Umbra Sumus

So, for the second time in a few days I find myself writing about Pakistani militant attacks designed to destabilse religious harmony. On Thursday night, at least 42 people were killed and hundreds wounded when two suicide bombers attacked a the famous Data Ganj Baksh Sufi shrine in Lahore. The Lahore commissioner, Khusro Pervaiz, blamed the attack on a “conspiracy in which locals are being used” – a euphemism often used to point the finger at neighbouring India. A dangerous remark that even if true does nothing to answer the charge that Pakistan is actually at war with itself. The so-called Pakistani Taleban funded by Wahabi and other conservative sects (the same groups conveniently used by the Pakistani army in the 1990s to attack Indian troops in Kashmir) are the likely culprits for this and the recent attack on the Ahmadiyya community. Despite what fanatics in both Pakistan and the West would have us believe, the dominant tradition within Pakistani society is a tolerant, peaceful Sufistic based Islam. Wherever I have travelled within the Islamic world it is the presence of Sufis that has reassured me and added to my knowledge of religion. Sufism – a mystical, internalised form of Islamic worship that centres on love and prayer and charity seems to spring up to defend Islam when repression threatens. I have met many Sufis – often practising in secret – and my admiration of their practice is matched only by my hope that this will be the last outrage against all people who seek only to practice their religion peacefully as they see fit.

I’ve never worked in the Data Ganj Baksh shrine but here are some other images linked by ‘Sufism’ from my archive:

India - Delhi - Worshippers (both Hindu and Muslim) pray and make offerings over the tomb of Hazrat Nizamuddin Awlia, a famous Sufi of the Chisti Order

India - Delhi - Musicians play and sing Qawwali (Sufi devotional songs) at the Hazrat Nizamuddin Awlia Shrine

Somaliland - Hargeisa - Men perform Zikr (recitation of the name of Allah - a key Sufi practise) in secret at a house in Hargeisa, the capital of the Self Declared Independent country of Somaliland.

Albania - Tirana - A Bektashi Dervish elder in the Order's mosque. in Tirana Albania. The Bektashi's, an order of Sufi's were persecuted along with all other religions under the Communist regime

UK - London - A portrait of a young man in the Peckham Mosque who has converted to Islam in the Sufi tradition

As the Labour government loses power and its party leader, the front runner to take the reins is David Miliband. I made a large story about him for the Times Magazine a little over a year ago.

UK - London - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear at his home in London

UK - London - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear at his home in London

Belgium - Brussels - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear during a live broadcast with a TV channel in the European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium

UK - London - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear at a meeting at his official residence with the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Mr Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Hussain Qureshi

Ukraine - Kiev - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear with his staff on Board the Queen's flight bound for Kiev, Ukraine for talks with the Ukranian government

UK - Birmingham - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear at a meeting in Birmingham with the Pakistani Foreign Minister, Mr Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Hussain Qureshi and members of the British Pakistani community

Belgium - Brussels - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear during an informal meeting with the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair in his office in the European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium

Belgium - Brussels - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear during an informal meeting with the Serbian Foreign Minister, Vuk Jeremich

Belgium - Brussels - David Miliband, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Member of Parliament for South Shields, Tyne and Wear holds his head in his hands during a live broadcast with a TV channel in the European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium

So, as two further national newspapers swing their support away from Gordon Brown, all indications a week before the election point to a hung Parliament controlled by the Tories. My views on this are complicated: when all the parties represent the Market and the status quo there IS no choice, however my formative political years were formed under the Thatcher government and so I reserve a particular dread for the Bullingdon Club‘s entry into Number 10.

I haven’t photographed elections – or much British politics – for a long time. I do however remember a particularly depressing April dawn dropping rolls of film off at Der Spiegel’s office after photographing John Major celebrating victory in 1992.

Subsequent years of PR-dominated press conferences and stage-managed photo opportunities made me less interested and I turned my attention to the world outside the UK. I do occasionally get to photograph politicians however. Here’s one of the Man that would be King taken a couple of years ago on assignment for the Times Magazine.

UK - Oxfordshire - David Cameron, Conservative Party Leader and Conservative MP for Whitney in his constituency office

I leave my final thoughts to one of my favourite essayists, Emma Goldman, whose views on the subject echo my own:

“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal…”

No gods, no masters.

Happy May Day.

It appears that the great Indian artist, MF Husain has accepted citizenship from Qatar after having to live in exile in London and Dubai since 2006. It may well close one of the saddest episodes in secular India: Husain, now 95, has been the target of Hindu fundamentalists after his depiction of naked Hindu goddesses. The Indian government has been unable to protect either his property or his personal safety and so one of India’s most famous sons is now unlikely ever to return to his home. I photographed him in Mumbai (then Bombay) about a dozen years ago for the Independent on Sunday Magazine. He was as charming as he was extraordinarily talented.

India - Mumbai - MF Husain

India - Mumbai - MF Husain with an image of his muse, Maduri Dixit

India - Mumbai - MF Husain with an image of his muse, Maduri Dixit

A recent portrait set on Audrey Niffenegger, author of the Time Traveller’s Wife and lately Her Fearful Symmetry for an American client. Shot in Highgate Cemetery on a chilly autumn day.

UK - London - Novelist Audrey Niffenegger whose last book, The Time Traveler's Wife has just been made into a film. Her new novel is called Her Fearful Symmetry. It's the story of twins who move to London to an apartment left them by their dead aunt. A good deal of the novel takes place at Highgate Cemetery where in real life Niffenegger volunteers as a guide

It’s been some weeks since the lives of two of the world’s oldest men came to a close. I’ve been out of the country a good deal recently and missed the chance to comment on Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, both veterans of ‘the war to end all wars‘. However, this morning, I noticed that the Hackney Gazette carried a story that Hackney Council is going to name a street after Allingham as he was born, like me, in Clapton.

I never met Allingham but I photographed Patch years ago for a Swiss Magazine whose name I’m afraid escapes me. Without criticism, it was Patch, buried without the military pomp that intrigued me more.

What stuck me about him was that he was a very, very ordinary man that by dint of a genetic fluke had lived on to become, very reluctantly, a living symbol of the Great War. An everyman. The Last Tommy. He seemed to me almost guilty about surviving and I suppose that isn’t uncommon for veterans who have seen their comrades fall. What was extraordinary was that he never spoke about the war until he was 100. When he did speak about it, it was to condemn utterly the futility and cruelty of what he had seen. I remember him, rasping in a soft, slow West country burr, how when he and his comrades were forced to open up on advancing Germans, they’d made a pact to try and shoot for their legs in order to avoid killing them. That to me seemed absurdly brave. His criticism of war (recently enshrined in a tribute by the band Radiohead) was no less telling. ‘Give your leaders each a gun and let them fight it out themselves…”.

UK - Somerset - Harry Patch, WW1 veteran

nb. The title refers to a line from Carol Anne Duffy‘s poem, ‘The Last Post‘ and is a reference to Wilfred Owen‘s quoting of Horace‘s words, “Dolce et Decorum est pro paria mori” (“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”).