Sufi Heritage of Punjabਪੰਜਾਬ ਦੀ ਸੂਫ਼ੀ ਵਿਰਾਸਤ

Sufism is the inward, mystical path of Islam, and Punjab is one of its great homelands. From the eleventh century, Sufi sheikhs settled in the river plains between the Indus and the Beas, teaching in the language of the people and opening hospices where travellers of every faith were fed. Their shrines still anchor Punjab's towns, their festivals still fill its calendar, and their poetry, much of it in Punjabi, is sung by Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims alike. The orders and figures below are the map of that heritage, and the Kosh's shrine and festival entries hang from it.

How Sufism took root in Punjab

Islam reached the region first through Sindh and Multan, and the Sufis followed the trade roads. In the eleventh century Ali Hujwiri settled in Lahore and wrote the Kashf al-Mahjub, the first Persian treatise on Sufism; his shrine, Data Darbar, is now the largest in South Asia. The thirteenth century was the golden age: Multan and Pakpattan stood among the great centres of Islamic learning in the subcontinent, and the khanqah, the Sufi hospice, became social infrastructure, offering food, lodging, healing and mediation to anyone who came. Sufi sheikhs advised rulers, translated learning into local tongues, and made the new faith intelligible in the idiom of the land.

The four orders in Punjab

An order, or silsila, is a chain of masters and disciples. The Chishti order, carried across India by Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, became Punjab's defining order through Baba Farid at Pakpattan: it kept its distance from courts, accepted the devotional music called sama, and fed all comers at his hospice, the world still visible at Baba Farid's shrine. The Suhrawardi order, founded by Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi of Baghdad, was established at Multan by Bahauddin Zakariya, who worked closely with rulers; his grandson Shah Rukn-e-Alam's blue tiled tomb, in this page's photograph, is its monument. The Qadri order, tracing to Abdul Qadir Gilani of Baghdad, spread through central Punjab from the fifteenth century, carried by Sultan Bahu's Sarwari Qadiri line and by the Qadri Noshahi line of Naushah Ganj Bakhsh of Gujrat. The Naqshbandi order, from Baha al-Din Naqshband of Bukhara, is known for silent remembrance of God and a strict insistence on the sharia alongside the mystical path; its Mujaddidi branch was led by Ahmad Sirhindi, from the Punjab town of Sirhind.

The poets who wrote Punjab's soul

Punjab's Sufis did something no court had done: they made Punjabi a literary language. Baba Farid's verses, composed in the thirteenth century, are the oldest substantial Punjabi poetry that survives, and they were treasured so widely that Guru Nanak gathered them into the Sikh scripture. Shah Hussain of Lahore perfected the kafi, the short sung lyric; Sultan Bahu of Jhang wrote his searching siharfi poems; Baba Bulleh Shah of Kasur, disciple of Shah Inayat, wrote the kafis Punjab still sings at every shrine fair; Waris Shah gave the region its great romance, Heer, in 1766; and Mian Muhammad Bakhsh and Khwaja Ghulam Farid carried the tradition into the modern age. Their verses are quoted today by people who could not name the order each poet belonged to, which is precisely the depth of the heritage.

Urs, langar and qawwali

The living centre of the tradition is the shrine, called a dargah or darbar. A saint's death anniversary is celebrated as an urs, literally a wedding, the soul's union with God: for days the shrine is lit, the tomb is washed and draped, and pilgrims arrive from whole districts. The shrine kitchen serves langar, free food for every visitor regardless of faith, the same ethic of feeding that runs through the Five Pillars of Islam and through Punjab's Sikh langars too. At night there is qawwali, the devotional music of the sama assembly, whose classic forms, qaul, hamd, naat, manqabat, marsiya, ghazal and the Punjabi kafi, tradition credits to Amir Khusrau in the thirteenth century; in the twentieth, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan of Faisalabad carried it to concert halls worldwide. After Partition in 1947, many shrines in East Punjab came to be cared for by local Dalit communities, and their urs gatherings still draw neighbours of every faith, as they always did.

The shrines on the map

Read Punjab's map through its shrines and the region's history falls into place: Multan, the city of saints, where the Suhrawardi tombs rise over the old fort; Pakpattan on the Sutlej crossing, where Baba Farid's hospice turned a ferry town into a pilgrimage city; Lahore, where Hujwiri taught and where Data Darbar still feeds its thousands; Uch, with its cluster of shrines where the orders met the Indus plain; and Sirhind, the Naqshbandi Mujaddidi town between the Sutlej and the Yamuna. In East Punjab the same geography continues at places like Malerkotla, whose Sufi associations kept it a byword for communal peace. The Kosh's shrine entries, linked from this hub, take the two greatest of these places, Pakpattan and Lahore, in turn.

What is a silsila?

A silsila is a chain: each Sufi master, or murshid, was initiated by his own master, and the chain is traced back through the order's founder to the Prophet Muhammad. To join an order is to accept its disciplines of prayer, remembrance (dhikr) and service under a guide. The four orders in Punjab differ in flavour, the Chishtis open and musical, the Naqshbandis sober and silent in their dhikr, but they share the same aim: closeness to God through love, humility and service to people.

Why do Sikhs and Hindus visit Sufi shrines?

Because Punjab's sacred geography is older than its hard borders. Baba Farid's poetry sits inside the Guru Granth Sahib, the shrine langar has never asked a visitor's religion, and the saints are remembered as poets and healers of the whole land, not of one community. A family that keeps a gurdwara's kirtan in the morning may still take an offering to a dargah on Thursday night, the traditional evening for shrine visits, and see no contradiction in it.