Hamid Baba (Abdul Hamid Mohmand): the Pashto poet of Mashokhel

At a glance

• Abdul Hamid (عبدالحمید) Mohmand, known as Hamid Baba, was a Pashto poet and Sufi-minded teacher from Mashokhel, a village of the Mohmand tribe in the Peshawar district. [2]

• Raverty gave him three works: a collection of odes, Dur-o Marjan ("Pearls and Corals"), a poem, Nairang-i Ishq ("Love's Fascination"), and Shah o Gada ("The King and the Beggar"). [2]

• No document gives his birth or death. Raverty's two books disagree: in 1862 he put the death about 1732, and in 1860 he placed Hamid in the reign of Timur Shah (1772–1793). [1, 2]

• Persians called him "Hamid the Hair-splitter". Raverty called him the cynical poet of the Afghans and the Shaykh Sa'di of Pashto. [2]

• The odes quoted below are in Raverty's 1862 English translation, with the Pashto from his Gulshan-i Roh (1860). [1, 2]

A teacher from Mashokhel

Henry George Raverty, a British officer who printed Pashto texts in the 1860s, wrote the earliest English account of Hamid in print. He says Abd-ul-Hamid was born at Mashokhel, a small village of the Kudrizi clan of the Mohmand tribe, which then lived in the Peshawar district. Rahman Baba was also a Mohmand, "but of a different clan". [2] Raverty could not find the year of his birth. He wrote that it was "certainly about the middle of the last half of the seventeenth century", which is about 1675. [2]

Hamid "was brought up to the priesthood", in Raverty's words, and is said to have learned a good deal at Peshawar. Students from the surrounding districts sought his teaching. [2] Raverty names no teacher, Sufi order or pilgrimage. The label "Sufi" rests on his verse: Raverty found it "generally of a moral tendency, and breathing contempt of the world and its vanities", and still "tinged with Sufi doctrines". [2] A recent essay in Dawn repeats the comparison with Sa'di: Hamid's poems, like the Gulistan and Bustan, are full of advice. [4]

The village was still his in the 1860s. Raverty says his grave was pointed out there, some of his descendants still lived at Mashokhel, and the house where he was born, lived and died was in ruins. [2]

Dates that do not agree

Raverty gives three pieces of evidence, and they do not sit together. In 1862 he wrote that the people of Mashokhel put Hamid's death about AD 1732. His descendants said four generations had passed since, which at thirty years a generation comes to within five years of that date. [2]

Then come two witnesses. A man of the village, who had died about twenty years before Raverty wrote and was in his 107th year, used to say he had often seen Mulla Hamid as a young man, when the poet was "upwards of fifty years old". A second elder, Malik Aziz Khan, about a hundred years old, said his father and grandfather remembered Hamid, and that the poet was just coming into notice near the end of Rahman's life. [2] Taken at their word, the first witness was born about 1735 and saw Hamid in the 1750s or later, which does not fit a death in 1732. Raverty does not remark on the clash.

Two years earlier Raverty had written something different. In the preface to Gulshan-i Roh (1860) he calls Abd-ul-Hamid the last poet of any note in the book, who "lived in the latter half of the past century, during the reign of Timur Shah", son of Ahmad Shah. [1] That is 1772 to 1793. Raverty did not say why he changed his mind between the two books.

A third fixed point is a poem. Hamid wrote on a killing in his own tribe in 1711, as Rahman did (see below), so he was writing by then. [2, 3] Nothing printed says how old he was then. The Dawn essay gives "1732" as the year of his death without a source. [4]

What he wrote

All three titles come from one paragraph in Raverty. [2]

Dur-o Marjan is the collection of odes (ghazals), and it is the work Raverty translated from. Raverty's Selections prints sixty of the odes, numbered I to LX, and the ones quoted below end with Hamid's name in the last couplet. [2] Nairang-i Ishq is a poem and Shah o Gada is a tale of a king and a beggar. Raverty says no more about either. The Dawn essay names none of the three and says Hamid drew on the Pashto romances, among them Adam Khan and Durkhanay, and Musa Khan and Gul Makai, and brought "colour and passion" to Pashto poetry. [4] Whether that describes the masnavis or only the odes is not stated.

Raverty says that many odes of Rahman and Hamid "are commonly sung all over Afghanistan, as popular songs are sung in Europe", although most singers, unless educated, understood little of the meaning beneath. [2] An Express Tribune report of 2013 opens a documentary on Hamid with a poem of his sung by the Afghan singer Nashenas. [5] For how odes and songs sit together in Pashto, see Pashto literature and oral poetry.

In his own words

Raverty printed the English in Selections (1862) and the Pashto in Gulshan-i Roh (1860). The couplets below are in both books. The Pashto follows his printing, and the transliteration gives Peshawari kh for the letter ښ. Each Pashto line holds the two halves of a couplet, first half on the right.

In one ode every couplet ends in the refrain na yam hargiz, "never am I". It opens on grief and love.

که له غم په امان نه یم هرګز، زه د عشق په کار پښیمان نه یم هرګز

Ka la gham pa amān na yam hargiz, za da ishq pa kār pakhaimān na yam hargiz.

Although free from grief and sorrow am I never; still, that I meddled in love's affairs, regret I never. [1, 2]

The second couplet:

که مې مال تالاکاوه کردن واهه شي، له مهرویو رو ګردان نه یم هرګز

Ka me māl tālākāwa kardan wāha shi, la mahrūyo rūgardān na yam hargiz.

