SHAIKH YACUB SARFI
Hazrat Shaikh Yaqub Sarfi, cousin of Baba Daud Khaki, was born in 1521 C.E.. His father, Shaikh Mir Hasan Ganai, was a nobleman in the court of the Sultan of Kashmir. He learnt the Qur'an at home, memorising the entire book by the age of six. By eight, he had begun composing poetry, and was then put under the care of a famous scholar, Maulana Muhammad Ani, who taught him Farsi and Arabic. After that, he studied Islamic jurisprudence, Arabic and Sufism from Maulana Mir Raziuddin and Hafiz Basir Khandabhawani. In search of a spiritual master, he set off on a long and arduous journey to Samarqand in Central Asia (modern-day Uzbekistan), where he accepted the noted Sufi Hazrat Shaikh Hussain Khwarizmi as his pir. After training on the Sufi path under him, he returned to Kashmir, settling down at the khanqah of Shaikh Sultan Kashmiri in Srinagar, making this the centre for his missionary work. In 1557, when Shaikh Yaqub Sarfi was thirty-five, the Shah Miri dynasty was overthrown by the...