Rahman Baba's mazar at Hazarkhwani, Peshawar: the shrine and its urs

At a glance

• Rahman Baba (رحمان بابا) is buried in the graveyard of Hazarkhwani, a village on the southern outskirts of Peshawar. Raverty, a British officer who translated his poems, wrote in 1862 that his tomb "may still be seen in the graveyard of his native village". [1]

• Dawn's report on the bombing says work on the present complex began on 17 November 1991 and ended in 1994; a later Dawn report gives 1992. It holds the mausoleum, a library, a mushaira hall for 600 people, a mosque, a canteen and a guest house. [2, 4]

• Poets have gathered at the grave since the late 1930s, and the three-day urs in early April has been the main yearly gathering since. [3, 4, 9]

• Before dawn on Thursday 5 March 2009, explosives set at the pillars of the mausoleum badly damaged it. No one was hurt. [2]

• The mausoleum was rebuilt at a reported cost of Rs39 million and reopened on 30 September 2012. [3, 4]

The grave and the graveyard

For most of its history the shrine was a grave in a village burial ground. Raverty, the British officer who translated Rahman's poems in 1862, gives no more than that: the tomb could still be seen in the graveyard of the poet's native village, which he spells Hazar-Khani and places in the Mohmand district of Peshawar province. [1] Rahman's life and verse are told in the article on Rahman Baba.

Two later gifts are reported, and Dawn's own reports disagree about when. A 2015 Dawn feature by Sher Alam Shinwari says that in the early 1950s Zahir Shah, then king of Afghanistan, sent a stone tablet to cover the grave. [3] A 2013 Dawn report by the same writer says Zahir Shah gifted the tablet in the early 1970s. [4] Both agree that the king in Kabul sent it. Neither says which year is right, and neither gives a document.

The building around the grave is later. Dawn's report on the bombing says work on the complex began on 17 November 1991 and ended in 1994, at an estimated cost of about 15 million rupees. [2] The 2013 report says it was built in 1992 for Rs20 million, over a covered area of 16,500 square feet, and that it was run by a trust until it passed in 2005 to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa directorate of archives and libraries together with eight employees. [4] The 2015 feature says instead that the Pakistan government built a complex around the shrine in the 1980s. [3] The reports do not settle these differences. The three agree that a government-built complex surrounded the grave by the 1990s and that the archives and libraries directorate ran it by 2009. [2, 4]

The complex Dawn described in 2009 held a conference hall, library, mosque, canteen and guest house, and the small shrines of three other saints: Tawoos Baba, Syed Sattar Bacha and Syed Sultan Bacha. [2] The Akhun Baba graveyard lay beside it. [2]

Poets and the urs

The shrine's literary life began before the complex. Dawn's 2013 report says Bazm-i-Adab, "the first ever Pashto literary society", formed in 1937 under the patronage of the Sufi Pir Syed Abdul Sattar Shah, with the writer Rahat Zakhili as president and Amir Hamza Khan Shinwari as vice-president, and began annual Pashto mushairas at Rahman Baba's grave in 1940. [4] The 2015 feature gives a different start: it says Markazi Naukhar Adabi Jirga, a society formed in 1934 under Abdul Khaliq Khaleeq, held the first grand Pashto poetry session at the grave in 1938. [3] The site's article on Hamza Shinwari has him founding the society in 1937 and leading it until 1950. Dawn's 2013 report adds that the yearly recital "soon turned into annual Urs", and that it gave rise to another body, Rahman Baba Adabi Jirga, in 1962. [4]

That jirga has been the organiser ever since. By Dawn's 2013 account it ran annual mushairas, the urs and weekly seminars, and published two magazines, Ghurga and Rahman Puhanah, without government support. [4] The 2015 feature describes the practice: organisers would offer a couplet of Rahman's, poets would try to compose verses in his style, seminars took up his work, and rabab players and qawwali singers performed his poems, a tradition it says went on uninterrupted for almost 70 years. [3]

