[THREAD]
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Once upon a time, a man we know little of today traveled out of Ḥalab (today's Aleppo), crossed the Khyber, and settled in Uch Gilaniyan, a small town in Bahawalpur (today in Pakistan). Several descendants down the line was Shah Mohammed Dervish.
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5 years after Aurangzeb had Guru Teg Bahadur beheaded for non-compliance Dervish was blessed with a boy. It was 1680. They named him Abdullah. By the time Abdullah was 6, his family moved to the village of Malakwal in Multan. Close to Malakwal was another village, Pandoke.
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Soon Dervish was taken to Pandoke by the village chief and appointed village teacher and preacher. The village still exists as Pandoke Bhatiyan. This is where Abdullah spent his formative years. Being Ashraf Syedi, this family drew lineage from Prophet Muhammad himself.
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Now Shah Mohammed Dervish was an accomplished scholar with a spotless moral character. So highly was he respected that his tomb still stands in Pandoke Bhatiyan where an annual Urs is still observed to celebrate his departure from the mortal world.
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Young Abdullah was most influenced by his sister who, like her father, was much into spirituality and meditation. Both siblings would remain celibate for life. A little older, the boy was sent to Kasur, a popular center of eminence those days, for higher Islamic studies.
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At Kasur, some 30 miles south of Pandoke, Abdullah joined Hazrat Ghulam Murtaza as a disciple. As an extracurricular, the boy continued to practice some mysticism of his own. Once done with scriptural studies, he decided to explore spirituality. This called for a teacher.
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His quest for a spiritual murshid (master) took Abdullah to Lahore where he heard about a very eminent Sufi by the name of Inayat Shah Qadiri. Inayat Shah, like all Qadiri mystics, traced his lineage to Abdul Qadri Jilani, the famous 11th century saint of Baghdad.
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Shaikh Jilani was so ahead of his time, he was preaching against militant jihad and ritualistic Islam at a time when swords were already drawing blood in religious crusades. One of his later spiritual descendants was Mian Mir, a contemporary of Guru Ram Das.
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It's well-known that Mian Mir had laid the foundation stone for the Amritsar's Harmandir Sahib upon request from none other than Guru Ram Das. This syncretism took a nearly-irreversible beating by the time of Inayat Shah. A lot has changed in India by then.
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By the time of Inayat Shah and Abdullah, the landscape had long been poisoned by the likes of Ahmad al-Fārūqī al-Sirhindī. Sirhindī was an Indian Islamic scholar and a member of the Naqshbandī sufi order. Also the most vocal critic of Akbar's newly-minted Din-i-Ilahi.
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Sirhindī positioned himself as a conservative Islamic revivalist and said things like:

"Those who give quarter to Kafirs disgrace Islam…”

This man was single-handedly responsible for more communal unrest than anyone or anything else at the time.
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Aurangzeb ascending to the throne and killing his own brother Dara Shikoh for being a Shi'a didn't help matters much either. We'll come to this a little later.

So coming back to Shah Inayat. Although an eminent sufi, the man came from a caste of gardeners or arain.
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He worked as a gardener in Lahore's Shalimar garden. One day while he was planting onion saplings, young Abdullah visited him having heard stories of the Shah's mystical prowess. Abdullah himself having some mystical practice of his own, decided to test this man.
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There were mango trees loaded with still-unripe fruits. Legends say Abdullah summoned his powers and cast a gaze at the mangoes willing them to fall. It worked. Annoyed, Shah Inayat chastised the boy and called him a thief for plucking the mangoes.
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Shah then gazed at the mangoes and they flew back to hang from the trees. Abdullah tried defending himself saying he neither touched the mangoes nor climbed the trees but Shah Inayat wouldn't buy it. He threw upon the boy a stern glare and, they say, it did something.
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That's the point Abdullah knew he'd found his murshid. Falling at Shah's feet, he introduced himself as Bullah, his pet name, and begged him to take him in as a disciple. Shah Inayat agreed. Bullah wasted no time and joined his murshid hook, line, and sinker.
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With each passing day, Bullah's spiritual ecstacy grew stronger, as did his devotion to Shah Inayat. He wrote kafis (verses in folk Punjabi) expressing this devotion. A legend says, he once saw a woman braiding her hair with flowers awaiting her husband.
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Inspired by her, Bullah dressed up as a woman, braided his hair with the same flowers, and went to meet his murshid. This may sound strange to us, but it was his expression of love for his master — presenting himself as a helpless damsel to her male savior.
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Misogyny? Remember, we're talking 17th century here. It was common for Sufis those days to play the woman in a borderline romantic relationship with God or murshid and that's why almost all kafis and qawwalis in the first person use the female pronoun for the singer.
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By playing the woman, Bullah surrendered his masculinity and any associated ego. Everything seemed to be going great for Bullah. Except one problem, caste. Bullah's folks weren't excited about him having a lowercase murshid.

