kalu_miah
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The Rockefeller foundation paper is interesting in its prediction of future. I saw in page 38, they mention a water war between India-Pakistan in 2027. Lets hope you can avoid a war, but it will require entire Muslim world to unite and rally around Pakistan, so India does not become aggressive. With increase of economic and military power, there is no telling what India will do around 2027 time frame. Currently Pakistan has a delicate balance with its nukes and its alliance with China, but the world may look very different in 2027 time frame. If India finds an opening, it will try to annex more land from its Muslim neighbors, Bangladesh is specially vulnerable.
The wiki page I believe describes the same sufi saint. You should read the columbia.edu paper as it thoroughly covers this Nimatullah prophecy phenomenon. Q1 was the original version and over time Q2 and Q3 were added. Zaid Hamid bases his prophecies on this embellished later day versions. After reading CM Naim's thoroughly researched scholarly paper with a lot of credible citations and references, his conclusions on this subject makes perfect sense to me. I post his summary below:
"Summarising the Prophecies
The above chronological narrative may now be summarised to bring out the fascinating trajectories the Ni’matullahi “prophecies” took in south Asia, as they grew in number from one to three. The original Q1 of the Shah of Kirman began in Iran as a harbinger of hope and a reminder of the promised Mahdi. Arguably, it brought solace to the local Muslim population in the context of Timur’s invasions in the 1380s, and the coming to end of the 8th century Hijri. Subsequently, it could have also catered to the messianic impulses of the supporters of Shah Isma’il, the founder of Iran’s Safavid dynasty. The poem reached south India with the Shah’s descendants, then gradually spread more widely. Did it play any
role in the Mahdavi movement of the 15th century, which started in north India but survived more in the south and north-west? Was it circulating during the times of Akbar and Jahangir as the first Hijri millennium came to a close? These are important unanswered questions. We only know for sure that Q1 came to wide public notice in the 1850s, first in support of the remnants of the so-called “Jihad” movement, and then to make “preordained”, and thus reconcilable, the terrible events of 1857 and their aftermath. But Q1 could not fully serve that cause; it needed indigenous augmentation. And so the south Asian Muslim milieu came up with Q2, attributing it to Shah Ni’matullah Wali to give it authority and history. As years progressed and new crises arose, particularly in Turkey, Afghanistan, and the Arab lands, Q2 itself had to be augmented. First it gained additional verses, then eventually a companion “Ni’matullahi” poem, probably before the end of the 19th century.
While both Q1 and Q2 had the classical rhyme requirement of both a radif and a qafiyah, the new poem, Q3, did away with radif and used a most common adjectival ending for its qafiyah. Now any would-be visionary could compose “prophetic” poetry. As various political crises occurred in the new century – first world war; the end of the Ottoman Caliphate; the second world war; Partition of India; the dissolution of the original Pakistan – Q3 kept gaining verses. From barely 30 in the first decade of the 20th century, they came to be almost 100 in the seventh – all attributed to what by then had become a brand name: Shah Ni’matullah Wali.
The Western King
There was also a second trajectory. When the Shah of Kirman wrote Q1 near the end of the 14th century, he claimed his words were based on what was revealed to him by god’s will (az kirdigar), and not dictated by stars (az nujum). His vision was exclusively his own; he did not invoke other prophecies. We do not know what he did with the poem. Did he send it to some aspiring prince? Did he have it distributed more generally through his disciples? We have
no answers. We only know that he composed his verses within an existing Muslim messianic discourse that posited a redemptive Mahdi and a reappearance of Jesus that would bring the world to its end. India played no role to play in that scheme of things. His single verse referring to India, in fact, described the Hindus as suffering under Turk and Tatar oppressors – a situation we could extrapolate he expected would end as his “prophecy” came true.
The second poem, Q2, turns its back on Q1’s central Asia and Iran, focusing almost exclusively on India and its Mughal and British rulers. There is no specific mention of India’s Hindus, and the Sikhs are mentioned only with reference to Guru Nanak and the land of Punjab. The only people vigorously invoked are an “Afghan” or “Western” king and his armies. Here it might be useful to recall that while Afghanistan could have been invoked in the spirit in which Shah Waliullah, in the 18th century, allegedly invited Ahmad Shah Abdali to invade Delhi, it was also the place to which, in the 20th century, thousands of Indian Muslims migrated during the Khilafat movement in a grand gesture of hijrat, and where other nationalists set up an “Indian National Government” under Mahendra Pratap. In fact, as late as 1941, Subhas Chandra Bose fled to Afghanistan to find his way eventually to Berlin and Tokyo. In other words, in the early decades of the 20th century, popular mind could see Afghanistan intimately linked to India in many more ways.
While its main concern is also India, Q3 contains much that relates to other countries, especially in the “Muslim” world. Significantly, it also contains remarks that seem trite but are in fact the tried and true weapons in sectarian confrontations – “moral decay has set in the society”; “religious scholars are ignorant of Islam, and practice deceit”; “sinful persons control religious and social affairs.” As years pass and verses increase, the two themes remain
significant, reflecting the pan-Islamism that found favour among south Asian Muslims in the first half of the last century and the steady increase in sectarianism within the dominant Sunni Islam.
We should note that except for the anonymous manuscript from Hyderabad and the publications of the Deendar Anjuman, no version of Q2 or Q3 makes any mention of the so-called Ghazwat- al-Hind. Also, until we come to the commandant of the Deendar Anjuman at Karachi, no commentator makes any claim that involves him. They place their hopes and ambitions elsewhere.
