Word: hamza
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...hard to think of an epic more dazzlingly splendid, and strangely forgotten, than The Adventures of Amir Hamza. Although it is some 10 centuries old, the work's first major English translation was published only at the end of last month, finally bringing to the world the legend of the reputed uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. A radiant warrior who saved kingdoms, wooed princesses and journeyed to fantastical realms, Amir Hamza was cherished in the courts of India's Mughal emperors and celebrated in places as far flung as present-day Georgia and Malaysia. But of late, his memory...
...Musharraf Farooqi, the 39-year-old translator, is an unlikely savior. Growing up in Pakistan, he read of Amir Hamza's exploits in abridged Urdu versions adapted for children - virtually the sole form in which the epic survived into the 20th century. Farooqi, who admits to not being the most diligent student, would drift into daydreams inspired by the stories in class, imagining, he says, that he was a demon "running around with a tree trunk and clobbering humans with it." In university, he frequently shirked his prescribed engineering curriculum for a pile of dog-eared folk tales scrounged from...
...dastan, which includes popular stories generated, modified and passed down by village elders and royal poets alike. Dastan fables were subject to endless revision, shimmering and shifting depending on who was telling them and who was listening. When a few unnamed storytellers recited their dastan of Amir Hamza to an Indian publisher in 1883, the transcription yielded 46 volumes, each some 1,500 pages in length...
...Though their roots are in Persia and Arabia, the stories of Amir Hamza blossomed most fully on the Indian subcontinent - a crossroads of religions, languages and narrative styles. "When it entered India, the sky was clearly the limit," says Muhammad Memon, professor of literature and Islamic studies at the University of Wisconsin. The richness of India's modes of cultural expression - particularly its blending of Sufi Islam and the mythological repertoire of the older strains of Hinduism - prompted opulent embellishments of the epic, deepening its playful world of myriad magical creatures and warlords riding rhinoceroses...
...Both films are based on actual atrocities. Redacted is inspired by the March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza, and the killing of her family and torching of their bodies and their home, by four American soldiers. Three of the GI's have been convicted by military juries, earning from 90 to 110 years in prison. The fourth, who was discharged from the Army before charges were brought, is to be tried in criminal court; the prosecutor handling the case says he will seek the death penalty...