Though my goods be plundered, and my neck stricken, the one to turn from the moon-faced am I never. [1, 2]

The last couplet of the ode carries his pen-name, as the odes in Raverty's selection do:

څه به یار په ما حمید د بوسې داد کا، چه لایق د دې احسان نه یم هرګز

Tsa ba yār pa mā Hamid da bose dād kā, che lāyiq da de ihsān na yam hargiz.

Why should my dear one on Hamid a kiss bestow, when of such beneficence as this, worthy am I never. [1, 2]

Another ode turns the same mood into advice. Its refrain is ma she, "do not become":

د دنیا د مال په تللو زهیر مه شې، مات آغزی دې له پښو خیژي دلګیر مه شې

Da dunyā da māl pa tallo zahir ma she, māt aghzay de la pkho khizhi dilgir ma she.

Be not grieved at the departure of this world's wealth! Be not sorrowful if out of thy foot cometh a broken thorn! [1, 2]

A third ode, about separation from the beloved, has the couplet on alchemy and ends with the poet's attack on hypocrisy:

نور عالم که په کیمیا زر کوي خاوري، ما زر خاوري کړه د مینې په کیمیا کښې

Nor ālam ka pa kīmiyā zar kawi khāwre, mā zar khāwre kra da mene pa kīmiyā ke.

If other folks, by alchemy, transmute dust into gold, I, by the alchemy of love, have turned gold into dust. [1, 2]

بت پرست وائي حمید و هغه کس ته، چه بندګي کوي د خدای په روي ریا کښې

But-parast wāyi Hamid o hagha kas ta, che bandagi kawi da Khudāy pa roy riyā ke.

Hamid styleth that person a mere worshipper of idols, who, with manifest hypocrisy, performeth his duty unto God. [1, 2]

The hair-splitter's manner

Raverty's note on the nickname is short: the Persians, "amongst a nation so rich in poets", acknowledged the beauty of his poems and called him "Hamid the Hair-splitter". [2] The Dawn essay gives the Persian as Shaʿir-i Mushgaf, a poet of fine hairs, and links it to his "push for subtlety". [4] Neither says which Persian writers used the name.

The English shows what is meant. In one ode he asks, "Are these the arched eyebrows of the beloved, or a reaping-hook?" In another the world is "a seller of barley, though an exposer of wheat". In a third, love is "both profit, as well as traffic", and so the candle yields its head with a smile. [2] These are conceits worked out couplet by couplet.

Raverty set him against Rahman. He found in Rahman "a fiery energy in his style, and a natural simplicity". [2] In Hamid he found the cynic. The Dawn essay, though, calls Hamid's style "very simple, easy-to-follow" in the same breath as his subtlety, and it says Rahman's popularity rests partly on his simplicity. [4]

Hamid and the burning of Jamal Khan

Hamid's best-dated poem is not an ode of love. In 1711 (Raverty gives 1122 AH in his note and 1123 AH in his text) a quarrel inside the Mohmand tribe ended in the burning of a village. Raverty's note says Jamal Khan of the Khudrizi clan had been raised to the chieftainship by Nasir Khan, the governor (subahdar) of Kabul. He plundered and destroyed the village of a fellow Mohmand. While Jamal Khan's son Jalal was being married, the injured man attacked at night with his friends, set the house on fire, and burned Jamal Khan, his son, his family and the wedding guests, "upwards of eighty men, women, and children". Rahman, Raverty adds, said that Gul Khan alone had stood by Jamal Khan and died with him. [2]

Rahman and Hamid each wrote a long poem on it. Raverty says the attacker was of Hamid's own tribe, and that Hamid's poem "seems to have been written in reply to one by Rahman, who takes the part of Jamil, by way of defending" the attacker. [2] Hamid's poem warns chieftains: "Every chieftain, who contemplateth the injury of his clan, should make the case of Jamal a mirror for himself." [2] In 2021 Mikhail Pelevin of Saint Petersburg State University compared the poems of Rahman, Hamid and Abd al-Qadir Khattak with Afzal Khan Khattak's prose account of the clash. He calls Rahman's an elegy, Hamid's a satire and Abd al-Qadir's a war ode. [3] The article on Rahman Baba uses the same poem to date him, and the Mohmand setting is in Pashtuns and the Mughal frontier.

The anecdote of the blessing

Malik Aziz Khan's family told Raverty that when some of Hamid's odes reached Rahman's ear, Rahman sent for the young poet. Pleased with his modesty and humility, he blessed him and prayed that his verses might be sweet to all men and that no one might ever excel him in Pashto. Raverty adds: "Up to the present day, certainly, Hamid has not been surpassed". [2] This is a village tradition recorded two lifetimes later, and Raverty himself doubted a related story of poetic contests between Rahman and Khushal Khan Khattak. [2] If the 1711 poems are answers to each other, the two poets did know of each other's work.

The grave and how he is read now

In 1862 the grave was a place the villagers pointed out. [2] In July 2013 the Express Tribune said it lay "close to Mashokhel" and was "in a noticeable state of disrepair". The paper was reporting a 40-minute documentary, The works and life of Hameed Baba, made by the late journalist Arif Shafi from interviews with scholars and Mashokhel residents. Its producer, Latifullah Daudzai, said Hamid is absent from most school courses, and that in 1973 King Zahir Shah visited the grave. [5] The visit rests on his word. The report adds that Hamid's contemporaries won enough respect for local government to build shrines and scholars to write books, and Hamid did not. That comparison is the paper's. See Rahman Baba for that shrine and religion among Pashtuns for the setting of such tombs.

The Dawn essay of 2025 names three poets for the age of Khushal, Rahman and Hamid, and treats Hamid as the youngest of them. [4]