Life Sketch of Hzt. Amir Khusro
Hazrat Amir Khusro
In the history of India’s
intellectual world, Hazrat Amir Khusro
enjoys an ever-lasting fame as one of the most versatile poets and prolific
prose-writers of the 13th century AD. His unique Persian-cum-Hindi
poetry and Hindi songs which, later on, developed into the “mother” of the Urdu
language, are historical contributions to the Persian, Hindi and Urdu
literature of India. His Persian poetry bears a hall-mark of his
wonderful personality, as it is so dear
to the hearts of both spiritualists as well as commoners of the East,
irrespective of their religious labels.
Hazrat Amir Khusro, a great
Sufi, who once exchanged all his wealth just for a pair of his Pir’s shoes, was
an intellectual giant of many languages, an artist, a prolific author, a
wealthy merchant, a genius musician who invented the “Sitar”, and
Tabla ,a versatile composer, and,
above all, a most dutiful and devoted “mureed” of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia, the
spiritual monarch of his time in India.
In short, his knowledge was a rare combination of a large variety of
languages and subjects, such as art, culture, religion, trade, music, Sufism,
history and poetry – an extremely rare of “All-in-one” type of highly amazing
mixture of Divine gifts. He was thus by
all accounts one of the most fascinating characters in India’s history. We can hardly do full justice to this
genius’s life-story in this limited space; his biography and voluminous
writings must be studied to admire his noble qualities and versatile career.
Amir Khusro’s full name was
Abul Hasan Yaminuddin. He was born in
651 Hijri (1253 AD) (preface of Ghurrat ul Kamal). at Patiali on Ganges in Etah
District, U.P, India. By birth he was a Turkish Moghul and his
father’s name was Saifuddin Mohammed who, before coming out to India, was the chief of a clan called “Laachin”
in Turkistan when Changez Khan ruled over that
territory. His mother was the daughter
of an Amir named Amad-ul-Mulk.
