Bulleh, What Do I Know About Who I Am?
Before accents became a test of faith, our Islam spoke in rivers, shrines, and poetry.
Bulleh, What Do I Know About Who I Am?
بلھا کی جاناں میں کون ؟
— Bulleh Shah
Before modern borders and sectarian lines, Islam in South Asia spoke in the cadence of our fields and riverbanks; through shrine ghazals, folk hymns, and prayers whispered under mango trees. Devotees did not worry whether their “kh” rattled like a desert wind; they were too busy feeling God in the cotton-spinner’s wheel, the river’s flow, the poet’s verse.
That landscape began to shift under British rule. Administrators, convinced that true civilization lay in centralized authority and strict moral codes, began recasting our living traditions as quaint folklore. They introduced English-medium schools, codified “Anglo-Muhammadan” law, and wrote reports on “superstitious” shrine gatherings. They shifted the focus from lived devotion to text and procedure. They squeezed the space for a faith that had always thrived in public lament, shrine festivals, and poetic majalis; they categorized it as irrational and ‘uncivil’.
In reaction, many Muslim leaders sought validation in imported forms of piety. The language of our cities changed: Ramzan gave way to Ramadan, Jannat to Jannah, Dua to Du’aa and a rehearsed, guttural “kh” became the shorthand for authenticity. What began as a defensive response to being labeled “uncivilized” hardened over decades into an aesthetic litmus test, a new internal colonization of hearts and tongues.
This shift took deeper root during General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime. His project of Islamization in the 1980s injected Wahhabi literalism into the national fabric; through Sharia courts, the Hudood Ordinances, and education reforms that replaced plural heritage with singular orthodoxy. Eid Milad-un-Nabi, once celebrated with joy in villages and towns across Sindh, Punjab, and Bengal, was condemned as bid‘ah, an innovation. Thousands of madrassahs, funded by Gulf patrons, reinforced a version of Islam stripped of its local colour and complexity. Faith was now expected to march in straight lines.
Yet, beneath these pressures, the subcontinent’s own spiritual DNA persisted through its poets and mystics. Centuries before any empire laid claim to this land, Kabir had already sung:
Dharam se barkat nahin, bhagat se barkat hoti hai.
“Blessing comes not from religion, but from devotion alone.”
Kabir, the subcontinent’s earliest mystic poet, leapt across sects to remind us that true piety is felt, not performed in borrowed accents and clothing. He rejected sectarian labels, reminding Muslims and Hindus alike that God’s presence transcended temples and mosques.
Bulleh Shah’s words defy rigid binaries:
مسجد ڈھا دے، مندر ڈھا دے، ڈھا دے جو کُج ڈھیندا
پر کِسے دا دل نہ ڈھائیں، رب دِلاں وچ رہندا۔
“Tear down the mosque, tear down the temple, tear down whatever you will,
but never break a human heart, for God resides in hearts.”
Bulleh Shah kept insisting that the divine is not confined to religious architecture, rituals, or geography; where piety is policed by accents, outlooks, and rituals, his verse restores the heart as Islam’s truest sanctuary. It offers a powerful counter to externalized religiosity and affirms that Reham (mercy) was the soil in which South Asian Islam once grew.
In Bengal, Lalon Fakir’s Baul songs declared:
Ami Hindu noi Musalman;
Ami shudhu prem.
“I am neither Hindu nor Muslim;
I am pure love.”
Lalon’s declaration isn’t a renunciation of belief, but a radical refusal to let identity be dictated by sect or appearance. He reminds us that divine love dissolves categories. His Baul songs reject performative piety and mirror the soul of the subcontinent, one where ishq (spiritual love) mattered more than labels, and the sacred flowed through shared folk idioms.
In the windswept plains of Balochistan, Atta Shad captured the ache and intimacy of a faith shaped by both suffering and shelter:
درد کی دھوپ میں صحرا کی طرح ساتھ رہا
شام آئی تو لپیٹ کر ہمیں دیوار کیا
“In the heat of pain, he stayed by me like a desert;
But when evening came, he wrapped himself around me like a wall.”
