Guru Nanak & His Mission

" GURU NANAK had the highest respect for pristine Islam which had risen in the 8th century like a flame of truth in the burning sands of Arabia. Its original message had a strongly humanist character " http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20030112/spectrum/book6.htm

Guru Nanak's love for Islam :-

1. He visited Mecca & Madinah ( Holy Places of Muslims ) where only muslims are allowed to go.

2. In the voluminous Guru Granth ( Holy book of Sikhs ) Quran is mentioned by name more than once.

3. Sikhs agree that Muslims concepts were adopted in the Sikh religion.

4. Guru Nanak was thoroughly conversant in the Qur'an. The Guru Granth Sahib contains the teachings, philosophies and beliefs of Islamic saints.

5. Sikhs believe that their faith is not the only way to God. True Faith is belief in ONE SUPREME GOD, who is the creator, sustainer of all the
worlds.

6. The words of Guru Nanak after his alleged enlightenment "Na koi Hindu Na Koi Mussalman" meant that neither Muslims nor Hindus were
preaching their religion purely and perfectly but had adultrated it with filthy rites and rituals.

7. Guru Nanak never intended to make a new religion or movement based on his teachings.

8. He strongly rejected the Hindu caste system, idolatry, and ritualism.

The Mool Mantra Of Sikhism Strongly Supports Islamic Monotheism :-

There is One God,
Eternal Truth is His name;
Maker of all things,
Fearing nothing and at emnity with nothing
Timeless is His Image;
Not begotten, being of His own Being;
By the grace of the Guru (Book) , made known to men

Professor Mushirul Haq Writes in his article on " The Mission of Guru Nanak : A Muslim Appraisal "

" To a man like me who was not born and brought up in the Sikh tradition, Guru Nanak may not appear in the same light in which a devout Sikh would like to see him. As an outsider I see in him a man who was determined to remind the people of their forgotten lesson of the oneness of God and the oneness of mankind. "

Why did Guru Nanak dissociate himself from the Muslims of those days :-

Although his dissociation was only to reduce groupism in the religious sphere, he was always misunderstood. This happened to Guru Nanak. He identified himself neither with the Hindus nor with the Muslims because he found them having gone astray from the real teachings of the religions which they claimed to follow.

If Muslims and Hindus had realized the essence of his message they could have regarded him as one of them. But since Guru Nanak refused to be reckoned as either a Hindu or a Muslim, both the religious groups regarded him as one who was determined to weakening the roots of Hinduism and Islam.

He was to remind them that all the messengers and the prophets in history came only to lead people to the right path. These messengers never considered themselves belonging to one group. They were for all. It were the people who created a new group. Guru Nanak really did the right thing when he declared that he was neither a Hindu nor a Mussalman. Certainly that was not a denial of Islam or Hinduism. That was only a declaration that even those who called themselves Muslims were not really Muslims judged by the standards of their own religion. Nor was there a Hindu found in the world as he ought to be.

Had Muslims and Hindus understood his message they would have certainly returned to the real teachings of their own religions. And that would have completed the mission of Guru Nanak. ie to Preach the Oneness of the One & Only Supreme Creator.

GURU GRANTH (THE HOLY BOOK OF SIKHS) HAS QURANIC PASSAGES IN AMENDED FORMS :-

An instance of this is the fact that one of the Qur'an's verses about the majesty of God, the "throne verse," claims Nanak's attention and general assent; his own verse in the Guru Granth Sahib known as "the Gate" has a similar tone and import

In sura 2, called Al baqra (the Cow) for instance, amid brief disquisitions on a multitude of subjects, including pilgrimages, divorce, menstruation, the rights of women, proposals of marriage, and the need for killing the adversaries of Islam, there appears, quite unexpectedly, one of the grandest verses of the loran the famous throne-verse.

There is no God save Him, the living the eternal;
Slumber overtaketh Him not, nor doth sleep weary Him.
Unto Him belongeth all things in Heaven and on the earth.
Who shall intercede with Him save by His will.
His throne is as vast the Heavens and the earth.
And the keep of them wearieth Him not.
He is exalted, the mighty One.

It is this beautiful and noble text which claims the attention and general assent of Guru Nanak and it is this text which he has matched by his own famous text, the Sodar, that Gate, or The Gate, as there being no definite article in the Indo-Sanskrit languages, it can only be expressed as that,

Like what is that Gate?
With what compares that Abode?
By visiting where He sustains All?

Then in this text Guru Nanak goes to imply that the formal nature of this "Throne" is best comprehensible by human mind through reference to those areas of Reality that pertain to sound and feeling rather than those that pertain to visual and spatial aspects of Reality, as is implicated by the Quranic text.

Herein Guru Nanak has the advantage of his acquaintance with the categories of the Samkhya school of Hindu Philosophy that categorises sound as the subject element of sensibilia and perception. It is only by a careful and critical analysis of such parallel texts in the Quran and the Guru Granth, that the true interrelationship between Islam and Sikhism can be properly understood.

Another grand verse, Sura 24:35 in the Quran goes under the name of mishkatul-anwar (The tabernacle).

God is the Light of the heavens and earth.
The similitude of His Light is a niche wherein is a lamp.
And the lamp is within a glass.
And the glass, as it were a pearly star.
This lamp is lit from a blessed tree.
An olive neither of the east nor of the west;
Almost this oil would shine though no fire touched it.
Light upon Light, God guideth whom He will to His Light,
And He speaketh in parables to men, for He knoweth all things.

