LITERARY NOTES: Unique work on Nobel Laureates

When one thinks of Syed Baqar Naqvi's important work Nobel Adabiat one cannot withhold one's surprise & gratitude to a work which is itself as remarkable as the idea behind the Nobel prizes. Syed Baqar Naqvi's work Nobel Adabiat is the first authorised publication which carries the citations, welcoming speeches & acceptance speeches of Nobel Prize Winners for literature spanning the 20th century from 1901 to 2000.
The Nobel Foundation is also to be congratulated that it allowed the Urdu language to enjoy the distinction of having the proceedings of Nobel Prize for literature Laureates' speeches in Urdu which no other language of South Asia or the Middle East has been able to achieve.
Congratulations, Mr Naqvi! He is a top notcher in insurance sector of Pakistan. It was a Herculean effort to translate the Nobel Prize proceedings. It took more than 10 years to do it. Mr Naqvi's translation sounds so authentic & close to Urdu idiom that one would like to believe that the proceedings were held in Urdu. I know that it is only a wish which doesn't promise to be true in any case. However the cosy, fervent translation deserves a more fervent way of admiration than the one I have preferred.
One finds in the acceptance speeches of 100 Nobel Laureates of Literature different ways of presentations of literature as a hobby horse, profession, addiction or a religion. Everyone included in this list of great achievers has enriched us with distinctive hundreds ways of what literature meant to the ones who reached the summit of their life-long achievements being pushed from one corner of the globe to the all world readership or from one language to the international horizon. The moment they are awarded the Nobel Prize they assume the status of a star that has to be taken seriously from the connoisseurs of literature all over the world. Race, language, religion & faith become irrelevant even for all those who attach some or all importance to these or any one of these aspects. The Nobel Laureate at once became a person who commanded respect & admiration.
Syed Baqar Naqvi had also earlier tried to present the profile of Alfred Nobel himself in a book but he was not satisfied with dishing out the biography of the Founder of Nobel Prize. He tried to do something big and no doubt the procedural copyright permission from the Nobel Foundation to have an Urdu version of the Nobel Prize citations & winner's speeches required money, time and above all patience.
Now anyone who needs to know what did a Nobel Prize winner say about his contribution in particular and the relevance of literature for the development of human kind could satisfy him through this book. The Nobel Laureate may belong to any school of thought and the way he put forth his thought in words will always be a contribution itself.
What is striking in the book is that it begins with the Nobel Prize winner for the year 2000 and goes back to the winner of 1901 to complete the circle. The reader has not been enlightened on this format. Moreover it would have been far better had the English version of the name had been given along with the names in Urdu. The names of the year could all be given in front of the name of the recipient. In this way the present format could be more reader-friendly.
Anyhow Syed Baqar Naqvi has not confined himself to the information provided by the Nobel Foundation. He has dug out many details from different websites and even consulted representative works of the authors to add some more spice to the narration. For example in the case of poets he has translated one or two poems of some poets to enable the readers have an idea as to what make readers aware of the particular features of a poet's expression.
Syed Baqar Naqvi's 'Nobel Adabiyat' is a book of reference for lovers of literature. They will be learning as to what made the Nobel Laureates worthy of the honour which was bestowed on them.
How interesting is the list of the great names in literature about whom we can know all that made them great and how modestly. They wore the crown of excellence on their heads.
Names such as Gunter Grass, Sean Henney, Nadia Gordimer, Octavio Paz, Naguib Mehfouz, Joseph Brodsky, Wole Soyinka, William Golding, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isaac Boshevis Singh, Saul Bellow, Pablo Neruda, Jean Paul Sartre, Boris Pasternak, Pearl S Buck, Andre Gide, T.S Eliot, Winston Churchill, Albert Camus, Luigi Pirandello, John Galsworthy, Thomas Mann, Anatole France, Romain Rolland, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Rabindra Nath Tagore, Sinclair Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, Christian Mathias Theodore & Sully Prodhume attract more of our attention in this hemisphere. The last one was the first Laureate to receive the prize in 1901, the year of its inception.
Isn't it really gratifying moment to read their profound Acceptance Speeches at the time of receiving the Nobel Prize?
Every Nobel Laureate has spoken differently from the others and one realises that there were innumerable ways of learning their abiding imprints on literature. The 100 topnotchers of literature decorating this book are more than enough to suggest that living with his book amounts to living with the Muse of literature itself.
