While Faiz disagreed with some aspects of Iqbal’s philosophy of life, he was an admirer of Iqbal’s poetry. As proof, one can point, initially, to the poem that opened this essay which a saddened Faiz wrote in 1938 after Iqbal’s death
'There came to our land a sweet singing beggar
Sang his songs and moved on
Desolate pathways and deserted taverns sprang to life
Far away is he now, that regal beggar
And forlorn once again, are the streets of our land’
“Iqbal” by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, ‘Naqsh-e Faryaadi’
It is often thought that there is nothing common between the poetry and art of ‘Allama’ Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), ‘poet of the East’ and Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984), Pakistan’s poet laureate. Iqbal is considered a champion of Muslims while Faiz is seen as the poet of workers, peasants, the downtrodden and oppressed regardless of faith. Lovers of Iqbal accuse Faiz of being an ‘atheist’ and a ‘communist’ while devotees of Faiz often dismiss Iqbal as a ‘Maulvi’ (a religious fundamentalist).
Undoubtedly, Iqbal composed many poems celebrating the glory of Islam and Muslims. Some of his most famous poems including the epic ‘Shikvah’ deal with Iqbal’s lifelong struggle to empower the Muslims of India and remind them of their lost glory. It is a supreme irony of history that Iqbal who was one of the first to conceive of the then fantastically improbable idea of a separate homeland for the Muslims of British India has been deified as the national poet of Pakistan even though he never lived in Pakistan, having died in 1938, nine years before the communal partition of British India into the dominions of Pakistan and India.
In contrast, Faiz Ahmed ‘Faiz’, although a ‘citizen of the world’ lived and worked a large part of his life in Pakistan. Faiz was never enamored of the idea of ‘Pan-Islamism’, the notion that all Muslims all over the world are part of one ‘Ummah’ or community. For Faiz, encouraging people to identify themselves on the basis of religion, nationality, ethnicity or anything other than their common humanity was inherently divisive. In addition, by virtue of his early association with the left leaning All India (later All Pakistan) Progressive Writers Association, Faiz was deeply sympathetic to the plight of ordinary working people and devoted his life and his work to their causes. His poem ‘Intesaab’ (‘Dedication’) is ample proof of this.
The two poets’ connection begins in Sialkot, their home town. Faiz’ father, Sultan Mohammad Khan was a friend of Iqbal as well as his contemporary at Cambridge Law. Both Faiz and Iqbal received their early education under the tutelage of the renowned scholar ‘Shams-ul-Ulema’ (the ‘Sun of scholars’) Sayyid Mir Hasan at Scotch Mission High School, although at different times. By the time Faiz was in his teens, Iqbal was already a leading figure in the literary life of India and, as such, once presented an award to Faiz in a poetry competition. Iqbal also wrote a letter of reference for Faiz’ admission to Government College, Lahore for his MA degree.
While Faiz disagreed with some aspects of Iqbal’s philosophy of life, he was an admirer of Iqbal’s poetry. As proof, one can point, initially, to the poem that opened this essay which a saddened Faiz wrote in 1938 after Iqbal’s death.
There is no authoritative record of Iqbal ever expressing an opinion about Faiz’ poetry. In addition, in the heat of the rising independence movement against British rule, which intensified after the first World War and its aftermath including the eventual abolition of the Turkish Sultanate, the last of the traditional Muslim Caliphates, Iqbal was preoccupied with weightier matters. However Faiz has written quite a bit in his prose works about the artistic and philosophic aspects of Iqbal’s poetry.
Interestingly, in spite of receiving almost universal acclaim and praise, both locally and internationally neither man was convinced of the worth of his own work. Iqbal says, “I have never considered myself a poet...I have no interest in the art of poetry...(however), I have adopted the poem as a way of describing some issues pertinent to this country (British India)....”
