Pakistan's Sufi Muslims brave bombs to worship

[rug]

By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times
June 14, 2011

Reporting from Lahore, Pakistan— Amid the throngs of Sufi Muslim followers streaming through the white marble corridors of the Data Darbar shrine, a young man in a cream-colored tunic and oversized sunglasses shuffled gingerly, guided by a brother on one side and his father on the other.

Twice a month Qasim Javed Malik comes here, a place he associates with spiritual recharging, not with the deafening clap of a suicide bomb blast, the odor of charred flesh, the blinding flash before everything went black.

"There's a strong divine attraction that pulls me here," Malik, 28, said softly, his face and hands pocked with scars from a suicide bomb attack at the shrine last summer that also left him blind. "I cannot stop coming here."

Neither can thousands of other Pakistani adherents to Sufism, despite a campaign of suicide bombings targeting a strain of Islam that embraces tolerance, welcomes women to its shrines and eschews the rigidity that characterizes hard-line Islamist doctrine.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan-shrines-20110614,0,6904430.story