THIS is in continuation of my previous column where I had singled out two novels of the past, which seem to have acquired a relevance to our present times. One is Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s Taubatun Nusooh, which was discussed in that column. The other is Maulana Abdul Halim Sharar’s novel Firdaus-e-Bareen, the English translation of which has recently been published by Oxford University Press, Karachi, under the title Paradise of the assassins. It has been translated by Tariq Mahmood and edited with chronology and notes by Amina Azfar. And it carries an exhaustive introduction to the novel and to the author by Asif Farrakhi.
Asif Farrakhi appears very unhappy with the critics, who, in his opinion, have been unjust to Sharar in the assessment of his novels. And it really is the case. With the kind of novels he has written, he deserves a better treatment. However, he has to his credit a single novel, Firdaus-e-Bareen, which had rightly been singled out as one different and better than what he had been writing in the name of novel. And now it has acquired a relevance to the terroristic times we are living in. In fact, it is now that the novel has earned a contemporary relevance, for the readers in times of Sharar the situation depicted here was a story from the past. The readers of our times will have a feeling of its coincidence with what is happening now.
However, I need not dwell on it. Asif has already highlighted this aspect of the novel. He quotes Keats saying:
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect and adds: “Invoking paradise, the hour of the assassin is with us again.”
But is it not something we least expected from Sharar and is it not what has encouraged Asif to counteract what he regards injustice on the part of the critics to Sharar. Asif, while doing this, has quoted him saying in one of his essays that India does not need novels suited to the European taste; instead it requires those ‘romances’ where the people can be shown the noble deeds of their fellow countrymen or their religious brethren, and through which they could be made to recall the glorious past.
So Sharar twisted the form of novel in accordance with his own taste, which had been nourished by Tilism-i-Hosh Ruba. And he conceived Muslim history in accordance with the emotional needs of himself and the likes of him. It was a romanticized version of history which was likely to lead to self-delusion instead of self-examination. This was how he developed a fictional pattern designated as Islamic tarikhi novel. Here the novelist aims at highlighting all what appears to him noble and glorious in the Muslim history. Its heroes are nobleness incarnate, fighting bravely with the non-believers. They are acutely conscious of the evil outside, knowing no evil within.
But Firdaus-e-Bareen is a breakaway from this tradition of Islamic tarikhi novel. Here is a chapter of Muslim history, which tells a different kind of story, the portrayal of a malady erupting from within. And how strange that in this novel no Muslim hero emerges to wage ‘jehad’ against this evil. A foreign tyrant Halaku Khan invades and crushes it:
Pasban milgai Kabai kau sanam khanai sai
How could Sharar afford writing such a novel? It negates his concept of Islamic tarikhi novel.
Perhaps Sharar was thinking in a different way. Hasan Bin Sabbah and his followers may be the product of Muslim history, but in the eyes of Sharar they don’t form part of Muslim Millat as they have been condemned as a sect known as Firqa-i-Batinya. When a group of Muslims is condemned for their beliefs, it may or may not be banished in a formal way, but in the eyes of orthodoxy it falls in the category of condemned sects and stands beyond the pale of Millat-i-Islamia. For Sharar, Hasan Bin Sabbah and his followers are not just a group of hated assassins and terrorists in the ordinary sense. They are a condemned sect deserving no more to be treated as part of Muslim Millat. Seen in this way, the inner evil easily turns into an external evil.
But a novel doesn’t always proceed in accordance with the intentions of the novelist. A novel, while in progress, develops its own logic, tempting the novelist to say much more than what had been intended and consciously thought of. Then comes in the reader, who is least interested in the personal beliefs and opinions of the author. He is solely concerned with what the novel says to him. And no doubt Firdaus-e-Bareen says much more than Sharar had intended to say.
The novel is provocative enough to give rise to certain disquieting questions. For instance, why is it that the Muslim heroes, who are seen in Islamic tarikhi novels fighting so valiantly with the external enemy often compelling them to vanquish, miserably fail when confronted with the internal enemy, the tyrants and the assassins. Why was it that the whole Muslim world felt helpless in face of the assassins. It was left for a foreign invader Halaku Khan, as the novel shows, to invade Fort Almut and crush the assassins.
THIS is in continuation of my previous column where I had singled out two novels of the past, which seem to have acquired a relevance to our present times. One is Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s Taubatun Nusooh, which was discussed in that column. The other is Maulana Abdul Halim Sharar’s novel Firdaus-e-Bareen, the English translation of which has recently been published by Oxford University Press, Karachi, under the title Paradise of the assassins. It has been translated by Tariq Mahmood and edited with chronology and notes by Amina Azfar. And it carries an exhaustive introduction to the novel and to the author by Asif Farrakhi.
