I am pursuing my research into Eastern realms of enchantment. This has taken me into the immense fantasy realm of a storytelling tradition that begins in Persia and flowers into its lushest growth in the Urdu language in northern India and Pakistan. The best of this material is only recently becoming available in English translation, thanks in part to a dream.
The translator, Urdu scholar and novelist Musharraf Ali Farooqi (who grew up on this stuff on hot afternoons in Hyderabad) dreamed he was visited by mythic creatures who came galloping right out of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, the name given to the main story cycle. In giving us the first accessible English translation of The Adventures of Amir Hamza (published by the Modern Library in a 900-page edition) Farooqi has made an enormous contribution to the common fund of world literature.
Turning these wonder tales into English was long thought to be an impossible task. They are the transitions of oral narratives, and you hear the voices of the many tellers, ranging from courtly Persian to bawdy, street vendors’ Hindustani. You get detail piled on detail. It won’t do to have an army ride into a city without naming a hundred kinds of weapons. In one passage we even get the itemization of seventy kinds of rice pilaf. The Urdu-language editors were quite unable to harmonize the variant plots of the numberless dastangos (storytellers) who contributed to these adventures. Yet Musharraf Farooqi has performed a marvel, serving a feast of delights as rich as the Arabian Nights and often absolutely fresh to the Western reader.
A Persian emperor sees his crown carried away by a crow that is killed by a hawk that restores it. The dream is interpreted by his vizier to foreshadow the coming of a hero, Amir Hamza, who will be born in Mecca. The vizier is despatched to Mecca to wait for the coming child (whose name is known to history as that of the martial uncle of the Prophet Muhammad). In the realm of fairies and jinn - the empire of Qaf - another royal dream of annunciation predicts the coming of the same Amir Hamza as the human champion who will overthrow a monstrous usurper.
What unfolds is a magnificent saga of danger, trickery and romance, in which raucous interludes of low comedy interweave with moments of mystical encounter. Every prince is accompanied by a "trickster" (ayyar) who uses disguise and deception and magical props in the neverending battles with sorcerers and demons. The trickster who accompanies the protagonist, Amar Ayyar, gains his bag of tricks through a dream on a holy mountain in which he meets the "prophets". He is given a zambil, a bag that is bigger inside than outside - so big it can contain a whole world.
In The Adventures of Amir Hamza we travel through a wondrous imaginal geography that includes contructed realities known as tilisms. These are realms of enchantment created by sorcerers. You may fall into one for various reasons and then find it very hard to get out.
Any world may prove to be a tilism, a realm of enchantment created by sorcerers in defiance of “the laws of God and of nature”. We learn a great deal more about the conditions of such realms in a giant offshoot of The Adventures of Amir Hamza, the immense fantasy epic known as the Tilism-e Hoshruba. The tilism of Hoshruba is the realm of Afrasiyab, the Emperor of Enchantment. Its geography is more various and complex than that of the ordinary world. There are tilisms within tilisms, nested worlds created by magic and imagination. Humans live in such places but do not see where they are. It is much easier to fall into a tilism than to get out.
The only way to pierce the veils of illusion and overthrow a tilism is to find the tablet that holds the secrets of the tilism, including the conditions for its destruction and the name of the person who will destroy it. The tablet could be concealed anywhere, often inside the tilism itself.
Musharraf Farooqi has just published the first volume of a projected 24-volume translation of Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism (Urdu Project, 2009) - a heroic enterprise that draws my admiration, and expands our knowledge of the mythic imagination.