Pir Baba of Buner (Sayyid Ali Tirmizi), 1502–1583

At a glance

• Sayyid Ali Tirmizi (سید علی ترمذی), known as Pir Baba (پیر بابا), was a Sufi teacher of Buner who lived among the Yusufzai in the sixteenth century. [1, 7]

• Dates: born 1502 (908 AH), died 1583 (991 AH), at eighty-one. [1, 7]

• His father came from Tirmiz on the Oxus and served the Mughals; the family were Sayyids. [1, 7, 8]

• He taught Akhund Darweza and led the orthodox side against Pir Roshan. [3, 7, 8]

• His tomb at Pacha in Buner is a major shrine of the Yusufzai country. [6, 8, 9]

• Militants locked the shrine in April 2009. [10, 11]

Names and sources

Caroe writes that he is "still known to countless pilgrims as Pir Baba", and gives his name as Sayyid Ali of Tarmez. [8] Leyden's 1810 translation of Akhund Darweza spells it Said Ali Tirmizi. [3] Khan and Yaqubi write Syed 'Ali Tirmidhi. [7] The Urdu and Persian books write Sayyid Ali Tirmizi. [1, 2]

He left no book that has survived. His follower Muhammad Shafi Sabir Naqshbandi, in a biography in Urdu, says that a man of his learning probably wrote, but that nothing of his has reached the present, and that Sayyid Abdul Jabbar Shah, a descendant, searched for it without result. [1] What is known comes from three kinds of source. The first is Akhund Darweza's writings, quoted by Leyden, by Khan and Yaqubi and by Sabir. The second is the colonial record, which treats him mainly as a shrine and a family. The third is the traditions of his own followers. The article keeps them apart.

A family from Tirmiz

Khan and Yaqubi say Pir Baba was born in 1502 at Qunduz, in what is now Afghanistan, and take the date from the introduction to the Pashto Academy's edition of the Makhzan. [7] Sabir gives the same year, 908 AH, and the death year 991 AH, 1583. [1] Sabir says his father, Sayyid Qanbar Ali, lies buried at a place called Khwaja Ghaltan, near Qunduz and Chardara. [1]

All the accounts make the family servants of the Mughal court. Khan and Yaqubi say Qambar Ali was a relative of Babur and Humayun and a high-ranking commander. [7] Caroe says Qanbar Ali of Tarmez on the Oxus came into India with his wife and son in the service of Babur and Humayun. [8] Sabir quotes Pir Baba as saying his father was counted among the kings' close men, and adds that, according to Sayyid Abdul Jabbar Shah, Pir Baba was a nephew of Babur. The court gave his father the title Amir Nazar Bahadur. [1] The Persian writer Muhammad Amin Khogyani, whose 1940 appendix quotes the same words from Akhund Darweza, gives the father the same title. [2]

Sabir says the boy had no interest in worldly things and was called a madman by the family for it, and that he learned the Quran and the commentaries from his grandfather, Sayyid Ahmad Nur, who also gave him the Kubrawiya Sufi line. [1] Khogyani's appendix says the same of the grandfather. [2]

From Panipat to Ajmer

Sabir tells it in Pir Baba's own voice. His father took him with the royal army, and at Panipat he saw Babur beat Ibrahim Lodi in 1526. Watching a throne pass from one hand to another, he took the world to be transient. [1] Khan and Yaqubi tell it the same way: the victory changed his thinking and he resolved to travel in search of the true meaning of Islam. [7] Sabir adds that at Panipat he visited the tomb of the Qalandar saint Sharaf al-Din Bu Ali, and that a spiritual state came on him there. [1]

Khan and Yaqubi and Sabir both bring him to Ajmer, where Shaikh Salar Rumi was his guide. [1, 7] Sabir names the shaykh Salar Ata Allah Rumi. [1] Khan and Yaqubi say that Salar Rumi, once he had finished teaching him, told him to guide people in some mountain country. [7] Sabir has the shaykh say the same: that he should go where the preaching of Islam was needed. [1]

His father came back through Punjab in 1540, after Sher Shah beat Humayun. Caroe says he stayed behind at Gujrat in the Punjab, and Khan and Yaqubi say he refused his father's offer to go with him. [7, 8] Sabir also describes the parting. [1] Khan and Yaqubi say he taught for a time at Pind Dado (Pind Dadan Khan), which they place in Gujrat, and that he then went back to Ajmer to find Salar Rumi dead. [7] Sabir says the shaykh had died by the time Pir Baba reached Ajmer, and that he stayed there for a while with the shaykh's son. [1]

