Book & Author
Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Coming Back Home — Selected Articles, Editorials and Interviews
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago, IL

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (February 13, 1911, Sialkot – November 20, 1984, Lahore),  one of the 20 th century’s greatest poets, was a multifaceted person — poet, writer, educator, journalist, freedom fighter, and humanitarian. His father Barrister Khan Bahadur Sultan Muhammad Khan was a Mir Munshi to King Abdul Rehman Khan of Afghanistan. In 1915 Faiz began to memorize the Qur’an, in 1916 he was admitted to Maulvi Ibrahim Mir's madrassa in Sialkot for learning Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. He was admitted to Scotch Mission School, Sialkot (1921) in class IV. He passed matriculation from Punjab University (1927), and intermediate from Murray College, Sialkot (1929). He completed BA with honors in Arabic (1931) and MA in English (1933) from Government College, Lahore, and MA in Arabic (1934) from Oriental College Lahore. He served as a lecturer in English at MAO College (1934), Amritsar, British India.

Faiz was fortunate to have prominent scholars as his teachers —  Maulvi Ibrahim Mir Sialkoti, Shamsul Ulema Syed Mir Hassan (Arabic), Yusuf Salim Chisti (Urdu), Ahmed Shah Bokhari, Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabussum and Maulvi Muhammad Shafi.

During the 1930s, Faiz was influenced by the leftist Progressive Movement — and in 1936, he became one of the founders of the Progressive Writers Association. During WWII he served in the British Indian army in Delhi. In December 1946, he resigned from the Army and moved to Lahore. In 1947 he became editor of  The Pakistan Times. He also worked as managing editor of the Urdu daily lmroz. During the Cold War era, in 1951, Faiz and a group of army officers were implicated in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. He was arrested under the Pakistan Safety Act and was jailed until 1955. After his release from prison, he was appointed secretary of the National Council of Arts. In 1962 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. He served as Principal of Abdullah Haroon College, Karachi until 1967. He also served as editor of Lail-o-Nahar until 1972. The same year he was appointed Director, Pakistan National Council of Arts (PNCA) and Advisor to the Federal Ministry of Culture. After the 1979 coup in Pakistan, he went into self-exile in Beirut where he worked as editor of Lotus until his return to Pakistan in 1982. He passed away in Lahore on November 20, 1984.

Coming Back Home — Selected Articles, Editorials and Interviews of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, has been compiled by Sheema Majeed — a literary researcher of Pakistan. She has also compiled more than fifteen volumes of the works of some of our best literati and intellectuals. The book starts with an Introduction by Khalid Hasan, and has four parts: I. Editorials, II. Interviews, III. On Faiz and IV. Alys Faiz. Part I has twenty-one editorials: 1. What Price Liberty? 2. Iqbal 3. To God We Return 4. We Demand 5. Innocents Abroad 6. Land and the Tiller 7. Unity Among Thieves 8. Exit 9. Progress of a Dream 10. Murdering Freedom 11. Co-ordinated Oppression 12. Retreat of Democracy 13. The New Challenge 14. The Role of the Artist 15. The Writer's Choice 16. Towards a Planetary Culture 17. Decolonizing Literature 18. Ring Out the Old 19. Long Live Gandhiji! 20. Grave Challenge, and 21. The First Step. Part II presents five interviews of Faiz. Part III has two articles on Faiz by Khalid Hasan and I.A. Rehman, and Part IV presents an interview with Alys Faiz.

In the Introduction, Khalid Hasan, reflecting on the caliber and craft of Faiz, observes: “Faiz Ahmed Faiz remains not only the greatest of our contemporary poets after Iqbal but the most transparent and honest of our intellectuals. He always saw things with clarity, and he spoke and wrote about them with the same clarity. Had he not been a poet, he would have been one of the great stylists of Urdu prose. And had he chosen to write his poetry, not in Urdu but in English, he would have produced equally memorable work. His English prose writing—represented in this volume by his newspaper editorials, some essays, and a comprehensive interview—is as profound as it is hard-hitting. In George Orwell's phrase, what Faiz wrote was always 'clear as a window pane.' No one since Iqbal has been able to express himself with such conviction and with such certainty as Faiz, who could render the most complicated idea in the simplest words.”

