If religion were to be broken down into two parts -- the personal and the public -- with faith or belief on the personal side and ritual on the public, which of the two would take precedence over the other? They may indeed complement each other but they are, for all practical purposes, distinctly different in character.
To what extent, for example, can belief have an optimum expression in ritual? Belief is a highly subjective phenomenon, so can it truly be expressed in the performance of a ritual?
This question came up recently when we had just taken a few key decisions in a weekly meeting about Khuldunia, a research organisation that is as yet in an embryonic form. Umber bin Ebad, Tahir Jamil and Hussain Ahmed Khan have convinced me of the dire necessity for such an organisation, and so we four are its principal members who meet regularly. My three colleagues are extremely motivated scholars with great profundity of thought and analysis. Each one of them has the rare gift of combining erudition with a zestfulness to do something meaningful.
After discussing business, we go on to talk about academic issues. Last week, the point under discussion was the relationship of faith and ritual with particular reference to the Pakistani society. The discussion flitted from one point to the other -- from theory to religious practice and its social implications that we witness in our society on a daily basis. The very rare moment of reaching a consensus among the four of us came when we discussed the centrality that ‘ritual’ has come to hold in our society.
The Oxford Dictionary defines ritual as "a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order". A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community, and are characterised by formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance. The field of ritual studies has seen a number of conflicting definitions of the term. One given by Kyriakidis is that a ritual is an outsider’s or "etic" category for a set activity (or set of actions) that, to the outsider, seems irrational, non-contiguous, or illogical. The term can be used also by an insider, or "emic" performer, as an acknowledgement that the activity could be seen as such by an uninitiated onlooker.
Rituals are a feature of all known human societies. They include not only the worship rites and sacraments of organised religions and cults, but also rites of passage, atonement and purification rites, oaths of allegiance, dedications, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages and funerals, even common actions like hand-shaking and greeting may be termed rituals.
The problem of rituals as performed in a society of religious zealots, like Pakistan, is that it’s a field that is markedly under-studied. Much of the analytical unravelling of ritual and its impact on society has been done in the Western academy. In South Asia, where reformation and renaissance has not occurred, peculiarities in the role of rituals need scholarly attention.
In such societies as in the subcontinent, cultures are not complementary enough for any Semitic religion like Islam to strike roots and bloom in an organic fashion. The negotiation between the cultures is punctuated with countless currents and cross currents, entwined into each other, and the monotheistic religion, as many Ulema assert in the Semitic tradition, makes it exceedingly problematic. In such a scenario, dotted with multiple religious orders, and with the kernel of the religion shrouded in abstraction, the primacy of ritual is enhanced further.
Moreover, the question of identity, with the onset of modernity, was addressed not essentially through the distinctness flowing from the faith but through ritual. However, before seeing how ritual plays into the Pakistani social life, it is pertinent to see the way ‘ritual’ has been conceptualised by social theorists such as Emile Durkheim (1858-1917).
Durkheim’s view, gleaned from his classic, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, regards ritual as an instrument which holds society together. This can easily be refuted in the case of Pakistan. Here, contrary to what Durkheim holds, ritual has contributed quite significantly in exacerbating the inter-religious as well as sectarian fissures.
However, when Durkheim asserts that "the unit of significance in ritual is action, since action causes beliefs, not vice versa", he also accords ritual a primary epistemological role -- insisting that "the necessary building blocks of thought are transmitted through the shared "effervescence" of ritual".
Durkheim’s inference about ritual is typified in the European social peculiarities at a time when sectarianism in various Christian polities had been mitigated to a substantial extent. Classificatory methods employed by the colonial regime in the 19th century had atomised North Indian society where the shared effervescence of ritual ceased to be the "necessary building blocks of thought". It rather became a divisive tool. Fuzzy identities fostered by some Sufi orders fast receded to the margins, and the ritual steeped in the textual tradition gained phenomenal strength.
In Pakistan, with religion having been designated as a sole identity marker, ritual was accorded unprecedented importance. We have seen the astronomical rise in the numbers of people aspiring to perform haj every year. Similarly, the number of people going for prayer to the mosque has also risen quite considerably.
All said and done, the performance of a ritual has become a defining feature of Islam as a faith. That perception of religion has not served well in any sphere of national life. We in fact have witnessed killing and disorder in the name of religion which is predicated on the performance of the ritual instead of its spiritual and intellectual character, which to me is its essence.