Pilgrims of Love The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult by Pnina Werbner (London: Hurst & Co., 2003. 348 pages.)

Abstract

Pnina Werbner’s Pilgrims of Love, a truly exceptional book in several important
ways, is the result of some eleven years of fieldwork in Britain and
Pakistan. While the topic, understanding a transnational Sufi cult, is quite
conventional within the discipline of anthropology, the time span in which the
research was conceived and conducted is perhaps one wherein anthropology began to question seriously even its most taken-for-granted truths. This
makes the final product anything but conventional.
The author makes very clear her position as an anthropologist and the
difficulties she experienced as a western Jewish female academic writing
about a Pakistani, or second-generation Pakistani, predominantly Muslim
male practitioner’s perspective. Her honesty about the nature of her field
experience, the classic nature of the research itself within the canon of
anthropological literature, and her assessment of what she calls “the limits
of postmodern anthropology” (pp. 14-15, 291-302) add a certain depth of
substance to the discipline’s ongoing discussion of the subject-object relationship.
This text is an important contribution to the body of literature
within the anthropology of religion and Islam, comparative studies of Islamic
movements, transnationalism, and, in general, to students and scholars of
Pakistan and South Asia ...