"How can an Arain be a teacher to a Syed?"
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One day Bullah invited his murshid to grace a relative's wedding party. The master, unable to visit, sent another disciple in his stead. This disciple was also an Arain and looked the part in his tattered attire. As expected, bullah's family didn't welcome this guest.
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But that was no problem. Problem was, even Bullah failed to make his master's deputy feel welcome. Later, upon learning of what went down there, Shah Inayat was furious. It's said, he rebuked Bullas thus:

"Tu Bullah nai tu bhulliyan ann (You're not Bullah, you're lost)."
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With those words, he turned away the boy. This event changed Bullah. He sank in repentance and was determined to win back his master's grace by any means possible. Soon he learned one of those means was music. So he picked up a sarangi, dressed up as a girl, and set out.
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The following 12 years of his life, Bullah spent writing kafis, singing them, and dancing from village to village living amongst a community of street dancers called kanjars. Kanjars were considered the bottom dwellers in the caste hierarchy of Medieval Punjab.
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Thus, this was also an act of renouncing his caste for Bullah — a Syed living amongst kanjars. Those were days Aurangzeb in his supreme fanaticism had banned music and dance as haram. Bullah's dancing and singing was in direct defiance of this Mughal fiat.
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By now, Bullah had earned a name for his Punjabi kafis, although he was also proficient in Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. Having spent 12 years living the kanjar life, Bullah decided it was time to go. Still dressed in the kanjar outfit, Bullah called upon his ex-murshid.
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There, before Shah Inayat's eyes, Bullah broke into a final transcendental dance singing one of his most famous kafis, "tera ishq nachaya." Impressed, Shah Inayat accepted him back and everything was great again. Bullah spent years as Shah's disciple from there on.
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By the time Shah Inayat passed away, Bullah had morphed into the great Sufi saint we know today as Baba Bulleh Shah. Besides being a Sufi, Bulleh Shah was also a social rebel and political activist, not very safe things to be those days. The Mughals were unforgiving.
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Bulleh Shah routinely hailed Guru Teg Bahadur as a ghazi (religious warrior) and his contemporary Guru Gobind Singh as a protector of religious freedom. This was a move bolder that one would think today. Here's what he once wrote about this protector:
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Na karun ab ki,
Na karun baat tab ki,
Gar na hote Guru Gobind Singh,
Sunat hoti sab ki.
Eng:
I neither speak of neither now,
Nor do I speak of then,
Had Guru Gobind Singh not been around,
All would've been forced into the Islamic life.
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5 years after founding the Sikh Khalsa, Guru Gobind Singh lost 2 of his sons to Aurangzeb's fanaticism. 3 years later, Aurangzeb was dead. Happy days? Not so soon. The very next year, 1708, it was the Guru himself. Now the Sikh leadership fell into a non-guru's hands.
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Banda Singh Bahadur led several guerrilla campaigns against the Mughals whose hegemony was literally at its nadir after Nadir Shah of Persia sacked Lahore. They say the city burned for days. Then came Ahmed Shah Abdali (or Durrani) from Afghanistan.
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It was against this backdrop of invasions, carnage, and communal animosities that Bulleh Shah came close to Banda Bahadur. Despite Banda's militancy being at odds with Bulleh's spirituality, the two shared a bond of deep respect and mutual reverence.
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It was Bulleh who persuaded Banda to refrain from killing innocent Muslims in response to Mughal persecutions. Banda Bahadur was finally captured and executed by Farrukhsiyar, Aurangzeb's great-grandson in 1716. It was one of the most agonizing executions in history.
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They gouged out Banda's eyes, cut his limbs into pieces, skinned him alive, and then beheaded him. Bulleh Shah was in his 30s at the time. Albeit deeply moved by his friend's execution, he continued on his path of spiritualism and defiance.
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Sep 8, 1757, Bulleh Shah breathed his last in Kasur, his first ever city away from family. Given his anti-establishment stance, local Mullahs refused him even a grave. No funeral prayers were allowed either. Today, people pay a premium to be buried near him.
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Bulleh Shah left behind a rich legacy of Sufi tradition and a vast body of work that includes hundreds of kafis dedicated to his love for God and his murshid, Shah Inayat. Remember "Tere ishq nachaya," that kafi he sang to Shah Inayat upon return from his spiritual exile?
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Today, that song is a staple across Punjab on either side of the border. From Abida Parveen to @arrahman, many big names have created their own renditions to evoke the same transcendental sentiments it must've done over 3 centuries ago.
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