Expounding on the personality of Faiz Sahib, Khalid Hasan states: “`What sort of a man was Faiz?', those who did not know him have asked. He was kind, generous, forgiving, and detached from the day-to-day minutiae that keep most of us tethered to the irrelevant and the frivolous. He was never bitter, and never retaliated against those who continued to attack him throughout his life because of his progressive beliefs. Shortly before Faiz died in 1984, his interview with I.A. Rehman provides us with a glimpse into the soul of this extraordinary human being. Recalling the formative years of the Progressive Writers' Movement in the 1930s, Faiz said, 'The goal was to guide the people towards freedom and to use their genius to establish an order based on social justice, an order in which an individual's status would be determined not by heredity or wealth but by his merit.’”

In one of his editorials on Iqbal, (The Pakistan Times, Lahore, April 21, 1948) Faiz notes: “We celebrate today the anniversary of the greatest name in our recent literary and cultural history. We have said a great deal in praise of that name and done correspondingly little. Iqbal has been acclaimed for three decades or more as one of our greatest national heroes and yet even in the city of his birth there is hardly a monument to his name apart from an unfinished tomb. Petty officials, Municipal Councilors, political opportunists, and distinguished millionaires have been treated better. We could perhaps have put forward the excuse, although with no great amount of plausibility, that the burden of indigent slavery would not permit of more expansive means of reverence and material circumstances would not allow us to watch the depth of our admiration with the splendor of its expression. That excuse is now no more. We have on one occasion complained rather bitterly against the custodians of our national heritage [...] the relics of Iqbal and against those who took upon themselves the task of enshrining his memory in some enduring mold.”

Commenting further on Iqbal, Faiz states: “Iqbal represented the enlightened synthesis of Eastern and Western learning, the best of our traditional literary culture and its modern modes of expression; the poet's sensibility camped with the scientist's aptitude for rational ratiocination. We can best pay homage to his memory, therefore, not by setting up lifeless monuments that cannot help us towards a better understanding of his verse and his message, nor by setting up institutions after his name that breed habits of thinking and feeling antithetical to his own. We can do it only by providing facilities for his cultural and social values to flourish.”

Faiz in his editorial “To God We Return” (The Pakistan Times, Lahore, September 13, 1948) reflecting on the death of Quaid-i-Azam, observes: “The Quaid-i-Azam has passed away, after long years of toil and sacrifice and service in the cause of his people, his frail body has at last been gathered unto rest and his soul called back to the abode of the eternally blessed. No name in the history of Indian Muslims has been as loved and acclaimed as the name Mohammad Ali Jinnah. No man in living memory evoked such unquestioned loyalty, such unqualified devotion, such unbounded faith, for the one-time oppressed, rejected and broken Muslim nation, Mohammad All Jinnah was much more than a political leader. He was the father and the brother, the friend and the counsellor, the guide and confidant, the comrade and leader all, combined into one. Millions hopefully whispered his name in hours of anguish and blessed him silently in moments of joy. For the best portion of his life, he carried on his shoulders the burden of all their cares, in his heart the ache of all their sorrows and in his bones the weariness of all their labors. And now he is gone. The nation has been deprived of his love and his wisdom that guided and sustained them, of his leadership that held them so closely together, of his incorruptible rectitude that set the standard for their moral and political conduct. It is difficult in the shadow of this faithful hour to discourse dispassionately on what consequences his bitterly mourned death will engender for Pakistan and the rest of the sub-continent. The horizon has never been so dark and cloudy as it is today, and the people of India and Pakistan have never faced more anxious days than the days we are now passing through. Not only has the social, cultural, and economic renaissance that the dawn of freedom was expected to bring not yet materialized but new dangers to national freedom and national happiness have arisen that have to be fought and overcome. A million homesteads are still drenched in tears for the loss, during the dark and bloody days of a year ago, of whatever was dear to them on this earth, and already the rumblings of fresh trials and new conflicts are audible from a distance. Short-sighted fanaticism and heartless greed are preparing to plunge both the dominions into another suicidal devil-dance, and the voice of the common, man is getting feebler through exhaustion. Both India and Pakistan need at this time all the wisdom and humanity they can muster to save themselves from the cataclysm that threatens, and it is a cruel irony of history that at precisely this time both countries have been deprived of the two wisest and most humane men in the sub-continent. Ours is very much the greater and more grievous loss. We can show no greater devotion to the beloved leader and give no greater proof of our loyalty to his memory than to base our conduct on the pattern that he has immortalized and to conduct ourselves in a manner that accords with his life-long preaching. From the great grief that envelops the nation today, must emerge a new courage and a new determination to complete the task that the Quaid-i-Azam began, the task of building a free, progressive and secure Pakistan, to restore to our people the dignity and happiness for which the Quaid-i-Azam strove, to equip them with all the virtues that the nobility of freedom demands and to rid them of fear, suffering and want that have dogged them their lives through the ages.”

