Shina Poetry by Fazal Ur Rehman Alamgir
English Translation
Nilao mai, these are ancient footsteps,
Nilao mai, the sacred stages of love.
Which valley did Laila wander through, my beloved,
That her dust still carries the fragrance of devotion?
Today I have reached the exalted station of love,
My life now walks only in the rhythm of your presence.
With a heart so deep, I stood face to face with fate,
Like a shell concealing pearls within its folds.
All my life’s sorrows have finally been spent,
Now my heart floats upon an ocean of joy.
I do not recognize myself anymore in this state,
My face is dyed in the crimson of roses.
I have shed blood unjustly, yet I regret nothing,
For the stains upon me are marks of honor.
Those tyrants who once wounded my eyes with cruelty—
Today stand shamed before the blade of truth.
[AMBIGUITY]
ReplyDeleteThe poem can be read on two simultaneous planes:
human love — the beloved leaves traces, colours, wounds and memories in the lover;
mystical love — the beloved becomes a figure for the Beloved, and the traces become signs of the Divine encountered through the self.
This is especially powerful around “Nilao mai”, the brow/forehead, and “dhaag”, the mark or scar. In a Sufi reading, the brow may become the place where destiny, surrender, and the trace of the Beloved are inscribed. The dhaag is no longer merely a wound: it is the visible sign of an invisible encounter.
The poem repeatedly returns to things that remain: footsteps, traces, colour, companionship, marks. That persistence makes absence paradoxical. The Beloved may not be physically present, yet the Beloved is more deeply present through the trace.
[SUFI]
The Footprints of the Beloved
Upon my brow, Your ancient footprints remain;
across the hidden roads of love,
Your wandering traces lead me onward.
You came like laughter upon the lips of sorrow,
like a secret fragrance entering the heart,
and left behind a thousand signs of love.
Love carried me to a station beyond the self,
where the lover and the Beloved
meet in the breath between two worlds.
When grief rose before me like a mountain,
You stood beside me—not outside me,
but within the very wound through which I saw.
And though a lifetime be swallowed by sorrow,
the heart becomes an ocean of joy
whenever it remembers Your name.
Do not say that I have forgotten You.
How could I forget what has become my face?
Your rose-red light still flowers upon my countenance.
Do not spill the blood of this bewildered lover,
for I bear upon myself the dhaag of love—
the sacred scar by which the Beloved is known.
Let the darkness of tyranny descend,
let the night surround the seeker;
the hand that has touched the Beloved
will still carry the sign.
And when all signs disappear,
when road and traveller, lover and beloved,
lose their separate names,
the trace alone will remain.
For I did not merely love You.
You wrote Yourself upon me.
JUSTIFICATION:
Here I translate the repeated imagery of remaining traces into a Sufi vocabulary of athar—the trace or sign by which the unseen becomes perceptible. The beloved's footprints become a metaphor for the spiritual path: the seeker does not possess the Beloved but follows the signs left by the Beloved.
The transformation of “dhaag” into “the sacred scar” is deliberately interpretive. In ordinary English, stain, mark, scar, or trace could all be possible. In the Sufi layer, the paradox is valuable: the wound becomes the means of recognition. The lover is marked precisely because the encounter has transformed him.
Likewise, “rose-red light” moves beyond a merely physical description. The rose is retained as an image of beauty, but light allows it to participate in the Persianate/Sufi symbolic field of illumination.
The crucial theological safeguard is that the original does not explicitly say “God,” “Allah,” or the Divine Beloved. Therefore this is a Sufi-inflected interpretation, not a claim that Alamgir necessarily intended every line as mystical doctrine.