Welcome to this week’s 5BF: Genghis Khan and his legacy, a taste of reading Marcel Proust, Iqbal’s infamous complaint to God and its answer, a Sufi kalaam, and more…
1 – what I read
The Mongol Empire by John Man – Man’s detailed book about
Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire that started from him is a great, if a bit
tedious, source for everyone to learn from. One would learn how Genghis was but
a beginning, and what followed after his death determined the fate of the
dominant Mongolians; and one would learn how their leniency with letting the
nations continue their culture, given that they adhere to Mongol Empire, left
no trace of their empire on today’s world.
2 – this week’s articles
Young Girls @newyorker.com – a short piece of Proust’s
writing, publicized posthumously by his publisher, ‘Young girls’ gives the
reader a taste of how it is like to read Proust: his patiently long and vivid
description, his ability to capture elusive emotions, and the palpable emotions
one feels off of the pages.
Can people change? @brainpickings.org – Maria Popova brings
her gathered knowledge from Hannah Arendt, Alain de Botton, and Elisabeth
Kubler Rose on the topic of painful relationships and one’s naïve and toxic
hope of believing the other party might change, which stops us from doing the
right thing: end the relationship.
3 – Iqbal’s Shikwa and Jawab e Shikwa (Complaint and Answer
to the Complaint)
One of the most revered and revolutionary poet and
philosopher of the subcontinent, Alama Iqbal wrote ‘The Complaint’ in 1912, where
he stood up to God and presented, with the most apt and exact of words wrapped
in beautiful rhymes, his complaints to God about the downfall of Muslim nation.
A few years on, he followed his Complaint with the ‘Answer to the Complaint’,
after the backlash he received for having blasphemed. Both these collection of
‘kalaams’ show the grandiosity of mankind and his abilities to do astonishing
things. For I have just recently begun to ponder on these collections, I can
only wonder what it did to the oppressed Muslims living in the United India under
British Raj, and also what it can do to Muslims of today, oppressed by their
own blindness and lack of direction.
4 – what I am listening to
‘Maikada’ by Muhammad Sami – beautifully sung by Muhammad Sami, this is the reprised version of the Sufi ghazal, Maikada, written in the earlier twentieth century, by Indian poet ‘Jigar Moradabadi’. Parts rebellion to Islamic orthodoxy, parts confession of one’s unusual ways of faith, this has got me hooked for the past week.
5 – this week’s quote
"You cannot expect somebody who loves you to treat you less
cruelly than he would treat himself."
Hannah Arendt