Baba Farid Quotes

Coming of age in such an environment, the educated elite of Punjab ends up disowning, in fact, ridiculing anything Punjabi, which includes the poetry of Baba Farid, Guru Nanak, Shah Hussain, Waris Shah and Bulleh Shah. Whereas the educated elite can quote verses from Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot, they are completely unaware of their local poets.

As I had studied the poetry of Rumi, Jami, Nizami, Hafiz and Amir Khusrau, with some difficulty in the original Persian, and with some ease in various English translations, I realised that Nanak had absorbed the ethos of Islamic poetical mysticism, inherited the belief in ecstasy of union of Baba Farid, Nizam-ud-Din Aulia and Kabir. Of

Baba Farid seems to have said to his disciples, ‘Give me not a knife but a needle. I want to sew together, not cut asunder.

Like Guru Nanak after him, Baba Farid suggested that at a basic level a Muslim and a Hindu were the same, sharing the joy and pain of being human.