Sarmad-e-geeti Mansur jo hamnishan | سرمد گيتي منصور جو همنشان

The Sarmad1 of the age, the inheritor of Mansur2

The enunciation of his name made the great idol-gods Manat and Uzza tremble3

Demonic armies laden with treasures battled him

He said, my God is enough for me

He shattered the fake customs of the age

He said, the human is human

It is no divinity

The head may bow before God if it may

No human is worthy of worship

In his time there were white-turbaned

Votaries of the rosary, votaries of piety too

To mess with idolatry

None had the courage

There were grandees and warriors

Only one frail unruly friend of God

Whose turban was tattered, full of holes

His clothes torn, his shoes cobbled with patches

His soul riven with arrows of insult

His call shook the houses of idolatry

The threshold of opium houses trembled too

The turbans of some spiritual heirs4 were knocked off

The hearts of faqirs and pirs started to race

O heirs to these thrones enough is enough

Vacate these shrines, these sanctuaries

Angels bow before the human, he declared

Do not fill his brain with ganja nor opium

Larh,5 your ravaged body was raped again and again

Yesterday Thatta was burned, today Karachi is gone

From the banks of Tamachi the fisherfolk were thrown out6

Today the biers of Aami and Phapi are carried7

O age, our entire tribe is killed

We bear no one a grudge for this murder most foul

We are indifferent to your vulgar ways

But there is no heat in the blood of the lover

If you want to read our epics

Read them on the walls of the execution chamber

There is no other tale of martyrs

There was a Bilawal, crushed in the oil-press8

There is a Syed, who has no limits9

Translated by Nauman Naqvi

[1] Sarmad Shaheed was a 17th century poet-saint executed for heresy by the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb. Mansur al-Hallaj was a 9th/10th century mystic, poet and philosopher who was executed by the Abbasid caliph of the time on charges of heresy.

[2] Giti Mansur

[3] Manat and Uzza, pre-Islamic idol Gods.

[4] Sajjada nasheen: hereditary heir to the seat of a saint.

[5] Larh: lower Sindh.

[6] Tamachi was a famous king of Sindh who fell in love with a fisherwoman named Noori. Their love has been memorialized in the folk literature of Sindh, most notably in the Shah Jo Risalo of the poet-saint Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai.

[7] Aami and Phapi: The nicknames of two girls, Amna and Fatima, who were raped and murdered in the ’80s near Thatta by Gulf shaikhs on one of their regular hunting trips to Sindh.

[8] Makhdoom Bilawal was a 15th century poet-saint of Sindh.

[9] G. M. Syed (1904-1995) was a thinker and the founder of Sindhi nationalism.