"Normally, we cannot know God," says Rizwan Oadeer, a neat and amiable inhabitant of Lahore, Western-dressed and American-educated, eyes shining behind his spectacles. "But our saints, they have that knowledge."rnMr Oadeer is standing in the belly of a shrine that he is building to a modern gnostic, Hafiz Iqbal, whom he venerates especially. Cool, and smelling pleasantly of damp earth and mortar, it holds Iqbal's grave, covered by an embroidered green shroud and sprinkled with pink rose petals. A young man-a Pakistani resident of London, Mr Qadeer says-stands in silent prayer to the saint, who was employed by Lahore's municipal government as a street-sweeper, and died in 2001 In a tradition of popular Sufism, which mingles classical Islamic mysticism with Hinduism and folk beliefs and is a dominant feature of Islam in South Asia, the saint's divine essence, or baraka, emanates from his tomb. "Physically, our holy saints do die," says Mr Oadeer. "But the spirit is still here, because they have reached eternity."
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