"Sa‘id
Halim Pasha"
EAST AND WEST
| For Westerners intelligence is the stuff of life, | |
| for Easterners love is the mystery of all being. | |
| Only through love intelligence gets to know God, | |
| love’s labours find firm grounding in intelligence; | |
| when love is companioned by intelligence | 1105 |
| it has the power to design another world. | |
| Then rise and draw the design of a new world, | |
| mingle together love with intelligence. | |
| The flame of the Europeans is damped down, | |
| their eyes are perceptive, but their hearts are dead; | 1110 |
| they have been sore smitten by their own swords, | |
| hunted down and slaughtered, themselves the hunters. | |
| Look not for fire and intoxication in their vine; | |
| not into their heavens shall rise a new age. | |
| It is from your fire that the glow of life comes, | 1115 |
| and it is your task to create the new world. | |
| Mustafa Kemal, who sang of a great renewal, | |
| said the old image must be cleansed and polished; | |
| yet the vitality of the Kaaba cannot be made new | |
| if a new Lat and Manat from Europe enter its shrine. | 1120 |
| No, the Turks have no new melody in their lute, | |
| what they call new is only the old tune of Europe; | |
| no fresh breath has entered into their breast, | |
| no design of a new world is in their mind. | |
| Turkey perforce goes along with the existing world, | 1125 |
| melted like wax in the flame of the world we know. | |
| Originality is at the roots of all creation, | |
| never by imitation shall life be reformed; | |
| The living heart, creator of ages and epochs, | |
| that soul is little enamoured of imitation: | 1130 |
| if you possess the spirit of a true Mussulman | |
| examine your own conscience, and the Koran— | |
| a hundred new worlds he within its verses, | |
| whole centuries are involved in its moments; | |
| one world of it suffices for the present age— | 1135 |
| seize it, if the heart in your breast grasps truth.. | |
| A believing servant himself is a sign of God, | |
| every world to his breast is as a garment; | |
| and when one world grows old upon his bosom, | |
| The Koran gives him another world! | 1140 |
Zinda-Rud
| The barque of us terrestrials has no helmsman, |
| no one knows where the Koran’s world lies. |
Afghani
| It is a world lost now in our breast, | |
| a world awaiting yet the command ‘Arise!’ | |
| A world without distinction of race and colour, | 1145 |
| its evening is brighter than Europe’s dawn; | |
| a world cleansed of monarchs and of slaves, | |
| a world unbounded, like the believer’s heart, | |
| a world so fair, that the effluence of one glance | |
| planted the seed of it in Omar’s soul. | 1150 |
| Eternal it is, the impact of it ever new, | |
| ever new the leaf and fruit of its sure foundations; | |
| inwardly it is anxious not of change, | |
| outwardly, every moment is revolution. | |
| Behold, that world lies within your own heart; | 1155 |
| now I will tell you of its firm foundations. |