The move to the Yusufzai

The accounts agree on the route from here. Pir Baba came to the Doaba near Peshawar, now Shabqadar and Charsadda. [7, 8] Caroe says two Gigiani mullas brought him to combat the spread of heresy. [8] Khan and Yaqubi name two disciples, Saifullah and Malik Gadai, and say he stayed a year. [7] Sabir names Haji Saif Allah Gigiani and Malik Gadai and agrees on the year. [1] Khan and Yaqubi say his followers kept him from going home to Tirmiz, because two false pirs, Tayyab and Pir Wali, were misleading people in Buner with music and mixed gatherings. [7]

Pir Baba married into the country. Khan and Yaqubi say he married the sister of Malik Dawlat Khan, and that sons and daughters followed. [7] Caroe says a malik named Daulat gave him his sister Mariam to keep him there. [8] Sabir says Pir Baba at first refused, and that the insistence of thousands of local people overcame him. [1] After a few years he went to see his mother. Caroe and Khan and Yaqubi both say his father was dead by then and his mother alive. [7, 8] Caroe adds a detail: she told him that with a wife and children he must go back. [8]

Caroe says he then sought a quieter place than the busy Doaba, and found it at Pacha, deep in Buner. [8] Sabir says he moved from Sudum to Pacha Kalay. [1] He lived there until his death.

What he taught

Caroe calls him "strictly orthodox in the straight Hanafi Sunni way". [8] Leyden's translation of Darweza says he was Darweza's teacher, lived at Bunher, and was the "preserver of true religion among the Afghans". [3] Sabir's chapter on his thought has him a scholar who acted on what he knew, who held that the path and the law are two names for one reality, and that wonders and visions are no proof of perfection. [1]

Khan and Yaqubi say he had opposed Tayyab and Pir Wali before he met Bayazid, and read that as a sign that he opposed anyone who went against the law. [7]

The quarrel with Pir Roshan

The Roshaniyya movement of Bayazid Ansari is told in the article on Pir Roshan. Caroe puts Pir Baba and Bayazid side by side as the two religious leaders of the frontier in the time of Mirza Hakim of Kabul, the one orthodox and the other "violently heretical". [8] The orthodox party's story comes from Akhund Darweza.

Khan and Yaqubi say Bayazid sent Pir Baba a pamphlet, and Pir Baba rejected it. Darweza, quoted by them, has him say that the Afghan lands had no Muslim king, and that "the exposition of Islam is the task of the Ulama whereas its implementation is the task of the Muslim kings". [7] They say he and Darweza went to Hashtnagar to debate Bayazid, and that Darweza wrote they silenced him. [7] Leyden's translation has Darweza say: "In several conferences, sometimes accompanied by my revered Pir, and sometimes alone", he covered Bayazid with confusion. [3] In Leyden's text Pir Baba, hearing a tradition about those who see a heretic and keep silent, decided to oppose the heresy, and took Darweza as his favourite scholar. [3]

Caroe adds the political result. The Yusufzai had at first followed Bayazid in numbers, but turned against him, "swayed to some extent by the orthodoxies of the Buner Sayyids, the followers of Pir Baba" and on a deeper reading by their dislike of any authority that asked for tithes. [8] Caroe says the Khalil and Mohmand then asked Akbar for help against the Yusufzai, a tribe that "had now, under Pir Baba's influence, forsaken the Tariki cause". [8]

The charge of acting for the Mughals

Some writers who side with Bayazid say Pir Baba and Darweza were agents of the Mughals. Khan and Yaqubi summarise them. Allah Bakhsh Yusufi, they say, argues that Pir Baba's mother belonged to the Mughal royal family and his father to the imperial army, so he had a soft corner for the Mughals, and that the Mughals planted him against the Roshaniyya, whom they could not otherwise remove. They say Abdul Akbar Khan Akbar holds that both men wished Emperor Akbar well. [7] The authors cite Yusufi's Yusufzai Pathan and Akbar's Pashto book; the article has not read either.

Khan and Yaqubi reply that Pir Baba left the world after the battle of Panipat and refused to go with his father to Delhi and Agra, that he took no reward from the Mughals and kept no contact with them, that he had opposed the two other pirs before Bayazid, and that the Yusufzai, who were hostile to the Mughals, would not have tolerated a Mughal agent. [7] They add that Bayazid himself first sent a disciple to Akbar and received gifts, so that Bayazid, not Pir Baba, had the Mughal contact. [7] Their conclusion is that the opposition was "for purely religious reasons". [7] They also write as defenders, and the article treats their view as theirs.

