Khwaja Ghulam Farid

Khwaja Ghulam Farid (25 November 1845 – 24 July 1901) was a 19th-century Sufi poet and mystic from Bahawalpur in the Punjab, belonging to the Chishti Order; most of his work is in his mother tongue, Multani — now known as Saraiki — though he also wrote in Punjabi, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi, Hindi and Persian.¹ The Urdu article gives his birth at Chachran on 25 November 1845, corresponding to 25 Dhu al-Qa'da 1261 AH, while the English article dates him only circa 1841/1845.²

He was born into a branch of the Koreja family that claimed descent from Umar, the second caliph, through an early migrant to Sindh; the family had been established as saints of the Suhrawardi order and later transferred their allegiance to the Chishti order.¹ His father died when he was about eight, and he was brought up by his elder brother, Khwaja Fakhr al-Din, receiving a fine formal education at the royal palace of Sadiq Muhammad IV, the Nawab of Bahawalpur.¹ The Urdu article states that at thirteen he took bay'ah with his elder brother Fakhr Jahan, and that when his brother and murshid died, when Farid was twenty-seven, he succeeded him as sajjada-nashin.² He performed the hajj in 1875 and then retired to the Cholistan desert, called Rohi, for chilla retreats totalling eighteen years.¹

His most significant works include the Masnavi Madan-e-Ishq (1882), the Diwan-e-Farid, and the Persian prose works Manaqib-e-Mehboobia and Fawaid Faridia.¹ The Urdu article counts 271 kafis in his Saraiki diwan and remarks on his mastery of music, saying he commanded thirty-nine rags and raginis and composed kafis in all of them.²

He died at Chachran on 24 July 1901 and was buried at Mithankot.¹ A literary award named after him, the Khwaja Ghulam Farid Award, is given yearly by the Pakistan Academy of Letters; the Khawaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology in Rahim Yar Khan bears his name, and his shrine at Rajanpur is counted among the ten most visited shrines in Pakistan.¹

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