The Sikh-Muslim School in the Punjab – Prof Puran Singh

Jun 19, 2024Jun 19, 2024 ~ harpreetsinghs ~ Leave a comment

It may not be inappropriate here to refer to a school of Nam-culture in the Punjab that must be so called to distinguish it from the Sufis (The Sufis being the Hindu-Muslim School of thought), the Sikh-Muslim School. It is well-known that Baba Guru Nanak was well-beloved of both Hindus and Muslims. In distant Baghdad, he counted disciples like Shah Behlol. At Mecca, he met Quazi Ruakan Din, the Pir of Uch and the latter bowed down to the Guru, begging of Him his sandals to be kept as relics in his dynasty and those sandals are still there. Farid Sani and others like Pir Makhdum Bahauddin were great devotees of Guru Nanak. Mardana was his disciple, Kamal of Kurham loved and died singing the Guru’s mantram “Glory be to the Guru” ! “Glory be to the Guru” !

And so this intercourse between him and the Muslim mystics became more and more intimate as the Guru’s culture spread. The Hindus recited Japuji, sang the Guru’s name, lived dedicated lives and went great distances to meet him. They gave up caste, and partook of the food at the Guru’s langar. Their doubts and superstitions were dispelled. And they came later on, in Sikh history, to be knows as Sahajdharis. These Hindus had abjured wholly the superstitious sundry faith of Brahminism and had taken shelter in the Guru. They formed the Sikh-Hindu School. The fact that this Sikh-Hindu School has automatically lapsed into Brahminism, however regrettable, shows that any school of new culture in India beset with so many quagmires of sects founded on smaller philosophies and empty dogmas, needs not only spiritual isolation, but physical isolation to live. Few Sahajdharis have survived, while the Sikh with beards and hair forming a kind of physical isolation still respond to the call of the Guru, as despite all their imperfections and poverty they still harbour the Guru’s spark.

In the time of Guru Arjan Dev, both Hindus and Muslims gathered round his person, Meeting him was a culture for all. The following extract from the pen of the Emperor Jahangir form His Memories shows how both Hiindus and Muslims gathered round Guru Arjan Dev, which the Emperor was of course unable to understand and appreciate as the great Akbar had done.

“So many of hte simple-minded Hindus, many many foolish Muslims, too had been fascinated by his ways and teachings. They called him Guru, and form all directions crowds of people would come to him”

The fact that Guru Har Gobind had to shelter a Muslim woman disciple from Lahore to Amritsar, to whom the Sikh name Kaulan was given, shows that there was already a reaction caused in some sections of Mussalmans. They might have been quite few due to political reasons, but the element of Intense devotion to the Guru was there among them. Ordinary surface-history does not record the meeting of the mystic ancestors of Bullah Shah and Waris Shah, but the litrature of these periods of the Punjab is full of internal literary evidence of the language of the Guru being used by these Muslim saints of the Sikh-Muslim School.

A most notable but invisible change had occurred. The Muslem poets of the Punjab gave up their Persian and Urdu in favour of the Punjabi language used by the Guru. Shah Hussain, Bullah Shah and Waris Shah, all belong to this renaissance which followed the influence of Guru Arjan Dev on the mind of his age and the age following immediately after him.

These Punjabi mystics belong to the Sikh-Muslim School, in which though nominally Muslims, they preached the Guru’s religion of love. and the Guru as God enough for the living beings of this earth.

The Punjab of the Gurus, whether Hindu or Sikh or Muslims, is essentially Sikh

Bullah Shah calls Inayat Shah his Sat-Guru. The Sikh has certainly no quarrel with names. It is the process of inspiration which must come to play under any names.

The dedicated and pure life of Sikh men and women must have had its effect all around it; so much so that it must be said that the Punjab of the Gurus, whether Hindu or Sikh or Muslims, is essentially Sikh. The new interpretation of Islam given by Iqbal as love is due to the un-conscious influence of the Guru’s presence in the Punjab. It is my faith, no Punjabi can escape the spiritual hidden effects of this great inspiration.

So also in the Sindh province. In the Punjab of the Gurus came caravans of disciples from Sindh, Kabul and Kandahar, from Baghdad and the Caucasus-Ranges and mingled as multi-coloured humanity in the job of the holy crowds, in the job of seeing him.

This pageant of the whole people made alive by the great magnetic influence of the Guru’s love and inspiration was life giving.

