Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai: the visionary
by: Khurram Ali Shafique
Some people say that he fell in love, left home,
became a phenomenon and came back to marry the woman who had been refused to
him earlier. There is no way of knowing whether the career of Shah Abdul Latif
Bhittai of Sindh actually paralleled the Count of Monte Cristo so closely (and
we need to be careful about apocryphal stories woven around the lives of great
saints), but there are other testimonials to the warmth of the heart that
throbbed in him.
The most astonishing is the way his work captured the
spirit of a new age that was coming up not only in the Muslim world but also
outside.
Bhittai was born in 1689 and died in 1752. This was
when the Muslim world seemed to be awakening to the realisation that a
universal ideal could be manifest in regional forms. Hence Abdul Wahhab in
Hejaz set out to distinguish between the crux of Islam and historical accretion
while Shah Waliullah of Delhi taught that the
traditional model of Islam was an application of its ideals in the context of
the seventh century Arabia and many other
applications were possible in other contexts. Surprisingly, the new ideals that
started developing in Europe around this time
also converged on regional states.
The only poet from that period whose work may be said
to represent all possible facets of this new life on behalf of everyone was
Bhittai. If the works of earlier regional poets from any region were translated
into another language they would all sound the same, but the work of Bhittai
could not lose its local reference in any translation. Yet, it could not be
said to be lacking in what was embodied in all others.
This was something which, interestingly, would become
increasingly pronounced in subsequent popular writers of Muslim India such as
Waris Shah, Mir Taqi Mir, Sachal Sarmast, Mir Amman, Mirza Ghalib, Bahadur Shah
Zafar, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Iqbal and so on. In this string, the poetry of
Bhittai serves as the first practical demonstration of the fact that a universal
vision could manifest in regional form — or “think global and act local,” as
the environmentalists were going to declare much later.
How world class poets receive their inspiration is
still a mystery, but most Sufi poets who cared for the feedback of their
audiences (unlike the proponents of “high literature” in our times) used
certain common symbols, metaphors, patterns and designs within designs — mise
en abyme — in their work. One such pattern was the Five Divine Presences.
Another was the “seven stages” which may have been originally derived from the
seven verses of the first chapter of Quran but subsequently it became the
framework for strings of seven stories in The Seven Beauties by Nezami Ganjavi
and The Seven Thrones by Abdul Rahman Jami, and the seven valleys in The
Conference of the Birds by Sheikh Fariduddin Attar, the seven destinations in
the celestial journey of Iqbal in Javidnama, the seven lectures in The
Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam by the same thinker and some
products of subsequent mainstream Pakistani culture.
In the work of Bhittai, these stages find expression
through his famous heroines. Orientalists have observed that the succession of
Sohni, Sassi, Leelan, Moomal, Marui, Noori and Sorath represent the seven
stages of the soul. The journey begins with the breaking of the pot which
carries Sohni across the river but also brings her back after each meeting with
the beloved, and therefore it must break — and she must drown — if she has to
be united with him forever.
Subsequently, Sassi learns the unity of creation,
Leelan finds out that Truth is a jealous beloved, Princess Moomal has to be won
through dangerous tests of ingenuity and resilience, Marui must defy
oppression, Noori should remember her roots and Sorath must die on the funeral
pyre from where her lover will come back like phoenix rising from the ashes.
Indeed, quite an apt allegory, and Bhittai’s
speciality is that he doesn’t narrate complete stories but offers dramatic
monologues highlighting the lessons to be learnt at each stage.
What has been generally overlooked by the Orientalists
is that the journey can be seen to represent more than the development of an
individual. The great Sufi secret that has been lost in our age was that the
development of an individual is not different from the journey of the entire
humanity from Creation to Judgment Day, and the same process is being repeated
in the lives of societies collectively.
In the light of Iqbal’s Javidnama, parallels can be
drawn between Bhittai’s heroines and the history of ancient civilisations:
Sohni (the Age of Adam), Sassi (the Age of Noah), Leelan (the Age of Abraham),
Moomal (the Age of Moses), Marui (the Age of Zulqarnayn), Noori (the Age of
Jesus Christ) and Sorath (the Age of Islam).
The crux is that we cannot always adjust history to
our personal experiences. We also need to place ourselves in the larger context
and make readjustments in ourselves. That cannot be extremely pleasant because
we are pitted against personal insecurities at the very first step.
The mandate of poets like Bhittai is to make it
pleasant and painless, not only for a few well-read listeners but for everyone.
They help everyone come out of their shells, acquire genuine self-worth and
join hands in giving birth to new civilisations.
If Pakistan is a catalyst for a process through which
“Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in
the religious sense… but in the political sense as citizens of the State,” then
there is no reason for dislocating Bhittai from the history of his region, as
so many scholars have been doing so far.
Not only does his message seem to portray what Pakistan truly
means to the masses, but Bhittai also seems to be the point from where the
course of history turned in this direction. Thus, he stands out as the man who
“lifted a civilisation out of one groove and set it in another… Nothing could
again be as it had been.”
Source: Dawn
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