That the Muhammadan Community is also unbounded in time, since the survival of this noble community has been divinely promised
In Spring thou hast heard the clamorous nightingale,
And watched the resurrection of the flowers;
The buds arrayed like brides; from the dark earth
A veritable city of stars arise;
The meadow bathed in the soft tear of dawn
That slumbered to the river’s lullaby.
A bud bursts into blossom on the branch;
The breeze new‐risen takes it to her breast;
A bloom lies bleeding in the gatherer’s hand
And like a perfume from the mead departs.
The ring‐dove builds his nest; the nightingale
Takes wing; the dew drops softly, and the scent
Is sped. What though these mortal tulips die,
They lessen not the splendour of the spring:
For all the loss, its treasure still abides
Abundant, still the thronging blossoms smile.
The season of the rose endures beyond
The fragile eglantine time, yea, it outlives
The rose’s self, the cypress, and the fir;
The jewel‐nourishing mine bears jewels yet,
Unminished by the shattering of one gem.
Dawn is departed from the East, and night
Gone from the West: their too‐brief‐historied up
Visits no more the wine‐vault of the days;
Yet, though the draught be drunk, the wine remains
Eternal as the morrow that awaits
When all our yesterdays are drowned in death.
So individuals, as they depart,
Are fallen pages from the calendar
Of peoples more enduring: though the friend
Is on journey, the companionship
Still stays; the individual is gone
Abroad, unstirring the community.
Other each essence is, the qualities
Other; they differ both in how each lives
And how they die. The individual
Arises from a handful of mere clay,
The nation owes its birth to one brave heart;
The individual has for his span
Sixty or seventy years, a century
Is for the nation as single breath.
The individual is kept alive
By the concomitance of soul and flesh,
The nation lives by guarding ancient laws;
Death comes upon the individual
When dries life’s river and the nation dies
When it forsakes the purpose of its life.
Though the community must pass away
Like any individual when Fate,
Issues the fiat none may disobey,
Islam’s Community is divine
Undying marvel, having origin
In that great compact, Yea, Thou art our Lord.
This people is indifferent to Fate,
Immovable in Lo, We have sent down
Remembrance, Which abides while there is yet
One to remember, whose continuance
Persists with it. When God revealed the words
They seek God’s light to extinguish, this bright lamp
Was never troubled it might flicker out.
’Tis a community that worships God
In perfect faith, a people well‐beloved
By every man who has a conscient heart.
God drew this trusty blade out of the sheath
Of Abraham’s desires, that by its edge
Sincerity might live, and all untruth
Consume before the lightning of its stroke.
We, who are proof of God’s high Unity
And guardians of the Wisdom and the Book,
Encountered heaven’s malice long ago,
The unsuspected menace of the hordes
Of savage Tartary, loosed on our heads
To prove its terror. Not the Judgment Day
Shall match the staring horror of those swords,
The thunder of those legions armed with death.
Confusion sore confounded in the breast
Of that disaster slept; its yesterday
Gave birth to no glad morrow. Muslim might
Quivered in dust and blood; Baghdad beheld
Such scenes as Rome ne’er witnessed in her throes.
Now ask, if so thou wilt, what new design
Purposing Fate, malignant as of old,
Proposed this holocaust; whose garden sprang
Out of the Tartar fire? Whose turban wears
The rose transmuted from those lambent flames?
Because our nature is of Abraham
And our relationship to God the same
As that great patriach’s: out of the fire’s depths
Anew we blossom, every Nimrod’s blaze
Convert to roses. When the burning brands
Of Time’s great revolution ring our mead,
Then Spring returns. The mighty power of Rome,
Conqueror and ruler of the world entire,
Sank into small account; the golden glass
Of the Sassanians was drowned in blood;
Broken the brilliant genius of Greece;
Egypt too failed in the great test of Time,
Her bones lie buried ’neath the Pyramids.
Yet still the voice of the muezzin rings
Throughout the earth, still the Community
Of World – Islam ‐‐ maintains its ancient forms.
Love is the universal law of life,
Mingling the fragmentary elements
Of a disordered world. Through our hearts’ glow
Love lives, irradiated by the spark
There is no god but God. Though, like a bud,
Our hearts are prisoned by oppressive care,
If we should die, the graden too will die.
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