Similarly, Faiz, one of the most beloved poets of South Asia and beyond, writes about himself:
‘It is the poet’s birthday, bring wine
position, title, honors, what has he not received
the only shortcoming, is that the one being praised
has written no verses worthy of any book’
As stated, it is ironic that Iqbal is considered a poet of ‘Pakistan’ since he died 9 years before the partition of India. It was Faiz who became the true inheritor of Iqbal’s poetic legacy in the newly independent state. Although Faiz lived in many different places at many different times, he remained very much a poet of Pakistan, more so since he was also a poet of protest and throughout his life, he had much to protest about in his ‘beloved land’.
In ‘Culture and Identity: Selected English Writings of Faiz ‘ (OUP 2006 pp 164-183) three essays by Faiz spell out in some details his thoughts about the poetry, personality and art of Iqbal. First, he quotes England’s pre-eminent poet and critic Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834) as saying that no man was a great poet who was not also a great philosopher. In the East, a whole galaxy of great names are testament to this foremost among them Jalaluddin Muhammad ‘Rumi’ (1207-1273), Muslihuddin ‘Saadi’ (1184-1283), Hafez ‘Shirazi’ (1315-1390), Amir Khusrau Dehlavi (1253-1325) and last, but not least, Mirza Asadullah Khan ‘Ghalib’ (1797-1869). For Faiz, Iqbal, too, belongs in the ranks of these great mystics for he possessed not only an intimate knowledge of both Eastern and Western philosophy, he was also well versed in several languages allowing him to describe his point of view with eloquence.
In addition, says Faiz, like the all the Western ‘poets of affirmation’,Dante, Milton and Goethe, Iqbal too was no mere abstract thinker. He was and remained intimately involved in the social and political life of his community and for the Muslims of India, he was not only a political but religious and spiritual guide as well.
Where the poetry and works of Iqbal and Faiz diverge is that while Iqbal took as his starting point the lost glory of the Muslims of India and the world, this point of view is absent from the poetry of Faiz. Not that Faiz intentionally avoided the subjects of God, faith or Islam, infact, his poetry has frequent references to ‘roz e mehshar’ (the ‘day of judgement’), ‘jaza o saza’ (divine reward and punishment) etc. The difference is that Faiz early on chose as his muse the collective human struggle against nature as well as against the oppression and injustice practiced by man upon man. For this reason, Faiz’ poetry has few or no references to metaphysical, supranatural elements such as angels, satan, etc.
In one of his essays, Faiz analyzes the evolution of Iqbal’s poetry as passing through four distinct phases. The young Iqbal, like all youth, paints pictures of the beauty of nature as well as about love and its loss. In the next phase, he rises above his own self and fixes his gaze on his community, the Muslims of India and talks of their misery, their hopes, fears and sorrows. Going beyond this, Iqbal fixes his gaze on all of humanity and humanity’s collective struggles and in the last, most mature phase of his poetry, his vision enlarges to encompass the entire Universe exemplified in the verse:
‘If I am the end of all Creation, what is beyond me?
Where is the peak of all my stormy tempests’
(‘Hazrat-e Insaan’ in ‘Armaghan-e Hijaaz’)
It is also interesting that even though many of Iqbal’s poems are considered ‘Islamic’, according to Faiz, nowhere in Iqbal’s poetry does one find descriptions of heaven, hell etc except symbolically. The simple reason, according to Faiz, is that Iqbal is a poet of struggle. One of Iqbal’s translators, Victor Kiernan elaborating on this explains Iqbal’s central poetic metaphor, that of ‘Khudi’ as ‘a sense of evolution and history through advance and struggle, of the development of a dynamic individual personality developed through practical activity in the world as against the lingering Sufi ideal of passive contemplation and mystic absorption’. This struggle is that of Man striving to maintain himself against an uncaring universe. The eternal world beyond the natural world, where there is no struggle, no effort is meaningless to Iqbal. His protagonist, the fallen angel ‘Iblees’ or Satan says as much to his erstwhile companion, the archangel ‘Jibreel’ or Gabriel in Iqbal’s brief but intense poem ‘Jibreel o Iblees’. Iblees says (referring to the afterworld) :
‘It is no longer possible for me to pass through here
So barren is this land devoid of palace or alleys ’
According to Faiz, this is the central theme of Iqbal’s poetry, Man, the universe in which he dwells, his loneliness in this finite world, and his struggle against the forces arrayed against him, both internally in the form of his own greed, cowardice,and heartlessness in exploiting his fellow humans as well as externally in the form of an unforgiving and harsh natural world against which he must struggle to sustain himself.
