by Ahfadul Mujtaba
An exploration of how Greek, Indian, and Islamic traditions understand suffering, tragedy, ego, and moral struggle, offering different pathways toward wisdom, humility, and endurance.
It began, as many good conversations do, over a borrowed book.
A colleague of mine, younger than me and holding a degree in International Relations, had recently come across a slim but weighty volume by the American geopolitical thinker Robert D Kaplan, titled The Tragic Mind. Knowing that my own background was in literature, he brought it to me not so much to be taught as to think aloud together. He was drawn to Kaplan’s central argument: that the most effective and humane politicians in history were not the optimists or the idealists, but those who carried within them a deep, clear-eyed awareness of human limitation. The leaders, who understood that good intentions routinely, produce catastrophic outcomes. Those who governed not from certainty, but from a tragic sense of life.
As we talked, his question became mine: where does this tragic sensibility come from, and what, if anything, can be done with it?
The oldest and most dramatic answer comes from ancient Greece.
Greek tragedy, think of the plays of Sophocles or the theories of Aristotle, was built around a painful but precise insight: that the very qualities which make a person great are often the same qualities that destroy them. Aristotle called this hamartia, loosely translated as the “tragic flaw”, though it was rarely simple wickedness.
Oedipus, the legendary king celebrated for his brilliant mind, was destroyed by his own relentless hunger for truth.
Antigone, a young woman of fierce moral courage, was executed precisely because she refused to bend her principles even slightly.
When this inner flaw met with an unyielding pride, what the Greeks called hubris, catastrophe became inevitable. The universe, personified through the gods, responded with nemesis: swift, crushing retribution. For the audience watching these plays, there was a release in this. Aristotle called it catharsis, a purging of pity and fear. But the lesson underneath was sobering. Wisdom, in the Greek world, almost always arrived too late. The hero understood himself only once everything had already been lost. The tragic mind here is noble, rigid, and ultimately doomed. It cannot bend, and so it breaks.
What Greek tragedy does not fully offer is a way out. It diagnoses the illness with extraordinary precision but stops short of a cure. The hero falls, the audience is moved, the warning is issued. And yet the cycle continues in human history regardless.
Travel east to ancient India, and the architecture of tragedy shifts considerably. In the great epic Mahabharata, a text so vast it contains within it an entire civilisation’s moral philosophy, tragedy is not the story of one proud man’s fall. It is a dense, suffocating web of interconnected choices, duties, and unintended consequences. Every character is simultaneously victim and agent, bound by Karma (the law of cause and effect, the understanding that every action carries a consequence, often one you did not anticipate) and Dharma (one’s sacred duty, which shifts depending on one’s role, relationships, and moment in life).
The most arresting scene in the entire epic is that of a young warrior, Arjuna, standing in his chariot on the eve of a vast battle, suddenly paralysed. He looks across the battlefield and sees his own cousins, beloved teachers, and childhood friends lined up as enemies. His duty as a warrior demands that he fight. His love for them makes that impossible.
This psychological crisis, depicted in a chapter called the Vishada Yoga or the yoga of despair, is one of literature’s earliest and most honest portraits of the tragic mind: not a man brought low by pride, but one brought to his knees by the crushing weight of impossible choices.
The philosophical response to Arjuna’s despair is delivered by the god Krishna in what becomes the Bhagavad Gita. The source of suffering, Krishna argues, is not the difficulty of circumstances but the ego’s fierce attachment to outcomes and identities. We suffer because we confuse our temporary roles, warrior, son, king, with our deepest self. The invitation is to act rightly, fulfil one’s duty, and release the need to control what follows. This teaching does not eliminate grief, but it relocates its source and, in doing so, offers a way to continue living and acting inside tragedy without being consumed by it.
A third response to the tragic mind emerges from Islamic thought, and it shares common ground with both traditions while taking on a distinctly different emotional register. Rather than centring on fate and pride, or on the illusion of the ego, Islamic philosophy frames suffering through the concept of Bala, a trial or test that is purposeful rather than arbitrary. Hardship, in this view, is not evidence of an indifferent universe. It is an invitation to something deeper.
The Islamic scholar Abul Hasan Nadwi, in his illuminating study Prophet Muhammad in the Mirror of His Supplication, identifies what he considers the most stubborn and universal of human afflictions: the tendency to regard oneself as superior and others as lesser. It is, Nadwi observes, a malady that cuts across all cultures and all eras, and one that is uniquely difficult to diagnose in oneself. He invokes the poet Muhammad Iqbal to name what makes it so elusive: “Lurking in the chambers of the heart, desire draws its cherished images.” Self-conceit does not announce itself. It disguises itself as confidence, as conviction, as righteous certainty. Only those who have genuinely wrestled with themselves, Nadwi argues, and who have sought help beyond their own strength, are freed from its grip.
It is against precisely this background that the Prophet Muhammad’s own supplication takes on its full meaning:
Allahumma Ajalni Sabooran, wa Ajalni Shakooran, wa Ajalni fi Ayni Sagheeran, wa fi Ayunin Naas Kabeera.
“O Allah, make me greatly patient, and greatly grateful, and belittle me in my own sight, and elevate me in the sight of others.”
Each phrase carries its own weight. Patience here is not passive resignation but an active, dignified steadiness, the refusal to let grief harden into bitterness. Gratitude, in its deeper sense, means finding meaning, even unexpected gift, within loss. But it is the final pairing that strikes hardest. To ask to be small in one’s own eyes is to voluntarily surrender the very thing the Greek tragic hero could never relinquish: the belief that the world owes him recognition. It is the direct antidote to hubris. And to ask for elevation in the eyes of others ensures that this inner humility does not become withdrawal or self-erasure, but remains engaged, dignified, and of genuine use to the world.
What makes this supplication remarkable is that the Prophet offered it not as a lesson for others but as a prayer for himself.
Nadwi draws attention to this pointedly. Here is a man who, by any measure, had every reason for self-assurance, and yet he turned daily to words that began with an acknowledgement of his own need.
A well-known episode from his life gives the prayer its most vivid context. Travelling to the city of Ta’if to seek support for his mission, he was rejected, mocked, and driven out by crowds who threw stones at him until he bled. His recorded response was neither anger nor despair. He prayed, speaking only of his own weakness, and asked for mercy even towards those who had harmed him. The supplication and the moment are, in this sense, inseparable: together they form a portrait of someone who has made peace with powerlessness, not through detachment, but through a grounded, humble presence in the situation as it actually was.
Returning to that conversation, I think what drew my colleague to Kaplan’s book was precisely this: the recognition that the leaders and thinkers who have navigated the world most wisely were not those who refused to feel the weight of tragedy, but those who felt it fully and were not undone by it. Each of the three traditions we wandered through that afternoon offers something distinct. The Greeks name the danger with unflinching honesty. The Indian tradition asks us to examine what we are actually clinging to. And the Islamic tradition suggests that suffering, met with the right interior posture, need not be merely endured. It can become, quietly, a source of depth and even strength.
No single tradition owns the complete answer. But together, they form something like a map, not out of suffering, which may be unavoidable, but through it. And perhaps that is what Kaplan was really pointing towards: not a world without tragedy, but minds cultivated enough to bear it with wisdom and without cruelty.
(The author, after retiring as IGP in Jammu and Kashmir Police, was a member of the Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission. Ideas are personal.)
