The Guru's Mosque

This is an excerpt from a really wonderful paper that explains why there is a Guru Granth Sahib inside, and Sikh caretakers of, a Muslim mosque.

Negotiating the Sharing of the Guru’s Mosque
Anna Bigelow
In the mid-seventeenth century the sixth Sikh Guru, Hargobind, is widely believed
to have built a mosque for the Muslim population of a settlement now called Sri Hargobindpur on the river Beas in Punjab, India. Two hundred years later the Muslim
residents departed during the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and the site
fell into disuse for some years. Sometime in the mid-1980s, a group of Nihang Sikhs
came to claim the building and care for it, regarding it as a sacred duty, given that
their revered Guru had ordered its construction.1. They cleaned it up, raised a Sikh
banner out front, and placed a copy of the Sikh scripture called the Guru Granth
Sahib in what had formerly been the qibla, marking the direction of Mecca. This
effectively converted the Guru ki Maseet (Guru’s Mosque) from a disused mosque
into an active gurdwara, or Sikh place of worship. No Muslims lived in the town at
the time, and initially no one objected. Then in 1997, a heritage restoration organization called the Cultural Resource Conservation Initiative (CRCI) came upon
the old mosque. They noted its architectural value, heard its story, and targeted
the deteriorating structure for conservation. In the fall of 2000, publicity about the project brought the building to my awareness as I was in India studying shared
sacred sites and interreligious relations.2 The publicity also caught the attention of the Punjab Waqf (Muslim religious endowment) Board, which was the legal owner
of the site.3 The Waqf Board and other concerned Muslims raised objections to the
Sikh presence and usage of the site. Eventually negotiations took place, resulting in
a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which agreed to share the maintenance
of the site between the Sikhs and the Punjab Waqf Board, with the heritage group
CRCI functioning as mediators and midwives to the process.
Among the many unusual features of the memorandum is the tenth stipulation
stating that “social practices that can fracture the structural unity of the site
and the building will be disallowed within the complex.”4 Significantly, in the view
of the architects of the agreement, the “structural unity” of the mosque known
as the Guru ki Maseet does not merely refer to the bricks and mortar that constitute
the building itself. Quite the contrary — the three main parties to the MOU
agreed that “structural unity is defined as the physical structure which includes the
building and its precincts and the social cultural values associated with it.” These
values include the “message of the historic building, namely the promotion of the
peace and harmony between different religious faiths by means of participation
and sharing responsibility.”5 Such language in the agreement was carefully forged
over several drafts executed by the three parties to the MOU: the Nihang Sikh
jatha (band), the Punjab Waqf Board, and CRCI, the heritage conservation group
based in Delhi. This story illuminates the production, conversion, reconversion, and
ultimate transformation of a contested space into a unifying structure. The negotiations constituted a complex process through which the parties involved generated a definition of the mosque as a shared site and affirmed all three groups as having legitimate interests in caring for it. This challenges the usual assumption that mosques are exclusively Islamic spaces. In this case, through affirming the site as a mosque, the Guru’s intention in building it was also affirmed, giving the Nihangs and the Waqf Board common ground. Furthermore, bolstered by their willingness to pursue a cooperative arrangement, the Guru ki Maseet’s role as a unifying site was given historical roots through a range of practices engaged at all levels of the constituent community. The negotiations over the final agreement revealed a subtle mutual attunement of language and the accommodation of conflicting practices in a highly charged political context. In particular, close attention to the process through which the final MOU’s language evolved shows how a shared conceptual space was laboriously created to sustain the joint management of a shared physical and social space.
The saga of the Guru ki Maseet is bound up with many highly charged issues:
population shifts, Partition history, minority religious identity, religion and politics, heritage conservation, conflict resolution, and the sharing of sacred space. An examination of the most intense phase of negotiations over the site’s identity in the spring of 2001 indicates that the resolution of the multiple claims to the Guru ki Maseet did not require that a single understanding of the site become dominant, eliminating other claims or suppressing variant usages of its space. On the contrary, the shared site came to embody what the phenomenologist of space Edward Casey identifies as the unique ability of a place to contain without conflict the most diverse elements that constitute its being. He writes: “There is a peculiar power to place and its ability to contain multiple meanings, diverse intentions, contradictory interactions. Surpassing the capacity of humans to sustain such a gathering, place permits a simultaneity and a filtering of experience, history, imagination, action.”6 This quality of the place was not, however, an ontological given. It was the product of efforts that proceeded with missteps and remediation through a potential minefield of claims and interests.
Ultimately, the negotiations and the final agreement explicitly asserted the multiple
identities of the site, devising a process and a vocabulary that allowed for inclusion rather than assimilation or domination. Exploring this case challenges received notions concerning the intractability of interreligious conflict over sacred space and raises interesting possibilities for transforming contestation into cooperation."

Source: Issue 99 (Fall 2007) doi 10.1215/01636545-2007-008
© 2007 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.
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Bigelow | Unifying Structures, Structuring Unity 159