Caroe does not repeat the charge but is not convinced the orthodox case would have won alone. He doubts it "unless the arguments used had been supported for political reasons by the arms of that arch-heretic, the Emperor Akbar himself". [8] He also writes that the anger shown to a sectary inside a faith is greater than the tolerance shown to other faiths. [8]

Sabir, the follower and a Pakistani author, takes a middle course. He says that the war between Pir Baba and the followers of Bayazid was not for any worldly purpose, though later some political colour was added, and that nobody apart from the prophets is held infallible. He suggests that the mistakes of both men be read as an error of ijtihad, and that either man's words be taken only where they agree with the Quran and the sunna. [1]

None of these sources cites a document that links either saint to a Mughal order or reward. The Mughal service of his father is not in dispute, and Sabir and Khan and Yaqubi both give it.

Death and shrine

Sabir says he died in 991 AH, 1583, and is buried at Pacha Kalay beside a mountain stream, with a mosque and a madrasa nearby. [1] Khan and Yaqubi say he died at eighty-one in the Yusufzai country. [7] Sabir says that soon after his death Akbar sent an army against the Yusufzai. [1]

Caroe, writing in 1958, describes a carved wooden building beside a clear stream under the range between Buner and Swat, containing the tombs of the pir and of a close disciple, with some dispute over which was which. The village beside it, he says, is one of the few places in West Pakistan where Hindus and Sikhs could still trade, which he calls "a tribute to the tolerance shown where there exists a real feeling of holiness". Cripples, blind people and lepers sat on the path. In the Mardan courts thirty years earlier, the commonest opening to a witness's evidence had been "When I was on my way to (or from) a pilgrimage to Pir Baba Ziarat". Caroe calls it "the most hallowed shrine in all the Frontier country". [8]

The colonial record says the same in other words. Bellew, who wrote in 1864, names it among the shrines Yusufzai pilgrims visit. He says it has no fair, "owing to the unsettled state of the country", and calls it "a sober place of pilgrimage". [4] The Peshawar gazetteer of 1897 repeats Bellew's passage nearly word for word. [5] The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 says the shrines of the Akhund of Swat and of Pir Baba attract pilgrims from all parts of the Muhammadan world. [6] The Peshawar gazetteer adds that after the expedition of 1897 the shrine, "which may be a survival of an old Hindu or Buddhist place of pilgrimage", was of greater importance locally than the Akhund's grave at Saidu. [5] That is a colonial guess, and the gazetteer offers no evidence for it.

Fredrik Barth, who worked in Swat in 1954, calls Pir Baba's shrine at Pacha and the shrine of the Akhund of Swat at Saidu the two major shrines of the whole area. He says both are graves of men of great prominence in their time, "though the position and actions of Pir Baba (Sayyid Ali Tirmizi) are known and remembered by few of the pilgrims". [9]

The descendants

His family has taken part in frontier politics for centuries. Caroe calls it "universally recognized as a line of true Sayyids", which Darweza was not. [8] A descendant, Sayyid Zaman Shah, was recognised by the later Mughals as an influential man in Swat and Buner, and his grandson Sayyid Akbar Shah led the Yusufzai resistance to the Sikhs and gave a home at Sitana to the Mujahidin colony. [8] Akbar Shah was accepted as "Badshah" of Swat until his death in 1857, and the Akhund of Swat himself proposed him for it, in part because he was a Sayyid, which the Akhund was not. [8] Caroe says that the new shrine at Saidu "was beginning to gain in popularity at the expense of Pir Baba Ziarat". [8] Barth notes that around 1900 a small group of "Saints" tracing descent from Pir Baba seized the villages of Parona in the Jambil valley. [9] On the Akhund, see the Akhund of Swat.

Khogyani, writing in Kabul in 1940, counts the reformer Jamal al-Din Afghani among his descendants. [2] The article has not seen a second source for that.

The shrine in 2009

In April 2009, militants from Swat took control of Buner. Dawn reported on 10 April 2009 that they moved into new areas, including the shrine of Pir Baba. They burned TV sets, pictures and tapes, and locked the shrine, stopping its followers from visiting. A local police officer said his seniors had told him not to interfere. [10] The Friday Times wrote in 2015 that the militants made the caretakers leave and that the Rah-e-Rast operation cleared the area. [11] Syed Farooq Shah, a descendant, told the paper that the annual urs in Rajab had been suspended for security reasons and that visitors came only by day. [11] The caretaker Gul Malang, who had served since 1948, said he did not leave even when the army fought the Taliban, and that the militants had curbed religious activity. [11] The two accounts of the caretakers differ. In 2015 activities at the shrine were not yet fully restored. [11]