Pir Roshan (Bayazid Ansari): founder of the Roshaniyya and author of the Khair al-Bayan

At a glance

• Bayazid Ansari (بایزید انصاري, Bāyazīd Anṣārī) called himself Pir Roshan (پیر روښان, Pīr-i Roshān, "the apostle of light"). He was born at Jalandhar in the Punjab to a family whose home was Kaniguram in Waziristan. Caroe gives 1525, Himayatullah Yaqubi 1521. [5, 7]

• He founded the Roshaniyya (روښانیان, Roshāniyān), a Sufi order that became an armed movement among the Mohmand, Khalil, Afridi, Orakzai and Bangash and fought the Mughals for about fifty years. [2, 5]

• His Khair al-Bayan is, in Mikhail Pelevin's words, "the oldest of all the works in Pashto preserved up to the present day". The text is in rhymed prose, and its opening explains the writing system he used. [6]

• His chief opponent was Akhund Darweza, who renamed him Pir Tarik, "the apostle of darkness". [3, 5]

• He died before 1581, on Caroe's reasoning, though 1585 is the date usually given. His sons and grandsons carried on the fight until about 1630. [5]

A family from Kaniguram

Olaf Caroe writes that Bayazid was born in 1525 at Jullundur, to parents whose home was Kaniguram, "in the upper Baddar Valley at an elevation of nearly 7,000 feet". His father was Abdullah, and the family went back to Kaniguram soon after the birth. [5] The Dabistan-i Mazahib, a Persian survey of religions that has a chapter on the Roshaniyya, draws on the Halnama, which it calls "a true work from Bayezid's pen". The Halnama names his father as Shaikh Abdullah and his mother as Banin, and says Abdullah disliked Banin, repudiated her and neglected the boy. [1] The same text says that whenever Bayazid went to tend his own field he guarded his neighbours' fields as well. [1]

The year of his birth is not settled. The Halnama, as the Dabistan quotes it, says he was born a year before Babur beat the Afghans, a victory its translators date to 1525 in the text and 1526 in a note. [1] Yaqubi reads the same text differently. It says Bayazid was five when Babur overthrew Ibrahim Lodi, and Yaqubi dates the birth to about 1521. [7] Pelevin prints 1524/25 as the start of his dates. [6]

Bayazid said his family descended from the Ansar, the Medinans who sheltered the Prophet. Caroe doubted it. He argues that Abdullah lived among the Urmar at Kaniguram and earlier in the Logar valley, that "Ansari" was a title which raised a man's religious standing, as "Khan" raises a Pashtun's, and that Bayazid "was most certainly an Urmar by background if not by descent". [5] The Ormur at Kaniguram are the subject of their own article, and Caroe notes that the Urmar themselves deny the identification. [5]

The break with his father

The sources agree that Bayazid quarrelled with his father and tell it four ways.

Caroe says Abdullah disliked the new doctrines, that father and son came to blows, and that Bayazid, badly wounded, lived as a hermit in a cave in a cliff above Kaniguram. [5] The narrative by Akhund Darweza, which Leyden translated in 1810, says Bayazid had taken to dealing in horses, learned irreligion from a Mulla Sulaiman at Kalinjar, and retired to a cell in the hills. Abdullah went there with a long sword, wounded him and made him promise to give up his errors. [2] Caroe names the same Mulla Sulaiman, of Jalandhar, and adds a variant in which Bayazid met him on a horse-buying trip to Samarkand. [5]

Yaqubi, working from Bayazid's own books, gives a quieter story. Bayazid travelled as a trader, met his cousin Shaikh Ismail Ansari, and began a course of retreats under him. Abdullah wanted him to seek a guide at the Multan shrine of Baha-ud-Din Zakariyya, and Bayazid refused a guide chosen for his family name. [7] The Halnama has the same exchange: Abdullah told him it was a disgrace to be the disciple of "the meanest of our relations" and sent him to Baha-ud-Din's sons, and Bayazid answered, "The character of a Shaikh is no inheritance." [1]

Whatever the cause, he left. He went first to the Mohmand of Nangarhar, then to the Khalil and Muhammadzai around Peshawar and Hashtnagar, where he made many converts. [5]