Faiz in his editorial “We Demand” (The Pakistan Times, Lahore, January 25, 1949) presents the sentiments of the people viz a viz free elections: “The West Punjab Assembly has been dissolved. The selfish pack of men who have, for the last 18 months, reveled in the people's misery and mocked at the nobility of freedom have been asked to quit. The people of West Punjab have been invited once again to exercise their sovereign right of choosing their own Government. We congratulate the Governor General of Pakistan on this bold and wise decision…The coming elections will be the first genuine test of democracy in free Pakistan, and we demand, on behalf of our people, that the test should be just and fair. We demand that every adult citizen must be given the right to vote. We demand this in the name of Islamic equality that makes no distinction between the rich and the poor; we demand it in the name of freedom that is the common heritage of us all; we demand it in the name of democracy that knows neither handicap nor preference between one free citizen and another. We demand that no one should be given the privilege to arrogate exclusively to himself the past prestige of the Muslim League, a prestige that belongs to the Muslim Nation as a whole. We demand that there should be no party tickets. We demand that political tricksters should not be allowed to load the dice for and against any citizen. Let the people judge every man on the basis of what he has deserved of them.”

Faiz further observes: “We demand that the men who have brought the Province to its present pass, the men who blackened the name of freedom for personal greed, the men who have dragged us into the mire of intrigue, must withdraw from the coming contest. Let us start with a clean slate, un-smudged by the names that have acquired in the public ear, the same ring as the name of Khizar. We demand complete and unfettered liberty for every free citizen of West Punjab to present his case before his people and we demand complete and unfettered liberty for the people to record their verdict. We have no doubt that if these demands are accepted, our stalwart people shall vindicate the tarnished honor of West Punjab. We shall yet be able to hold our heads high again in the world assembly of free peoples.”

Faiz in his editorial “Land and the Tiller” (The Pakistan Times, Lahore, March 13, 1949) discusses the issues of agriculture and landlords (Jagirdars): “Today Pakistan's land system is as archaic as the prevailing methods of production, with the result that our output per man and per acre is very nearly the lowest in the world. A substantial part of our national wealth is being wasted by a backward technique and the vast majority of those who live by agriculture are condemned to horrible grinding poverty. Among the many problems that have to be successfully tackled if Pakistan is to develop and make full use of her abundant agricultural resources, the most urgent of all is the present system of land ownership, which is as outmoded as it is unjust and constitutes the biggest stumbling block in the path of our progress…In West Punjab, reputedly the land of peasant proprietors, according to one estimate 6 percent of the owners hold over 50 percent of the land, and at the other end, 63.7 percent of the owners hold only 12.2 per cent of the land, their holdings being uneconomic even by conservative official standards. An official report further admits that land gradually passing out of the hands of the small holders and the big landowners becoming even bigger. In other Provinces, the situation is even worse…The East Bengal Bill to abolish Zamindari, introduced in the legislature many months ago, has still not assumed any concrete shape. Those in power in the Provinces seem to be inhibited from taking requisite action by their keenness to preserve the parasitic class of landlords and jagirdars.”

