Islam in Sind has long been popularised and sustained by the sufi saints or pirs who fill the province's history and whose shrines still dominate the Sindhi countryside. These religious personalities have acted as ‘hinges’ or ‘mediators’ between God and Man. Supreme and sublime, they have presented models of perfect behaviour to successive generations of ordinary Sindhis. To an overwhelmingly unlettered following, they came to symbolise what it meant in practice to be a Muslim. As a direct consequence of their influence and the popular loyalty which they inspired, these religious leaders also became ‘mediators’ between the rulers and the ruled. Kings and governors drew on their cooperation, and, in return, the position of pirs in Sindhi society was strengthened through the economic and political repercussions of official patronage. By the time of the British arrival in Sind in the middle of the nineteenth century, pirs formed a very substantial section of the local élite with whom the new rulers negotiated their system of imperial control and sajjada nashin families belonging to the province's leading shrines came to occupy a privileged position under British rule. To a great extent, the religious and political infrastructure created over preceding centuries provided the foundations on which the relationship between the British and the pirs of Sind later rested: in many ways this relationship was a direct continuation of a state of affairs which had existed in Sind for hundreds of years.