What he taught

All the accounts, friendly and hostile, say that Bayazid claimed to be a pir-i kamil, a perfect guide, without whom no one could know God. Yaqubi quotes his Sirat al-Tauhid to say that worship and good deeds count for nothing with God unless the worshipper knows Him, and that this knowledge comes through a perfect guide. [7] Yaqubi counts eight stages on the road, set out in Bayazid's writings: shariat, tariqat, haqiqat, marifat, qurbat, wasalat, wahdat and sakunat. The last he reserved for himself, and in it he took the title Miskeen, "the poor one". [7] The Dabistan lists the same ladder in its own spelling and says the last four terms "are peculiar to the style of the lord Miyan Roshen". [1] In the Halnama's image, the law is night, the way is the stars, the truth is the moon and knowledge is the sun, and "nothing is superior to the sun". [1]

His critics heard something else. Caroe lists their charges: pantheistic Sufism with the transmigration of souls added, the belief that God was fully manifest in holy men and above all in Bayazid, and a licence to kill those without the new knowledge and take their goods. [5] Raverty, in 1862, calls the founder an "impostor" and says he took the transmigration doctrine from a Mulla Sulaiman of Jalandhar who had initiated him in the tenets of the Jogis. [3] Raverty and the Encyclopaedia of Islam, in Caroe's summary, traced Bayazid's ideas to the Ismaili heresy, and Caroe himself offers the Kharijites as a likelier source. [5]

The Dabistan reports the harsher sayings too, without hostility. It says Bayazid held ritual washing unnecessary, named no fixed direction for prayer, valued a Hindu who knew himself above a Muslim who did not, and ordered his self-satisfied opponents killed. It also says he and his sons took part in highway robbery and put a fifth of the take in a common store to be shared among the deserving. [1] Leyden, who translated the chapter, calls his two sources "of the most opposite description": the Dabistan's author is "almost as favourably inclined towards" Bayazid as Akhund Darweza, the author of the Makhzan, is "rancorous and hostile". [2]

Akhund Darweza's version has Bayazid telling his followers, "I am both your God, and your prophet", and promising those who obeyed that they would be reborn as men, while the disobedient would come back as hogs and bears. [2] This is an enemy's report, written to be read to the Yusufzai, and Yaqubi, after reading Bayazid's own books, finds his views "not un-Islamic in nature and contents" though "against the established norms and traditions". [7] He also says the opponents argued that Bayazid denied the day of judgement. [7]

The books

The Khair al-Bayan (خېر البیان, Khair al-Bayān, "the best exposition") is the only one of his works to survive in full. The Dabistan says he wrote it in four languages, Arabic, Persian, Hindi and Pashto, "the same purport" in each, and counted it a divine inspiration. [1] Raverty gives the same four languages and adds that Akhund Darweza retitled it Sharr al-Bayan, "the exposition of depravity". [4] Raverty says copies were burnt wherever the mullahs found them, in Bayazid's lifetime and after his death. [4]

The Berlin State Library copy, Ms. or. fol. 4093, has 168 folios and was finished on 20 Ramazan 1061 (6 September 1651) by a scribe who calls himself a follower of Pir Roshan. The introduction is in Arabic, Persian, Pashto and a fourth language that Pelevin marks "Panjabi(?)", and the main text, he says, is in Pashto with Arabic insertions, in rhymed prose modelled on the 55th sura of the Quran. A complete copy dated 1668 is in the Salar Jung Museum at Hyderabad. Georg Morgenstierne published notes on the Berlin manuscript in 1939 to 1940, Abd ul-Qadir found it again at Tübingen in 1959, and the text was printed at Peshawar in 1967 and in facsimile at Kabul in 1975. [6] The fourth language is Hindi in the Dabistan and Raverty, and "Panjabi(?)" in Pelevin, who says it has never been identified exactly. [1, 4, 6]

Raverty names a second work, the Khurpan, "a burlesque" on the Quran's name Furqan, and says Bayazid had help in his writing from a Mulla Arzani, whose own divan, Raverty thought, had entirely disappeared. [4] The Dabistan adds the Arabic Maqsud al-Muminin, "the desire of the right believers", and Yaqubi quotes it alongside the Sirat al-Tauhid in an English translation by Mir Wali Mahsud. [1, 7] The Halnama itself, the Dabistan says, is Bayazid's account of himself. [1]

