Author: mara.ahmed

Iqbal, Is the Sky Yours or Mine?

Allama Iqbal

Muhammad Iqbal, 1877-1938, was a poet of Urdu and Farsi, philosopher, sufi, and revolutionary, who combined in his works the traditions of Al-Ghazzali, Rumi, Ibn-e-Khaldun, Ahmad Sirhindi and Shah Walilullah. While he understood the power of the West, had read the Western philosophers, and was familiar with the advances in physics, unlike Syed Ahmad Khan, he remained firmly rooted in Islamic tradition, and refused to re-examine the Islamicate through Orientalist texts. He was criticial of the West’s excessive emphasis on reason, its materialism, and the depredations of capitalism. Many decades before Frantz Fanon and Aime Cezaire, he was the deep thinker and stirring poet of self-discovery, urging peoples of color to regain their dignity, to dig deep into their own traditions in order to overcome, and transcend, the materialism, racism, excessive rationalism, and the West’s abuse of power and its own principles.

This ghazal is a translation from Wings of Gabriel, the best collection of Iqbal’s Urdu poetry. From time to time, I will be presenting translations from this collection.

??? ?? ?? ??? ???? ????? ???? ?? ?? ????

translation by M. Shahid Alam

If the stars are topsy-turvy: is the sky yours or mine?
Should this fret me? Is the world yours or mine?

If Heaven lacks the tug, the heat of love’s adventure,
Dear Lord, this cosmic enigma is yours: not mine.

On that first dawn of creation, how dared he to defy
Your decree. Was he your emissary: or was he mine?

Muhammad is yours, Gabriel and the Qur’an too.
But these melodic words: are they yours or mine?

It’s this star, scintillating, that lights your creation.
Whose loss is it – the fall of Man? Is it yours or mine?

– M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston.

Anish Kapoor at the Goog

If you think that you have seen ’emptiness’ as that hole at the heart of the material’s mass, surrounded by a planished facade, then think again. To see the void as a contained negative space indented in the material is only to apprehend its physicality. To figure the depth of the void as providing a perspectival absence within the frame or the genre is to linger too long with the pedagogy of manufacture or the technology of taste. The practice of ‘true making’ occurs only when the material and the non-material tangentially touch. The truly made thing pushes us decisively beyond the illustrational, the ‘look of the void’; the sign of emptiness expands the limits of available space.

Gallery here.

Obama ordered US air strikes on Yemen

US President Barack Obama personally issued the order for US air strikes in Yemen last Thursday which killed scores of civilians, including women and children. Local officials and witnesses in the area of Mahsad, the site of the heaviest US bombardment, put the number of those killed at more than 60 and said the dead were mostly civilians. They denied that the target was an al Qaeda stronghold. Full article.

Made in Pakistan – Scenes From 2009

An interesting film, albeit limited by its unrelenting focus on the middle class. But it was the Q&A that proved most illuminating about Pakistani society. Why was it only about Lahore, demanded one Islamabad questioner (irritated perhaps, by a gem of a putdown in the film that if one student had nothing positive to contribute in Lahore, he should leave and settle for an ordinary degree in Islamabad). Unfazed, the director, Nasir Khan, proffered a disarming excuse: that he had no money to travel. What could he do, he shrugged. Your average Taliban is 17, lean and married. He is 33, overweight, overworked and still unmarried. That got a laugh. Full article.

US steps up drone attacks, assassinations in AfPak “surge”

The Obama administration has sharply escalated the drone attacks, launching more than twice as many over the past year as the Bush administration carried out in its last year in office. The secretive nature of the CIA program is designed in large part to obscure the horrific toll in civilian lives inflicted through the firing of Hellfire missiles into Pakistani villages. As with virtually all of these attacks, the US media parroted unnamed intelligence officials in claiming that the victims of the latest missile strike were all “militants,” without any corroboration of who had been killed. The Lahore newspaper The News, citing figures supplied by Pakistani officials, reported in April that 687 civilians had been killed in approximately 60 drone strikes that had been carried out since January 2008. Given that fatality rate, with nearly 30 drone attacks having been launched since, the number of Pakistani civilians slaughtered in this fashion could easily have topped 1,000. Full article.

Umrao Jaan- In aankhon ki masti ke

UMRAO JAAN ADA is an Urdu novel by Mirza Hadi Ruswa first published in 1899. It is considered the first Urdu novel by many and tells the story of a real life courtesan and poetess by the same name from 19th century Lucknow. As the novel suggests, the story of Umrao Jaan was recounted by her to the author, when he happe…ned to meet her during a mushairah (poetry gathering) in Lucknow. On listening to her couplets, the author along with Munshi Ahmad, a novel and poetry enthusiast present at the gathering, convinces Umrao Jaan to share her life story with them. In the course of time, Mirza starts noting down her story and shares the text with her. She agrees to correct it. Thus the novel is written in first person as a memoir.

The book was first published by Munshi Gulab Singh and Sons Press in Lucknow in 1899. Incidentally, Umrao Jaan Ada herself also published a novel titled ‘Fasan-e-Ruswa’, which describes the love story of Mirza Hadi Ruswa with a French woman Sophia Augustan. Umrao Jaan Ada became popular in the courts of the Nawab of Awadh for its Urdu poetry and composition. It is known for its elaborate and insightful portrayal of mid-19th Century Lucknow – its decadent society, and the moral hypocrisy of a patriarchal system where Umrao Jaan becomes the symbol of a nation, attracts many suitors but everyone is only looking to exploit her.

From Audre Lorde – Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Those of us who stand outside of this society’s conception of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference– those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older– know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.