In his editorial “The New Challenge,” Faiz cites the speech of Mr Liaquat Ali Khan in which he highlighted the importance of spiritual, social and moral values: “Addressing the annual convocation of the Punjab University, Mr Liaquat Ali Khan laid great stress on the importance of spiritual, social and moral values for those who were entering the portals of mature life as part of a nation which had recently attained the stature of a free and sovereign entity. This new national status imposed added responsibilities on the younger generation which had been brought up in the stultifying and demoralizing atmosphere of slavery but had to share the labor of building up a state edifice worthy in every aspect of this new won freedom. In this task, the educated classes naturally have a big part to play, but they can do so only if they are inspired by high ideals and guided by correct principles. It was proper, therefore, for the Prime Minister to place before the new generation the right perspective in which our struggle for liberation and the achievement of Pakistan should be viewed.”

In his editorial “Decolonizing Literature” Faiz observes: “When the process of colonial occupation or domination got underway in Asia and Africa the literature and languages of the subject, peoples were among the first victims of foreign cultural aggression. Its impact hit different communities in different ways depending on their level of social and cultural development, thus confronting each one of them with a different set of dilemmas in their quest for identity after liberation. These may be divided into three broad categories. First, the tribal and pre-tribal collectives, as in parts of Africa, where the verbalization of social intercourse and experience had not yet attained a written form. Second, those regions where the alphabetization of the oral tradition, mainly devoted to religious and historical themes, had been brought about through ecclesiastical agencies, Islam or Christianity, and lastly countries with developed classical languages as in Arab North Africa. How best can these countries off-load the unwholesome elements of their colonial legacy and what are their options for linguistic and literary development? Among the first group, where a European language impinged a local vernacular, still in the elemental stage of oral development, to create a new patois of English, French or Portuguese, perhaps the process of emasculation or even the obliteration of the local vernacular is too far gone to be completely reversed.”

Commenting on the death of Mahatma Gandhi, Faiz in his editorial “Grave Challenge" (The Pakistan Times, Lahore, February 3, 1948), states: "The Delhi tragedy is not the isolated act of a political lunatic. The swift reactions that have followed it suggest wide underground ramifications. A challenge has been hurled at those who stand for a tolerant, democratic India; and if it succeeds, much more will have been lost than Gandhiji. It is for Pandit Nehru and those who think with him to meet this challenge of brute force. There is tangible evidence of India's conscience having been quickened by the tragedy. It is an irony of fate that the Muslim accusations of aggressive designs against RSS and allied organizations were always discredited as communal propaganda; and now that the mortal part of Gandhiji has succumbed to the assassin's bullet, it has dawned upon the saner elements in Indian life where the real danger to the body-politic lies. The lesson has been learnt at a tremendous cost. It will go to India's lasting discredit if Gandhiji's mission that cost him his life remains unaccomplished. Many searches and arrests have followed, and more will. Mere police action will not do. It will be necessary to stamp out the organizations that harbor designs for a revolution from the extreme right. Private armies and arms depots constitute a major threat to the State. Unless the topmen of militant sectional organizations are brought to book, the dangers ahead will be incalculable. An Urdu Weekly of Delhi pointed out, not very long ago, that one had only to be inveterately and blatantly anti-Muslim in order to be acclaimed leader. This mentality will have to be suppressed. The Government will have to act without regard for the social position and political standing of the undesirable people. Gandhiji's murder is one of the darkest crimes in history and is comparable only to the crucifixion of Jesus...It is our earnest hope and prayer that India may be spared the nemesis to which an entire people is sometimes landed by the doings of its misguided fanatics.”

