In Spring thou hast heard the clamorous nightingale, and watched the resurrection of the flowers;

The buds arrayed like brides; from the dark earth a veritable city of stars arise;

The meadow bathed in the soft tear of dawn, that slumbered to the river’s lullaby.

A bud bursts into blossom on the branch; the breeze new-risen takes it to her breast;

A bloom lies bleeding in the gatherer’s hand; and like a perfume from the mead departs.

The ring-dove builds his nest; the nightingale takes wing; the dew drops softly, and the scent is sped.

What though these mortal tulips die, they lessen not the splendour of the spring:

For all the loss, its treasure still abides abundant, still the thronging blossoms smile.

The season of the rose endures beyond the fragile eglantine time, yea, it outlives the rose’s self, the cypress, and the fir;

The jewel-nourishing mine bears jewels yet, unfinished by the shattering of one gem.

Dawn is departed from the East, and night gone from the West: their too-brief-historied up visits no more the wine-vault of the days;

Yet, though the draught be drunk, the wine remains eternal as the morrow that awaits when all our yesterdays are drowned in death.

So individuals, as they depart, are fallen pages from the calendar of peoples more enduring:

Though the friend is on journey, the companionship still stays; the individual is gone abroad, unstirring the community.

Other each essence is, the qualities other; they differ both in how each lives and how they die.

The individual arises from a handful of mere clay, the nation owes its birth to one brave heart;

The individual has for his span sixty or seventy years, a century is for the nation as single breath.

The individual is kept alive by the concomitance of soul and flesh, the nation lives by guarding ancient laws;

Death comes upon the individual when dries life’s river and the nation dies when it forsakes the purpose of its life.

Though the community must pass away like any individual when Fate, issues the fiat none may disobey,

Islam’s Community is divine undying marvel, having origin in that great compact, Yea, Thou art our Lord.

This people is indifferent to Fate, immovable in Lo, We have sent down remembrance,

Which abides while there is yet one to remember, whose continuance persists with it.

When God revealed the words they seek God’s light to extinguish, this bright lamp was never troubled it might flicker out.

’Tis a community that worships God in perfect faith, a people well-beloved by every man who has a conscient heart.

God drew this trusty blade out of the sheath of Abraham’s desires;

That by its edge sincerity might live, and all untruth consume before the lightning of its stroke.

We, who are proof of God’s high Unity and guardians of the Wisdom and the Book;

Encountered heaven’s malice long ago, the unsuspected menace of the hordes of savage Tartary,

Loosed (its feet and set it) on our heads to prove its terror.

Not the Judgment Day shall match the staring horror of those swords, the thunder of those legions armed with death.

Confusion sore confounded in the breast, of that disaster slept; its yesterday gave birth to no glad morrow.

Muslim might quivered in dust and blood; Baghdad beheld such scenes as Rome ne’er witnessed in her throes.

Now ask, if so thou wilt, what new design purposing Fate, malignant as of old, proposed this holocaust;

Whose garden sprang out of the Tartar fire? Whose turban wears the rose transmuted from those lambent flames?

Because our nature is of Abraham and our relationship to God the same.

As that great patriach’s: out of the fire’s convert to roses. When the burning brands depths anew we blossom, every Nimrod’s blaze.

Of Time’s great revolution ring our mead, then Spring returns.

The mighty power of Rome, conqueror and ruler of the world entire sank into small account;

The golden glass of the Sassanians was drowned in blood; broken the brilliant genius of Greece;

Egypt too failed in the great test of Time, her bones lie buried ’neath the Pyramids.

Yet still the voice of the muezzin rings throughout the earth, still the Community of World – Islam – maintains its ancient forms.

Love is the universal law of life, mingling the fragmentary elements of a disordered world.

Through our hearts’ glow love lives, irradiated by the spark there is no god but God.

Though, like a bud, our hearts are prisoned by oppressive care, if we should die, the graden too will die.