The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El Yezdi by Richard F. Burton
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Richard F. Burton >> The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El Yezdi
Haji Abdu then proceeds to show that Faith is an accident of
birth. One of his omitted distichs says:--
Race makes religion; true! but aye
upon the Maker acts the made,
A finite God, and infinite sin,
in lieu of raising man, degrade.
In a manner of dialogue he introduces the various races each
fighting to establish its own belief. The Frank (Christian)
abuses the Hindu, who retorts that he is of Mlenchha, mixed or
impure, blood, a term applied to all non-Hindus. The same is done
by Nazarene and Mohammedan; by the Confucian, who believes in
nothing, and by the Soofi, who naturally has the last word. The
association of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph with the Trinity,
in the Roman and Greek Churches, makes many Moslems conclude that
Christians believe not in three but in five Persons. So an
Englishman writes of the early Fathers, "They not only said that
3 = 1, and that 1 = 3: they professed to explain how that curious
arithmetical combination had been brought about. The Indivisible
had been divided, and yet was not divided: it was divisible, and
yet it was indivisible; black was white and white was black; and
yet there were not two colours but one colour; and whoever did
not believe it would be damned." The Arab quotation runs in the
original:--
_Ahsanu 'l-Makani l' il-Fata 'l-Jehannamu_
The best of places for (the generous) youth is Gehenna.
Gehenna, alias Jahim, being the fiery place of eternal
punishment. And the second saying, _Al- nar wa la 'l-'Ar_--"Fire
(of Hell) rather than Shame,"--is equally condemned by the
Koranist. The Gustakhi (insolence) of Fate is the expression of
Umar-i-Khayyam (St. xxx):--
What, without asking hither hurried _whence?_
And, without asking _whither_ hurried hence!
Oh many a cup of this forbidden wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence.
Soofistically, the word means "the coquetry of the beloved one,"
the divinae particula aurae. And the section ends with Pope's:--
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right.
CONCLUSION
Here the Haji ends his practical study of mankind. The image of
Destiny playing with men as pieces is a view common amongst
Easterns. His idea of wisdom is once more Pope's:--
And all our knowledge is ourselves to know.
(Essay IV. 398.)
Regret, _i.e._, repentance, was one of the forty-two deadly sins
of the Ancient Egyptians. "Thou shalt not consume thy heart,"
says the Ritual of the Dead, the negative justification of the
soul or ghost (Lepsius "Alteste Texte des Todtenbuchs"). We have
borrowed competitive examination from the Chinese; and, in these
morbid days of weak introspection and retrospection, we might
learn wisdom from the sturdy old Khemites. When he sings "Abjure
the Why and seek the How," he refers to the old Scholastic
difference of the _Demonstratio propter quid_ (why is a thing?),
as opposed to _Demonstratio quia_ (_i.e._ that a thing is). The
"great Man" shall end with becoming deathless, as Shakespeare
says in his noble sonnet:--
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then!
Like the great Pagans, the Haji holds that man was born good,
while the Christian, "tormented by the things divine," cleaves to
the comforting doctrine of innate sinfulness. Hence the universal
tenet, that man should do good in order to gain by it here or
hereafter; the "enlightened selfishness," that says, Act well and
get compound interest in a future state. The allusion to the
"Theist-word" apparently means that the votaries of a personal
Deity must believe in the absolute foreknowledge of the
Omniscient in particulars as in generals. The Rule of Law
emancipates man; and its exceptions are the gaps left by his
ignorance. The wail over the fallen flower, etc., reminds us of
the Pulambal (Lamentations) of the Anti-Brahminical writer,
"Pathira-Giriyar." The allusion to Maya is from Das Kabir:--
Maya mare, na man mare, mar mar gaya, sarir.
Illusion dies, the mind dies not though dead and gone
the flesh.
Nirwana, I have said, is partial extinction by being merged in
the Supreme, not to be confounded with Pari-nirwana or absolute
annihilation. In the former also, dying gives birth to a new
being, the embodiment of _karma_ (deeds), good and evil, done in
the countless ages of transmigration.
Here ends my share of the work. On the whole it has been
considerable. I have omitted, as has been seen, sundry stanzas,
and I have changed the order of others. The text has nowhere been
translated verbatim; in fact, a familiar European turn has been
given to many sentiments which were judged too Oriental. As the
metre adopted by Haji Abdu was the Bahr Tawil (long verse), I
thought it advisable to preserve that peculiarity, and to fringe
it with the rough, unobtrusive rhyme of the original.
Vive, valeque!