Al-Risala (English), September 1984

and milk, under the Prophet’s instructions, stones crash down the mountainside in symbolic confirmation of the correctness of this way. The Quran exhorts man to obey God’s commandments, and everything in the universe, by fully following the law of nature, proclaims that no other path is possible in this world. The Quran says that one should build for oneself without causing harm to others, and the sun, moon and all heavenly bodies, revolving in their orbits, show how proper this demand is. The Quran says that after this world another world is coming in which man will reap the consequences of his deeds: and the universe, with its ultimate meaningfulness, testifies that life cannot end with the present world; another world must come in which truth and falsehood are exposed for what they are. The Islamic Centre, Delhi, was inaugurated in 1970. It has purely constructive aims. It seeks to present Islam to the world as the science of life; it wishes man to observe the religion of realism that the whole universe observes. In a nutshell, we want to make science journalism, and journalism science. □ He Could Not Stand Being Criticized The American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), first met Rabindranath Tagore in London on the 30th June 1912. He was very impressed with Tagore’s talent. When an English translation of the Bengali poet’s book of verse Gitanjali, was published. Pound wrote that Tagore’s works had all the grandeur of Dante. He even said that Tagore is “greater than anyone of us.” Ezra Pound wrote these words on Tagore in the American magazine Fortnightly Review in March 1913. Just one month later, on April 22, 1913, he wrote a letter to the editor of Poetry magazine, in which he called Tagore “superfluous”. His works are just a repetition of old tales, Pound wrote, and whatever literary relish there was in Bengali original had also been done away with in the English translation. How did this change come about in Ezra Pound’s opinion of Tagore? The reason for it was that Pound had, with the help of Kali Mohun Ghosh, translated the poetry of Kabir into English. Before being published in book-form, this translation had been serialized in a