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From The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition:

Kabīr was a North Indian mystic and poet (d. ca. 1448). Although ... regarded as one of the most influential saint-poets of medieval Northern India, there is very little authentic information concerning his life. We can reliably state that he was born in Benares to a family of low-caste Muslim weavers called d̲j̲ulāhās, probably in the opening years of the 9th/15th century. Beyond this, various hagiographies of Kabīr, depending on the authors’ sectarian affiliation, make competing claims that he was a Muslim Ṣūfī, a Hindu with liberal Vainava leanings or a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity who rejected institutionalised forms of both Islam and Hinduism.

Kabīr’s fame is based on the numerous couplets (dohās) and songs (padas) attributed to him and called Kabīrvāṇīs, or “words of Kabīr”. Written in a caustic colloquial style in a mediaeval Hindi dialect and sung in folk melodies, these compositions have been an integral part of oral religious literature in North India, being recited by Muslims and Hindus alike. Selections of Kabīr’s verses have been incorporated into the Ādi granth, the scripture of the Sikh community, as well as the Pāñčvāṇī, the hymnal of the Dādūpanthī sect. The Kabīr Panthīs, "the followers of the path of Kabīr", have a compilation of his poetry called the Bijāk. Since Kabīr’s verses, like most medieval Indian devotional poetry, were initially transmitted orally and recorded in writing only later, there are serious doubts concerning the authenticity of much of the corpus attributed to him.

Kabīr, who was influenced by various religious currents including forms of Ṣūfīsm and tantric yoga expounded by the Nāth yogis, is regarded as the pioneer poet of the sant movement that swept across North India in the 15th century. The sants, or poet-saints, were participants in a grass-roots religious reformation that rejected the worship of multiple deities in favour of an esoteric form of religious practice whose goal was union with the one attributeless (nirguṇa) God. They also questioned the efficacy of religious rituals and validity of scriptural authority. Expressing themselves in vernacular poems, the sants conceived of the human-divine relationship in terms of viraha, or yearning, longing love. Union with the Divine could be attained by anyone, regardless of caste, through meditation on the divine name and with the guidance of a guru.

In poems attributed to him, Kabīr is particularly harsh in his attacks on the representatives of institutionalised religion, the Hindu brāhmin and the Muslim mullā or ḳāḍī, whose bookish learning and rituals he considered entirely useless in the spiritual quest. After his death, some of Kabīr’s disciples organised themselves into a sect, the Kabīr Panth. Notwithstanding Kabīr’s anti-institutional and anti-ritualistic stance, at the sect’s central monastry in Benares, both monks and lay people engage in a ritualised recitation of Kabīr’s poems and make offerings to an image of their master.

(Ali S. Asani)

(Qur'an 48:4)