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ShareI have in a rare idle moment thought of standing for parliament, but the closest I ever got was standing outside it for half an hour in the rain today. Westminster buzzes with traffic all day and in the evenings, the two possible accessible pubs on the streets outside parliament, one just under the shadow of Big Ben when the sun is across the river at an angle, and the other on Whitehall next to the window from which Charles I emerged to be executed, are very crowded. Anywhere else in England the TV sets on the walls of the pubs feature football or pop, but in the Red Lion, the TV is switched to the Parliament Channel which mostly features the empty green seats of the House of Common with some cove rabbitting on about the health-and-safety hazards of Santa Claus beards or some such compelling question.
I was not outside the House of Lords to take my place on the benches of peers of the realm. Her majesty has not yet recognised, or perhaps is reluctant to acknowledge, my noble qualities. I was standing in a queue to get into a poetry reading. This may sound odd, but this particular reading was being held in the House of Lords because the chief guest was Prince Hassan of Jordan and the meeting room had been booked by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Third World Solidarity -- unlikely hosts for literature.
The queue had to pass through the sort of security checks in force at airports, only more thorough. The mother of parliaments is taking no chances. It was the launch of Islamic mystical poetry, Sufi verse from the early mystics to Rumi, a Penguin book edited with translations by Mahmood Jamal. Launching it from the House of Lords seemed to be part of an obvious political ingredient to its publishing strategy.
Very many lords and ladies of the House and members of parliament from the Commons attended the crowded occasion. Prince Hassan spoke first, delivering an erudite speech about the historical strands of Islam.
Mahmood, a poet in his own right and an Islamic scholar, was introduced as the descendant of two Muslim Sufi 'saints' and missionaries. His ancestral home is the area of Lucknow known as 'Firangi Mahal' and the audience was told that the family came by this inheritance when Aurangzeb confiscated it from a British indigo trader and bestowed it in a firman upon them. Mahmood grew up there and a few years after Partition was taken by his parents to East Pakistan and thence to Karachi and to study in London.
Mahmood talked about the purpose of writing such a book. He said he didn't want to call it Sufi poetry, but deliberately used the word Islamic because today the 'Islamics', fundamentalists, Wahabis and terrorists, through their murderous actions and pronouncements, have created the impression that they represent the Abrahamic faith of Islam. Abd-al Bari, Mahmood's grandfather, a respected scholar and Indian nationalist told Mahmood in his boyhood that the Wahabis were furthest from the truth of Islam. Fuelled with oil money and political agendas from Saudi Arabia and Iran, the fundos have given the world the impression that they represent Muslims, Islam and its traditions, but like the crickets who make the most sound from the shelter of the grass, they are not the largest animals in the meadow. Mahmood claims that the Sufi tradition is the only authentic Islam and its inspirations will carry the faith forward. His collection of Sufi verse should go a very tiny way to spreading that certainty.
I am not competent to comment on the quality of the translation but the verses of poets from Rabia Basri (801 AD) to Mian Muhhamad Baksh (1907 AD) (the subtitle which says 'Early Mystics to Rumi' is clearly wrong!) proclaim the mystical faith which is full of human questioning and doubt and bereft of the vulgar philosophical definitions and certainties of the murderous faith of the deviants. I would stand in the rain for twice the time to hear it proclaimed.
