Is Poetry Universal?- a gristly verse of Mir

Is poetry Universal?

Stupidity, we know, is universal and poetry, we have been taught, is what stupid people now go in for to make believe they are smart.

Over the last 40 years, Translations, of the best American Academic type- and 22,000 new M.F.A’s add more to the pool every decade- have indeed made poetry Universal in this special sense. Great energy and enterprise has been devoted to this end. Suppose the Jodrell Bank radio telescope detects a transmission of alien poetry from some distant Galaxy. It will be seamlessly translated into shit long before it is even deciphered. The same thing will happen after it is deciphered. Thus, a Globalized translation industry has already yielded us a Universalized poetry. Advanced Galactic Civilizations have banned contact with less developed planets precisely for this reason. They too have Academic poetry translators just itching for something ‘primitive’ to vomit all over.

Theology was once the Universal form of Stupidity and that was cool because, if you think about it, God makes us stupid.

But, Poetry?

It used to be the thing that knit the people of an oikumene together.

I guess that’s more profitably done by S.U.V’s and Shopping Malls.

Since India now has plenty of both, what is the point of Poetry? One answer, I think, is that with the aid of distinguished Globalised academics, people belonging to different Religions from different parts of India can at last come to despise everything venerable possessed by each other as worthless shite .

How? Why? Academic translations of and commentaries on great vernacular poets focus entirely on proving not just the poets themselves, but their entire intellectual milieu, to have been utterly stupid. 

In the past, we had to take the savants at their word when they assured us that our great poets were incorrigible fuckwits. Now, thanks to Google search, we can find things out for ourselves and discover that the reverse is the case. The great poets of other religions, other times, other languages were just so-oooo much smarter, wiser, more sophisticated in their thinking than we can ever hope to be.

Look at this ghazal of Mir Taqi Mir’s-
                                      – ‘vājib kā ho nah mumkin maṣdar ṣifat ṡanā kā/
                                           qudrat se us kī lab par nām āve hai ḳhudā kā 
The first line is difficult to make sense of because there is a word-play involvng Arabic grammatical terminology- but it means something like-  Though necessary (for salvation), finding the source of ecstatic praise of the name and attributes of God is highly improbable.

The second line is limpid-  ‘By the power of Nature, the name of God has come upon her lips’- which is what happens in my erotic reveries featuring hotties like Angela Merkel & Nancy Pelosi who, notwithstanding the Satanic origin of their Socialist beliefs, nevertheless cry out the name of Our Saviour in the throes of passion.
The second couplet of the ghazal is-

sab rom rom tan me;N zardii-e ;Gam bharii hai;

xaak-e jasad hai merii kis kaan-e zar kaa ;xaakaa

Every hair of my body is horripilated by the jaundice of Grief. The dust print on my shroud is the map of which gold mine? – i.e. Grief has turned me into the Gold mine sought by Mystical Alchemy but rather than my gaining immortality or the status of the perfect man, I am a sort of reverse Midas, deadened by what most touches me.

A gold mine is similar to ‘masdar’- which means ‘source’ and, in grammar, is the basic verbal noun from which everything else is derived. God, of course, is the source of all things and it is our duty to praise Him both formally and ecstatically. However, to experience ecstasy while calling out the name of God is not a duty we can discharge simply out of a sense of obligation. It is a halachah vein morin kein. The knowledge that it is necessary for us forecloses the path to its fulfilment. This isn’t a case of ‘fake it till you make it’. What’s totally unfair is that Tyrannical hotties, though thoroughgoing Satanic Socialists, like Merkel & Pelosi, nevertheless are saved, at least in our wet dreams of them, coz they’re all like thrashing about screaming ‘O God, O God, O God, O GOD!’

In Arabic, I’m guessing, this would be ‘Subhan-allah!’ which is interesting because there is a doubt as to whether the word Subhan (Glory) is a verbal noun derived from a 3 letter root in the typical way, or if it is ‘ismul masdar’ without such a root.

Q: Is Subhān (Glory) a Masdar or Ismul-Masdar? In other words is this word a state of something in and of itself, or is it extracted from an actual verb?

A: The learned sages inclined towards both options, some said Subhānallāh (Glory for Allah) is Masdar a verbal noun extracted from the verb Sabaha and some others said Subhānallāh (Glory for Allah) is an Ismul-Masdar again a verbal noun though it is not extracted from any verb i.e. Subhān (Praise) is a Hāla (State) of Wujud (Being) and has no verbal equivalent. 

This shows that the ‘sana’ in the first line of the couplet (which means praise not necessarily directed at the Deity but which might focus on His attributes) gives us a clue as to in what form the ‘name of God has come upon her lips’. If she has said ‘Subhanallah’ then she has, in a sense, achieved a mystical station (Hala) within the hidden hierarchy of Being (Wujud) which is God. However, our contemplation of this, far from pleasing us sensually by allowing us to glimpse ‘the lineaments of gratified desire’ has had the opposite effect- we have become the reverse Midas of what most touches us and perish of that Grief whose alchemy impoverishes the slave while permitting the tyrant to climb higher in the chain of Being.

Which is like toooootally unfair.

The Tetragrammaton, to me taunt,  upon her wanton lips

 Appears Salvation’s font in Oneiric apocalypse

So jaundiced by what most touches me

I am the Midas of Grief’s alchemy

Okay, mebbe that’s a bit crap, still it’s an attempt to highlight what is interesting here- viz. a dry as dust deontological issue of a substantivist Theological type being re-cast in highly wrought relationist terms, that too within a wholly transgressive erotic mise en scene.

But what I have written above is quite worthless. It is not Academic. It is not Universal. 

Prof. Pritchett & Prof.S.R. Faruqi’s commentary on this ‘gristly verse of Mir’s’.
The salient points are
1) vajib is taken to be ‘a thing without which something else cannot exist’- i.e. something necessary rather than contingent.
On this reading, Faruqi treats this couplet as straightforward speculative Metaphysics of a Universal kind. Following him, albeit with some reservations, Pritchett gives us this-

1) the necessary wouldn’t [be able to] be contingent, like praise of the origin/source,

2) through that one’s nature/Power, on the lip the name of the Lord comes

This may be meaningful- precisely because it is ‘Universal’- to Academic or American translators- they write worse everyday- but, to me, it is not intelligible,or indeed recognizable as being related to Mir’s couplet.
Vajib, for a cultured and devout Muslim from a Hanafi majority country- or indeed a Hindu from that country- must mean something more than ‘necessary’. It is that type of duty which isn’t made absolutely clear and unambiguous and which thus requires some hermeneutic effort or imaginative engagement on our part. 

