Mian Muhammad Bakhsh
The Sufi poet of Mirpur whose Saif ul Malook is recited across the Pothohar and Kashmir.
Mian Muhammad Bakhsh was born at Khari Sharif near Mirpur, in the hill country where Punjab meets Kashmir, into a family of custodians of a Sufi shrine. He studied in the madrasas of the region and spent his life as a dervish, writing in the Pothohari dialect of Punjabi.
His great work, Safar ul Ishq, better known as Saif ul Malook, finished in 1863, retells a Persian romance of a prince who falls in love with the picture of a fairy princess and travels through the world to find her. Under the adventure it is a long meditation on the soul's journey, and its couplets have become proverbs. Singers in the Pothohar and in Azad Kashmir still recite it in a distinctive slow style, and it is sung in mosques, at shrines, at weddings and in Mirpuri homes in Bradford and Birmingham.
He is buried at Khari Sharif, where his urs draws great crowds. Along with Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah he is one of the three poets whose lines a Punjabi Muslim is most likely to know by heart, and his verses on friendship, death and the vanity of pride are quoted far beyond the Sufi world.
In their words
Famous linesਦੁਸ਼ਮਣ ਮਰੇ ਤੇ ਖ਼ੁਸ਼ੀ ਨਾ ਕਰੀਏ, ਸੱਜਣਾਂ ਵੀ ਮਰ ਜਾਣਾ। ਡੀਗਰ ਤੇ ਦਿਨ ਗਿਆ ਮੁਹੰਮਦ, ਓੜਕ ਨੂੰ ਡੁੱਬ ਜਾਣਾ।
دشمن مرے تے خشی نا کریئے، سجݨاں وی مر جاݨا۔ ڈیگر تے دن گیا محمد، اوڑک نوں ڈب جاݨا۔
Do not rejoice when your enemy dies: your friends must die too. The day has passed into afternoon, Muhammad; in the end the sun must set.
Saif ul Malook (1863)
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