The urs falls in the first half of April and lasts three days. Dawn's reports from 2007, 2015, 2017 and 2019 describe the same programme: wreath-laying and Quran recitation on the first day, then a seminar and a mushaira on the days after. [6–9] The 2007 mushaira was divided into four sessions, with poets from across the Pashtun belt, and researchers read papers on his life and work. [9] In 2017 about 150 Pashto poets took part, and the first of two sessions was for visiting poets and the second for local ones. [7] The 2015 and 2017 reports add the humbler parts: free meals (langar) for visitors, zikr and the recitation of his poems, and in the evening local singers performing his ghazals to rabab and mangay, the clay pot. [6, 7] In 2017 Dawn also saw the dhamaal, a whirling Sufi dance by the shrine's malangs, and in 2015 it saw devotees dancing to the folk tunes. [6, 7]

Devotees' own voices are in the record. Gulmast Khan Malang, from Tirah, told Dawn in 2019 that he had paid his respects regularly for 40 years and returned to his village each year with renewed spirit. [8] The Rahman Baba Khakrob Union, a body of 400 volunteers serving the shrine, told Dawn in 2015 that between 300 and 500 people gathered on Friday nights for a Sufi concert, and that before the bombing the urs drew 30,000. [3] The site's article on the rabab and Pashtun music says more of the instruments.

The weekly gathering is on Friday night, and a librarian told the Express Tribune in 2010 that the shrine was busier on Fridays. [3, 5] Thursday is the usual day of pilgrimage to shrines across the Pashtun country (see Pashtun folk beliefs).

The bombing of 5 March 2009

Dawn's Ali Hazrat Bacha reported that the mausoleum was bombed "early on Thursday", 5 March 2009. [2] The report says the grave and the gates of the mosque, canteen and conference hall were almost destroyed. A bomb disposal official said five explosives, each about five kilograms, were packed in connected containers and set off together, and police said they had been tied round the pillars. [2] Sardar Khan, president of the shrine's volunteers, said the attackers had climbed the rear boundary wall and put explosives under the four main pillars and one at the grave. [2] The watchman said he was preparing for the dawn prayer when he heard the blast. [2] Devotees and mendicants around the shrine were preparing for the three-day urs. [3]

The attackers did not announce themselves in anything the reports quote. What is known of their objection comes second-hand. The watchman told police he had received a threat on his mobile phone three days earlier, and that the attack was meant to end the tradition of women making pilgrimage to the grave. [2] Sardar Khan told Dawn that groups of "Taliban-like" men with long hair and beards had come before and asked why the caretaker did not stop women visiting, and that two had once told him that praying in the complex mosque was haram, to which he told them to get lost. [2] Police suspected Mangal Bagh, head of the banned Lashkar-i-Islam in the Khyber tribal area, but said they were still investigating. [2] Dawn's reviewer of Robert Sampson's translations wrote in November 2010 that Taliban militants attacked the shrine three months after Sampson published an article on the threat to folk poetry along the border, and that the timing was meant to disrupt the annual April gathering of mystics and folk poets. [11] That is the reviewer's reading. No group is named in these reports as having claimed it.

A Dawn opinion piece of 3 November 2010, on the attack on Baba Farid's shrine at Pakpattan, quotes the attackers' message: "We will keep attacking if you continue with heretic practices and do not follow the interpretation in which we believe in." [13] That was said of Pakpattan and not of Hazarkhwani. It is the reasoning attributed to the attackers there. The quarrel is old. Raverty's 1862 notice says some mullahs spread a report that Rahman had turned atheist because he stopped attending the mosque, and that he escaped them by promising to pray with the congregation again. [1] Raverty calls those mullahs envious, which is his judgement.

