadth of participation that many other shrines do not extend. The shrine's single largest gathering is its Urs, the death-anniversary observance, timed each year to the eighteenth of Sha'ban on the Islamic calendar, three days that draw thousands of pilgrims from across Pakistan and rank among the largest Sufi gatherings in Sindh. That openness and popularity have also made the shrine a target. On 16 February 2017 a suicide bomber detonated explosives during the dhamaal itself, killing more than eighty worshippers in one of the deadliest attacks on a place of worship in Pakistan's recent history, an assault widely read as an attempt to silence exactly the inclusive, syncretic devotion the shrine represents. The dhamaal resumed within days of the attack, drummers and dancers returning to the same courtyard, which is generally read locally and in subsequent reporting as the shrine's own answer to the bombing.