Heritage: their chief virtues

[Gul Agha <agha@CS.UIUC.EDU>]

        BROAD-MINDEDNESS

Broad-mindedness and tolerance are the chief virtues of a Sufi, and
the Sufis of Sind have fully lived and preached them.  The Sufi is not
a sentimentalist.  He is a person who studies the various religions
and, being radical in thought and affectionate by nature, he soon
shakes off the common prejudices that haunt men, and divide man from
man.  The great poets of Sind laid great emphasis on this; they
refused to call themselves Muslims or Hindus.

Says Latif:

        As breath pervades everywhere,
        so Sufis live in every heart.

He instructed the Sufi:

        Infidel nor Muslim be,
        Heaven and Hell are not for thee.
        Sufi is one who says:
        "Make, oh make the Beloved thine."

The Truth is one, the Beloved is one, why fight over names?  They
asked him: "O Latif, what are you a Shia Muslim or a Sunni one?"
He replied: "Between the two."  They said: "But between the two is
nothing." "Yes, yes," he replied, "that 'nothing' am I."

Sachal was very forcible in his language when condemning formal
religion:

        Love forgives all religion.
        The lover never entangles himself
                in either Islam or Hinduism.

Bedil says: "The Lover is sick of religion."

Rohal says beautifully:

"One is a Hindu, another is a Muslim, a third is the enmity between
them.  The blind cannot be free from darkness.  Who can convince them
of the truth?  But oh Rohal, when I entered the path of the Beloved,
and saw, I found the Lord the very same, the very same.  Now tell me,
he that sleeps inside the Kaaba shrine, on which side should he
stretch his legs?"

Muslims protest if a person sleeps with his feet towards the Kaaba, so
Rohal put before them this riddle.  He that lies secure in the Kaaba
of the heart, he sees no difference between Hindu and Muslim.

Dalpat the Hindu Sufi sang:

"If the Kaaba is the house of God, why not the temple too?  If the
Lord lives in the pipal tree, who lives in the babul then?

        In the Mosque and the Monastery
        Shines the one resplendent light.
        Oh! Dalpat, I know not how this disharmony
                entered into men!"

  -- Excerpted from Jethmal Parsram Gulraj, Sind and Its Sufis
        Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar 1924 (English 224pp)

[Saaiin Jethmal Parsram Gulrajani was recently named one of the 'Ten
Greatest Sindhis of the 20th Century' by the largest Sindhi mass
circulation daily newspaper in Sindh.]

haku mojuudu,

Gul Agha