Mecca, Medina and Baghdad
Baghdad and the inscription
Bhai Gurdas places Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji outside Baghdad; a Turkish inscription there may or may not name Guru Ji.
In Bhai Gurdas's first Var, Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji arrives at Baghdad with Mardana and sets up outside the city. He gives a call, and the whole town falls silent. The pir, Dastgir, comes to look and asks what kind of faqir this is and from what family. Mardana answers for him.
They talk, and Guru Ji speaks of countless worlds above and below. The pir asks to be shown them. Guru Ji takes the pir's son and in the blink of an eye shows him the upper and lower regions, and from below brings back a bowl of sacred food. Bhai Gurdas closes by saying that such power could not be kept hidden.
How do we know?
The sources conflict on this story, or scholars doubt it.
This is a good test of the sceptical method, because a single expert letter on one line changed the assessment, and later scholars have contested it. The inscription has not been re-edited here, and this site reports the disagreement without choosing. The Sufi figures named in some accounts, Abd al-Qadir Jilani and Bahlul, lived long before, so tradition must in any case be taken loosely on who was met.
- Early sourceHas Guru Ji stay outside the city and give a call that hushes it, with Pir Dastgir asking who he is and a son taken to see the many worlds. (pauris 35-36)[Src]
- ScholarshipAccepts the visit, gives a translation and notes that a date now read as 917 was once photographed as 927, with Bhai Gurdas as earliest witness.[EoS]
- ScholarshipReports Miharban's and Puratan's silence, B-40's quite different story, and V. L. Menage's analysis finding the text probably from 1226 Hijri or 1811-12, with Baba Nanak unlikely on metrical grounds. (pp. 125-132)[McLeod]
- ScholarshipCites Jhinasi Tekin of Harvard as reading Baba Nanak in the line and finding it does fit the metre. (note, ch. on Baghdad; appendix I)[Singh]
- ScholarshipReproduces R. S. Verma's 1970 paper calling McLeod's doubts baseless and defending 917, with Verma's chronogram total. (pp. 276-277)[Singh]
- ScholarshipDescribes a cloak at Dera Baba Nanak, said to be from a Muslim devotee at Baghdad and brought there in 1828.[EoS]
