About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

Firdaus-e-Bareen ("The Highest Paradise") was written by Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926) of Lucknow and first published in 1899. Sharar died in 1926, so the novel is in the public domain in Pakistan, India and everywhere else.

The Urdu text here is the one on Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org/wiki/فردوس_بریں), in modern spelling, in its nine sections. The two longest sections are each divided into two chapters for easier reading; nothing has been cut. The footnotes that the Wikisource editor added at the end of the book, on Mongol genealogy, are not included.

The English is a new, complete translation made for this library, paragraph by paragraph with the Urdu. Where the characters speak in the form of a play script, as Sharar often has them do, that layout is kept. Lines of Persian verse are translated, with the original in a translator's note.

Introduction

Sharar was one of the makers of the Urdu novel. A journalist and the editor of the Lucknow magazine Dil-gudaz, he wrote more than twenty historical romances, set across the Islamic past from Spain to Persia, and his essays on the old culture of Lucknow (Guzishta Lucknow) are still read today. Firdaus-e-Bareen is his best-known novel and is set on university Urdu courses in Pakistan and India.

The story is set in the 1250s, in the mountains south of the Caspian. A young couple, Husain and Zamurrud, are travelling on pilgrimage when they fall into the hands of the Batinis, the secret order based at the fortress of Alamut. Its leaders have built a garden "paradise" hidden in the mountains, where devotees are drugged, shown houris and palaces, and sent back into the world ready to kill at command. Sharar follows Husain as he is drawn in and used, until the order falls to Hulagu Khan's Mongol army in 1256.

The novel mixes adventure, romance and history, and it gave Urdu readers a vivid picture of how a charismatic sect could deceive and command. Sharar took his history from Persian chronicles; where he makes small errors in the Mongol genealogy, the translation follows his text as written.