Qurratulain Tahira:
No other poet suffered so much for her conviction as Qurratulain Tahira did. Her poetry and life explain each other so well that she has become the universal symbol of resistance to compulsion in religion.
The way she wrote the poetry of faith - and the way that poetry has become synonymous with the poetry of love - is something which is destined to go down in the annals of Iran, nay in the annals of the world. All the great Orientalists and lovers of poetry and wisdom marvel at the tenacity of Qurratulain to live out her conviction.
She was not only a great poet but a great orator, an uncommon religious scholar and logician who beat her opponents in intellectual battles - the manazaras. It is not surprising that she had to be strangulated for being too powerful a woman to bow down to the dictates which she couldn't comply with. May be she thought that even in her death she would remain alive.
As a poet she has left an indelible imprint and quite a few Urdu scholars have accepted her as a poet of unsurpassable passion. Abdul Ghafoor Nassakh was the first to discuss her in his Tzkiratul Maasrin. Maulana Abdul Halim Sharar wrote a great tribute, entitled Qurratulain, in 1923. Shaikh Abdul Qadir wrote highly appreciative articles about her in monthly Makhzan. Others who praised her included Professor Hidayat Husain who wrote about her in the Royal Asiatic Society's journal, and Allama Iqbal, Khwaja Hasan Nizami and Sarojini Naidu.
Born in Qazwin in1819 in a family of distinguished scholars she was mother of three children when strangulated on the order of the Qachar court for the crime of being a deviant. Much of Iqbal's passion could be traced to Qurratulain whom he paid the highest compliment of placing her on Falak-i-Mushtri in the trio of those great souls who could change the destiny of mankind through their passion and commitment.
It is strange that Iqbal is supposed to be hostile to Wahdat-ul-Wujood but Hallaj, Qurratulain and Ghalib got the ultimate honour of being at Falak-i-Mushtri. Iqbal had written development of metaphysics in Persia under the impact of Ibn Arabi and with the passage of time he substituted Maulana Rumi for Ibn Arabi, proving thereby that his criticism of Wahdat-ul-Wujood didn't imply a departure of 180 degrees from Wahdat-ul-Wujood. In fact, he accepted some religious plea that it was difficult to have Ibn Arabi as the role model.
In his Javed Namah, modeled after Dante's Divine comedy and on Ibn Arabi's imaginary Mairaj Namah, the conducted tour of the skies is taken under the guidance of Maulana Rumi's conducted tour of the skies (in fact planets). Pir Rumi takes Iqbal to Falak Mushtri and points out that there were only three sacred souls (Arwah-i-Muqaddissah) - Mansur bin Hallaj, Qurratulain Tahira and Ghalib. Iqbal is taken aback and asks why the trio was there. Rumi informs Iqbal that these three souls enjoy the rare privilege and power. Asked what that power was, the answer was that they were blessed with a fire which could melt the earth. So strong these souls were in their conviction, ie love, that they could use their gaiti gudaz, ie the earth melting Ishq, to achieve any object they set their eyes upon.
It is interesting that Bahai Scholar, Dr Sabir Afaqi, in his book "Iqbal Aur Amri-Bahai" has claimed that Iqbal was attracted towards Bahaism because he liked the 'reconstruction' of Mard-i-Momin who could absorb the knowledge without forsaking the life of Islamic faith. Iqbal is well-disposed towards Bahaism in his metaphysics of Persia. This thesis of Iqbal which was originally written for Cambridge University was also accepted by the Munich University as a PhD dissertation without any substantial change. Very few Iqbal experts have paid attention to the fact that its chapters on philosophy and psychology were heavily influenced by Myron H. Phelp's book "Life and Teachings of Abbas Effendi".
It was because of the above mentioned book's influence on thinking that Iqbal wrote the following lines in his treatise Development of Metaphysics in Persia. "But all the various lines of Persian thought once more find a synthesis in that great religious movement of modern Persia - Babism Bahaism - which began as a Shia sect with Mirza Ali Muhammad Bab of Shiraz and became less and less in Islamic character with the progress of orthodox persecutions." Qurratulain Tahira's favourite Bahar of a ghazal with its Radeef & Qafia has been favourite of many an Urdu poet and this is her great contribution.