Eighty years separate two U.S. First Ladies – one, Eleanor Roosevelt known for her courageous outspokenness, and the other, Melania Trump for her soignée silences.

Mrs. Roosevelt used her position in the White House and later as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. to champion humanitarian causes. As chairman of its Commission on Human Rights (1946–51), she oversaw the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. On her death in 1962, Adlai Stevenson (her successor at the U.N.) praised her, saying: ‘She would rather light candles than curse the darkness’.  

Mrs. Roosevelt’s name and wisdom came to mind while reading an array of books recently. She once said: ‘Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.’

Great minds like Edward Gibbon wrote about empires. Western chroniclers once believed that all roads led to and from Rome. Two recent historians have turned that egocentrism on its head: Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Road (2015) and William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road (2024).

Frankopan questions ‘the mantra of the political, cultural and moral triumph of the west.’  He marks that ‘the rise of Europe sparked a fierce battle for power – and control of the past.’ The true cradle of civilization, he argues, lay not in the west but in the Middle East, which over time linked China to the Mediterranean. President Xi Jinping’s One Belt, One Road is the first fulfilment of Frankopan’s prophecy that ‘the Silk Roads are rising again’.

Dalrymple sees his subject - India - through a gold-tinted prism. He contends that ‘for a thousand years, India‘s ideas transformed the world, creating around itself an Indosphere’. India became ‘a crucial economic fulcrum and civilisational engine at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds…fully on a par with and equal to China.’ Interpreting India’s modern upward trajectory, Dalrymple asks: ‘Could they do so again?’

Two other authors – Americans but Pakistani in origin and therefore more productive abroad - are Waleed Ziad and Murad Mumtaz Khan. Waleed’s book Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints Beyond the Oxus and Indus (2021) reveals the role of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufis, who ‘fused Persian, Arabic, Turkic, and Indic literary traditions, mystical virtuosity, popular religious practices, and urban scholasticism in a unified yet flexible expression of Islam’. Sub-surface, they influenced social movements from Turkey to Indonesia, and even in China.

Murad Khan’s Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500–1800 (2023) tackles the sensitive subject of portraiture in Muslim art. In particular he pulls into prominence two Mughal royals – prince Dara Shikoh (son of Shah Jahan) and his sister princess Jahanara. Both became practicing Sufis. Murad quotes from Jahanara’s recollection of her Risala-i-sahibiyya, of her initiation into the Qadiriya order. She writes that when meditating alone (court propriety denied her the physical presence of her spiritual guide Mulla Shah), she uses a painted image of him as a sacred surrogate, without committing idolatry.     

Eleanor Roosevelt’s second group - average minds who discuss events – is over populated by journalists, television talk-show hosts and op-ed writers. They keep their noses pressed to window panes to observe what is happening anywhere in the world. Today, only a split-second separates an event from its coverage by the media. The world can watch typhoons and tragedies, conflicts and comedies in real time. And, tiringly, President Trump all the time.  

Roosevelt’s third category – those who discuss people – is exemplified by Pakistani authors. They prefer to write about themselves. Their heavy autobiographies, like the pyramids, aspire to immortality. Farhatullah Babar’s The Zardari presidency, 2008-13 (2025) is as good (or bad) an example of this genre. Other titles include the retired bureaucrat Salman Faruqui’s faux memoir Dear Mr. Jinnah (2024) and the translation from Urdu of Hayat Raghaani’s Queen Zarqa: A Transgender’s Odyssey (2025).

It is a truism that books have a shelf-life beyond life itself. Embedded in them is the experience, the knowledge and the effort of millions of minds – great, average and small. Somewhere, they also contain the warning that one mind – even when elected democratically – can cause havoc across the world.  

In 1933, General Erich Ludendorff (a WWI hero), after supporting the  Nazis, was mortified when their leader Adolf Hitler was elected and appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg. Ludendorff sent this warning to Hindenburg: ‘You have delivered our holy German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.’ 

Voters in every democratic autocracy today are realising that their votes have become spent candles, whose light is being replaced by a dimming darkness.   

F. S. AIJAZUDDIN

[Dawn, 30 October, 2025]