- Lived:
- c. 1680, Uch, in the Bahawalpur region of the lower Punjab (present-day Pakistan) → boyhood in Pandoke village near Kasur, study in Kasur and Lahore, the long last decades in Kasur, where he died c. 1757
- Field:
- Punjabi Sufi poetry — master of the kāfī, the sung lyric of the Punjab; a Sayyid of the Qādirī order who took a low-caste gardener as his spiritual guide
- The Big Idea:
- Every label — caste, creed, sect, nation, even his own exalted birth — is a wall between the soul and God, and he burned his own first. A descendant of the Prophet knelt to a vegetable-grower and wrote the songs that both halves of Punjab still cannot stop singing.
- In their words:
- "Bulleh, what do I know of who I am? Not the believer in the mosque, not given to the rites of unbelief." (from his most famous kāfī; the translation is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- The clerics of Kasur declared him an infidel and refused him burial in the town graveyard — and today his tomb is the heart of Kasur, his death-anniversary fills its streets, and a rock version of his kāfī topped the charts of two countries 250 years after he died.