Guru Nanak has revealed a text which not only takes note of the above verse but also constitutes the Guru's own disquisition on the Lamp that guides.

Guru Nanak opens by declaring:

My Light is the Name of One and only God.
And its oil is the pain and suffering:
The former is consumed and the latter is then done away with.
And, lo! there is no-doing between I and Death.

Allama Iqbal - The great Muslim Poet pays rich tribute to Guru Nanak :-

The land where Chishti delivered the message of truth.
The land where Nanak sang the song of God's oneness,
The land where the Tatars made their home,
The land which lured the Arabs from Arabia,
That land is my home, that is my home.

Evolution of SIKHISM :-

It is often stated that Guru Nanak started a “universal” religion, Sikhism, which is tolerant of other faiths; and considers all faiths to be equal, i.e., many paths leading to same destination. But, if Guru Nanak DID NOT agree with categorizing people according to religious belief then how can he be the founder of a new religious belief - Sikhism

1469 to 1539

A turmoil was enveloping the Indian scene in the fifteenth century A.D. The political domain was in the grip of a pandemonium; the Pathan and the Mughal rulers were at daggers drawn and the poor populace was constantly trampled over. The impersonators and imposters were plundering the realm of religion. The caste discrimination was tearing off the social set up and brotherhood. The womanhood was brutally subjugated. Health, wealth and honour, all had become defenseless. Such was the predicament at the advent of Guru Nanak, the first Supreme preceptor of the Sikh Religion. He was born in the house of a revenue official, Mehta Kalu, in the year 1469 at Talwandi, in District Sheikhupura (now in Pakistan).

Nearly first thirty years of his life Guru Nanak minutely studied and experienced himself with all the temporal aspects of the human life. On full moon day he emerged from his contemplative trance, and declared the real purpose of his manifestation into the mundane world. His first message to mankind was "Na koi Hindu, na koi Musalman."

To reform a society and to re-instill in it the human values, a reformist needs courage to expose the exploiters. Guru Nanak was not only endowed with Godly vision but also with the fortitude to speak against the societal atrocities committed by the ruling elite, and the corrupt implementations conducted under the garb of religion. He narrated such inhuman offenses fearlessly.

Sikhism as we know it today is the result of the teachings of the ten Gurus, the first of which was Guru Nanak (1469-1539) and the tenth and last of which was Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708).

Guru Nanak spread a simple message: "We are all one, created by the One Creator of all Creation." There is no definitive biography of Guru Nanak, though there have been many attempts to write the story of his life by his devotees after his death.

There is a story of how he disappeared for three days and came back with enlightenment. It is reported that he was no longer the same person he had been. Then he uttered these words:

"There is but One God, His name is Truth, He is the Creator, He fears none, He is without hate, He never dies, He is beyond the cycle of births and death, He is self illuminated, He is realized by the kindness of the True Guru. He was True in the beginning, He was True when the ages commenced and has ever been True, He is also True now."

These words are enshrined at the beginning of the Sikh holy scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib. It was 1499 and Guru Nanak was thirty years old at this time.

After this, with a Muslim companion, Guru Nanak undertook long journeys as part of a spiritual mission. He took twelve years to return from this first journey. He then set out on a second journey traveling as far south as Sri Lanka. On his third journey Guru Nanak traveled to the north to Tibet.

Guru Nanak visited Sheikh Ibrahim, the Muslim successor of Baba Farid, the great Sufi dervish of the twelfth century at Ajodhan. When asked by Ibrahim which of the two religions was the true way to attain God, Guru Nanak replied, "If there is one God, then there is only His way to attain Him, not another. One must follow that way and reject the other. Worship not him who is born only to die, but Him Who is eternal and is contained in the whole universe."

On his fourth great journey Guru Nanak travelled to Mecca . He visited Madinah and Baghdad, too.

After having spent a lifetime in travelling abroad and setting up missions, an aged Nanak returned home to Punjab. He settled down at Kartharpur with his family. People came from far and near to hear his hymns and preaching.

After Guru Nanak’s death in September 1539, his Hindu followers thought him to be a Hindu and his Muslim followers thought him to be a Muslim. That is to say, both Muslims and Hindus viewed him from the perspective of their respective faiths.

It was the later disciples of Nanak who gave shape to a new religion, of which Nanak is considered the first Guru. In 1604, Arjan Dev (one of the ten Gurus) compiled the hymns of Guru Nanak along with the compositions of both Hindu and Muslim holy men, like Jaidev, Surdas, Sheikh Farid, and Kabir. The compiled book was enshrined by Arjan Dev in the Golden Temple and was called the Adi Granth.

It was the tenth (last) Guru, Gobind Singh, who organized the community of Sikhs into a khalsa — "a spiritual brotherhood devoted to purity of thought and action." He taught his followers to wear long hair (kesh, denoting saintly appearance), long underwear (kachha, denoting self-control), iron bangle (kara, denoting purity in acts), comb (kangha, denoting cleanliness of mind and body), and sword (kirpan, denoting fight for a just cause).

The Sikh scripture called the Adi Granth (called respectfully as Guru Granth Sahib) is considered the Supreme Spiritual Authority and Head of the Sikh religion, rather than any living person. It contains the works of not only the ten Gurus but also the hymns by Muslims Saints (sufis ) like Sheikh Farid (1175 - 1265) and Sheikh Bhikan (who died during the early part of Akbar’s reign).

Thus confidently we may conclude :-