Chishti Sufi of Pakpattan; among the earliest voices in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji
Shaikh Farid
A Chishti saint of the thirteenth century whose Punjabi couplets on death, humility and the brevity of life are the oldest texts in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, included by Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji three centuries after they were composed. The first poet of the Punjabi language whose work survives.
Life and place in the scripture
Farid was born near Multan in 1173 into a family that traced itself to Kabul and beyond. He studied at Multan, became a disciple of the Chishti master Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki at Delhi, and after years of severe ascetic practice settled at Ajodhan on the Sutlej, now Pakpattan, where he taught until his death in 1265 and where his tomb became the main Sufi shrine of Punjab. His disciple Nizamuddin Auliya carried the order to Delhi.
Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji contains 112 saloks and four hymns under his name, in an old Multani Punjabi: short, severe verses on the certainty of death, the folly of a life spent on the body, and the need to answer harshness with gentleness. The Gurus respected them enough to reply: several saloks of Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji, Sri Guru Amar Das Ji and Sri Guru Arjun Dev Ji are interleaved with Farid's as comments. How the thirteenth-century text reached the Gurus is unclear; one view is that it came through Farid's successors at Pakpattan, whom Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji is said to have visited.
His inclusion makes the Sikh scripture the only major religious canon to contain the work of a Muslim saint as scripture.[EoS][EoS][EoS]
What the sources disagree on
- Authorship of the Farid-bani
Whether all the saloks are by Farid himself or partly by a later successor of the same name (Shaikh Ibrahim, 'Farid the Second', whom Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji met) has been argued since the nineteenth century. The Encyclopaedia records both positions.[EoS]
Images
An imagined gathering of Sufi saints, including Baba Farid, in a Guler-style painting. Commons has no date for it. The saints lived at different times.
Unknown, Date not known. Public domain. Source
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