Arzani Khweshki: Roshani poet and disciple of Pir Roshan

At a glance

• Arzani (ارزاني), called Mulla Arzani and Arzani Khweshki (خویشکي), was a poet of the Roshaniyya, the order of Bayazid Ansari, Pir Roshan. His Pashto poems are dated to about 1600. [3]

• Henry Raverty wrote in 1867 that Bayazid "was principally assisted in his literary labours" by Mulla Arzani, "whose pen was a very sharp one". [1]

• Raverty thought his Diwan had "entirely disappeared". A copy of 25 leaves with 49 odes is in the British Library as Or. 4496, in a nineteenth-century hand. [1, 5]

• William Sherman, who has studied it, reads Arzani's Pashto as a language of mystical and messianic religion, not of Pashtun ethnic feeling. [3]

• No scholar's account gives his birth or death. A shrine of "Shah Arzani" at Patna, with a death date of 1623, is linked to him by a 2016 post on the History of Pashtuns blog, but no scholarly account makes the link. [2, 7]

A disciple of Pir Roshan

Bayazid Ansari, whom his followers called Pir Roshan, founded the Roshaniyya in the sixteenth century and fought the Mughals from Tirah. Arzani belonged to his circle. Sherman describes him as a disciple of "the illuminated master" who wrote his poems "just around the year 1600". [3] Saeyd Aref Arefi of Kunduz University, in a 2025 journal paper, calls "Mullah Arzani son of Burhan" the most important supporter of Bayazid among the poets who left regular diwans. [4]

Raverty, the British officer who published Pashto texts in the 1850s and 1860s, is the earliest writer in English to name him. In the introduction to his Grammar he says Bayazid "was principally assisted in his literary labours by Mulla Arzani, whose pen was a very sharp one", and adds that Arzani wrote a Diwan and other poetical works. [1] He gives no dates and no place. The Roshani books were hard to find in Raverty's time: he says copies had been burnt "on which the Mullas could lay their hands" in Bayazid's lifetime and after his death, and that those who still followed the doctrine in secret feared to produce them. [1]

His names

Raverty writes Mulla Arzani. The British Library catalogue gives the author as Arzani, Khweshke, with the Pashto forms ملا ارزاني and خویشکي، ارزاني. [5] The shrine at Patna is recorded as that of Shah Arzani. [2]

The Diwan

Raverty is inconsistent about it. In his list of Pashto poets "now rarely to be met with" he names "Arzani" among them, and two pages later he says Arzani's Diwan has "entirely disappeared". [1]

The British Library holds a manuscript catalogued as Or. 4496, "Diwan-i Arzani", in Pashto, written in Arabic script on paper, 25 leaves, 34.5 by 19 cm, dated to the nineteenth century. The catalogue describes it as 49 odes in Pashto by a follower of Bayazid Ansari, and cites D. N. MacKenzie's 1965 catalogue of Pashto manuscripts in the British Isles, number 65. It gives the first line as ته الف ئي کوز ته یا فقیر راوړه بي ریا, with no translation. [5] The manuscript is therefore a later copy of poems from about 1600; no earlier copy is described in the catalogue.

Arefi lists Arzani first among the Roshani poets who "arranged diwans", and says that no Pashto poet before the Roshanis had written a regular diwan. He adds that some researchers also credit Bayazid with a collection, which "has not been fully proven". [4]

The poems

Sherman publishes two passages from the British Library manuscript in English. The first is from a ghazal that begins with the sin of Adam and the pride of Iblis and ends in a garden:

Arzani wrote this poem in Pashto

in the garden that is his heart.

An apple tree planted in the desert

will wither and fall in the wind.

The second is the close of a poem on the dervish:

If you see with the eye of your heart,

everywhere will you witness the Lord.

If you hear with the ear of your heart,

all sounds are but praise of God.

All creatures around you

are but creations of God, the One.

The lovers believe,

the ignorant deny,

and Arzani speaks Pashto,

again, again, again, from the depths of his heart.

The translations are Sherman's; he shows the page of Or. 4496 (folio 20b) that carries the lines about the apple tree. Sherman's post does not print the Pashto of these lines. [3]

Sherman's argument is about what the Pashto is for. Earlier scholars, he says, took the poetry of the Roshaniyya as the voice of an Afghan rebellion against the Mughals, "Pashto is for Pashtuns striving to create a Pashtunistan". In Arzani he finds "little indication" that the language is tied to a communal or ethnic identity. He reads it instead as a means to explore messianic ideas, a language in which a spiritual master could claim a place among the saintly, and where the Roshaniyya understood Pashto as the key to hearing "the voice of God in all of creation". [3] The poet names his language inside the poem, as the second quotation shows.

Arefi, reading the same movement as literary history, says the Roshani poets put Sufi terms into Pashto verse, wrote mostly ghazals, and gave later poets a form to build on. He reports that "Rahman, Hamid, Mirza and others" took inspiration from the ghazals of Arzani, Dawlat and Mukhlis, and that, according to Saif-ur-Rehman Masood (1998), Khushal Khan Khattak "seems to be influenced" by Arzani, an influence also seen in Rahman and Mirza. [4] For the wider story see Pashto literature and oral poetry.

The shrine at Patna

The Bengal District Gazetteer for Patna (1907) says the centre of Muslim worship in the Sultanganj quarter is the dargah "erected in Sultanganj over the remains of Shah Arzani, an Afghan by birth, who died here in 1623". It says the shrine is visited by Muslims and Hindus, with a three-day fair in the month of Zikad drawing about 5,000 people, a tank dug by the saint, and a large khankah endowed by the emperors Farrukhsiyar and Shah Alam, with an income of about Rs. 50,000. [2]

Sita Ram painted the shrine in 1814 or 1815 for the Marquess of Hastings's album, and the British Library's description of the picture repeats the gazetteer's 1623. [6] The History of Pashtuns blog (2016) treats Shah Arzani of Patna as the Roshani poet, and quotes the gazetteer. [7] The gazetteer does not make that link, and Sherman's account of the poet does not mention Patna. The match rests on the name and the Afghan origin; the scholarly accounts do not show it.

What is not known

Arzani's birth, his parentage beyond Arefi's "son of Burhan", his death and his burial are not given in Raverty, Sherman or Arefi. They place him in the circle of Bayazid, and Raverty's lost Diwan is not entirely lost. The surviving text is a nineteenth-century copy in London. For his teacher see Pir Roshan; for the order's opponents, Religion among Pashtuns.