Ennobling Power of Sultan Bahoo’s Poetry

Sultan Bahoo Sahib (1629-1691) is revered by unanimous consent, as a great Punjabi Sufi poet. This paper argues that his poetry is not only a pinnacle of Sufi wisdom, it also enshrines antidote to the prevailing cynicism, uncertainty, pessimism, nihilism and consequent despair in the post-modern society that has lost its religious and spiritual bearings.

rohaniyat o amliyat

Looking Around: An Angle on Our Times - Reductive view of Reality

Modernity has made an accelerated move away from the divine principles, the treasure of metaphysical and spiritual, non-human wisdom, which is perennial, because prior to all ages and therefore can never be lost (Nasr, 1999). Modernity has reduced the meaning of reality to the physical and material world alone, experienced by external senses and discursive reasoning. Science has no doubt, done great service to humankind, but its offshoots- naturalism, nominalism, and positivism- have generated ‘scientism’, the belief that there is no reality save revealed by science, and no truth except the one delivered by science (Wilber,1998). This empiricist epistemology pronounces the spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, emotional and poetic spheres and truths to be worthless or non-existent. Contemporary Western intellectual thought makes a formal denial of what lies beyond human comprehension, for example, the idea of God and sacred (Guenon, 1999). Such a worldview reduces life to a skeleton without a soul, a shadow without substance.

 Sultan Bahoo’s World View - Affirmation of God

Sarwari qadri orderhttps://www.sultanbahoo.net/life/sarwari-qadri-sufi-order/

On the other hand, Sultan Bahoo’s Sufi poetry rests on the certainty, the firm belief that there is no reality except one God, that is, Allah. Bahoo Sahib’s poetry springs from the love of Allah Almighty. He expresses divine Transcendence and Immanence in his vision of Oneness when he echoes the Quranic verse “wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of God” (2:109). Wherever he turns his eyes, inside and outside, he sees Allah only. He does not see anything other than God. Therefore, his poetry does not give any description of physical objects. As his heart is emptied of everything other than God, likewise everything other than God is obliterated from his sight. This is expressive of the mystical experience of self-annihilation. His poetry is premised on the Quranic verse: “Everything perishes save God”. Allah is the only Absolute, Final Reality.

Sufi: Mirror of God

A Sufi is the most perfect expression of human nobility and dignity. A Sufi is not an ordinary person. He is a reflection of God and plants his feet on the seventh heaven. Sufis have been compared to precious gems like pearls and rubies. Sultan Bahoo compares ordinary people to earthenware and looks at Sufis as crystals (Bahoo, 2002:46). There is an unfathomable distance between the thought and imagination of ordinary poets and the thought and imagination of Sufi poets. As Maulana Rumi explains, “What is this talk of thought? There, all is pure light. The word thought is used for your sake, O Thinker, Saints belong to the realm where ‘all is pure light’” (1989, bk. 11:230)

 Western Romantic Poetry

A Sufi’s consciousness and experience are different from the Romantic sensibility of Western poets. Western Romantic Poetry is a reaction to and protests against the positivist, insentient, impersonal world view. Shelley sees a larger Being pulsating in the universe, and voices the unifying vision in these words,

“The light whose smile kindles the universe,

The beauty in which all things work and move”

And Blake exclaims the idea of Oneness in these words, “To see a world in a grain of sand”

Likewise, Wordsworth expresses the idea of ‘One in all’ in the following words:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of thought

And rolls through all things

However, the Nature-mysticism of Romantic poets has a “profane” character, because the idea of God or sacred does not inform their insights or experience (Zaehner, 1961). The feeling of Oneness, the unifying vision for a Romantic poet is not a vision of God. Romantic poets do not construe the One ground which contains within it all creaturely existence as God.

Moreover, they “physically see” nature - flowers, trees, hills, grass blades, and creeks - with physical eyes and “hear” the murmuring rivers and singing birds with physical ears (Stace, 1961). They rely upon human imagination to transform the mundane into a heavenly world. According to their epistemic stance, human imagination is the source of truth and meaning.

Sufi Epistemology: Heart as the source of knowledge

On the other hand, in Sufi epistemology, the heart is the source of knowledge. Sufism has been called “heart wakefulness”, and Sufis are known as “men of heart” (Lings, 1983). Sultan Bahoo Sahib, like all Sufi poets, sees with an ‘inner eye’, the eye of contemplation, and the spiritual knowledge is revealed to his heart. In Sufi hermeneutics, the term “heart” does not mean the bodily organ or seat of emotions; it is a supersensory organ to which the vision of God is revealed. Sultan Bahoo says that the heart is deeper than the deepest sea, and it houses all the universes.

Impersonal View of God

As the truth and reality of God cannot be empirically or rationally proved, His existence is denied by the dominant intellectual traditions of the West. The result is a shuddering collapse of all that defines our humanity. The world ceases to be a comforting place, created and governed by the Creator, God, Who cares for and loves His creatures. Modern Western poetry voices this crisis of faith, feeling of cosmic alienation, that is, either God is a fabrication of ‘infantile fantasy’, a relic of humanity’s childhood, or a remote, non-caring, blind, impersonal, mechanical force. The American poet Stephen Crane (1871-1900) expresses this impersonal, insentient view of God in these words,

A man said to the Universe

“Sir, I exist!”

“However”, replied the universe

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation”

These lines show modern man’s isolation and the frightening darkness of his spirit because there is no comforting answer to cure his loneliness, as the dark, unknown forces remain unreachable. When, in times of despair and fear, we, as humans, look to higher powers for comfort and enlightenment, then we feel more isolated.