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THE HINDU online
Sunday, April 7, 2002
 
 


Literary Review 

 The Islam of Urdu poetry 
 
 

Terrorism and chauvinism are not exclusive to any one religion. And there is more than one Islam, just as there is more than one America. The Islam found in humanist Urdu poetry is very different from the Islam as practised by the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, says RALPH RUSSELL. 
 
 
 

THERE are millions of people who now think that our enemy is not only Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, but Islam itself. It isn't. Edward Said wrote in an article published immediately after September 11 that there is more than one Islam (and more than one America). Indeed there is, and it is on this that I want to concentrate here. 

In Urdu poetry, there is an Islam that runs clean counter to the Islam of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. My profession as a university teacher of Urdu for more than 50 years has given me abundant opportunity to study its literature and form friendships with many of its mainly Muslim writers and scholars. Urdu literature is, for the most part, the work of Muslims and portrays the life of the Muslims of the Subcontinent, but it is rarely concerned with propaganda for Islam, and where it is, it is for an Islam as different from the Islam of the fundamentalists as chalk is from cheese. The 18th-century Urdu poet Mir said 

Go to the mosque; stand knocking at the door 
Live all your days with drunkards in their den 
Do anything you want to do, my friend 
But do not seek to harm your fellow men. 
I am not a Muslim. I became a convinced atheist at the age of 15 and have remained one for all my subsequent 68 years. So I am "against" Islam (and Hinduism, and Christianity and every other religion). What I am most emphatically not against is Muslims and Hindus and  followers of other creeds. Nor am I against all religious tenets. As a humanist, I wholeheartedly support all those tenets which accord with those of humanism. Urdu poetry does this. The most popular part of Urdu poetry is the ghazal, which, thanks largely to Hindi films, is loved by millions of non-Muslims and millions of non-Urdu speakers. 

It deserves to be. Its message is one of vigorous humanism and of loathing and contempt for fundamentalism. It has a long pedigree. Its classical forebear was Persian, as Latin was the classical forbear of the languages of Western Europe, and already in the 13th century the great Persian poet Sadi was declaring: 

The religious path is nothing but the service of humanity. 
Hafiz a century later wrote: 
Do not distress your fellow men and do what else you will. 
For in my holy law there is no other sin than this. 
Mir, as we have seen, echoes Hafiz's words, and has many other verses in the same vein: 
What have the angels got to do with man?
The highest rank belongs to him alone. 
And, 
Man, formed of clay, gave lustre to this mirror. 
None would have looked into it but for him. 
"This mirror" being the universe, which is the mirror of God's beauty. Ghalib, still probably the most popular Urdu poet in India, wrote a century later,
The object of creation was mankind and nothing else. 
We are the point round which the seven compasses revolve. 
The seven compasses meaning the seven skies, whose revolution determines our fate. And this is not "just poetry". In one of his letters  he writes, "I hold all mankind to be my kin and look upon all men — Muslim, Hindu, Christian — as my brothers, no matter what others may think." Hali, half a century later, wrote,
The first lesson of the Book of Guidance was 
The whole human race is God's family. 
In a country where Hindus greatly outnumber Muslims, the ghazal poet stresses that Hindus are as much members of the family as he is. All true lovers of God are a single community, regardless of the name by which they call Him. Akbar Ilahabadi in the first decades of the 20th century writes: 
His radiance fills the kaba, He lies hidden in the temple. 
It is to Him we cry, whether as Allah or as Ram. 
And Iqbal, by far the most popular Urdu poet of the 20th Century, says: 
The infidel with a wakeful heart bowing before his idol 
Is better than the religious Muslim asleep in the mosque. 
And so on, so far as I am aware, to the present day, although I am not very familiar with the ghazal poetry of the latter part of the 20th century and so have confined myself mainly to the earlier classical poets. To the Muslim mystic, whose mouthpiece the ghazal poet is, the formalities of religion are unimportant. Love of God and of God's human creation is all. In his vocabulary the shaikh is the personification of fundamentalist doctrines and his colleague the vaiz — the preacher  — the isseminator of them. (And the shaikh has his counterpart in the Hindu Brahmin.) Keep away from both, says Mir: 
Mir, quit the company of shaikh and Brahmin 
And mosque and temple too — leave them behind. 
From Mir's time onwards both shaikh and preacher have been the object of ridicule and contempt. Mir writes: 
If pilgrimage could make a man a man 
Then all the world might make the pilgrimage 
But shaikhji is just back, and look at him — 
An ass he went: an ass he has returned. 
The man is such a dunce that he cannot even understand what Mir is telling him: 
Mir's every word has meaning beyond meaning 
More than a worthless shaikh can understand. 
The preacher too comes under attack 
I grant you, sir, the preacher is an angel.
To be a man, now — that's more difficult. 
Not only Urdu but all the other languages of the largely Muslim peoples of the subcontinent of which I have knowledge — Pushtu, Punjabi, and Sindhi — carry the same message. To which, regrettably, one must add that most of them like this message but don't allow it to have much impact on their daily lives — rather like Christians who have for centuries sung the praises of God because "He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek", but have no sympathy with those who seriously commit themselves to exalting the humble and meek. And of course the shaikhs are still playing their accustomed role of intimidating those who do not toe their line. 

Non-Muslims, particularly those who are familiar with this humanist Islam, must do all we can to make our compatriots familiar with humanist Islam and deeply appreciative of it. People who value the Hindu tradition of bhakti and love the forceful poetry of Kabir should have no difficulty in this, since that tradition is exactly the same. Peoples with a long Christian tradition too should find no difficulty, since the message of Islamic humanism is exactly the same as the message of Christianity. The Bible tells them (Galatians, 5,14), "For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And St. Augustine's succinct "Love, and do what you will", uncannily prefigures the couplet of Hafiz which I quoted above. And while they are about it, both Hindus and Christians would do well to reflect too that they have a fundamentalism nearer home, a bigoted Hindu or a bigoted Christian fundamentalism, which need to be combated with the same zeal as Muslim fundamentalism further afield. 

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Ralph Russell is an eminent Urdu scholar and translator and the author of numerous books on Urdu literature.