Place · Chishti dargah · Pakistan

Pākpattan (Ajodhan)

Also known as Baba Farid, Baba Farid — Pakpattan, Baba Farid, Pakpattan, Fariduddin Ganjshakar, Pakpattan

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Chishti silsila; Guru Granth Sahib bhagat bani

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

30.340, 73.390

Connections (9)

• Scriptural inclusion inHarmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple)

  Baba Farid's Punjabi verses are the oldest material in the Guru Granth Sahib, older than Nanak's own, and their inclusion put a Chishti Sufi shaikh into the scripture of a different religion. Guru Arjan compiled the book in 1604 to fix the canon against spurious hymns, and the decision to include Muslim and low-caste voices alongside the Gurus' own is the clearest statement the book makes about itself.

• Silsila lineageQutb Sāhib, Mehrauli

  Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki at Mehrauli was the teacher of Baba Farid at Ajodhan, now Pakpattan in Pakistani Punjab — the second and third links of the Chishti chain in India. A silsila is a line of spiritual transmission, and on the ground it becomes a pilgrimage route: Ajmer to Delhi to Pakpattan to Delhi again at Nizamuddin, each tomb a station, the whole chain walkable and now cut by an international border.

• Silsila lineagePīrān Kaliyar Sharīf

  Sabir Piya of Kaliyar was Baba Farid's disciple and his sister's son, and the branch descending from him is the Chishti-Sabiri, distinct from the Nizami line that runs through Nizamuddin Auliya at Delhi. His shrine on the Ganga canal below Hardwar puts a Sufi node inside the Gangetic pilgrimage network, and the Kaliyar urs draws a heavily Hindu crowd — which is normal at several Chishti shrines and not at all at most mosques.

• Chishti SilsilaPīrān Kaliyar Sharīf

  Sabir Piya of Kaliyar was Baba Farid's disciple and his sister's son, and the branch that descends from him is the Chishti-Sabiri, distinguished from the Nizami line that runs through Nizamuddin Auliya at Delhi. His shrine sits on the Ganga canal below Hardwar, which puts a Sufi node inside the Gangetic pilgrimage network — and the Kaliyar urs draws a heavily Hindu crowd, as several Chishti shrines do.

• Chishti SilsilaHazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi

  Farīduddīn Ganj-i-Shakar at Pākpattan was Bakhtiyār Kākī's successor and Nizāmuddīn's master — the third and fourth links of the Chishti chain in the subcontinent. Bābā Farīd's Punjabi verses were later taken into the Guru Granth Sāhib, which is how a Chishti shaikh became Sikh scripture. Farīd also moved the order out of the imperial capital to a Sutlej river crossing, which is what allowed the Chishtis to stop being a court institution at all.

• Teaching lineageGuru Nanak

  Sikh tradition has Nanak visit Pākpattan and receive Farīd's verses from Shaikh Ibrahim, his twelfth successor — which is how a thirteenth-century Chishti's Punjabi poetry reached a sixteenth-century Sikh compilation. 134 of Farīd's compositions are in the Granth. Farīd's slokas are the earliest substantial literature in Punjabi, so the language's founding poet is a Chishti Sufi read as scripture by Sikhs, which is a considerable inheritance for one verse tradition.

• Monastic foundationBābā Farīd

  Farīd moved the Chishti centre out of Delhi to Ajodhan on the Sutlej, and wrote in Punjabi rather than Persian. Both decisions mattered: the order stopped being a capital institution, and its shaikh became the first substantial poet in a north Indian vernacular. Once a year the shrine's Bahishtī Darwāza, the gate of paradise, is opened for the urs, and the crush of pilgrims passing through it has repeatedly killed people.

• Silsila lineageManghopir, Karachi

  Manghopir's saint, Haji Syed Sakhi Sultan Mangho, is placed by shrine tradition in the circle around Bābā Farīd of Ajodhan, which makes the crocodile shrine on Karachi's edge a Chishti foundation at the far south-western end of that network. The claim is the usual one made by coastal Sindhi shrines, and it matters less as biography than as affiliation: Pakpattan is the node every Punjabi and Sindhi Chishti lineage traces itself back through, and a dargah without such a line has no standing.

• Silsila lineageRahmān Bābā

  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.

On these journeys

• Places of the Granth's bhagats
• Chishti silsila
• Major dargahs
• Guru Nanak's fifth udasi — within Punjab
• Punjab before partition — five rivers, one landscape

Sources

Baba Farid — Wikipedia; Shrine of Baba Farid

• Wikipedia — Baba Farid