Person · 1173 – 1266 (A.H. 569–664) · born 1173 · Chishti Sufi shaikh of Ajodhan (Pak Pattan)

Baba Farid (Fariduddin Ganjshakar)

The Chishti shaikh who settled at Ajodhan, later known as Pak Pattan, and died there in A.H. 664 (A.D. 1266), leaving sloks under his name in the Sikh Granth Sahib that the same source used here states were actually composed by his successor, Shaikh Brahm.

"O Farid, thou hast not walked in God's way; therefore He hath not appeared unto thee. Who is there who hath knocked at God's door for whom it hath not been opened? Lose thy life on the way of the Friend if thou desire to be even as those holy men." — a quatrain Macauliffe's translation introduces as words Farid himself repeated when his teacher Qutub-ul-Din judged him deficient in scholarship and sent him to Sarsa to finish his education (Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion, vol. VI, p. 366). English translation only; no Punjabi/Persian original is printed on the page.

What the sources did afterwards. Macauliffe states plainly, in his own narration rather than a quoted legend: "It is certain that it was Shaikh Brahm who composed the sloks and hymns bearing the name of Farid in the Granth Sahib, though he used the name of the founder of his spiritual line as his poetical nom de plume" (p. 357) — Shaikh Brahm being a later successor of Farid at Pak Pattan, also titled Farid the Second, Farid Sani. The verses now read worldwide as Baba Farid's own voice are, on this source's own account, a later hand's. Farid's own last words are separately recorded as spoken in Arabic, not Punjabi: "Ya hayyo, ya qayyum" — "O ever living, O eternal God!" — at which word he died (p. 384).

Draft. This entry is an unreviewed first draft. It has not yet been checked by a subject reviewer — see sources and method.

Kothiwal to Ajodhan

The Jawahir-i-Faridi tradition preserved at the Pak Pattan shrine, as Macauliffe translates it, records that Farid "was born at Kothiwal on the first day of the month of Ramzan, A.H. 569 (A.D. 1173)" (Macauliffe, vol. VI, p. 361), son of Shaikh Jamal-ul-Din Sulaiman and Bibi Miriam. He studied in Delhi under Khwaja Qutub-ul-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki, withdrew for a time to Hansi, and returned to Delhi to take up his late master's mantle before finally moving on.

The source states he "ultimately left it in the keeping of Jamal-ul-Din of Hansi, and thence proceeded to Ajodhan, the present Pak Pattan, where he afterwards died, and where his followers now reside and receive offerings at his shrine" (p. 366) — the settlement, on a canal drawing water from the Satluj where visitors washed before seeing him, that gave the town its later name.

The sloks, and whose voice they carry

The verses that travelled furthest under Farid's name carry an ethic of non-retaliation: "Farid, if men beat thee with their fists, beat them not in return; Nay, kiss their feet and go home" (p. 394) — one of a numbered sequence of sloks Macauliffe prints from the Sikh Granth Sahib under the heading "Sloks of Shaikh Farid."

Macauliffe's own history complicates who actually wrote them (see erasure). Farid died, the source states, "of pneumonia on the fifth day of the month of Muharrim, A.H. 664 (A.D. 1266)," his death commemorated by two chronograms translating as "He was unique, a saint of God." — a date Macauliffe adds was given differently by Farishta and the Khulasat-ul-Tawarikh, and that he judges "proved false by the chronograms."

Sources