‘If there is a binding demand from the lawgiver to do something, it is wazib. However, the Hanafi’s consider the demand Fard when both text and the meaning are definitive (qati) and wazib when either the text or meaning is speculative (Zanni – because liable to interpretation of meaning or investigation of authenticity). Difference between Fard and Wazib has important consequence. Denial of binding nature of a command established by definitive proof (Fard by Qati evidence) leads to unbelief. However, denial of Wazib (according to Hanafi’s) or 2nd category of Fard (according to the majority) lead to transgression (Fisq).’
(Shah Abdul Hannan, quoted from ‘Usul al-Fiqh‘) 
An Urdu speaking Muslim, I’m guessing, wouldn’t even need to look up Google, the way I had to, to clarify this. He’d already know about the farz/ vajib distinction. Still, if he is an academic, he will still write shite by way of translation or commentary because that is more ‘Universal’ and smart people can’t be bothered with what is merely local and particular. Instead, they have to show that Indian poets were primitive and incapable of reasoning properly and thus truly Universal. It gives a frisson of self-recognition- Caliban glimpsing himself in the looking glass- to the truly primitive fuckwits of the American Academy.
Still, they are only doing their vajib duty. Yet, might there not be a better way?

Suppose you work for McDonalds. A crystal clear duty (farz) is a statement like ‘wash your hands after going to the bathroom’. There’s no scope for quibbling because there are no two ways about it. If you deny that this duty is obligatory, you will be sacked. However, a duty like ‘greet the customers in a cheerful and friendly way’, leaves scope for interpretation and imagination and hence can be called ‘vajib’.
 An employee of McDonalds who is passionate about her job may greet an elderly office worker like myself with a degree of archness vastly agreeable to me personally but which gives offence when directed at young, cross dressing, prostitutes like Ramachandra or Ranajit Guha. Clearly, duty of the wajib type is something one should be so passionate about that even more or less perilous experimentation in its discharge amounts to trespass merely- not malicious treachery or outright treason.
To take a case in point; the first time the young lady at the local McD greeted me with ‘Look what the cat dragged in! Busy night dear?’- I might have resented the implication that I was a broken down lady of the night driven from the streets by Dawn’s unforgiving light- more especially as, in dispensing me the extra sachets of butter I’d requested, she shuddered with revulsion and said ‘I know what you use those for!’  Ramachandra & Ranajit Guha, on the other hand, precisely because they genuinely are cross-dressing prostitutes, greatly object to such treatment which, BTW, explains their animus against ‘Globalised Capitalism’.
2) Faruqi takes ‘sifat’ as ‘likeness’ rather than a metonymy for the theology of Tawhid asma wa sifat- i.e. uniqueness of God’s name and attributes- as expressed in ecstatic sifat sanaa- ‘praise of the attributes’ which can form part of the Sama Musical repertoire of a devout Sufi and serve as a preparation for recognizing the true haqiqa Muhammadi of the age.
Currently, there is some controversy as to whether such practices are permissible or whether they shade into a polytheistic cult of miracle working Saints.
However, for the poet, there can be no doubt that the duty to praise the Lord includes an artistic licence for passionate hermeneutic investigation and semantic experimentation.
3)  Faruqi reads ‘masdar’ in a univocal and universalist manner. God is the source and return of everything. However, in Islamic philosophy, there is a distinction between ‘haqiqi’ and ‘majazi’ such that only what is essential and inerrant in a duty performed returns to the source. Thus, the girl at McD who wordlessly passes me extra napkins with a gesture indicating I should use them to bulk out my cleavage in the hope of at last attracting a customer, is neither the source nor place of return of this sympathetic and friendly gesture because, having no other concern but to correctly discharge her duty, it is only McD’s own corporate ethos and success in training its staff which originates, i.e. inculcates, the gesture and, tipping being prohibited, which gathers in the entirety of the continuing stream of profit which that repeated gesture gives rise to every morning.

Pritchett writes ‘ṡanā kā maṣdar ṣifat = like the source/origin/ground of praise. Apparently the ṣifat has to apply to the whole phrase ṣanā kā maṣdar , because if we try anything else that annoying kā is left just sticking out impossibly. Faruqi Sahib says- ‘The idea is that just as the maṣdar of all substances (that is, their origin, the place to which they all have to return– that is, the place beyond which there’s nothing– that is, the Lord) is necessary, in the same way praise of the maṣdar (that is, praise of the Lord) too is necessary (that is, necessary in its own essence, not dependent for its existence on any other thing). And when that is necessary, then we cannot express it by means of words (which are only contingent, because their existence is dependent on something else).’
My response is– ” sana ka masdar sifat’ is illiterate- i.e. corresponds to no collocation. In any case, is it really true that sana (praise not necessarily restricted to the Deity) has a masdar in God? Does God do sana of anything?
Mir wasn’t illiterate. Nor was he a dark Theologian.  What he is talking about is sana-e-sifat- which, for euphony, becomes ‘sifat sana’- praise, or ecstatic contemplation, of the attributes, a stage in Sufi mystical praxis.
Pritchett’s commentary draws attention to the two ka’s in the first line. One way of applying her ‘meaning-machine’ method is to think of the ka in ‘Vajib ka’ as an example of what Pierce calls ‘hypostatic abstraction’ by which an adjective or predicate- ‘honey is sweet’ – turns into an extra subject- sweetness is possessed by honey-, thus increasing by one the number of “subject” slots — called the arity or adicity — of the main predicate.
‘In this case an izafati construction- namely vajib-e-namumkin- has been broken up into vajib ka nah mumkin which by itself does sound awkward. The meaning however is clear. What is being denominated is the class of acts which, though necessary to Salvation, are not univocally obligatory such that failure to perform them can be recognized without ambiguity. In other words, something necessary is also multiply realizable such that entailment becomes ambiguous because the Piercian arity is either impredicative, fractal or impredicatively fractal but in any case inexact. For acts which are ‘farz’ but not vajib, not only is it the case that the acts are possible but those acts must necessarily come to be for those who are Saved and thus God is their source and place of return (masdar). Let us suppose it is necessary to say ‘Allah hu’ to be Saved. Clearly, Frances Pritchett is predestined to be Saved. Hence, during the course of her Doctoral viva voce (what? Jus’ coz the Rector of the LSE personally altered my diploma certificate to read ‘Confirmed Bachelor of Arts’ don’t mean I iz totally ignorant of what PhD types get up to) when the examiner said ‘Knock Knock’ and l’il Franny Pritchett replied ‘Who’s there?’ and the examiner said ‘Allah’ what happened next was predestined and as such its source and return was with God alone. However, notice that li’l Fran (whom I picture in a pinafore and pig-tails so as not to give way to lubricious thoughts) is not saying ‘Allah hu’ such that the sifat (‘Hu’) agrees with the mausuf (subject) derived from the ism masdar (derived noun) ‘Allah’. 