Recently in our days, there was a Muslim fakir in the district of Gujrat (This district is now in Pakistan) in Punjab who would, while going away or returning to his place, alight at Amritsar and pay his visit to the Golden Temple. He used to say, “What must have been the influence of the great Gurus, when after four hundred years, here by touching his marble floor of their temple, one gets the stream of Simrin, ‘Naming him’, so much quickened. The broken ones are united here. No impurity can stay here. A magnetic current of inspiration still flows here. Those who know aught of spiritual life and of Simrin can feel the flow of inspiration”. Such is the testimony of this mystic, evidently not openly of the Sikh School.

There are a hundred more Muslim mystics who practice Guru’s word, “Glory to Him!” “Glory to Him !” They sing “Blessed be Guru Nanak !”

Though history does not trace the social tradition of a decade ago of which I myself have been a child and eyewitness, there has been great amity almost; amounting to kinship as of blood between the Sikhs and the Muslims in the Villages. The other day I went to a village and lived as a the guest of a Muslim family of farmers. Their simple rustic feeling and service reminded me of the Sikh, and I melted away into the feeling. “These are the Sikhs of my Guru, the untutored children of God !”. Seeing them I almost cried, “How good to be Muslims if such sweet love and service is Islam !”

Sikh life cast a halo of spiritual softness, almost that of the Budha’s sculptured face on the Land of the Five Rivers and mellowed down the tone of the very speech of the Muslim. These were the social effects of the Sikh-Muslim School.

Rai Bular, the Bhatti child of Talwandi (now Nanakana) has left behind in the very blood of his offspring a feeling of worship of Guru Nanak.

These followers of Guru Nanak loved the Gurus, served the people, and thought ill of no one. Their universal goodwill, their angelic demeanour, their saintly lives drew an involuntary and silent homage from the people of the Punjab. Even the old Pathans of the Indian Frontier bear witness and say, “The Sikh is a Fakir, his prayers reach God. Bow to him as a man of God whenever you see him”.

The Guru loved the people, made no distinction between the Hindu and the Muslim. It was the spirit of the Guru’s love unshackled by sects and creeds that went deep into the soul of the people.

Invisible transformations were many, but great impetus to a universal friendship between man and man was given by the Guru. He awakened the people to a new spiritual and social consciousness. He awakened individuals to cosmic consciousness. All religions met in the Guru, loosing their names. The past was fulfilled and all the future hovered round the song of the Guru. The “Guru” was thenceforward a whole religion of love, for people. It was a new liberty.

Guru was thenceforward a whole religion of love, for people. It was a new liberty.

A reference to the pure Punjabi literature created by Bullah Shah and Waris Shah would show the atomic structure of its words, that this is the language; of Guru Granth, with an individual note, of rapture from each poet. Particularly the whole tone of Bullah Shah is distinctly of the colour of the Guru. He refers to the transient pleasures of the world as “plucking of Kasumbha flowers”. The Guru also calls them the false dye of Kusumbha as compared with the fast dye of the maddar-root to which the joys of soul are compared.

“The men of deeds , of practice of His presence have crossed the river.

I am left behind, defeated in myself.

I have been picking Kusumbha buds from these fields of life”.

He refers to Simrin as “Spining of cotton yarn” He refers to man as the Bride who is to make preparations here by making sufficient yarn and cloth for her “dowry” and refers to the home after death as the Home of Her Bridegroom. This is exactly in the spirit of the Gurus, in the very same phrase.

“Sat Guru has made me un-manifested manifest me.”

(Sat-Guru nealakh lakhya hai) – is a whole refrain of Bullah’s one poem which reads life a tune taken from Guru Granth. Bullah Shah sings directly out of his soul, but he is truly inspired by the Guru-atmosphere in the Punjab.

Shah Hussain, whose songs are so poignant with aching love for God, is strongly resonant of Guru culture. All great things refuse to be classed. They go everywhere and get classed with everything. But to swing the pendulum is to impart new life to it. Sikhism has been, all along supposed to be a blend of Semitic and Aryan cultures. From my study of Guru Granth, the most authentic record of the Guru’s mind, I can say that it is the historic culmination of Buddha’s religion. the religion of the truly illumined, the truly illumined of all races and countries. Few would deny the true spiritual and human culture first starts from Buddha in this world, it is Buddha’s gospel that in the life of Christ becomes true Christianity¹. By Christianity I mean the Religion of Christ himself. “Those who have seen the Son, have seen the Father”. And the Christ’s inspiration gives Islam its humanity. Semitic and Aryan cultures seem to have in animal sacrificing cruelty a common ancestry. Islam in this latter aspect is Vedicism, a dualism and goes to conquer the Kafir like the Aryan of the old conquering the non-Aryan.

