From the One Light

The Guru Granth Sahib contains the compositions of fifteen figures who were not Sikhs — Hindu bhakti poets and Muslim Sufis — set in the same raags, on the same pages, under the same authority as the Gurus' own. Not as an appendix, and not as comparative material. Guru Arjan compiled them in.

Kabir, born Muslim and raised in a Hindu Vaishnav order, a julaha or weaver, is the largest non-Guru contributor, with over five hundred compositions. Sheikh Farid was a Sufi shaikh: 134 compositions. Ravidas was a Chamar, a leather-worker of an untouchable caste: 41 hymns. Namdev was a calico-printer: 60. Bhikhan is usually listed as Muslim, though scholars have disagreed about him.

Kabir's lines, inside Sikh scripture, use the Arabic words. Allah, and noor, the light. A Muslim-born weaver saying that every human being came out of one light, and that the categories therefore dissolve — printed in a book that had already declined to ask whose it was. The passage states the bridge in the act of being it.

One correction, because it is the most common misattribution in this territory. The famous line na koi Hindu na koi Musalman — there is no Hindu, there is no Musalman — is not in the Guru Granth Sahib, and it is not Guru Nanak's written word. It belongs to the janamsakhi tradition, the hagiographic literature, as his reported first words after emerging from the river Bein. The scriptural line is Guru Arjan's, at Ang 1136, a century later. Popular usage collapses a story about the first Guru into a verse by the fifth.

Use the real one, and note that it is the better one for this subject: it is the fifth body saying it under the first body's signature.

So the object that receives the Guruship in 1708 is a book whose own composition already answers the question. What gets passed on is not the property of the people who pass it.