3. The Human Spirit
“When you see two of them meet together as
friends, they are one, and at the same time six hundred thousand,” Mawlana
Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-73) wrote about true mentors, some eighty years after Nezami.
“Their numbers are in the likeness of waves: the wind will have brought them
into number. The Sun, which is the spirits, became separated in the windows,
which are bodies. When you gaze on the Sun’s disk, it is itself one, but the
one who is screened by the bodies is in some doubt. Separation is in the animal
spirit, the human spirit is one essence.” Can we say this about Nezami and Shakespeare, and perhaps also
about Rumi, Goethe and Iqbal?
The following note appeared in a Sufi
magazine published in Urdu from Meeruth, a city in India, on August 1, 1913:
Dr. Sheikh Muhammad Iqbal dreamed that Rumi
was commanding him to write a masnavi. Iqbal replied, “That genre
reached its perfection with you.” Rumi said, “No, you should also write.” Iqbal
stated respectfully, “You command that the self must be extinguished but I reckon
the self to be something that should be sustained.” Rumi replied, “My intended
meaning is also the same as what you have understood.”
He [Iqbal] found himself reciting the
following verses as he woke up, and then he began to write them down…
Those verses were in Persian, which was the
language of Rumi, but the title of Iqbal’s book alluded to Nezami, who had
called his first work The Treasury of Secrets. Iqbal named the first
part of his masnavi ‘The Secrets of the Self’ and the masnavi itself Secrets
and Mysteries.
In the preface, Iqbal repeated claims that
were the trade mark of Nezami, such as that his work contained means for
spiritual excellence as well as worldly power and that many poets were born
after they died, coming back like roses growing from the dust of their tombs
(Nezami had compared such poets with fish under water, raising their heads when
their names were called). In the works of Iqbal, several characters from Nezami
were going to reappear in modern settings – Khizr, Layla, Qais, Pervez and
Farhad, among others. Just as Nezami had employed the name of his son, Muhammad
bin Ilyas, to represent posterity, so Iqbal was going to address the coming
generations through his son (and may have had this end in mind even as he named
the child in real life: Javid literally meant “the eternal” or even “eternity,”
the subject of Nezami’s last epic).
The poem about Shakespeare, which Iqbal
sent for inclusion in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, is found as an
unfinished draft in a notebook used by the poet around this time. The finished version does not exist in facsimile. The poem may have
been completed just shortly before being sent to Sir Israel Golancz in 1915 or
1916, and written on a paper that did not come back either from the scribe who
scribed it for being sent to England or from the friend who translated it. In
any case, Iqbal had been “visited” by Rumi in his dream by the time he sent the
poem to Sir Israel.
The original in Urdu, since it has fourteen
lines, obviously divides itself into seven couplets (four in the first stanza
and three in the second). If translated faithfully, they trace the development
of Prospero’s art (and Shakespeare’s) through the same major conflicts that
appear in the chronological storyline of The Tempest, the relationship
becoming increasingly visible as the poem progresses.
Shakespeare
The exile of Prospero
The river’s flow mirrors the red glow of
dawn,
The quiet of the evening mirrors the
evening’s song;
The liberation of Ariel
The rose‑leaf mirrors spring’s
beautiful cheek;
The chamber of the cup mirrors the coquettish
wine;
Miranda’s coming of age
Beauty mirrors Truth, the heart mirrors
Beauty;
The beauty of your speech mirrors the human
heart.
Ferdinand’s courtship
Life finds perfection in your sky‑soaring
thought:
Was your luminous nature the goal of Life?
Gonzalo’s awakening
When the eye looked around to see you,
It saw the sun hidden in its own radiance.
Stephano’s plot
You were hidden from the eyes of the world,
But with your own eyes you saw the world
exposed and bare.
The Breaking of the Staff
Nature guards its mysteries so jealously,
It will never again create one who knows so
many secrets.
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