Islam by its attitude of conquering others and hating the Kafir and the animal sacrifices in the name of Allah, presents difficulties to the modern thinker. Islam lives in the first great Caliphs. Islam lives now only as an aggression a kin to that of an Empire-maker.

Guru Nanak sympathised with the Muslims in their fall from true Islam into the mad religion of empire-making and crushing their fellow-beings under their heels, and there are many passages in which he as their teacher admonished them back to the right conduct, right feeling and right contemplation. The wise and truly religious therefore, bowed down to the Guru.

The religion of the Gurus thus is the Great Humanity of feeling which makes man good without an effort, and is but a “looking up”, “a gazing up” towards God. Men and women looking up to Him forever, waiting for His coming, opening their mouths like rain-birds to the shower of His Love. A moment comes when by His favour, man is transmuted into a god. And all effort of creation is to produce that great man of God. If any animal is to be sacrificed in love of Him, it is the animal-in-man.

The synthetic blending of things take place in the realms of the intellect; the Guru lives in the soul of the Universe, in the spirit of life, in the labour of Love, in the inebriation of that Great Beautiful. A new present start with the Guru. The future is all his.

These are individual opinions. ↩︎

Guru Nanak And Divine Grace – Prof Puran Singh

Mar 1, 2024 ~ harpreetsinghs ~ Leave a comment

Guru Nanak rose with tumultuous moral indignation, but unperturbed himself. And he rose as a new genius of Heaven, a spontaneous ‘Buddha-personality – the Handicraft of Creation. In this mind, there is at last no kafir, there is none who stands in need of anything but God’s mercy. The Guru says that Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Sikh all are in great need of becoming true men. All the need of the great sympathy of that one cosmic spirit which pervades this creative Nature and Nature’s creation is He in person, whom we can touch flesh to flesh, and not a dead machine that merely revolves.

Guru Nanak condemns false creeds and crooked politics and the unjust social order. He condemns the hollow scriptures and isms of the times; he condemns barren pieties, asceticism’s, trances, sound-hearing yoga’s, bead-telling, namaze’s fasts, and all the formal vagaries of religious and political hypocrisies. He condemns them without sparing any, for it was all darkness in the world and men.

True Islam had declined long ago – a great spiritual momentum has already produced a communal cohesion of a great mass of men who did and thought as they chose, mostly like the old conquering Aryans and Brahmins. Islam then established in India as a religion had become a tyranny. It was just lip-profession as in the case of the Hindu and Christian. Lip-profession covers the bestiality of man in his social of political tyranny.

Guru Nanak takes up, like a giant, the long-rooted conventions of Hindu and Muslim on the palm of his hand and pitches them into the sea. Off with cant. Away with nonsense. Down with lies.

This calmness of Guru Nanak is superhuman; this is the power of the New Presence of God revealed through him.

Luther’s melodrama of burning the papal bulls is the wrath of a mere man, it is the small theatrical show, of an extraordinary human power. The true power of the Infinite is, never agitated like that. It never seems so extraordinary, so out of the way, so theatrical. It is the powerful calf of unfathomable depths.

Here, in the Punjab, was the wholesale destruction of all such systems in a glace, in a smile, in a presence. Down with the dead form and the evil minded social order. Down with false Islam, and false Hinduism; take to the true creeds. He filled the people with Himself.

The people forgot their past errors. Here was a man at last, their friend, their God, on whom they, like animals in distress, had been used to call in their distress and sorrow, as taught by those rare hidden nameless wanderers that came and sat under their trees with them, who were inexplicably happy and begged food at their poor doors.

God came to them suddenly from nowhere. And he was so human, yet inscrutable in his strange, wondrous miraculous “natural super naturalness.” And they were face to face with Him on whom they used to call as “Hari, Krishna”, “Krishna”, “Rama”, but here was He a man !

