Cunningham (1849) has not understood who this Karun was and took it to be a corruption of Harun from the famous Harun el Rashid, which cannot be the case. (5) It may be that this composition takes Guru Nanak Dev Ji to a realm outside of history, into legends and myths. Some of the hagiographies speak about his teacher named Pir Jalal who was a renowned Islamic scholar from Egypt, and who could have been a contemporary of Guru Nanak.
 

         Rattan Singh Bhangu in his conversation with Captain Murray does not take this myth to be  literal or historical:

         Dohira. After hearing my narration, Murry remarked, that all his doubts about Guru Nanak had been removed. But how did Baba Nanak hold a discussion with Emperor Karun? He certainly had his doubts about it. (1)
         Chaupai. The Emperor Karun’s empire existed thousands of years ago, so how could Baba Nanak have a dialogue with that emperor. Then I gave an explanation to Murray, that there was an anomaly about this dialogue. (2) Baba Nanak himself never narrated this episode in his own words, but some foolish chronicler had written it as a dialogue. Later on another more irresponsible writer further expanded it, and made further interpolations into this episode. (3) They neither tallied the chronology of years between the two personages, nor did they calculate the time lag between the two events. Since such discussions between saints were quite prevalent in those days, some odd writer had recorded it as a discussion. (4) They could not differentiate between an episode and a discussion, as the foolish writers could not ascertain the real facts. I regard the first chronicler as an irresponsible romantic fellow, and count the latter writers in the same category of romantics. As some idiots mistake a dried empty beehive for a worn out moon splinter, much as some others regard an oil- seed crusher as God’s eye lashes’ colouring stick. (5) Dohira. Although there is a gap of thousands of years separating, the times of Muslim emperor and Baba Nanak. But this myth about Karun’s forty heaps of wealth, Had been written time and again by these writers.6. There had been an emperor by the name of Karun, Baba Nanak had just referred to Emperor Karun’s myth. And how he had piled up forty heaps of coins, and how he died empty handed even after amassing such a huge wealth. (7) There was an ancient prophet by the name of Amar, Who had met and blessed Emperor Karun. But the foolish writers have attributed (6) his incident, as a dialogue held between Karun and Baba Nanak. (8) Bhangu has a very strong argument, so what we can say is that this letter was given to a King as was the custom, which includes moral advice with reference to the legendary Karun, but the King himself could not have been called this name, which could be an error and interpolation by early Sikh writers, which Bhangu rightly makes note of. As he suggests it could be dialogue about King Karun rather than a meeting which is also a possibility. The style of the writing is generally different from most of the compositions in the primary scripture of the Sikh canon, the Adi Sri Guru Granth Sahib. The language in the Nasīhatanāmā is called ‘Turki’ and is an idiomatic language, based on Punjabi and Lehndi,