By Muhammad Arbaaz Niazi

Sheikh Noor-ud-Din Noorani is remembered in Kashmir as a saint whose words have passed from one generation to the next. His verses are recited, his name is invoked at religious gatherings, and his place in the valley’s spiritual history is rarely questioned. 

But the reverence surrounding him has also made it easier to overlook what he was saying about the society he lived in. 

Sheikh-ul-Alam was a mystic, but he was also a social critic who examined the conduct of ordinary people, the ambitions of the powerful and the damage human greed could inflict on the natural world. 

Kashmir remembers his holiness more readily than his criticism.

That difference matters because his poetry was never an invitation to turn away from society. 

He wrote in Kashmiri, drawing on the language of fields, forests, hunger, death and daily work. His ideas did not depend on elaborate philosophical arguments. He took questions about human conduct and placed them within the reach of people who worked the land, raised families and lived under rulers whose decisions affected their lives. His spiritual teachings grew out of his observations of the world around him.

His iconic verse “Ann poshi teli yeli wan poshi,” usually translated as “Food will remain as long as the forests remain,” captures this way of thinking. 

Kashmir has repeated the line so often that it risks becoming a cultural slogan, detached from the argument contained in it. The verse connects human survival to the health of the natural world. Forests sustain the conditions on which food production and community life depend. Their destruction cannot be separated from the lives of the people who live among them.

Sheikh-ul-Alam did not have the vocabulary of modern environmental science, but his understanding of human dependence on nature remains relevant to Kashmir’s present predicament. 

Forests face pressure, water bodies have deteriorated, and ecological spaces have come under strain. Development is often discussed in terms of construction, economic activity and the use of land. 

Sheikh-ul-Alam’s verse points towards a more basic measure of progress: whether the land continues to sustain the people who depend on........

© Kashmir Observer