Abstract
Sufi mystic Shah Hussayn was born ca. 1539 into a Muslim weaver family. When he was about ten years old, he was initiated into the Qadiri Sufi lineage by Shaikh Bahlul Darya’i, who lived in Chiniot, a village outside Lahore. He lived as a mendicant student, wandering in the empty lands outside the city walls by day and returning to stay at the shrine of Lahore’s patron saint, Ali Hujwiri, by night. At the age of thirty-six he had a profound spiritual experience while studying the Quran, when his teacher Sa’dullah recited the verse, “the life of the world is nothing but play and pleasurable distraction.”1 Hussayn immediately resolved to throw off all constraints of piety and instead to live like a child at play, abandoning hypocrisy and ambition as well as fear of social disrepute.
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References
Translated by Aditya Behl from Abdul Majid Bhatti, ed. Kafiyan Shah Husain (Lahore: Punjabi Adabi Academy, 1961), poem no. 9. Subsequent parenthetical numbers refer to Bhatti’s verse numbers.
Lajwanti Ramakrishna, Punjabi Sufi Poets: AD 1460–1900 (New Delhi: Ashajanak Pub-lications, 1973), 32–46.
Other studies which focus on Shah Hussayn as a poet include Ramakrishna and A. Rauf Luther, Madho Lal Hussayn: Sufi Poet of the Punjab (Lahore: Shaykh Mubarak Ali, 1982)
Najm Hosain Syed, Recurrent Patterns in Punjabi Poetry (Lahore: Majlis Shah Husain, 1968).
Shuja al-Haqq, A Forgotten Vision: A Study of Human Spirituality in the Light of the Islamic Traditions, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Vikas, 1997) 2: 219–34.
Rizvi also cites the love of these two men, without analyzing the phenomenon or assessing its importance, in S. A. A. Rizvi, History of Sufism in India (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1978, reprinted 1986) vol. 2: 64–65 and 437–38.
Yogi Sikand, “Martyr for Gay Love,” Bombay Dost, 4: 4 (1998): 8–9.
See Aijaz al-Haqq Qudusi, Tazkirah-i Sufiya-i Punjab (Lahore: Salman Academy, 1962); M. Habibullah Faruqi and Mohan Singh Diwana, Halat o Kafiyan Madho Lal Hussayn (Lahore: Malik Ahmad Taj Book Depot, no date).
See FazI Ahmad Jiyuri, trans., Azkar-i Abrar: Urdu Translation of Gulzar-i Abrar (Lahore: Islamic Book Foundation, 1975), 458.
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© 2000 Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai
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Kugle, S., Behl, A. (2000). Haqiqat al-Fuqara: Poetic Biography of “Madho Lal” Hussayn (Persian). In: Vanita, R., Kidwai, S. (eds) Same-Sex Love in India. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62183-5_19
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