‘Rather, she is saying ‘Allah who?’ in which statement there is no sifat at all. By no stretch of the imagination can she be said to have completed a vajib-e-mumkin type of action. The intentionality is lacking, hence her utterance does not have the grammatical property of correct deployment of sifat. Yet, equally clearly, if not more so, l’il Fran is nonetheless saved precisely because God has not merely commanded (amr) but also provided the material ground for the requisite action to be completed (khalq). This is a case where God is both the source and place of return of the occurrence.’
‘Prof. Farqui appears to be making a mistake- pardonable because he actually studied Arabic instead of reading Archie Comics in the back row with the cool kids; the Mullah having been either bribed or intimidated to look the other way- by thinking that masdar can be the mausuf of sifat in this context. It can’t. That’s shirk. It’s the doctrine of hypostatic union by which the Christians worked their own damnation at Ephesus.’

Faruqi, by neglecting the specifically Islamic meaning of Mir’s words has ended up talking nonsense.
IF God taught Adam the names of things and in any case the Quran is uncreated, why should words be only contingent?
I had a hazy sort of idea that Faruqi Sahib follows Al Jurjani- as opposed to Al Rummani- because he insists on strict compositionality whereas Rummani allows tazmin w.r.t. Revelation – i.e. use of a Quranic word- to be endophorically unrestricted by the rest of the sentence it appears in. In other words, the Quranic word occurring in a secular text yet continues to participate in its own ‘masdar’ such that the latter proves increasingly more real (haqiqi) while the former’s trajectory becomes more and more phantasmal and spectral (majazi) in the same manner that this dervish’s diffuse fog of a winter morning gradually coalesces into the baksheesh of a single, solar, Rupee of Light.
Be that as it may, there is nothing in Jurjani, or indeed any other authority, to license what Faruqi has written.
Excluding the Hanafi meaning of vajib, let us look again at the couplet.
vājib kā ho nah mumkin maṣdar ṣifat ṡanā kā
qudrat se us kī lab par nām āve hai ḳhudā kā
Regarding ‘sifat sana ka masdar’- that ‘masdar’ praised in sifat sana- i.e. the ecstatic practice of praising God as the source and return of the devotee’s own piety (which is passionate Love) – it is not possible to say it is part of vajib (i.e. what is necessarily entailed in the manner of a crystal clear duty), yet we see that ‘by Nature’ the name of the Lord has come upon the lips of the Beloved.
Suppose Mayor McCheese receives a complaint against the girl who serves me my Big Breakfast.
Angrily he upbraids her- ‘Why are you pretending that an elderly Tambram office worker is actually a low class prostitute? It is against Company policy. What you are supposed to say is ‘Thank you. Have a nice day’ not ‘Now get the fuck out of here, you diseased old ho-bag.’
‘Did I say that?’ the tear-stricken girl plaintively replies, ‘I have no memory of it. Filled with the spirit of McD what I uttered I know not. Greatly have I sinned. I shall go and commit suicide by eating a whole bucket full of KFC.’
‘Wait!’ says Mcburglar, ‘All these years I have been lurking in the shadows trying to steal cheese burgers. Yet, by the intercession of the Blessed Thief Dysmas, this Grace has been vouchsafed me- I saw with my own eyes the McAngel of the Lord descend into this humble vessel you see before you. It was McAngel who spoke through the lips of this handmaiden of the Corporation.’
‘But,’ says Mayor McCheese, ‘How is it possible (mumkin)? Something which is vajib (a necessary duty) must surely be univocal?’
‘Nay’ spake the McAngel through the lips of a seated customer, ‘univocity can be multiply realizable, indeed must be so. Just as ‘Have a nice day’ means ‘Get the fuck out of here you ugly old ho-bag’ when applied to a middle aged Tambram cross-dressing prostitutes like Ramachandra Guha or Sanjay Subhramanyam, so too does the opposite hold when applied to elderly, not cross-dressing at all, Tambram office workers. ‘Everybody knows this. Now just fuck off and let me finish my Big Breakfast while availing of your free wi-fi to update my blog.’

If not for McDonald’s, then certainly for Islam, granted that what we know to be necessary (vajib) does not entail praise of the source of attributes, nevertheless, by nature rather than pious reason, we constantly observe that the name of God has come to the Beloved’s lips.
Mumkin, in the philosophical sense, means that which is possible but which carries no entailment properties. A mountain of gold is possible but its actual existence is not entailed nor is anything from us with respect to it demanded or required. I am not religiously obligated to deny it exists or to go looking for it or to buy bonds issued by its prospector.
Mumkin in the ordinary sense would give us- ‘Just from what we know to be necessary for our salvation it is not probable that the ecstatic practice of praise to the name and attributes could take its origin or find its completion in God (i.e. the attributes are more like prosopoi and thus no hesychastic practice is essential for Salvation for the reason given by Barlaam of Calabria) .’
 In other words, the devotional practice under discussion is supererogatory. In the second line, the proof is given- The name of God came upon her lips- how? Not from what she considers necessary for her salvation, but because Nature itself, when in ecstasy, cries out the name of God.

True, Faruqi Sahib reads masdar and sifat as having a grammatical meaning and holds that we can’t change the necessary into the contingent.
However, the conventional view is
1) It is shirk to say masdar of all substances is necessary.
Piercian hypostatic abstraction is a feature of all languages, formal or otherwise. No entailment of prosopoi or hypostases arises- indeed it is specifically guarded against in Hanafi Islam.
2) It is bida to say praise of masdar is necessary.
When did Caliph Omar do praise of masdar? Show the grounds of likelihood that any significant percentage of the Sahiban did so. Why is it not mentioned in the Sahih hadith of Bukhari?
3) It is ridda to say that words- including those found in the Quran- are only contingent.
In the Quran, unlike the Bible, Allah reveals the names of things to Adam. Even the Mutazilites didn’t consider tazmin of Quranic words to suffer the defect of contingency.
Nevertheless, Faruqi Sahib says- ‘The simple meaning is that praise of the Lord is impossible/noncontingent [naa-mumkin]. The interpretation of vaajib kaa mumkin nah ho is that vaajib kaa mumkin nahii;N ho saktaa . Here kaa has been used in an extremely fine way. For example, they say aadhe kaa puuraa nahii;N ho saktaa ; that is, the thing that is half cannot become whole.’
So- let’s see if we understand you right, Faruqi Sahib. Mir’s ‘simple meaning’ is, just as half can’t become whole, so too Religious duty is impossible to perform. Why? Because God is a bastard/ Gimme pork with  mustard.
What is the fucking point of reading a fucking Urdu poet from North fucking India if that’s the level of his thought?
Is it really impossible to perform namaz, keep roza, go for Hajj? Maybe for stupid North Indian Urdu speakers. Tamil Muslims face no such difficulty.
But, it is a fact that a pious young Tamil Muslim, A.R. Rehman, shows great veneration for great Urdu poets like Mir. So, I think the simpler explanation is that Faruqi is wrong about this couplet which means- granted, the ecstatic Sufi practice of ‘praise of the attributes’ is not a supererogatory religious duty or hallmark of Salvation such as God has to exert himself to bring about to fulfill His plan of predestination- nevertheless, as if to prove the contrary, such and such has occurred.
What precisely?
qudrat se us kii lab par naam aave hai khudaa kaa
By the power of Nature (which was Created by God) the name of God has come on that person’s lips.
Faruqi Sahib says next-
‘In the second line he has said that if the name of the Lord comes to our lips, then this too is through the power of the Lord.’
But Mir hasn’t said ‘if the name of the Lord comes to our lips’. I’m no scholar but ‘us ki’ means ‘to that person’ not ‘to us’. But who is ‘that person’ in the context of the Ghazal? It is the tyrant/beloved. When does the word ‘God’ come to the lips quite spontaneously or as if from Nature itself? The answer, of course- if you will pardon my coarseness- is in the throes of ecstasy.

