Khudaya dasey tanha na kei souk pe gham kei,
laka ze da yaar pe gham kei yum tanha!
Na ba ma ghundei shaheed wi pe jahan kei,
ne ba ta ghundei dilbar shi bal paida!
Lord, do not make anyone lonely in sorrow
like I am alone in grief for my beloved!
Never will there be on earth a martyr like me,
Nor a beloved like you be found!
Enemies of Pakistan are at it again. After blowing up girls schools in North West Pakistan, forcing traffic to drive on right hand side instead of left in Malakand, digging up the grave of a minority sect leader and hanging the already dead person in the public square in Swat, militants have now started blowing the resting place of those who are already dead.
Is there any limit to this insanity?
Pashto’s language’s famous poet Rehman Baba‘s mausoleum was severely damaged by militants in the early hours of March 5, 2009.
Believe it or not; probably like some of our readers, I am now reluctant to open newspaper to avoid reading any bad news about Pakistan. It hurts. It simply hurts. This is such a bitter pill ‘jo na ugli jaaye hai na nigli jaaye hai’ (which I can neither swallow nor throw out). I have now become numb to bad news and I try to avoid it but then every few days a bigger and worse bad news like the one above comes by which I have to write about. This is despite the pain I feel in writing these sentences.
According to Dawn newspaper:
The shrine’s watchman had received a threat from suspected militants on his cell phone three days ago. He told police that the attack took place to crack down on the tradition of women making pilgrimages to the site of the grave of Rehman baba; a 17th century poet, revered for his message of love and peace.
The high intensity device almost destroyed the grave of the Rehman Baba and the gates of a mosque, canteen and conference hall situated in the spacious Rehman Baba Complex. Police said the bombers had tied explosives around the pillars of the tombs, to pull down the mausoleum.
The entire area was covered with thick smoke and dust soon after the blast,’ said the president of the volunteers of the shrine association of the complex, Sardar Khan, who was busy in removing rubble of the damaged portions. He told Dawn that he was the first one to reach the shrine after the blast. ‘I saw major portion of the grave was blown up and the building was badly damaged but no one was present there,’ he said and added that he informed the local police and some media persons about the incident.
The Dawn newspaper gives more information on the mausoleum complex in following words:
The tomb was a part of the spacious complex housing a conference hall, library, mosque, canteen, guest house, small shrines of some other saints, Tawoos Baba, Syed Sattar Bacha and Syed Sultan Bacha.
The work on construction of the complex was initiated on November 17, 1991 and completed in 1994 with an estimated cost of about 15 million rupees.
Rehman Baba’s full name was Abd-ur-Rehman and he lived 1632 to 1707 AD. He enjoys the same fame in Pushto as Shirazi does in Persian.
I, along with our editorial board as well as our readers sincerely hope and pray for peace in Pakistan and hope to get our lovely country back from the clutches of these ‘zaalim’ people who could do acts like the ones shown in photos here.
God bless Pakistan and here is our prayer to peace !
I want to end this post with a couplet from Rehman Baba’s poem ‘Agony of Love’.
ATP’s Earlier Post: Two Poems by Rehman Baba
Photo Credits: Riaz Anjum at Associated Press of Pakistan
References:
1. The first Pushto sher of Rehman Baba is from the website here
2. Pashto Academy: University of Peshawar: Nightingale of Peshawar
3. Poetry of Rehman Baba at Learn Pushto
They attacked another mazar again….We should go down on our knees, beg forgiveness and destroy the Daata Sahib and offcourse Quaid-e-Azam’s mazar…..
Those who are offended by the above remarks….we have a similar sort of a thing in Swat
Religion is just one of several major parts of human behaviour and, therefore, history. Was either of the World Wars caused by religion? Was either lacking in delusion or insanity? Human history requires a scholarly quest. Life, society and humanity is a complex plurality. Extremists reduce religion or ideology to a distortion. It’s easily done. Requires no rocket science. Only something compact can be wielded, as a stick, to achieve the extremists’ invariably short term and ultimately political goals. So the quote is similar to what the extremists do in as far as it reduces religion to a relatively infinitesimal distortion of its thousands of years of history. Except it is likely a result of intellectual laziness rather than rigidity. With all its ups and downs. Good and bad. It’s just human history. If religion were to become extinct today, war, extremism, intolerance, rigidity, hate… will still all continue. As long as the human race continues. And that too is looking at a distorted reduction of what humans have achieved and are capable of – both religious and non-religious. As an aside, albeit an important one, religion is also an identity, as separate from the belief system. Was Mahmood Ghaznavi a king first? Or a muslim first? Or Ferdinand and Isabella, for that matter. Or Akbar… and Aurangzeb. Or Plotemy, Avicena, Copernicus…
I honestly am scared of watching news on tv and even coming to this website..its always one bad news preceded by another..our beloved country has gone to the dogs and nobody seems to take any action to prevent it from more disaster but that is to be expected as we are cursed with the worst possible political leadership in the entire world.
As someone here said, a country where people believe the Lal Masjid weirdos were martyrs will not bat an eyelid at this atrocity… it isn’t so much the attack as the lack of any public outrage that is the problem here…
By the way, why haven’t the resident conspiracy theorists pointed their fingers across the eastern border yet? What is the world coming to?
Woh Subh, your first paragraph is guilty of exactly what it is accusing others (the generalised “you”) of. The second paragraph, I’m afraid, sounds very much like gloating. You say “it is Allah and only Allah who decides who is or is not a believer”, yet you also know who is a “munafiq qaum” and you decide who is committing “shirk”. Your last paragraph is perfectly fine, but if you replace “you” and “yoursleves” with “we” and “ourselves” it will sound even less arrogant, presumptious and self-righteous.
Whether the sarcasm in the query I made of Zechhetti was clear or not, makes no difference, as long as people know exactly what he was trying to say. He and his ilk might be a minority. But it’s a huge minority. Critical mass has been reached. Unfolding events confirm that the momentum is against ‘live and let live’ and for ‘kill or be killed’. Yet, we cannot give up. We might as well fight on. Die fighting rather than die begging.