Zaid Hamid’s cobbled together version marks a significant departure in one way: his poem turns its back on the Muslims of present-day India and Bangladesh and focuses primarily on Pakistan. Its first part, “Prophecies of the Past”, uses verses from Q2 and Q3 to swiftly narrate a haphazard political history of south Asia, beginning with Timur and ending with the Mukti Bahini. The next part, “Prophecies about the Present”, consists of verses chosen exclusively from different versions of Q3, and reads like a jeremiad. It bewails the various evils – impiety and corruption, aping of Christian ways, neglect of Islamic virtues – that allegedly ail the Muslims of Pakistan, thus suggesting a reason for Pakistan’s debacle in 1972. The section’s final couplet, however, offers some hope: “The Banu Sulaiman, i e, the Afghans, will rise like honourable people and fight back, blessed with God’s special favour, with hundred-fold more bravery”. Then comes the final section, “Prophecies for the Future”, in which Hamid, using two verses from Q2 and two from Q3, promptly declares:
“(1) When tyranny and heresy will become common, a Western King, well-equipped to run the state, shall come forward to remove them.
(2) God will manifest His special favour to the Muslims of Western Pakistan, and their hands will become powerful to act.
(3) A lion from among the lions of Hazrat Ali will appear, a killer of infidels. He will be a partisan of the faith of the Prophet and a defender of the land.
(4) He shall bring to his aid invisible help from the Northeast.”
Near the end, Hamid explains that the “Western King”, using extraordinary weapons, shall achieve an unbelievable victory over the infidels and then reign for 40 years. Exactly who the “King” might be becomes clear if we remember that Hamid’s full name is Syed Zaid Zaman Hamid, and that all Syeds, being descendants of Ali, are his “lions”. Not surprisingly, Hamid’s version totally leaves out the “Habibullah” mentioned in Q2, but underscores references to the Afghan people as supporters of his own “Western King”.71
That was the second trajectory the “prophetic” poems took – from being carriers of consoling tidings they turned into a kind of martial manifesto. It was a potential they always had but became overtly evident as their proponents became more consciously martial.
Finally we must ask: why, over at least two centuries, have so many cherished these “prophecies”, and why so many still do?
Prophecies are like conspiracy theories; they are both an opiate and a weapon to the despairing. They lessen the latter’s pain, and fortify them against any calamity that appears to them inexplicable, far too overwhelming, or manifestly undeserved. Prophecies enable the desperate to survive, and the forlorn to hope. For believers, a prophecy puts the crisis at hand within a fundamentally non-hostile, even comforting, context: God’s unfathomable plan for the humankind on earth. By providing a “rationale”, prophecies make any crisis appear “rational”, and thus humanly manageable – through peaceful piety, no doubt, but also through mundane efforts, including violence.
As seen above, the Ni’matullahi “prophecies” place every soulwrenching crisis faced by south Asian Muslims within a messianic narrative – the coming of the Mahdi – that is familiar to them and, being willed by god, requires no further accounting. Simultaneously, they introduce an element of hope too. Some saviour – “Habibullah”, the “Western King”, the Mahdi, Jesus – would eventually defeat the enemy. In that scheme of things, the “Western King” et al functioned as blank spaces that the believers fill in differently at different times. Shockingly, no believer seems to care that every such scenario of hope is actually very shortlived – the “prophesied” total victory of Islam does not lead to centuries of peace and human possibilities; on the contrary, it brings all human possibilities to an end in mere 40 years.
When Syed Ahmad Khan wrote, “Wahabis believe in no prophecy”, he tacitly acknowledged that most other Muslims did.71 It was as true in 1973 as it was in 1872, and as it is now. Qamar Islampuri thoroughly debunked Q2 and Q3 in 1973, but described Q1 as ilhami (“divinely inspired”). Now consider the following, culled from prominent Pakistani newspapers in just two months in 2010:
Seven centuries ago a strange man was born in the sub-continent: Shah Ni’mat Wali (sic). With respect to visions, he towers over others. Britain was then an insignificant island, but he prophesied the British take-over of India. Three centuries before Guru Nanak’s birth, he foretold the rise of the Sikhs.... Professor Ahmad Rafiq Akhtar is ...is a genius and a scholar, and also a wayfarer on the mystical path…In early 2000, he told the American ambassador totally out of the blue: “The world shall drown in innocent blood if George W Bush comes to power.”73 Logical and scholarly arguments have established that in the 81st year of Pakistan’s [existence] the crescent-and-green flag shall fly over New Delhi. Likes of the events that happened in the first six years [of Islam] in Medinah have already happened here, but what in Medinah took one year, has required a decade in Pakistan...The Battle of Badr took place in the second year of Hijra; here the war of September [1965] occurred in Pakistan’s second decade. [Badr] happened 17 months after Hijrat; our war occurred 17 years after the nation’s birth.74 I asked [Sarfaraz Shah], “Do you say these things just to give people some courage? For what is evident in Pakistan is most disheartening.” He replied, “Nature has a system and a design that are always visible to our eyes. But there is also a Will of Nature (sic). Intellectuals and analysts come to their conclusions by observing the System. But faqirs see the Will of Nature too, and according to it, inshallah, Pakistan will be a dominant power in coming years. Its time to rise again has come.”75
One may not find counterparts of the above in the pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post, but an hour’s channel surfing on cable TV in the US would remove any delusion that religious phantasmagoria has disappeared in the “Enlightened” world. It would also confirm that “prophecies” come useful to the powerful too. St John’s “Revelations”, Shah Ni’matullah Wali’s “Prophetic Poems”, Nostradamus’ “Divinations” – they are here to stay, and will not go away any time soon. Far too many human frailties find refuge in them, and too many human ambitions draw nourishment from their words."
God help Bangladesh 