His metaphors, of searing pain and eventual refuge, mirror the lived experience of South Asian Muslims who have held on to tenderness even under harsh orthodoxy. In Shad’s voice, we hear Balochistan speaking back to distant doctrines, not through rejection, but through poetry that knows how to endure. His words don’t just describe love; they embody it, in a language native to this soil.
In Sindh, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai wandered deserts singing:
نالِ دل، جارِ دل، میں عشق نہ اُنہی جیئوں، جسم بے جان
“With the heart, with the heart, with the heart
without love, the body is a soulless shell.”
Latif’s voice was shaped by Sindh’s rivers and desert winds. In this verse, he does not merely describe love, he insists on it as essential to life and faith. His ishq is neither performative nor inherited; it is a lived state. His verse echoes the core: that what once made our Islam soulful was not conformity, but intensity, not borrowed etiquette, but burning from within.
And in the courts of 18th century Hyderabad, Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, a courtesan, mystic, and the first Indian woman to publish a divan, spoke of faith as sincerity, not spectacle:
کاش لب پہ ہو دعا، دل میں ہو اخلاص کا نور
عشق میں بس یہ ہی معیارِ بندگی ٹھہرے
“May there be prayer on the lips, and the light of sincerity in the heart,
For in love, let this alone be the measure of devotion.”
Her words echo what so many spiritual poets in this land have insisted: that worship without sincerity is hollow. Her verse draws a gentle boundary between ritual and essence. In her world, what mattered was not how piety looked but how it felt; measured not in postures, but in presence. Her poetry joins the long tradition of South Asian voices that placed sincerity above spectacle, and love above performance.
And from the mountain winds of Swat and Bajaur, Pashto Sufi poets like Rahman Baba declared:
Da sabr guluna da zra pa dagha shagu rangi.
“The flowers of patience blossom in the wounds of the heart.”
Rahman Baba, the great Pashto Sufi, evokes the sabr (spiritual patience) that generations of South Asian Muslims have carried while preserving their tender, pluralist Islam in the face of hardening borders – literal and spiritual. His verse fits into this mosaic as a quiet reminder that even in erasure, something beautiful survives. His patience is not passive; it’s the endurance of a faith that refused to forget where it came from.
These poets were not outliers. All these voices tell the same story: Islam in South Asia was not a transplant, but a transformation. It merged with the grain of local life. These voices, our own, are proof that Islam here has always been a dialogue with local culture, shaped by Bhakti poetry, Jain non-violence, Buddhist mindfulness, and indigenous ethics. Shrines welcomed all castes and creeds; qawwali drummed in courtyards where the poor and the learned mingled without hierarchy. Its shrines welcomed Dalits, Adivasis, and Brahmins alike. In fact, legends of the Hussaini Brahmins, a Hindu clan that mourns Imam Hussain to this day, show just how porous our boundaries once were.
Reclaiming this heritage today is not nostalgia – it is an urgent corrective to an identity crisis born of centuries of external pressures. De-Arabization does not deny Islam’s seventh-century origins in Arabia. Rather, it insists that once Islam reached South Asia, through trade, Sufi saints and political exchange, it became ours. It was rewritten in every dialect, reimagined by every community, reborn in every festival.
To de-Arabize is to resist the notion that piety must look, sound, or feel like a distant capital. It is to honor our right to pray in Punjabi couplets, Sindhi folk choruses, Bengali melodies, and Urdu ghazals, without apology. It is to remember that the Quran’s message of mercy and justice was never meant to be confined to a single accent or a single model of worship.
If authenticity were measured only by perfect Arabic pronunciation, our own sacred songs would vanish. But they endure, in whispered lullabies of faith, in dust-strewn shrines where flowers fade but devotion remains, in the pages of centuries old manuscripts passed from hand to hand.
Our faith does not come with an accent; it comes with a voice shaped by rivers and mountains, by poets and pilgrims, by the shared memory of love and loss.
We need not mimic an empire to embody faith.
In reclaiming our own spiritual grammar, we may not fully answer Bulleh’s question, but we come closer: Bulleh, what do I know about who I am?
We are not just echoes of empire or imitation. We are the soil that sings in many tongues, the voice that has endured across centuries. And perhaps in that layered voice, some part of us begins to remember who we are.