Baghdad, January 27
A desolate courtyard surrounded by fields of mournful graves is all that remains of an ancient shrine to Guru Nanak inside a sprawling Muslim cemetery in Baghdad.War, insurgents or looters have wiped any trace of a historical footnote that had preserved the memory of Guru Nanak’s 16th-century journey through Arabia and his stay in Baghdad, hailed by Sikhs as an early example of inter-faith dialogue.

“No one visits anymore,” lamented Abu Yusef, the lean and bearded Muslim caretaker, standing in the nearly-bare patio where a disorderly stack of broken electric fans and a discarded refrigerator replace the prayer books and articles of Sikh worship that had furnished a shrine whose modesty mirrored the apparent humility of the man it honoured. “Before the war, a few Sikh pilgrims would occasionally arrive,” Abu Yusef said, referring to the US-led invasion that toppled former dictator Saddam Hussein and unleashed an unending cycle of violence.

“Once or twice we even had western tourists. Last year, after a very long time, a Sikh man came from Dubai who promised to return and rebuild the shrine. But since then, nobody,” he said with a resigned shrug.

When they came, the pilgrims would stay a night or two and convert the shrine into a temple, Abu Yusef recalled. “They slept in the courtyard, where they also cooked large quantities of food to share after worship with whoever came along,” he remembered, pointing to the places in the roofless, sun-beaten enclosure with whitewashed walls and a plain concrete dais that had housed prayer books, painted portraits of the guru and a prized stone plaque from the 16th century.

What is known about the origins of the site, which lies today inside central Baghdad's expansive Sheikh Marouf cemetery that adjoins a disused train station where decaying railroad cars rest frozen on rusted tracks, is gleaned from scant historical sources.

One is a Punjabi hymn by the poet and philosopher Bhai Gurdaas, written several decades after the visit. — AFP