32 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
directly to Farid. He calls him pir kamaly the man who has attained the ultimate spiritual perfection attainable by man; the man who incarnates in himself the truth of God. It is obvious that according to Warris Shah, Farid is the real Sufi, and further, real Islam is what Farid teaches. The Sufism of Warris Shah is exactly the same as that of his pir kamal— Farid. This truth of Farid is not only for personal salvation j but is also the panacea for all human ills in society. According to Warris Shah, the freedom of the Punjab from all its ills, its happiness and salvation, lies in the acceptance and practice of the truth propounded by Farid. The lovers that Warris Shah creates have his full approbation. He creates his positive characters in the exact image of Darvesh, the positive character propounded by Farid. He is very explicit about it. The lovers created by him are real lovers only because, like Farid himself, they have overcome in themselves the deadly sins like selfishness, greed, lust and the like nqfas and hirs—the same that Gurbani in its own idiom also declares as such. Farid is the connecting link between Gurbani on one side and Warris Shah on the other. In other words, in spite of all the differences in tradition, the idiom and the form in which the positive characters have been portrayed, the human and social essence of Farid's Darvesh, Gurbani's Gurmukh and Warris Shah's Aashiks, are the same. In Gur~ 'bani's idiom Heer and Ranjha are Gurmukhs or Aashak is the secular form of Gurmukh. This brings us to the conclusion that Farid, and the Gurus, the bhaktas included in the Adi Granth and Warris Shah depict the social reality from the same standpoint and have the same value pattern. The only thing left to be seen is what exactly this standpoint is and what the implications of the value pattern are with reference to the nature of society and man. What is the nature of man for whom these poets draw the reader's sympathy and approbation ?
Apart from the history of men, neither morality nor religion nor consciousness has an independent history and development of its own. In order to understand this consciousness, we have to look to the real existence of men. Marx and Engels wrote thus in The German Ideology :
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men altering their material production and their material intercourse, alter—along with this—their real existence and their thinking and the products of their thinking.1
As long as a class society functions normally and is more or less stable, its ruling ideas are the ideas of its ruling class. The ruling classes dominate not only in material production but also in cultural and intellectual production. The consciousness of a society about itself and about the world in general is the consciousness of its ruling class. Marx and Engels have made this point very clear in The German Ideology :
Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views * and conceptions, in a word, man's consciousness, changes with every