As far as I know, we believe that Hazrat Baba Guru Nanak, he was a Muslim and what I fail to understand is if he was a Muslim, then how come that this Sikhism started as a new religion or, I don’t know whether it’s a sect or a religion, I mean if it is a religion and if we think that it is a religion, then what’s the explanation, I mean, because if it’s… No, no, it’s not a new religion at all and this is what we prove and this is a debate going on with the Sikhs for the last 100 years.
The fact is that they were converts gained from among the Hindus in most cases and Hazrat Guru Baba Nanak, who himself was a convert at the hands of a Sufi near Dera Baba Nanak, near Nankana Sahib, he got initiated at his hands and was one of his followers. So, because he hailed from among the Hindus, then he began to address his own community that is Hindu and started gaining converts from among them. Now, he became very popular for his piety because he was a great saint and he gained a very large number of converts from among the Hindus and a small number from among the Muslims as well. But he did not have time enough to educate those people properly.
Only his main stress was on the unity of God. Yet the cloak that he was wearing, on that cloak nothing but the verses of the Holy Quran were written. He always carried a Hamaal Sharif with him, that is the Holy Quran, which is carried small size Holy Quran. And he spoke of the Holy Quran, he performed Hajj, he said prayers and he knew no religion but Islam. But he did not have time enough to educate his people and he died before he could educate them all but he left a confused people instead and immediately a division took place after his death. Part of those who believed in Islam, they wanted to bury him and part of those who believed and were still under the influence of Hinduism, and were not properly educated, they wanted to burn his body.
The result was that that division became in fact a cause for the creation of a sort of new religion. A hot debate went on and bloodshed was feared until somehow the Muslim sect among the, I mean who had hailed from the Muslims and who understood Guru Baba Nanak perfectly to be a Muslim, they somehow removed his body from the place where it was kept under the darkness of night and got it buried somewhere and declared it to the others that Allah had lifted his body to the heaven. So they started believing that he was a Guru whose body was lifted to the heaven.
So because the Muslims were weaned away from them at that juncture, all that was left of Sikhism were those uneducated Hindus who had come from Hinduism. And they did not want to believe in Islam but they believed in that saint and his teachings of the unity of God alone, to that much they understood him. So because they were no longer Hindus either, so they were left without a teaching. Even today the Sikhs are without a Sharia, without a book because Guru Granth Sahib does not speak on the fundamentals of human relationships at all.
And this is our challenge to them, we tell them that this is because Guru Baba Nanak Sahib believed in the law of the Holy Quran so he didn’t give you a law. All the law that is known to them is five Kakas, five Ks, five articles which they must wear which begin with the word K. That is all the Sharia known to them. And that God is one, that’s all. So these things do happen when you are not capable of teaching your followers properly and after all he had not invented a new religion and because he was known to study the Holy Quran, to wear it, to respect it and also he gave this admonition to his followers repeatedly in Granth Sahib, what is called Granth Sahib, that you must not oppose the Holy Quran and the scribes of the Holy Quran.
And he speaks so highly of the Holy Book and how it should be followed and that there is no redemption except in the Holy Quran that everything is very clear in the very Granth Sahib. You don’t have to go outside to prove that he never brought a new religion. Right, further to this question, another offshoot of the same confusion is, alright we do agree that Guru Nanak was a saint but what view should we have about the current Sikh people, I mean are they the true followers or are they misguided people? The fact is that these Hindu Sikhs got further divided into various sects and some among them have even become idolaters and they do not call themselves Sikhs, they call themselves Hindus.
Yet Guru Baba Nanak Sahib is their saint. These followers of Guru Baba Nanak are found mostly in Sindh area. Majority of the Hindus living there are his followers, they have his idols made and they have even deviated from the unity of God, that teaching. So these things do happen with the passage of time. I mean this was the initial deviation which started and deterioration in their religion which started at the death of Hazrat Baba Nanak Sahib. And so many centuries have passed since and you could not expect that religion to be reformed automatically. It must, once a step astray is taken, then it must go on and on farther apart from the original source.
But other factors interfered and they were very unfortunate factors as far as Islam was concerned. These Sikhs became hostile to some Muslim governments. Not because of religion but because they felt it was a foreign rule and there was a political rebellion against the Mughal Empire by some Sikhs in the Punjab and some other places. So that political movement in fact pushed them farther apart from the sympathies to Islam and from sympathies to Muslims. With the result that some Mughal king had to fight battles with them to suppress their rebellion.
And they were driven to the jungles. And stories, concocted stories mostly were invented of the cruelties perpetrated by Muslim kings against the Sikhs. So they became truly jungly for a while. They lived in the jungles and they lost contact with civilization at many a time and became more and more militant in their nature. And more and more hostile to the religion of those kings which wanted to suppress their movement of liberation.
So this is how Sikhism was weaned away ultimately. It was not their love for the Hindus which bracketed them later on in politics with the Hindus but it was the hatred of the Mughal emperors and the Muslim kings which out of a common enemy factor pushed them more towards the Hindus. Still they have no religious relationship but it was only that affinity of common enemy which ultimately worked havoc in East Punjab against the Muslims who were residing among the Sikh majority areas. And that caused East Punjab to accede to India rather than to Pakistan. Because there was no unity and no love.
So the same movement, the same inner desire to become free and liberated and to form our own government which pushed them apart from the Muslims. The same desire is at work now to push them apart from the Hindus. So this is the right time in history for them to travel after this rebounce back towards Islam. And this is why we are preparing a very ambitious scheme of addressing the Sikh community at this juncture of history.
And we are already at it and the scholars are working and Inshallah after we are prepared we will launch a worldwide movement to attract Sikhism to Islam once again. And now they are in a better frame of mind to listen to us. Much better than any time before.