Whether he wrote Pashto poetry is argued from two enemies and a friend. Akhund Darweza says Bayazid circulated poems in the Afghan language among the Yusufzai and the neighbouring tribes, and that he answered with poems of his own. [2] Faqir Muhammad Faqir and Shahab Aziz Arman, in a 2019 article in the Pashto Academy's journal, quote the Halnama as saying that Pir Dastgir composed qasidas, ghazals, ruba'is, qit'as and masnavis in Afghan, and quote the preface to Darweza's Makhzan, which names him as a verse writer too. [8] They hold that the Ilm Risala and the Farhat al-Mujtaba are his verse, and that the three books share vocabulary and style. They note that Siddiqullah Rishtin thought the Ilm Risala might be by Arzani or Wasil, and that Abdul Hai Habibi said the attribution needed more study. They themselves call his verse weak, of value for vocabulary and history. [8] No poem of his is quoted here, because no printed text we could read gives one with confidence. For the Roshani poets who followed him, see Pashto literature and oral poetry, and for the circle's music, Pir Roshan and music.

The alphabet attributed to him

Popular summaries say Bayazid devised a script for Pashto. The sources we could read support less than that, and not all point one way.

Pelevin says the Berlin manuscript opens with an introduction "with the explanations of the graphical system used by the author", on folios 1b to 8a, followed by a blank page before the main text. [6] So the book does explain a way of writing Pashto. Pelevin does not list the letters. [6]

Raverty gave the credit elsewhere. In the third edition of his grammar (1867) he says the original Pashto alphabet had twenty-nine sounds and that "the system of orthography followed for the last three centuries or more" was "first arranged by Akhund Darwezah", Bayazid's great opponent. [4] Leyden found that Akhund Darweza's Makhzan contains "mystical explanations of the Arabic and Pashtu letters of the alphabet", and that his son Karimdad wrote a dissertation on "the peculiar letters of the Afghans". [2] The two men may both have worked on the letters; these sources do not say who fixed what, or how many letters Bayazid's script had.

From preaching to war

Caroe tells the next stretch of the story. At first large groups of the Yusufzai accepted Bayazid, but the followers of Pir Baba in Buner opposed him, and Akhund Darweza "entered the lists in defence of orthodoxy". Bayazid moved his headquarters to Tirah, where Afridi, Orakzai, Khalil, Mohmand and Bangash "flocked to his standard", and there, Caroe says, he conceived the idea of mobilising the tribes against Akbar's empire and "actually issued drafts on the treasury of Hakim", the Mughal prince holding Kabul. [5] See the Afridi and the Orakzai.

He was arrested by Hakim's uncle Faridun and tried for heresy at Kabul, and was released, "nominally for a consideration, really because the Kabul government feared his tribal supporters". [5] Leyden's source says some learned men interceded for him with the commander Mohsin Khan, and Akhund Darweza complains that they forgot the rule that a punished unbeliever's repentance counts for nothing. [2] Caroe adds that he won "many skirmishes". [5]

The accounts that follow come from his enemies. In Leyden's version of Akhund Darweza, Bayazid announced a march on Hindustan, shared out its provinces among his followers, ordered everyone with a horse to hand it over for double price after the conquest, and had three hundred Tirah Afghans killed after calling them forward with their hands bound. [2] The Dabistan chapter does not mention these charges.

Both Caroe and Leyden end the campaign in Nangarhar. Bayazid came down to the plain, sacked and burnt a town that Leyden calls Baroe (Caroe has "a place called Baro"), and the Mughal commander Muhsin Khan Ghazi caught him on the retreat. Caroe says he was "defeated with great slaughter". Leyden says his men, who had been told that Muhsin Khan would fall dead from his horse on seeing Bayazid, broke at the first charge. [2, 5]

Akhund Darweza and the name Pir Tarik

Akhund Darweza, a Tajik and a disciple of the saint Pir Baba, is the other half of the story. Pelevin dates him 1533 to 1638 and counts 61 known manuscripts of his Makhzan ul-islam, written with his son Abd ul-Karim. [5, 6] Caroe calls him "the first extant writer in Pakhtu" and the Makhzan "a doctrinal diatribe", and doubts whether its argument would have prevailed against the heretics "unless the arguments used had been supported for political reasons by the arms of that arch-heretic, the Emperor Akbar himself". [5] The Pir Baba party and the Roshanis are treated further in Religion among Pashtuns.