Great was the joy of the people, They merged all other names in Him, all scriptures in His speech. The soul of a whole people suddenly rose to its inner sovereignty. Pundits and scholars may now read the word of the Guru, as their learned treatises might assist them, but to the seekers of truth, the people, then and now it is as simple as the rising of the sun on their mud huts. It was the cure for their suffering. It is the end of their dark night. And His Word on their lips can mean only one thing-it is the Guru, His love, His Mercy, His Help. To the disciples of the Buddha of Kapilvastu, all scriptures were resumed in the name Buddha. To the disciples of the Christ, the whole of human history gathered in and shone before their loving gaze in ‘Christ’. The Sikhs of the Punjab forgot all the past in the new light that flooded their hearths and homes, that illuminated them; they saw it was God’s Universe. Death is not the goal; the body of flesh and its dead rotten finalities are not the end. The people understood this one thing-call on Him when are in difficulty, as the child calls on the mother and the Guru comes to your aid. There is He.

This is all the meaning of the Guru’s song to the people. To sing His praise, to love Him – this is essential, what else is needed ?

Jesus Christ, the Buddha of Palestine, had added the Pasion to the Nirvana of the Buddha of Kapilvastu, and Guru Nanak, The Apostle of Nankana, added to the Nirvana and Passion the love of men, Sadh Sangat in which there was no ‘Kafir’ and no castes. Man and his God are one. In Guru Nanak all the former prophets are fulfilled and completed.

Guru Nanak, The Apostle of Nankana, added to the Nirvana and Passion the love of men, Sadh Sangat in which there was no ‘Kafir’ and no castes. Man and his God are one. In Guru Nanak all the former prophets are fulfilled and completed.

The Name “Guru” the teacher, or the Dispeller of Darkness, “The Logos-in-body”, “The Infinite-in-person”, he passed on to his successor. He could not live without the people, the disciples. He must sing and there was his minstrel, Mardana. He must gather crowds of angles around him, he was happy seeing great congregations happy and free in that great inner love which no one can name, and no one can say he knows it not, as Goethe puts it. He added simple home life to the individual, freedom to man and made him responsible to a society of gods. Man was made out of his inner goodness, spontaneously responsible of Love. Happily responsible to himself and not to the legislature ! In the society of man, conceived by Guru Nanak, came the resurrection of the individual as well as his sweet death.

"God harden me against myself,
This coward with pathetic voice
Who craves for ease and rest and joys,
Myself each traitor to myself.
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,
My cog wherever I go,
Yet one there is can curb myself,
Can roll the strangling load from me,
Break off the yoke and set me free.

The soul ripens in the company of the Guru’s devotes. He has become now multitudes.

Guru Gobind Singh – In Him, Guru Nanak’s sword in unsheathed. The Buddha had stood between the doe and the huntsman, the Christ between the people and the tyrants, the rulers, the kings. It is here too the same mercy, the same compassion. The tore humanity into no sects. Hindus and Muslims met round him as Disciples. The work ‘Sikh’ means learner.

And the feeling of every new Buddha exhausts the one patterns of its expression forever. With the Guru, Heaven unsheathed its sword to save the people from both religious and political oppression-the fanatic, savage oppression of the oppressors. This feeling has yet to work in spontaneous progress of man till Humanity ripens, and the visible proof of His sword being the sword of self-sacrifice, as was the Cross of the Christ, and being but the symbol of his compassion, is marked on the face of his people, these Sikhs, his disciples. Far away, separated from the Guru, for more than two centuries, after Guru Gobind Singh’s time persecuted, hunted, tortured-the Sikh, humanly speaking, has borne untold suffering, Yet here he is, When, in 1923, he was mercilessly beaten by the iron-shod, blind lathis of the police at Guru-ka-Bagh, near Amritsar, beaten unconscious and felled, he again rose and went towards the “Door of the Guru” ; again he was beaten unconscious, he fell and rose again with the same direction in his soul, the Sikh in him still unbeaten. There shone the light of the Guru on his face. It is same if we Sikhs blame the oppressors. Blaming is the way of cowards, those gone degenerate.

In the times of Guru Gobind Singh there shone the same light on the horseback of the Khalsa. No! The Sikh did not end in the barrack-room, as says Tagore, the poet who is not intimate with the inner animal in the Sikh, the animal that lifts its dumb eyes to his Guru, his God. They certainly do not know him, who say so.

If the Guru and his disciples took up sword, it was not with the hands of a Lenin or a Napoleon; it was rather as a Joan’ d Arc or like the wives of the Inca, when caught unawares by the barbarous Spaniards. Mere cries of a blind history should not be able to hide the sun of Truth; that Guru Gobind Singh waged war is a myth.

