When you enter a village in South India, two landmarks often stand out immediately: the house of pirs and a Sufi dargah. It is not uncommon for a single place to host more than one shrine, each deeply woven into the histories of its community, landscape, and devotional culture. Even for those unfamiliar with Sufism or Muslim sainthood traditions, these sites serve as everyday reminders of love and compassion. Rich with Islamic imagery and narrative tropes, they open pathways to diverse stories of devotion, empathy, and spiritual longing.

While Sufism and Islam are sustained by an intense textual tradition as well, the practices at these shrines are most often carried forward through oral storytelling, poetry, and everyday conversations. The connection between Islam and these everyday practices remains intriguing, especially in the context of contemporary religious crises fueled by Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiments. For many South Indians, local Sufi or pir practices extend beyond normative understandings of Islam or the Muslim community. Importantly, "Sufi" is not the term most used in this context; instead, people speak of "pirs," signifying the broader world of Muslim saints and their conceptual contours.

As I explained in my 2013 publication The Festival of Pirs: Popular Islam and Shared Devotion in South India, many Muharram practices extend into Sufi or pir traditions in local Islam. In this short essay, I return to this idea and show how Sufism functions as a larger concept, one that goes beyond mysticism to experience everyday life in all its social and religious dimensions. To begin, I introduce Chaakali Mallayya, who is a non-Muslim performer of Islamic public rituals during Muharram in a village in Telangana. His words echo in my heart:

"Peeru swamy is our home deity, caste deity, and beyond that a symbol of our intense devotion that has become an everyday matter for the entire community."

For many like Mallayya, such devotion takes its ultimate form during the month of Muharram. Locally, these ten days of rituals are known as "the festival of pirs," marking the first ten days of the month as a key moment in the calendar. Although Muharram is normatively tied to Shi'i commemoration of the battle of Karbala in 680 CE, in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh it transforms into a deeply local "festival".

Communities reinterpret this history through pir practices, reshaping culture and reimagining the ideas of the Muslim saints' for what outsiders might call "Sufism". For them, Sufism is less about mystical abstraction and more about everyday life, ethical communication, and at times, protest and resistance. For caste groups such as washers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, and Dalits, the "festival of pirs" offers an alternative to dominant devotional practices. Whereas hegemonic Hindu temple traditions often exclude lower castes from rituals and storytelling, pir festivals provide a space for devotion and inclusion.

Muslims often distinguish between the divine authority of God and the mediatory role of saints, yet non-Muslims such as Mallayya worship saints as gods and goddesses. This elaborate ritual repertoire begins with honoring the Prophet's family and local Muslim saints, frequently referred to as turaka devudu ("god of the Turks") or Sufi devullu ("gods of Sufis"). Although orthodox strands of both Hinduism and Islam dismiss these practices as mere "popular religion," many communities embrace them as acts of protest and resistance against religious hegemony.

During my field research in the town of Nalgonda, I met Venkat, a 25-year-old who never misses a ritual at the local shrine of Jan Padu Saidulu. He explained: "It was a memorial built on the grave of the Sufi saint Sayyed Jani, who had an immense impact on hundreds of villages and towns in this region. Personally, I feel deeply attached to this saint because his life story taught me the value of inclusivity, while most religions emphasize exclusivity as the norm."

Belonging to a Dalit community, Venkat's family takes immense pride in the worship of Jan Padu Saidulu. Many of his relatives name their children Jani or Saidulu as a mark of respect for the saint. While devotion to the saint and frequent visitations to the shrine remain central, naming functions more like a statement of resistance. Venkat explained that naming helps many lower-caste communities challenge the dominance of upper-caste religiosity, which often controls ritual and storytelling culture.

It is not merely about Venkat or any non-Muslim devotee. As an individual, academic and activist, I owe enormously to these inclusive practices in which I was born and raised. My own Islamic religious education contributed to understanding this situation, but my visits and field research around several shrines revealed the value of love, compassion, and empathy produced and circulated in this environment. Long conversations with non-Muslim communities taught me many dimensions of such ethical communication.

In 2006, as the month of Muharram began, I traveled endlessly, visiting almost one Sufi shrine every two days. At the Abbas Ali dargah in Karim Nagar district, I met Mallayya and his team, who routinely sing and perform for the public during Muharram. The very usage of the local term "The Festival of Pirs" challenged my academic mindset, yet the narratives I heard throughout Telangana unsettled me in profound ways.

One evening, while Mallayya was giving me a tour of the village, he suddenly stopped and said: "Karbala is just here, babu gaaru. Here this mound was where the martyrdom happened!" As a historian, I was skeptical, stubbornly holding onto the chronology of Islamic history. Yet the budding ethnographer in me wanted to listen to what "ordinary" people said. I asked him repeatedly, "How do you know it's Karbala? What do you mean by Karbala anyway?"

It took me time to realize that Mallayya was indeed speaking of the same Karbala—thousands of miles away in Iraq. I knew well that Karbala is a city in central Iraq, about a hundred miles from Baghdad, historically known for the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE when the Prophet Muhammad's grandson was martyred. That battle led to a split in Islam, and the site became sacred for Shii Muslims, symbolizing the sacrifices made by the Prophet's family to protect the Muslim community.

If Mallayya located Karbala in his remote village in Telangana, how do we understand this history? What makes him claim ownership of this Islamic site? When I asked, he and his team simply said: "Babu gaaru, the entire family of the Prophet belongs to our village, and here's where his grandson martyred. That's all we know!"

Yet his knowledge went beyond simple family history. I watched him and his team narrate the entire story in ten episodes over the ten days of Muharram. Throughout the performance, Iraq was barely mentioned. For the villagers, regardless of caste or religion, the Prophet's family lived among them and sacrificed their lives for their village.

Every geographical location from Islamic history was, as they proudly said, "right here, here," pointing to places in their village. This narrative knowledge leads us to ask: How many Karbalas are there? How many Prophets? Where exactly did they live? More than history or ritual systems, what stayed with me was the everyday conversations villagers held with the Prophet's family and their associates, woven into place histories and shrine stories.

In times when communal politics and hate speech cast long shadows, I remember these conversations with various caste groups and the emphasis on Sufism's role beyond mysticism. To return to Mallayya's words: We are here to share love, not hatred.

We tell the story of the martyrdom to realize the power of that love that the entire family of the Prophet shared with the world. When we visit their shrines, we are reminded that love always wins, not hate.