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A Sacred Geography of Sindh: How Sindh Built, Lost, and Rebuilt Its Holy Places

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  Reading a Province by Its Shrines Good evening. Before I show you a single map, I want you to picture something. Picture the Indus at dusk — a broad, brown, restless god of a river, sliding south through a land that receives almost no rain. Now picture, strung along its banks like beads on a thread, the domes and cupolas and whitewashed tombs of the men and women whom Sindh decided to call holy. That thread of the sacred, running from the northern gate at Kashmore down to the tidal creeks below Thatta, is the subject of today’s article. And today, we are going to read it quantitatively — as data. The evidence in front of us is a database of 624 documented religious sites spread across all 30 districts of modern Sindh: shrines and tombs, temples and mosques, churches, gurdwaras, stupas, a Parsi fire-temple, and a synagogue. The dataset was compiled from encyclopaedic and news coverage, heritage archives, devotional websites, and district profiles. Every site is geo-located; ...
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Between the Sacred and the Suffering: Ritual Healing, Dargahs, and the Endurance of Supernatural Belief in South Asia

  I. An Invitation to Look Without Judging   Imagine this. It is early morning — perhaps four o'clock — in the ancient city of Lahore. The streets are still dark. A man in his early forties, a schoolteacher, has been awake for hours. He has a seven-year-old daughter. For three months, she has suffered from unexplained seizures. He has taken her to two hospitals. The neurologist has adjusted her medication twice. The MRI shows nothing definitive. The seizures continue. Tonight, the schoolteacher has brought his daughter to Data Darbar — one of the largest Sufi shrines in all of South Asia, the tomb of the eleventh-century saint Hazrat Ali Hujwiri. Thousands of people mill about in the warm night. Qawwali music — devotional Sufi poetry set to rhythm — fills the air. The teacher sits beside his daughter, his hands raised in supplication, tears running down his face. He is praying to the saint, who has been dead for nearly a thousand years, to heal his child. Now. B...
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