Muslim Saints of South Asia: The eleventh to ... - blog blog blog

THE ASCETIC OF PAKPATTAN
in 1604) are ascribed to Farid. Thereby he is the only Muslim (not
counting Kabir, who, all the same, has to be regarded as belonging
to the Indian bhakti tradition) whose literary output became a part
of the scripture of people of another faith.
The prevailing tendency on the part of Sikh Gurus, and subsequently
Punjabi scholars, to ascribe the section of Ādi Granth, called
Saloka Pharīda or Farīd-bāńī, to Shaikh Fariduddin Ganj-i Shakar
considerably lengthened the age of the Punjabi literary tradition in
comparison with other modern Indian literatures, taking it back to
the thirteenth century. 21 At the same time it is impossible to assume
that the early Sufi hagiographers (Amir Hasan, Amir Khurd, Hamid
Qalandar and Jamali Kanboh), who have narrated details of the
saint’s life and activity so extensively, would not have said even a
word about the existence of Farīd-bāńī in their works. Less popular,
but more reliable is the version according to which Farīd-bāńī dates
from the sixteenth century and is attributed to Shaikh Ibrahim Farid
Thani (i.e. to the ‘second’ Shaikh Farid), a descendant and twelfth
sajjādanishīn of the saint. However, indirect evidence in favour of
earlier authorship of Farīd-bāńī is its obvious thematic and stylistic
influence on the verses from the same Ādi Granth, belonging to the
founder of Sikhism Guru Nanak (1469–1539) himself. It is interesting
that Nanak more than once called himself sāiru, from Arabic shā‘ir
(‘poet’) and not the Indian equivalent kavi, which gives an indication
of some Muslim model of his creative work, possibly Farid’s poetry.
‘Unless this is to be understood as referring to exclusively to poets
writing in Persian, it suggests the contemporary existence of a class
of Muslim vernacular poets’ (Shackle 1993: 276).
Saloka Pharīda from Ādi Granth, as far as metre is concerned,
resembles dohā (13+11 mātrās per line with a final disyllabic rhyme)
and is, like dohā, ideally suitable for mnemonic practice and oral
transmission. As far as their contents are concerned salokas are
variations on the theme of memento mori, widely used in Indian as
well as Muslim gnomic poetry:
pharīdā piććhalī rāti na jāgiohi, jīvadar . o muiohi
je taiņ rabbu visāriā, ta rabbi na visāriohi
Night ends, but still you sleep; you die while living yet,
Though you forget the Lord, still He does not forget.
(Shackle 1993: 273)
This couplet serves as an example of how Arabic doctrinal vocabulary
was gradually finding its way into the Indian poetical forms, adapting
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