Reactions

Local people held a protest the day after, the Hazarkhwani union council's nazim Hidayatullah Khan told Dawn, and called the building beyond repair. [2] The provincial minister for culture, Syed Aqil Shah, visited the site and said the structure was apparently damaged beyond repair and would have to be rebuilt. [2] Dawn's 2013 report says President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai both responded promptly to reconstruct it. [4] The Express Tribune said in 2010 that the Afghan government had reportedly offered to pay for the rebuilding. [5]

From the poets' side, Yousaf Ali Dilsoz, then chairman of the Rahman Baba Adabi Jirga, told the Tribune in 2010: "His teachings were for all humanity. Let alone Muslims, non-Muslims also revere Rahman Baba because his love and teachings are not restricted to one group of people or an area." [5] Two students of a religious seminary in Peshawar, eating langar at the shrine in 2013, said: "Rahman Baba was not only an eminent Pashto poet but also a great religious scholar and spiritual figure. We condemn bombing of shrines of such pious people by militants." [4] At a Rahman Baba conference in Lahore in 2015, the World Punjabi Congress chairman Fakhar Zaman said Rahman's poetry was a call against what he called mullah-ism and extremism, and that this was why the tomb was bombed. [10] That is his claim, offered at a literary conference, and not a finding.

Dawn's timeline of attacks on shrines in Pakistan lists the Rahman Baba bombing among attacks that begin with the Pir Rakhel Shah shrine in Balochistan in March 2005, where 35 people were killed, and include the Data Darbar in Lahore and the Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine in Karachi. [12] Unlike those, the Hazarkhwani bomb killed no one.

Rebuilding

The Express Tribune visited the site in June 2010. Only Rahman's grave stood untouched; the outer structure, damaged because the bombs had sat on its pillars, had been pulled down, and the new design would have 16 pillars. [5] Qazi Laiq, director general of the Peshawar Development Authority, said the federal government had allocated Rs35 million and that the original architect had been asked to advise, and that the building would carry Quranic verses and Rahman's poetry inside. [5] A foreman, Mohammad Ishaq, said the new structure would be "bomb proof", and Laiq answered that no material can be. [5] The urs of 2010 went ahead with the site under construction, with a two-day mushaira at the shrine and a seminar at the Iranian Cultural Centre. [5]

The final cost was Rs39 million, and Chief Minister Ameer Haider Khan Hoti reopened the shrine on 30 September 2012 at a ceremony kept away from the media for security reasons. [4] Nine police constables were posted by a new checkpost, in three shifts. [4] In April 2015 the devotee Kachkol Kaka told Dawn that half the police force had been withdrawn six months before; a police official said the guard had not been withdrawn for good and that the shrine remained under observation. [3]

The shrine since

The visitors did not return in the old numbers. Shinwari's 2015 feature says about 1,500 people came every day before the bombing and about 300 afterwards, and that the 30,000 to 50,000 who came for the urs had become about 3,000. [3] The Tribune's librarian in 2010 put it at 1,000 to 1,200 a day before and about 300 after. [5] The 2013 Dawn report says a pre-blast survey counted 1,500 a day and that about 800 a day were coming then. [4] Women, were afraid, Sherin Gula Bibi, 70, told Dawn in 2015: "Baba's shrine was a source of solace for me... But now due to the fear of militants I cannot dare go there." [3]

The mushaira hall was the weak point. In 2013 the jirga's president Malik Wazir Khan said the hall had no sound system or chairs, and that the cafeteria, library and mosque were in shambles. [4] In 2015 Yousaf Ali Dilsoz, the jirga's general secretary, told Dawn that the jirga had held its mushaira and seminar for two years at the Iranian Cultural Centre in Saddar bazaar because its application to use the shrine was rejected every year without a reason. [3] The jirga's president said in 2017 that the hall, built in 1992, was still not working. [7] By the 2019 urs the Peshawar district nazim, Mohammad Asim Khan, said a room beside the hall would go to the jirga and the hall would be available after renovation, and Dilsoz said a Pashto mushaira would be held at the shrine on the Sunday. [8] The library held about 5,000 books in 2010 and about 6,000 in 2013. [4, 5]