By William Darlymple - California Literary Review - Carlsbad, CA, U.S.A.Monday, April 23, 2007
"The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other".
(...)
Zafar’s poetry was deeply imbued with the Sufi ideals of love, which were regarded as much the surest route to a God who was seen to be located not in the heavens but deep within the human heart.
For if the world of the heart lay at the centre of Sufism, it also formed the cornerstone of the principal literary form in late Mughal Delhi—the ghazal, which derived its name from the Arabic words “talking to a woman about love.”
The love of the ghazal poet was ambiguous—it was rarely made entirely clear whether it was sacred or worldly love to which the poet referred. This ambiguity was deliberate, for just as the longing of the soul for union with God was believed to be as compelling and as all-embracing as the longing of the lover for the beloved, both loves could be carried to the point of insanity or what Sufis called fana—self-annihilation and immersion in the beloved.
In the eyes of the Sufi poets, this search for the God within liberated the seeker from the restrictions of narrowly orthodox Islam, encouraging the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its mystical essence. As Ghalib put it,
The object of my worship lies beyond perception’s reach;
For men who see, the Ka’ba is a compass, nothing more.
Look deeper, he tells the orthodox: it is you alone who cannot hear the music of His secrets.
Like many of his Delhi contemporaries, Ghalib could write profoundly religious poetry, yet was skeptical about literalist readings of the Muslim scriptures.
Typical were his bantering meditations on paradise, which he wrote in a letter to a friend: “In Paradise it is true that I shall drink at dawn the pure wine mentioned in the Koran,” he wrote,
but where in Paradise are the long walks with intoxicated friends in the night, or the drunken crowds shouting merrily?
Where shall I find there the intoxication of Monsoon clouds?
Where there is no Autumn how can Spring exist?
If the beautiful houris are always there, where will be the sadness of separation and the joy of union?
Where shall we find there a girl who flees away when we would kiss her?
In the same spirit in Ghalib’s poetry the orthodox Shaikh always represents narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy:
The Shaikh hovers by the tavern door,
But believe me, Ghalib,
I am sure I saw him slip in,
As I departed.
[A long excerpt from historical novel The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple can be read on California Literary Review: click on the title above.]
[Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775-1838) last of the Mughal Emperors;
for Urdu Poet Mirza Ghalib (d. 1869), see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirza_Ghalib]
"The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other".
(...)
Zafar’s poetry was deeply imbued with the Sufi ideals of love, which were regarded as much the surest route to a God who was seen to be located not in the heavens but deep within the human heart.
For if the world of the heart lay at the centre of Sufism, it also formed the cornerstone of the principal literary form in late Mughal Delhi—the ghazal, which derived its name from the Arabic words “talking to a woman about love.”
The love of the ghazal poet was ambiguous—it was rarely made entirely clear whether it was sacred or worldly love to which the poet referred. This ambiguity was deliberate, for just as the longing of the soul for union with God was believed to be as compelling and as all-embracing as the longing of the lover for the beloved, both loves could be carried to the point of insanity or what Sufis called fana—self-annihilation and immersion in the beloved.
In the eyes of the Sufi poets, this search for the God within liberated the seeker from the restrictions of narrowly orthodox Islam, encouraging the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its mystical essence. As Ghalib put it,
The object of my worship lies beyond perception’s reach;
For men who see, the Ka’ba is a compass, nothing more.
Look deeper, he tells the orthodox: it is you alone who cannot hear the music of His secrets.
Like many of his Delhi contemporaries, Ghalib could write profoundly religious poetry, yet was skeptical about literalist readings of the Muslim scriptures.
Typical were his bantering meditations on paradise, which he wrote in a letter to a friend: “In Paradise it is true that I shall drink at dawn the pure wine mentioned in the Koran,” he wrote,
but where in Paradise are the long walks with intoxicated friends in the night, or the drunken crowds shouting merrily?
Where shall I find there the intoxication of Monsoon clouds?
Where there is no Autumn how can Spring exist?
If the beautiful houris are always there, where will be the sadness of separation and the joy of union?
Where shall we find there a girl who flees away when we would kiss her?
In the same spirit in Ghalib’s poetry the orthodox Shaikh always represents narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy:
The Shaikh hovers by the tavern door,
But believe me, Ghalib,
I am sure I saw him slip in,
As I departed.
[A long excerpt from historical novel The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple can be read on California Literary Review: click on the title above.]
[Bahadur Shah Zafar (1775-1838) last of the Mughal Emperors;
for Urdu Poet Mirza Ghalib (d. 1869), see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirza_Ghalib]
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