Prof Faruqi says- Without the power of the Lord it is not possible that His name comes to the lips. If the Lord would not so wish, or the Lord would not exert his power, then capacity does mankind have to invoke His name? The meaning of lab par naam aanaa can also be, in addition to ‘to mention’, ‘to remember’.Now the interpretation emerges that if we remember the Lord, then this is His power. For khudaa kii qudrat there are three meanings. One is the one that has been mentioned above, that this is an expression of the Lord’s power. Reference has also been made to the second meaning, that if the Lord so wills, only then can we bring his name to our lips. The third meaning is exclamatory, that if his name comes upon our lips, then that is his power. That is, that if even deaf-mutes like us, or even sinners like us, remember him and mention him, then if this isn’t the power of the Lord, then what is it?
Moreover, in the whole line is hidden the meaning that if the Lord’s name comes to our lips only through the will of the Lord himself, then if we don’t remember him, what sin do we commit? To encompass so many meanings within a verse of praise [;hamd] is a difficulty fit for Mir alone. On the basis of its fineness of meaning, the troublesome entanglement of the first line (or rather its weakness of poetic structure [na:zm], which is very rare in Mir) becomes acceptable.
The problem here is that Faruqi is missing out all the philosophical subtlety in Islam and thus reducing Mir’s couplet to imbecility and antinomianism of a cliched, Orientalist, Omar Khayyam type. It is sheer imbecility for a Muslim to say ‘if we don’t remember the Lord (i.e. pray regularly) then we don’t commit any sin’. This is like saying ‘If I don’t wash my hands after going to the toilet, I don’t breach McD’s code of conduct. They have no right to sack me. Why? Because they have the power to force their employees to wash their hands after taking a dump. Yet, I was an employee when I took the dump. I was still an employee when I failed to wash my hands. Only after I emerged from the bathroom with shit stained hands was I sacked. No failure of mine occurred. The failure was McDonald’s. They didn’t use their power to make me wash my hands while I was still in the bathroom.’
Faruqi’s reading of this couplet cashes out as
1) Mir was stupid. If he thought he was a Muslim it was only because he was a stupid Indian donkey.
2) Mir wasn’t a Muslim. He was just too cowardly to come out and say so.

Faruqi also misses out what is poetic about the second line- i.e. not only is Mir stupid and not Muslim, he is also not a poet.
The fact is people who cry out ‘Jesus Christ!’ or ‘Sarah Palin!’ while in the throes of passion- pace Faruqi- aren’t actually ‘remembering’ God, nor is it a type of prayer which the Lord himself must exert his omnipotence to specifically bring about. This is because, though ‘remembering God’ even at the moment of orgasm may indeed be a necessary part of one’s self surrender to the Deity it is ‘vajib-e-mumkin’ something possible and perhaps deontically enjoined but carrying no entailment property such that God necessarily causes it to occur.
Pritchett writes- The first half of the first line is in fact doubly confusing because the normal, least-marked meaning of mumkin is not ‘contingent’ (in a philosophical sense) but ‘possible’, in a plain everyday sense, so that nah mumkin readily suggests naa-mumkin , ‘impossible’. The reader’s mind plays with ways that some necessary thing might prove also to be impossible, a (Ghalib-like) paradox so enjoyable that it’s hard to let go of it. But that kaa does do what SRF says– it makes the expression idiomatic, since normally an adjective like vaajib simply won’t have a kaa after it. It forces the expression to become, ‘to make OF the necessary, the contingent’ and denies us the chance to read ‘the necessary would not be possible‘.
This is quite foolish. A necessary thing which proves impossible is simply an instance of an axiom system being shown to be inconsistent. It is something a priori known to be wrong. There is no question of ‘the mind playing about’ in this arena. If you do the sum 5 plus 10 on your calculator and you get back ‘battery low’ on the screen your mind does not play around with stuff. No gorgeous Ghalibian paradoxes arise. You just put in new batteries.
Why is Pritchett compelled to utter such idiocy? It is because she does not understand that vajib can mean something highly specific in the poetry of a Hanafi majority country- viz. a type of duty which is essentially poetic. To that type of duty, granted there is no necessary entailment of a particular ecstatic Sufi practice founded upon something which, in Christendom, we might link with prosopoi and hesychasm, yet nevertheless, in reverie we see that Nature itself has wrung from her lips the cry ‘O God!’

What’s wrong with saying Mir or Ghalib or whoever was a Muslim? What’s wrong with saying Urdu is a proper Muslim language? Are you worried that this hands an easy victory to Hindutva nutjobs like me?  If so, it still behooves you to give the hate-mongers a walkover every-time on those questions where they are logically in the right. Not to do so damages the ethos of what you seek to defend. Moreover, our nature, of itself, is brisk to beat anyone who thinks being Right creates Might- so that’s entirely forgivable.
What is unforgivable is treating dead Brown Men as illiterate imbeciles unable to profit by the philosophical hermeneutics of the very traditions they enriched.  Why? Because them Dead Brown Chaps were good poets- at least in comparison with the merely brain-dead Brown person writing this-

If prayer & fasting is to our back a rod

Must Nature in ecstasy cry out ‘God!’?

Upon Men, Mercy, Mystics explain

 Love is the crutch of Tamburlane

What co-evolves with language?

Consider the following bromide.

‘As with flowers and the bees, so too does true poetry co-evolve with what pollinates it.’

The conceit is obvious enough- poetry is like a flower-bed to which the connoisseur returns to gather nectar. In the process, cross-pollination occurs and though the poet dies and the gibbet of his thwarted passions crumbles to dust, yet, his poetry, having reproduced itself, has gone forward, with shifting associations and shiftless associates, aboard a drifting raft of goliard vagabondage, across the ravaged centuries and pillaged wastelands of the heart.