The Sikh when beaten at Guru ka Bagh was not alone; he was not an individual, he was like his Guru, whole multitudes; he was the people, even as today.

There were women on the roadside chanting the name of Guru and giving their brothers the milk of affection to sip before they went onwards to be beaten to death. No victor was received with greater honours, no king was ever given a more sincere welcome. This is the Sadh Sangat of the Guru, there is a spirit of self-sacrifice for the people, infused forever into a whole people. If the Sikh is still ignorant of the great Sikh consciousness. If the Sikh is still ignorant of the great humanity of his Guru, if he gets small and miserable at times, and is ferocious like the lion, it is the exhibition of his own vexation, not the Guru. All evil about him is thick darkness; but great is the spark that shines therein. It is only the spark that we should see. Darkness is every where in this world-a wholly unsatisfactory world-if the spark is lacking.

Guru Gobind Singh’s noble feeling is as divine as of the Buddha, as passionate as of the Christ, and as intensely human as of Muhammad. And he is the Guru, the God-personality which as a myriad facets.

He did not save his sons, nor his wife or mother or father. He lived and died as one who gave his all to the people. He sacrificed the propagation of his religion too, if the people could be saved. He did not call the people to any kingdom-he called them to death, to affliction. It is the summons of the Guru that still calls the people and they die hearing his voice. This intense love of the people for him is an expression of his feeling for them, not so much of their feeling for Him.

Not that Guru Gobind Singh felt not the pangs of a man and a father; he felt as the Buddha felt when Rahula asked him for his patrimony. See Guru Gobind Singh in Lakhi jungle after Chamkaur when he asks, in the extreme poignancy of that human feeling, that someone should go and get the news of his other two sons whod had gone to Sirhind side; two were lost before his eyes in the battle of Chamkaur from where he came to Lakhi jungle. The messenger had gone; Sirhind is many miles away and he asks them. “Has he returned, what news ? ” “No, Sire ! not yet” , they say. “Ah ! go and get on a high tree and look out; he must be coming.” Such is the father in Guru Gobind Singh. This man of keen, affectionate feeling as a man, a son, a father, a husband gives away his all for those whom he loves so intensely-in the service of the people; and he loves the people as no one every before him did. He calls them of his own blood, The Khalsa, the Beloved child of Guru Gobind Singh. The disciples become the children of God, of his Blood. There is the feeling of Buddha in the breast of Guru Gobind Singh, the same renunciation, the same Nirvana, the same good will for all living beings, and yet it no more wears the “Yellow Robe”. A wholly new shape, long tresses knotted on the crown of his head, a soldier’s dress, a sword by the side, and riding on his bay charger. He librates the slaves of centuries from the horrors of persecution and the idle speculation of metaphysics; puts the strength of gods into their muscles, makes them men, and they despise death and go riding like kings , these very grass cutters, howers of wood and drawers of water. And he asks soldiers to die to make human misery less and human happiness more. In vain does his disciple breathe who does not live and die for His great divine pain for his fellow beings.

Religion was purified by the compassion of the Thathagata, the Buddha; human love by the mercy of Jesus Christ, and it is the Guru’s great love of the people that is now filling all the noble tendencies of mankind. Now is needed the compassion of the Buddha, the love of Jesus the Christ. Now appears in addition the divine brotherhood of Sadh Sangat of the Guru, and all the previous Buddhas fulfilled in the Guru. All religions must take it up, all political creeds must bow down to it, science must work for it, so hath the Guru willed. Modern politics has been purified by the Guru and social reconstruction ushered in, which shall be now the universal tendency of the whole future struggle of man. The law of love is to dominate all spheres of human activity. False justification of human tyranny as the law of Karma is to be extinguished by the Law of forgiveness.

The Buddha of Nankana and Anandpur has risen and He is to be fulfilled in every individual man as the past Buddhas and in one Universal Human Society in a lyrical divine fellowship with its face towards God¹. In Guru Nanak, in Guru Gobind Singh the true democracy of humanity is to be realized. All previous tiger-history is to be put away and all nations have to open their bibles and read the sweetness of human love in their soul and heart, their speech and service. Such is the new future of man, to be realized in the Guru’s City of Joy.²

This is rendering of Gurmukh ↩︎
Anandpur – is the city of joy ↩︎