Faiz describes Iqbal’s conflicting opinions thus:
‘Most...writers have put a great deal of stress on the religious element in Iqbal’s work without clarifying that Iqbal’s concept of religion was in many ways totally opposed to the concept of the orthodox Muslim theologian. In fact, the Mullah...is the subject of some of the bitterest satirical verses written by Iqbal. On the other hand, progressive critics have made much of his admiration for Marx and Lenin and...his genuine appreciation of the egalitarian character of socialist society (but they) ignore that his approach to social and economic problems was idealistic and abstract...’
Iqbal’s time saw prevailing Indian Muslim opinion split between two equally unsatisfactory schools of thought. The liberal apologists of Empire personified by ‘Allama’ Abdullah Yusuf Ali, the Cambridge educated ICS (Indian Civil Service)man, best remembered for his erudite and beloved translation and interpretation of the Quran and religious clerics best represented by the fiery Jauhar brothers, Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali ,staunch supporters of the Khilafat movement and a perpetual thorn in the side of the British. Neither the liberals’ exhortations to be loyal to King and Empire nor the religious scholars’ calls to return to the Islam of bygone days reflected the true desires of India’s Muslims especially the emerging middle classes.
Faiz goes on ‘...(Iqbal’s) work reflected all the inner intellectual contradictions (and the)...confused dreams and aspirations of the middle strata of Indo-Pakistan Muslims during the first three or four decades (of the 20th century)...(making his work) popular amongst progressives and reactionaries alike for his title as the national poet of Pakistan’
While Faiz describes the evolution of Iqbal’s thought in relation to the society he lived in , a similar explanation can be offered psychologically. This dichotomy of the ‘inner and the outer’, ‘the world and the self’, ‘“me” and “other”’is at the very heart of human existence. It torments and entices us, maddens and frustrates us. It is the quintessential dilemma of a self aware being.
Externally (as Faiz points out) in the objective world of nature, Man’s universe is not limited to this world alone but to other worlds beyond this one and thence to the entire universe. No goal no matter how lofty can bring him peace and fulfillment. Beyond every mountain peak that I climb lies another, higher one. Thus ‘each success is a partial failure and each fulfillment a partial prostration’.
Internally, in Man’s subjective world of self experience, he struggles against his own base impulses of greed, anger and the desires of his ‘animal’ nature: lust, power, the wish to dominate, subjugate and exploit his fellow man.
Within this struggle lies hidden the despair and anger of a self aware creature aware of its own end, approaching inexorably in the form of its death. We struggle against it , by accumulating possessions, money and the trappings of a ‘successful’ life or by frantic efforts to ‘possess’ or ‘own’ others body and soul as if that would cushion us against our own end or render it more bearable. In reality, this agony is a reflection of the pain immortalized in Dylan Thomas searing ‘Do Not Go Gentle’:
‘Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. ’
The creative nature of art and poetry that engages and struggles with these univeral human truths eases our pain and erases our loneliness, if only for a time.
If such creativity goes a step further and attempts to change some of those truths by changing the conditions of human existence, it becomes the measure of greatness. This is the art of an Iqbal or a Faiz embodied in verses such as:
‘The secrets of this ocean of silence are locked
‘til cleaved by (your very own) rod of Moses’ (Iqbal)
or:
‘Speak! to summon Judgment Day
Speak! to hasten the day of justice’ . (Faiz)
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The author is a Psychiatrist practicing in Arkansas, USA. Email: |