Person · Pashto Sufi poet
Rahmān Bābā
The most loved poet in Pashto, born near Peshawar about 1653 and buried at Hazārkhwānī. He wrote a Dīwān of mystical verse in a plain, memorable register — on poverty, humility, the uselessness of worldly rank and the sufficiency of love — and it entered ordinary speech to a degree few poets manage anywhere: Pashtuns quote him in argument, at funerals and in letters, often without knowing they are quoting. He is the quietist counterweight to Khushāl Khān's politics, and the two are read as a pair.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
His shrine was bombed in 2009 by militants objecting to women visiting it and to music being performed there; it was rebuilt, and the singing resumed.
Connections (2)
- Canonised by textPashto literature
Rahmān Bābā is the other half of the Pashto canon and its most widely quoted voice. Where Khushāl writes politics, Rahmān Bābā writes renunciation — the uselessness of rank, the sufficiency of love, the equality of the grave — in a register plain enough that the couplets have passed into ordinary speech, quoted in arguments and at funerals by people who could not name the source. His Dīwān is sung at his shrine at Hazārkhwānī, which militants bombed in 2009 for that reason; the singing resumed.
- Silsila lineagePākpattan (Ajodhan)
Rahmān Bābā's verse belongs to the Chishti devotional world that Pakpattan is the node of in this region — the same vocabulary of love, poverty and annihilation of the self that runs from Bābā Farīd through Bulleh Shāh in Punjabi and through Rahmān Bābā in Pashto. The three are the vernacular Sufi poets of the Indus basin's three main languages, writing within about five hundred years of each other, and all three are sung rather than read, at shrines rather than in schools.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Rahman Baba”. Dīwān of Rahmān Bābā, ed. and trans. Robert Sampson and Momin Khan (2005); Pashto Academy, University of Peshawar, editions.
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