‘Waning Crescent’: A biography of the journey of Islam from divine faith to ideological system

Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Ghalib were the two most prominent Urdu poets of 18th-century Mughal India. Apart from being contemporaries with a fair amount of envy for each other’s poetic repertoire, they also held each other in great esteem. Revered as Mir was as Khuda-e-Sukhan (God of Poetry), Ghalib went a step further and praised him in the following couplet:

Reekhta ke tum hi ustad nahin ho Ghalib
Kehte hain agle zamane men koi mir bhi tha

You are not the only master of Rekhta, Ghalib
They say there used to be a Mir in the past

Faisal Devji, much like Mirza Ghalib, reverentially starts his new book Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam with an interesting couplet by Mir Taqi Mir:

Mir ke din-o-mazhab ko ab puchhte kya ho unne to
Qashqa Khincha, dayr men baytha, kab ka tarq islam kiya

Why do you ask Mir about his religion and school?
He’s daubed saffron on his forehead and is sitting in a temple
Having long abandoned Islam.

What makes this couplet interesting is the context in which it was written. The Mughal Empire, though on its last legs, was still alive. Muslims living in the subcontinent barely felt any anxiety about their political relevance, or for that matter, any concern regarding their downfall. What...

Read more