“Khudi ko kar buland itna ke har taqdeer se pehle
Khuda bande se khud pooche bata teri raza kya hai.”
Translation:
“Elevate yourself so high that even God, before issuing every decree of destiny, should ask you: Tell me, what is your intent?”
In Iqbal’s poem “Complaint and Answer” he writes the above quote, which has gotten a lot of attention. It has gotten interpreted through music and performed by famous Muslim music artists, such as Mohsin Ali. I looked up Mohsin Ali’s musical rendition of this poetic verse by Iqbal, and when I started playing it on my guitar it reminded me of a famous Jewish chant song “Oseh Shalom Bimramav”. The words to this Jewish song as I learned it are:
“Oseh shalom bimromav
Hu ya’ase shalom aleinu
Ve’al kol yisrael
Ve’al kol yoshve tevel
Ve’imru, imru, amen”
“He who makes peace in his high places
He shall make peace upon us
And upon all of israel
And all foreign peoples
And we say Amen”
I combined these two songs into one song that I recorded and performed. For me, the significance or the message of this piece is similar to that of Iqbal’s overall work “Complaint and Answer”. In “Oseh Shalom,” Jews ask God to bring peace upon us. The underlying implication of this, and many other prayers like it, is that Jews have done their part and now it’s time for God to do his part. Iqbal inverts this assumption and challenges Muslim readers to stop asking so much of God and start asking more of themselves. In other words, Believers need to step up their game and elevate themselves so that they are worthy of God’s benevolence. I tried to express this inversion musically by starting with “Oseh Shalom” in a slow kind of reflection and then picking up the tempo as the music shifts into “Khudi Ko Kar Buland”.