Commenting further on Gandhi’s assassination, Faiz in his editorial “The First Step” (The Pakistan Times, February 6, 2022) notes: “Five days after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian Government has taken the first step forward and banned the RSSS throughout the territories of the Indian Dominion…The Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh has been functioning for many years now and under the garb of promoting spiritual and physical well-being of Hindus has organized itself as a militant fascist party, preaching hatred and spreading the cult of violence. When the recent phase of communal rioting started the RSSS with its other allies regarded it as an opportune moment to make a bid for power. As blood continued to flow and innocent heads hit the dust, as women were dishonored and infants mercilessly butchered, the RSSS went from strength to strength. By the end of last year, it had spread its tentacles to every Indian city and province…The dregs of Indian society who distributed sweets when the tragic event took place, have not given up the struggle and intend to lie low for some time so that the people's sorrow is forgotten, their anger vitiated by direct action against a few scape-goats and their demand for a purge of the administration side-tracked by talk of 'unity in the face of disaster' and other meaningless slogans. Or will the final victory still lie with Mahatma Gandhi and the millions in the country who support his aims and ideals? The first decision of the Government in this connection has received wide welcome. But it is universally felt that only if this decision is regarded by the Nehru Government as the first step in the fight against the forces of evil and darkness, then alone might we see the completion of the noble work for which Mahatma Gandhi died. If, however, it is the only step and after a few weeks or months the RSSS, under some other name, raises its ugly head, and its allies, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Akali party and the Princes are allowed to exist and stage a comeback of their perverted ideology then the future is dark and dismal, and the Mahatma has lived and died in vain. The new Nehru-Patel unity, which was trumpeted in the recent meeting of the Congress Party in the Constituent Assembly is likely to lead to confusion unless it is made clear that it is based on a definite agreement to carry out in toto Gandhiji's policy and to give no quarter to the rabid communalists who have caused such great disasters…In this struggle for the ideals for which Mahatma Gandhi stood, we in Pakistan are vitally concerned and have an important part to play. For the future of both people and both countries is inextricably linked together, and to the extent that we base our future policies on the last will and testament of Mahatma Gandhi — that without communal amity and without Indo-Pakistan accord there  can be neither freedom nor progress for either — to that extent is the future happiness and prosperity of this sub-continent assured.”

The selection concludes with an interview of Faiz Sahib’s dedicated wife — Alys Faiz — conducted by Cassandra Balchin (You can't behave like an Englishwoman when you're married to Faiz, Herald, Karachi, 1991). In response to the question: “What were your best years with Faiz?” Alys Faiz stated: “It may sound strange, but I grew most when Faiz was in prison. And in Beirut. That was a much more enlightened environment, compared to Pakistan. The Lebanese are a very cultured people and there were the Palestinians also. They too were Arabs, but enlightened Arabs. That's why the Arabs are afraid of them, because when there is a Palestine, it will be a socialist Palestine—in spite of what the fundamentalist groups try to do. But Faiz was not happy there in Beirut, because he was away from his people. You see, when Faiz wrote a piece of poetry he used to go to Sufi (Tabassum) and after that, it would be Sibte (Hassan) he'd go to. He had to have an audience to try out the first version of his poem. Of course, he'd tell me what it was about, but he had to have an audience and that he couldn't have abroad. He rejected quite a bit of it—I've seen him reject it. I've seen him write something and tear it up. I would say 'What's that?'”

Coming Back Home — Selected Articles, Editorials and Interviews is an excellent collection of Faiz Sahib’s work. It is a historical account witnessed and recorded in an elegant manner by Faiz Sahib in written and oral expressions. The collection is a unique gift for admirers of Faiz Sahib; they can experience the elegance of Faiz Sahib’s prose like his poetry!

(Dr Ahmed S. Khan is a Fulbright Specialist Scholar)

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