Posts Tagged Farid

Book Review

The War that Wasn’t: The Sufi and the Sultan By Fatima Hussain Publisher: Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi Pages: 245

Last year I had a chance to meet Dr Fatima Hussain, a thoughtful and inspiring academic based in Delhi. We had all congregated in Agra for the SAARC writers’ summit and Hussain’s facility with subcontinental history, especially Sufism, was most impressive. This is when I found out that her book had just been published and my curiosity to read the book knew no bounds. The title of this book was even more intriguing: “The War that Wasn’t: The Sufi and the Sultan”. Essentially the title summarises a millennium of the societal resistance offered by the Sufis against state power as well as the embedded social relations in the Indian subcontinent.

Hussain teaches History at Delhi University and was educated at Lady Shri Ram College and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has also authored The Palestine Question: A Historical Perspective (2003) and several scholarly articles. An interesting volume that she edited – Sufism and Bhakti Movement: Contemporary Relevance (2008) – perhaps explains the relative fluency of her familiarity with the subject. After her marriage to Pakistan’s leading Punjabi writer and activist, Fakhar Zaman, she is now delving into documenting the history, culture and morphology of Lahore. (more…)

The soulful poetry of Khawaja Ghulam Farid (1845-1901) best represents the essence of Seraiki language. Diwan-e-Farid, a collection of the poet’s verses, happens to be an outstanding masterpiece of Seraiki mystical poetry that reaches the poetic excellence and transcendence found in the messages of Rumi and Iqbal in terms of exploring the metaphysics of knowledge and being.

Shahzad Qaiser has undertaken a major labour of love by rendering the Diwan-e-Farid into English and issuing another separate volume – The Metaphysics of Khawaja Ghulam Farid – that explores the vastness of meaning in Khawaja Farid’s poetry. It is rare these days to find a civil servant who can spare time to devote himself to the cause of letters. In contrast to past traditions, present day civil service has become a vehicle for playing along with palace intrigues and extracting opportunities from the vicissitudes of power. Rejecting this trend, Qaiser appears to have shunned the ordinary power-mongering culture and delved deeper into the mysteries of divine love. Therefore, his endeavour to search for the inner meanings of Khawaja Ghulam Farid’s poetry has been eminently successful. These two volumes are highly readable and well-presented for specialists and lay readers alike.

Khawaja Ghulam Farid was born in Chachran, located in the south of present day Pakistan’s Punjab province. His spiritual ancestry was somewhere linked with the revered Baba Farid Ganj-e-Shakar of Pakpattan and hence he was named after the master saint of the family. It is the metaphysical understanding which talks of reality as the divine essence and removes the difference between Ahad and Wahad and one and many that constitutes the doctrine of ‘oneness of being’ (more…)