Might there be something more to this hackneyed image? Or, precisely because it is so hackneyed, might that something not be everything? Consider, for a moment, the text, ‘Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted’ and though what is summoned to our comfort bear but the ashes of our Eden- is not what is Truly Divine the knowledge that this Paraclete began its career as an Athenian  ambulance chaser?

So chastening a reflection naturally prompts the question- what co-evolves with our language such that Reception is canalized whereas Expression accumulates capacitance diversity? Well, abstracting from the brain, presumably we are talking of that portion of our Baldwinianly evolved ethology which militates for an increase in the frequency and salience of mutuality type contexts. The pay off for diverse expression is discharge without costly filtering while the pay off for narrow, canalised, Reception is more frequent reinforcement- bis repetita placent- without costly processing.
This suggests that information isn’t being thrown away by the solution to Symbolic Communication’s underlying co-ordination problem and that the cost of conserving this information is minimized by the way it is shared between Language and its co-evolved ethology.

Before enquiring what that might imply, it’s worth pondering whether Language can without decoherence describe, once again abstracting from the brain, what co-evolves with it, as distinct from the wider fitness landscape. If it can, well and good. Science may be interested in that project for some reason of its own, but surely Philosophy and Poetry aren’t particularly affected no matter how that story pans out. 

On the other hand, if what co-evolves with our language is precisely that unthought known which inscribes its limits- towards which words can gesture but no further venture- this is the bizarre limbo of meta-metaphoricity- then we have something interesting and, it may be, comparative literature, or comparative philosophy, can offer us insights otherwise inaccessible- except, of course, literature and philosophy are always already comparative by reason of their co-evolution with what pollinates them- thus what we have here is an owl of Minerva whose abortive flight takes wing with, not the inky seepage of night, but the brisk syzygy of eclipse.

Why this matters is because there is a notion that autonomy consists in regulating one’s actions by a principle and that the meaning individuals have- what they signify and, even in absence, illocute or illumine- is precisely the golden thread running through all they suffered and spoke or wrought and rued.
Here, clearly, if the categorical imperative can be named and formulated with more or less fine graining, then it can generate a universalist deontics whose aporias only await some advance in logic or further assemblage of evidence such that something seamless and harmoniously constructed is presented to us. In a sense, to oneself espouse such a principle is to put oneself, if not immediately then sooner or later, in a position superior to Pragmatics-as-Negotiation, or Meaning-as-Work,  albeit by at first incarnating a but ‘Noble Lie’ yet eventually, and it may be by that very imposture, achieving that Inedia which is Omniscience in that wholly buffered from everything else, one is at last an unmoved mover, and thus the limit of Knowledge which, after all, is instrumental merely.
Currently, as far as I know, people are welcome to believe something along these lines so long as they are cowards or subscribe to a non-aggression principle. This is because a would be unmoved mover, for whom discretion isn’t the better part of valour, would soon find himself being moved along by a swift kick in the pants.
This raises the question of whether we, as a Liberal Society, ought to permit, or indeed publicly subsidise, inculcation in an Intellectual Inedia which parallels indoctrination in physical anorexia as, not an outward sign of inward Grace, but a reversal of inward and outward such that what is available to be seen is those inward organs of digestion and excretion which, having nothing to reproach themselves with, can appear in their emptiness as the immaculate sheath of the body’s withering stalk from which emerge two famished head lamps- signifying Virtue and Beauty- vomiting a baleful light.
One important reason to say yes, or, going a step further, to become a connoisseur of the hunger artists of the Djikstra deadlocked Humanities, is that, if what co-evolves with Language is its limit, then to us is accorded a destiny higher than that of plunder or propagation because, becoming the earth of that flower-bed, we yet with Meaning aren’t done, save that ontologically dysphoric feeling of being alien plants on this planet gaining no nourishment from this Sun.
This gives an ironic twist to-

Guard the Garden, Ghalib, the bees attacks to defeat

The moth too is martyred by the wax they secrete!

The folly of reading Ghalib as un-Muslim- Ghazal 65

Every beauty throngs to thee, by propinquity, in all candor
I only accede to tyranny, so a rival raise thy dander

Ghalib wrote this when he was about 19

{65,1}

sitam-kash maṣlaḥat se hūñ kih ḳhūbāñ tujh pah ʿāshiq haiñ
takalluf bar-t̤araf mil jāʾegā tujh-sā raqīb āḳhir

1) I am oppression-accepting from advice/prudence, for beautiful ones are your lovers
2) {leaving aside formality / ‘to tell the truth’}, a Rival like you will become available [to me] finally

The commentators, and Prof Pritchett herself, take Raqib as ‘rival in love’ and neglect its other meaning, when applied to God, as protector as in the phrase ‘Allah raqib’.

Ghalib’s ghazal 68- harif-e-matlab-e-mushkil

For to its own maze unequal, the Mystic path enchants

& Prayer’s Alexanderine purpose, Khizr supplants

Why wander the waterless wastes of univocity, ego?

You yet retain a conception of high and low.

Its tryst is a glorious spectacle but where is the Mind?

Where Alexander’s mirror by Anticipation refined?

Every atom of the Udhri being but Sun worshipping sand

Night & the Desert’s love-play may the Simoom understand

The bowl of the starry Heavens is the waste-paper basket of the glib

Don’t ask the depth of Siduri’s Tavern of Madness, Ghalib!

Note

Al Khdir (Khizr), who first appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, led Alexander to the Waters of  Life but drank from them alone.

Alexander is considered the inventor of the mirror. (So the one Empire he can’t conquer, command his attention/ Allah to Alexander allots the Mirror’s invention). 

The Banu Udhra were a sun-worshiping tribe who ‘died when they fell in love’. Lailah & Majnun belonged to this tribe.

Wisdom dispensing Siduri, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, kept a Tavern at the end of the World.