Raverty says Akhund Darweza turned Pir Roshan into Pir Tarik, "Saint of Darkness", and that the nickname is how Bayazid "is best known in Afghanistan up to the present day". [4] Leyden's translation has Darweza boasting that he gave the "more appropriate name" and that it "will constantly retain, to the end of time". [2] The same text records his admission that his own sermons did little good: "as the power of religion, and religious ordinance is feeble without the authority of the prince", his efforts "were of no avail". [2]

Death and burial

The accounts of how Bayazid died disagree. Akhund Darweza, in Leyden's translation, says he escaped on foot after the rout at Baro, reached Hashtnagar, fell ill with a fever from the heat and thirst, and died that evening at Sherpao in the west of Hashtnagar. He says the tomb that appears to be Bayazid's is in Hashtnagar, "but in reality, it is in hell", and that his followers claim the tomb is at Kaniguram, where they pray at it morning and evening. [2]

Caroe gives a date by another route. Bayazid's sons carried his coffin with them, and when the Yusufzai beat them in 1581 the coffin was broken open, the bones burnt and the ashes thrown into the Indus. So Bayazid "must have died before 1585, and indeed before Akbar's expedition to Kabul". [5] Akhund Darweza agrees that the bones were carried: after a year, he says, Shaikh Umar raised them from the grave and bore them before the army in an ark. [2] Pelevin's 1572/73 is given without a reason. [6]

His sons and grandsons

The next generation gets its own articles. In brief, Akhund Darweza names five sons: Shaikh Umar, Nur-ud-Din, Khair-ud-Din, Kamal-ud-Din and Jalal-ud-Din. [2] Four were beaten by the Indus Yusufzai at Bara near Topi, and three of them were put to death. Jalala, a boy of fourteen, was taken to Akbar, who pardoned him at Attock in 1581. [5] He escaped to Tirah, led the Roshanis against the Mughals for about eighteen years, and was killed in 1599 after taking Ghazni, by a stray shot in Caroe and by a Hazara's hand in the Dabistan. [1, 5] His nephew Ihdad took over and was killed in the 1620s. The Dabistan has him shot at a fort named Navagher, Caroe in the Lowaghar hills of Kohat. [1, 5] Ihdad's wife Bibi Alai, Jalala's daughter, and her son Abd al-Qadir led the last great rising, the siege of Peshawar in 1630. [5] The Mughal side is in Pashtuns and the Mughal frontier.

The poet Mirza Khan Ansari belonged to the family, and Raverty found his Pashto "very ancient". [3]

How he is remembered

Orthodox Pashtuns have kept the name Tariki for his followers. Caroe wrote in 1958 that "the orthodox still refer to his followers as Tarikis", and Yaqubi, in 2017, says the word is still in use and that Bayazid "is still regarded a heretic by most of the conservative mullahs". [5, 7] Khushal Khan Khattak used the name as a figure of speech. In a poem Raverty translated, he says his own flesh "teacheth" him "impiety and infidelity, like unto Pir-Ros'han". [3]

The land keeps his family's memory. Caroe notes that the Tirah tribes' hold on their freedom "is a tradition, still living, which the sect had done much to inspire", that boats wrecked on two black rocks in the Indus near Attock are called Jalaliya and Kamaliya, and that the highest hill of the Khattak range near Cherat is called Jalala Sar. [5] He concludes, "Whatever their doctrines, history shows that the free Pathan spirit owes a debt to these men." [5]

Scholars still disagree about what he was. Yaqubi calls him "the Ibn Arabi of the subcontinent", a Sufi of the unity-of-being school, and argues that making him a Pashtun nationalist is "simply anachronism". [7] Faqir and Arman call him the first writer of a Pashto book. [8] In the 1810 Leyden article, a Peshawar informant says that the pious cast stones at the ruin where Bayazid once lived, and that his reputed followers met there secretly by night. [2] Caroe quotes Raverty's claim that the Bangash still followed Pir Roshan's doctrines "either openly or in secret", and thinks the Roshaniyya had something to do with the beginnings of Shia sectarianism on the borders of Tirah, though he never heard the identification made in public. [5]