Saif-ul-Malukਸੈਫ਼ੁਲ-ਮਲੂਕ

About the book

Saif-ul-Maluk is a long Punjabi verse romance by the Sufi poet Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, completed in Ramadan 1279 AH, the year 1863, when its author was thirty three. Bakhsh gave his poem his own title, Safar-ul-Ishq, the Journey of Love, but the world knows it by the name of its hero: Saif-ul-Maluk means Sword of the Kings. In about 9,249 couplets, the figure Prof. Saeed Ahmad gives for the poem, it retells one of the later tales of the Arabian Nights, the story of Prince Saif al-Muluk and Badi-ul-Jamal, and turns it into a Punjabi Sufi allegory of the soul in search of God.

The poem is written in the Punjabi of Bakhsh's own country, the Pothohari and Pahari speech of the Mirpur and Jhelum hills, with Majhi and Hindko elements and a rich store of Persian and Arabic words, in the Perso-Arabic script tradition of Punjabi Sufi poetry. It follows the classical masnavi pattern, opening with hamd, praise of God. Its first couplet runs, in the roman spelling of the translations: "Awwal hamd sanaa elaahi, jo maalik har harr da": first, all praise is for God, the Lord of all, and it goes on to say that whoever remembers His name does not lose in any field. Bakhsh carried the manuscript to Lahore himself and stayed three months inside Lohari Gate while it was printed at the Mustafai Press in Kashmiri Bazar; the first edition appeared in 1869.

What is the story of Saif-ul-Maluk?

Saif-ul-Maluk is the only son of Asim bin Safwan, king of Egypt. Among the treasures he inherits are two ancestral seals, one bearing his own image and one the image of a fairy, Badi-ul-Jamal. The tale links the seals back to the Prophet Suleiman, Solomon, the king of jinn and fairies, who is said to have given them to the prince's forefathers. The prince also dreams of a lake, and of the fairy herself, and though his father warns him that she is not human and cannot be met, his love only grows, until he gives up his royal life to seek her.

His road leads toward Bagh-e-Irum, the garden city of the fairies. At the lake that folklore identifies with Lake Saiful Muluk in the Kaghan valley, he meets a saint who sets him on the path: in the lake telling, he is given the Sulemani cap, is helped by a jinn, and is put through forty days of prayer before the fairy comes to the lake to bathe with her companions. While she bathes, her wings, in some tellings her clothes, are hidden, her companions fly away without her, and the two meet and confess a love that each has already dreamed of.

The obstacle between them is Deo Safed, the white giant who rules the fairies of Koh-e-Kaaf, Mount Qaf. When he comes in rage, his steps raising a storm on the lake, the couple pray, and a dry tunnel beneath the lake is opened to them. People around the lake still say the two live in that shelter and rise to the surface on the full moon night. After many trials, in the scholarly summary of the tale, the prince reaches the fairy country at last and weds the queen of the fairies.

A romance that is also a prayer

Bakhsh never lets the reader forget that the love story is a picture of something larger. Saif is the seeker, the soul. Badi-ul-Jamal, whose name means unique in beauty, is divine beauty and truth. The road between them, with its storms, giants and long obedience, is the Sufi path, on which earthly love, ishq-e-majazi, is schooled into divine love, ishq-e-haqiqi. Between the episodes the poem keeps stopping to teach, in couplets people still quote, on humility, poverty, greed, and the worthlessness of prayer that has no love in it, which is why the poem's own name for itself, the Journey of Love, is the honest one.

The lake that carries its name

High in the Kaghan valley near Naran, in Mansehra district, lies Lake Saiful Muluk, a glacial lake at 3,224 metres inside the national park of the same name. The lake is named after the prince of the tale, and local tradition treats its shores as the very place where he waited for the fairy. The Arabic story, and its hero, are older than Bakhsh, but it was his Punjabi poem that fixed the story so deeply in this region that the lake and the poem now carry each other: visitors hear the tale at the water, and readers of the poem picture this water.

The author

Mian Muhammad Bakhsh (c. 1830 to 1907) was a Qadri Sufi of Khari Sharif near Mirpur, honoured as Rumi-e-Kashmir and Arif-e-Khari. Saif-ul-Maluk is the greatest of his eighteen books, seventeen in Punjabi and one in Persian, among them his own tellings of Sohni Mahiwal, Shirin Farhad and Mirza Sahiban. His full story is in his Kosh entry.

Reception and legacy

Critics have called Saif-ul-Maluk the most famous versified work in Punjabi, and its author a bridge between medieval and early modern Punjabi literature. Its first edition was reprinted in facsimile by Prof. Saeed Ahmad in 2017, with an English translation, nearly a century and a half after it appeared. No complete standalone English translation of the whole poem has been published: readers in English meet it in selected verses, translated among others by Saeed Ahmed, and in partial translations such as Kaneez Fatima Sayeda's.

Above all, the poem lives aloud. It is recited in homes and village gatherings, sung by Gujjar and Bakarwal herders in the Pir Panjal hills, read in special sittings at Bakhsh's Urs at Khari Sharif, and performed in the traditional Bakhsh style by reciters in the Mirpur diaspora in Britain. Singers of Punjabi Sufi kalam, among them Shaukat Ali, Alam Lohar, Arif Lohar and Sain Zahoor, have carried its verses far beyond the hills where it was written.