(See Prof Pritchetts ‘Desertful of roses’ for full commentary)

ḥarīf-e mat̤lab-e mushkil nahīñ fusūn-e niyāz
duʿā qabūl ho yā rab kih ʿumr-e ḳhiżr darāz

1) it’s not equal to a difficult purpose, the incantation/enchantment of prayer/desire/neediness
2) may the blessing/prayer be accepted, oh Lord, that the lifetime of Khizr be long

nah ho bah harzah bayābāñ-navard-e vahm-e vujūd
hanūz tere taṣavvur meñ hai nasheb-o-farāz

1) do not be, foolishly/absurdly, a desert-wanderer of the illusion/imagination of existence
2) still/now in your imagination/thought is lowness and highness

viṣāl jalvah tamāshā hai par dimāġh kahāñ
kih dīje āʾinah-e intiz̤ār ko pardāz

1) union is a {glory/appearance}-spectacle, but where is the mind/spirit/mood
2) such that a finish/perfection would be given to the mirror of waiting?

har ek żarrah-e ʿāshiq hai āftāb-parast

gaʾī nah ḳhāk huʾe par havā-e jalvah-e nāz

1) every single sand-grain of the lover is a sun-worshipper
2) even on [his] having become dust, the desire/wind of the glory/appearance of coquetry did not go

nah pūchh vusʿat-e mai-ḳhānah-e junūñ ġhālib
jahāñ yih kāsah-e gardūñ hai ek ḳhāk-andāz

1) don’t ask about the extent/capacity of the wine-house of madness, Ghalib
2) where this bowl of the heavens/’wheel’ is a mere/single/particular/unique/excellent dust-bin

Ghalib’s ghazal 33

Its pathways but puttees to the blistered poppy’s marching band

Not a droplet of the parterre’s Hawaiian wave hasn’t sand

 Of Jamshed’s grail’s graven design, a luckless Prometheus lacking wine

Steals not fire but ire & Satire’s self-contemning Plimsoll line

Tho’ in the Silence its Songs sow the Rose shreds its skirt

Calling the nightingale cuckoo, still Scent & Color flirt

I’m not green but grown lean chasing not the dragon, but a tramp

Color & Scent distinguish to extinguish my smell of the lamp

Tho’ a hundred times manumitted from the fetters of Love

How housel my heart that’s foe to flight above?

Without heart’s blood in the eye, Vision’s wave is of dust
 So haunting its bouquet, Wine’s bodega went bust

 A garden in bloom- thy heart’s unrolling picnic rug’s display

Spring’s purple cloud is which Mind’s Beaujolais?

See Prof. Fran Pritchett’s Ghalib site for a scholarly treatment.

yak żarrah-e zamīñ nahīñ bekār bāġh kā

yāñ jādah bhī fatīlah hai lāle ke dāġh kā

be-mai kise hai t̤āqat-e āshob-e āgahī

kheñchā hai ʿajz-e ḥauṣalah ne ḳhat̤ ayāġh kā

bulbul ke kār-o-bār pah haiñ ḳhandah’hā-e gul

kahte haiñ jis ko ʿishq ḳhalal hai dimāġh kā

āzah nahīñ hai nashshah-e fikr-e suḳhan mujhe

tiryākī-e qadīm hūñ dūd-e chirāġh kā

sau bār band-e ʿishq se āzād ham huʾe

par kyā kareñ kih dil hī ʿadū hai farāġh kā
be-ḳhūn-e dil hai chashm meñ mauj-e nigah ġhubār
yih mai-kadah ḳharāb hai mai ke surāġh kā
bāġh-e shiguftah terā bisāt̤-e nashāt̤-e dil

abr-e bahār ḳhum-kadah kis ke dimāġh kā

not a single grain of the earth of the garden is useless) here even/also the path is the wick/bandage of the tulip’s wound/brand

without wine, who has the strength for the tumult/terror of awareness?

weakness of enthusiasm/spirit/stomach has drawn the line on the cup

 at the doings of the Nightingale are the smiles of the rose
 what they call ‘passion’ is a defect of the mind)

 it’s not fresh/new to me, the intoxication of the thought/idea/imagination of poetry

I’m a longtime opium-addict of the smoke of the lamp

 a hundred times, from the bondage of passion we became free
 but what can/would we do? for only/emphatically the heart is an enemy of freedom/disengagement
 without heart’s blood, the wave of the gaze in the eye is dust
 this wine-house is ruined for [want of] a trace of wine

 your garden in bloom, a carpet/spread of the joy/fruitfulness of the heart

the spring raincloud, the {cask/distillery}-house of whose mind?

Wallerstein, Wallenstein & Ghalib, the Grand Turk

Like many fat, sedentary. and deeply unadventurous Tamil Brahmins, I have an unreasonable and unreasoning love for the Turks and Mongols and, dunno, like Magyars and Bulgars and Khazars and so on. Why? I guess it has to do with the origin story of the Gokturks. They were slaves forced to labour in the iron mines of the Altai Mountains till one day, a little less or more than two thousand years ago- i.e. a time when the Greeks and the Romans and the Iranians and the Indians and the Chinese were already middle aged and the Copts and Hebrews and Babylonians virtually senescent- they just Spartacized themselves and upped and rebelled and began the second (the Bronze age was the first) great process of Globalization- i.e. the creation of a World Historical System-  in a manner that clearly established that, for this World, Tengri- the Sky- is the limit. Oppression and exploitation aint fucking karmically ordained and don’t fucking move things along towards the proper Hieros-gamos, or sacred marriage, between Earth and Heaven which, like the samadhi/satori of the Buddhists, arises absent, or irrespective of, any structure to events or, indeed, the hysteresis of history.

Mutatis mutandis, as of the Turks, much the same thing can be said about a bunch of adventurous fishermen off the Western coast of Eurasia whose courage and good cheer outlasted the walls of wood that defended them from the stupidity of slavery in situ, granting them instead a Marine passage to Ariosto’s moon.

The great, good and always utterly wrong, Immanuel Wallerstein- who, sadly, never got drunk with Obama’s dad, even vicariously, though sharing the same vantage point on ‘African Socialism’- is my target for a Tesco-Champagne fueled mugging today coz like he didn’t connect with the young Graciella Chichilnisky, preferring to talk to the likes of Samir fucking Amin back in the Seventies. As I have often explained- ’68 was nothing special- not because History reached a turning point but failed to turn, but by reason of the patriarchal attitudes, the misogynistic practices of the 68-ers- the soixante-huitards as pseudo-intellectuals term them- who failed to understand that 69- pace Ahdaf Soueif–  is sublime and always present as a liberative praxis outside history and sans any fucking Structure at all. Had Wallerstein’s tickly mustache been pressed into service against Chichilnisky’s immaculate, mathematical and uterine font- rather than a dialogue with other hairy Seventies’ Marxist or soi-disant Marxist men- the project of a World Systems Analysis would not have been still-born. 

Oh dear.
If structures pre-exist and Historical processes are structural- then there is no convergent evolution, everything is genealogical; the human faculty for Mathematics, for abstraction, is unavailing- there was no reason for it to evolve- a casteist karma, a biological destiny, binds us- & as in ‘the Death of Wallenstein’ all that is left for us to say is-
Stern is the on-look of necessity,
Not without shudder may a human hand
Grasp the mysterious urn of destiny. 
But this is a funeral, not Keat’s Grecian, urn which once grasped, at last gasp, you grasp only ashes.

