Abdul Hamid Baba

Abdul Hameed masho gagar (Pashto: عبدالحميد ماشوخېل‎ - also known as Abdul Hamid Baba), was an Afghan[1] poet and Sufi figure.[2]

Abdul Hameed Masho khel
Diedcirca 1732
Other namesMoshogaf(wekhte seronky)
Known forPashto Poetry

Biography

Abdul Hameed baba Masho Khel was born in the second half of the 17th century (1664-1724 onward) at Masho Khel, a small village near Badaber Peshawar, a Pashtun tribe. Hameed travelled to Peshawar, where he undertook his education, and became a priest. At this point, Hameed was a man of considerable stature among intellectuals, and students from a number of surrounding districts came to receive instruction from him.[3]

Hameed's poetry was written primarily in the Pashto language. His poems generally had a moral to them, and were often tinged with tones of contempt for the world and its lack of virtue. The morals of his poems were based on Sufism, as a large proportion of other Muslim poetry was.[3]

Hameed's exact death date is not known, but it is thought by those in his home village that he died around the year 1732. He died in the same house that he had lived in for most of his life.[3]

Reception

Hameed's poetry was popular even in Persia, where he was dubbed "Hameed the Hair-splitter".[3]

The 19th century British officer and linguist Henry George Raverty calls Hameed Afghanistan's cynical poet and compares him to Saadi (c. 1210) in Persia,[4] "the Saadi of the Pascho language"[2]

Hameed's major works, Love's Fascination, The King and the Beggar and Pearls and Corals have all been translated into English.[3]

References
  1. Raverty, Henry George (1862). Selection from the Poetry of the Afghans. p. 85. Abd-ul Hamid, the author of the following poems, was born at Mashy Khel, a small village belonging to the Kudrizi clan, or branch, of the Afghan tribe of Mohmand, one of the purely Afghän tribes at present dwelling in the Peshawar district. line feed character in |quote= at position 59 (help)
  2. Riaz Ahmad. "18th century Sufi poet's grave in ruins". The Express Tribune.
  3. "Abdul Hameed Baba". Dawatan.com. December 29, 2006. Retrieved January 27, 2011.
  4. Henry George Raverty: ÆBD-UL-ḤAMĪD (p. 85–86), in: Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans, from the 16th to the 19th Century: Literally translated from the original Pushto; with notices of the different authors, and remarks on the mystic doctrine and poetry of the Sūfīs (scan of full text), edited by Henry George Raverty, Williams & Norgate, London 1862. p. 85

Further reading
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