Note 7 — INTRODUCTION
Reynold Alleyne Nicholson translation
Here Iqbal adds: “Mauláná Rúmí has very beautifully expressed this idea. The Prophet, when a little boy, was once lost in the desert. His nurse Halíma was almost beside herself with grief, but while roaming the desert in search of the boy she heard a voice saying:
‘Do not grieve, he will not be lost to thee; Nay, the whole world will be lost in him.’
The true individual cannot be lost in the world; it is the world that is lost in him. I go a step further and say, prefixing a new half-verse to a hemistich of Rúmí (Transl. l. 1325):
In his will that which God wills becomes lost: ‘How shall a man believe this saying?’”