Texts of Islam

Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: Khwājah Muḥammad, Bangash: Introduction

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This is a biographical sketch from a 19th-century British anthology of Afghan poetry, introducing the Sufi poet Khwājah Muḥammad of the Bangash tribe, who lived during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. The compiler, H.G. Raverty, notes that almost nothing is known about the poet's birth, residence, or death, and that his collected odes (the Dīwān) survive in what may be a single known copy. Khwājah Muḥammad lived as a Dervish in poverty and religious withdrawal, following the Chishti Sufi order, and ceased writing poetry after completing the hajj to Mecca and Medina. His verse is characterized primarily by Sufi mysticism, with occasional elegies for lost friends. A striking footnote departs from literary biography entirely: Raverty recounts unexpectedly witnessing the last Nawab of Farrukhabad — a descendant of the very tribe he was writing about — being marched in chains through the streets of Nasik for his role in the 1857 rebellion, sentenced to permanent exile in Mecca, and appearing to Raverty as a broken, thoroughly Indianized man with little remaining Afghan identity.

Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: Khwājah Muḥammad, Bangash: Introduction

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