Ghalib, proud of his Gokturk origins, says- 

Since Sorrow can tax the Free no more than one breath

Lightning’s the lone candle we light for a death

butm because Ghalib was an Indian pensioner of John Company he adds-

Ours too is a World- but one barren to its own passion, tumult & wrath

& we the nuptial taper of the heart’s bed-chamber of its moth

Ghalib ghazal 83

‘Ind is an Eden with no Adam in it’

  That my Death deflower me in a garden strange

Shunned orphans’, All-father, Shame arrange

& that my blush for Thee never quite fade

Coiff coquette curls in ambuscade

{83,1}*

mujh ko diyaar-e ;Gair me;N maaraa va:tan se duur
rakh lii mire ;xudaa ne mirii bekasii kii sharm

1) [you/they/he/she/it] killed me in an alien/other country/region, far from the homeland
2) my Lord upheld the pride/shame of my helplessness/friendlessness

vuh ḥalqah’hā-e zulf kamīñ meñ haiñ yā ḳhudā
rakh lījo mere daʿv;ā-e vā-rastagī ki sharm

1) those circles of curls are in ambush, oh Lord—
2) may one uphold the honor/shame of my claim of liberation

Prof Pritchett’s opens her comments on this ghazal as follows-

‘The first line sounds entirely like a complaint or lament. Some person or persons or thing or things– which remain, thanks to the grammar of the ergative, entirely unspecified– killed me, and added insult to injury by killing me in a foreign land, far from my homeland. What could be a more heartless deed? What could be a sadder fate? The dead lover himself seems to lament it from beyond the grave; for more examples of the dead-lover-speaks situation, see {57,1}.’

My reading differs by placing the poet in Ibn Arabi’s barzakh which is the proper place for ‘khayal’. 

Turning to the second couplet, Prof. Pritchett says- ‘This is a verse in which those who maintain that the beloved can always be taken as God find the going somewhat awkward. Clearly the lover is asking God for help with the beloved; it’s hard to make sense of the verse in any other way. It would really be an extraordinary casuistry that could make the lover ask God to help the lover escape His own curly tresses.‘

As a matter of fact, no such infirmity obtains. Translate ‘curly tresses’ as prosopa and the conceit is one, if not Petrarch, then Barlaam of Calabria would have been familiar with. In any case, it is only by the blessing of the beloved that one ever finds her lips rather than falling into the Babylonian well of her dimples or getting tied up in knots by her uncoiffed hair.

We don’t have to say Ghalib was ‘vataniya’ rather than ‘Islam pasand’ because, for the purpose of this ghazal, he presents as already dead and in barzakh, that eroding isthmus or bi-directional limit of both ‘vatan’ and ‘Islam’.

Farsi doesn’t have gender so I suppose the gender driven ‘split egrativity’ in Ghalib’s rekhta makes a particular point- one connected with his return from the East.

The Monist meaning, it seems to me is cast in decidedly ‘Purabi’ dress.

Ghalib’s ghazal 61

N.B. I’ve revised the first couplet on the basis of an excellent comment received.  I suppose I may add that my version of this Ghazal is based on the notion that the beloved’s duty of cruelty is of an amr al taklifi (as opposed to takvini) sort- i.e. it is a supererogatory imitatio dei.

My Ramadan heart trembles at the Sun’s dark duty of refulgence
Upon that desert thorn I’d fall as Night’s dew of indulgence.

Marvel not that Zuleikha’s mirrored chamber’s mascara has run!

Again Jacob’s eyes argent tain the mise en abyme of his son.

Majnun was still learning two letters of Thy Name

When Night and the Desert ciphered my fame

Charred pieces of my heart for the salt cellar so compete

Death is the elixir makes my undoing complete

The coquette’s duty of cruelty of which Thy Devotees sing

Is that Black Sun which shines on the back of every thing

Again Dusk stains the clouds that half-forgotten hue
Of the flower garden afire for parted from you
.

To bear witness to such coquetry e’en Paradise its Peace barters

Doomsday is the wind winnowing the dust of us martyrs

Ghalib, quarrel not with the Confessor if he collar you by force

Think, how driven was Despair to his hand take recourse?

See Prof. Frances Pritchett’s ‘desertful of roses’ site for Urdu script and detailed commentary.

laraztā hai mirā dil zaḥmat-e mihr-e daraḳhshāñ par

maiñ hūñ vuh qat̤rah-e shabnam kih ho ḳhār-e bayābāñ par

nah chhoṛī ḥaẓrat-e yūsuf ne yāñ bhī ḳhānah-ārāʾī

safedī dīdah-e yaʿqūb kī phirtī hai zindāñ par

fanā-taʿlīm-e dars-e be-ḳhvudī hūñ us zamāne se
kih majnūñ lām alif likhtā thā dīvār-e dabistāñ par

farāġhat kis qadar rahtī mujhe tashvīsh-e marham se

baham gar ṣulḥ karte pārah’hā-e dil namak-dāñ par
nahīñ iqlīm-e ulfat meñ koʾī t̤ūmār-e nāz aisā
kih pusht-e chashm se jis ke nah hove muhr ʿunvāñ par
mujhe ab dekh kar abr-e shafaq-ālūdah yād ātā
kih furqat meñ tirī ātish barastī thī gulistāñ par
bah juz parvāz-e shauq-e nāz kyā bāqī rahā hogā
qiyāmat ik havā-e tund hai ḳhāk-e shahīdāñ par
nah laṛ nāṣiḥ se ġhālib kyā huʾā gar us ne shiddat kī
hamārā bhī to āḳhir zor chaltā hai garebāñ par

Plain meaning as given by Pritchett.

My heart trembles at the trouble (or pain) taken by the shining sun

I am that drop of dew/’night-wetness’ that would be on a desert thorn
Even/also here, His Excellency Joseph didn’t leave off chamber-adorning
The whiteness/whitewash of the gaze of Jacob wanders/travels/spreads on the prison-cell

I am oblivion-{instructing/instructed/writing/copying} in the lesson of self-lessness since that era/time
When Majnun used to write lām alif on the wall of the schoolhouse

To what an extent I would have found freedom from the trouble of salve/ointment!If the pieces of the heart had agreed among themselves over the salt-dish
In the clime/region of love/affection there’s no account-book of coquetry such
That there would not be a seal/stamp of/from the back of the eyes on its title page
Now, having seen the sunset-stained cloud, there {comes / would have come (?)} to my memory

That in separation from you, fire used to rain down on the garden

Except for / apart from} the flying/flight of the ardor of/for coquetry, what will have remained permanent/eternal?!

Doomsday is a mere/particular/unique/excellent swift/brisk breeze on the dust of the martyrs OR A mere/single swift/brisk breeze is Doomsday on the dust of the martyrs

Don’t quarrel/fight with the Advisor, Ghalib– if he would use force/severity, so what?
Even/also our power, after all, operates on the collar

Was Ghalib an atheist?

Former Chief Justice Katju has suggested that Ghalib was opposed to feudalism and progressive in his views. Does the following verse support the notion that, like Marx, he considered Religion a mere opiate for the Masses?

{174,10}*

ham ko maʿlūm hai jannat kī ḥaqīqat lekin
dil ke ḳhvush rakhne ko ġhālib yih ḳhayāl achchhā hai

1) we know the reality/truth of Paradise, but

2) to keep the heart happy, Ghalib, this idea is good

Islamic scholars make a distinction between metaphorical (majazi) understanding- where there is a contextual indicator of some shared fact of experience- and literal (haqiqi) truth. Since human beings have no shared or objective experience of the Unseen realm- which includes Paradise- Scriptural declarations on such topics can only be taken literally not metaphorically.

Thus the meaning here is- ‘We know that Paradise exists and has certain properties as a matter of literal truth, rather than figuring in Scripture as a metaphor or symbol for something else, but, nevertheless, to keep the heart happy this dream or imagining (khayal) is good.’ 

What precisely is the dream or imagining which keeps the heart happy? It is the dream or imagining of Heaven- as opposed to the Revelation of its literal truth. Why is it the heart- as opposed to the brain or liver- which is being made happy? Well, the heart has a special importance as being the place where something higher, purer and more Spiritual intermingles with something lower, material, and impure- e.g. ‘Ruh’ and ‘nafs’.

A meta-metaphor- i.e. a figurative way of speaking about figurative language- operates by making some sort of higher/lower or pure/impure or imaginary/real or noumenon/phenomenon type distinction between its own field of reference and that which is literally true.  

Ghalib is showing that the khayal of Jannat– i.e. human beings’, necessarily empirically unsupported, conception of Paradise, as opposed to literal Revelation regarding it- is a meta-metaphor- it is majazi majaz– i.e. it isn’t a new ontological category but a sublation away from an erroneous or mischievous one. Furthermore, the happiness of the heart, that it gives rise to, is contextually pinned down to the self abnegation of the lover, his amor fati and will-to-annihilation. In other words, Ghalib’s meta-metaphoricity here  affirms orthodoxy and reconciles to it the apparently transgressive element in taghazzul such that a special excellence in Revelation- viz. its suitability to human beings- is brought out because, Ghalib says, the literal nature of Revelation has

1) the property of being understood

2) the further property that any imaginal departure from perfect coincidence with that literal understanding- i.e. any semiotic slippage arising from figurative speech or imaginal conception or the admixture of personal hopes and dreams- has the power to self-correct by producing the longing for its own annihilation such that it only truly tastes happiness in the sure prospect of that annihilation- i.e. though entry into Paradise is not certain, death is and that is good enough. In other words, the Scriptural Revelation of a Paradise which literally exists (but which, as sinners, we may not be certain of entry to) instead of troubling the Ghazal-lover’s hearts with anxiety has the opposite effect such that even those who feel themselves certain to be excluded from it gain happiness for their heart merely from the metaphoricity, as opposed to the literal truth, of this Revelation.

Of the Heavenly City, tho’ only the literal Truth endures

Its metaphoricity, on Hearts, yet Thy Ruth secures

In commenting on this verse, Prof Pritchett has listed others which contain ‘snide remarks about Paradise’ e.g.

kyā hī riẓvāñ se laṛāʾī hogī

ghar tirā ḳhuld meñ gar yād āyā

1) what a fight there’ll be with Rizvan!
2) if your house, in Paradise, would come to mind/recollection

which paints a hilarious cartoon of Heaven’s bouncer acting instead as a jailer.

Of course, the objective reality which this figurative speech alludes to is that of another figure of speech- in other words Ghalib is using a meta-metaphor- a very common one, whereby the visible delights of the beloved’s house are enhanced by a metaphorical comparison to Paradise- of which we have only literal knowledge, not metaphorical understanding, through the unstinting Grace of Revelation.
Another verse Prof. Pritchett highlights is
satāyish-gar hai zāhid is qadar jis bāġh-e riẓvāñ kā
wo ik guldastah hai ham be-ḳhvudoñ ke t̤āq-e nisyāñ kā
That Garden of Rizvan of which the Ascetic is a praiser to such an extent/ it is a single/particular/unique bouquet in the niche of forgetfulness of us self-less ones. 
Here, the Ghalibian meta-metaphoricity arises from a deliberate semiotic slippage between collocations- e.g. sabz bagh and bagh e rizvan- such that Prof. Faruqi comments ‘In this verse the beauty of style and rarity themselves are of no common order. To demean paradise with such a suitable word as ‘bouquet’, and then to do it in such a way that it is lower than the low and to make that very thing a cause of adornment (they arrange bouquets in niches) is no laughing matter. This is a high order of innate wit…. Then look at the use of ‘self-lessness’ with ‘niche of forgetfulness’– it creates a novel form of wordplay upon wordplay. When we’ve forgotten ourselves, why wouldn’t we forget a commonplace bouquet like Paradise?….
It should also be kept in mind that ‘niche of forgetfulness’ is a metaphor; by using it in its dictionary meaning Ghalib has created a reversed metaphor. This too is a special trait of Mir and Ghalib’s. (1989: 32-33) [2006: 42-43]’
A Meta-metaphor is, I think, a reversed metaphor; it is majazi majaz, it points to the phenomenal nature of phenomenal understanding- it is a Feurbachian thesis which prevents the semiotic slippage and degenerative moral indignation-as-Gadarening-availability-cascade Marxian brand of imbecility.
So Ghalib wasn’t an atheist- either that or he was an atheist but not stupid. Since Indology can’t admit that an Indian poet wasn’t stupid, it follows that Ghalib was a true Muslim- if only by God’s Grace.

Ghalib ghazal 214

وحشت کہاں کہ بے خودی انشا کرے کوئی

ہستی کو لفظِ معنیِ عنقا کرے کوئی 

حسنِ فروغِ شمعِ سخن دور ہے اسد

پہلے دلِ گداختہ پیدا کرے کوئی

vaḥshat kahāñ kih be-ḳhvudī inshā kare koʾī
hastī ko lafz̤-e maʿnī-e ʿanqā kare koʾī
ḥusn-e furoġh-e shamʿ-e suḳhan dūr hai asad
pahle dil-e gudāḳhtah paidā kare koʾī




                              Now lost to Self Loss are the Sahara’s rolled gold scrolls of Rhyme

How, as Phoenix, entail Existence to the Parrot beak of Time?

Asad, Conceptive beauty imparts a Candescence far indeed!

Must, as wicks, bardic hearts first burn all they bleed?

Where now is that Dark, Backward and Abysm of Clime

Whose Phoenix is the sugar-fond Parrot of Time

For Love spoke The Word, Ataraxia attacks

Smoke, thou memory bird of melted wax