Faiz on Iqbal - 1
By Dr. Rizwana Rahim
TCCI, Chicago, IL
Faiz had the advantage of growing up in a poetic world dominated by Iqbal. Both were born in Sialkot, adopted Lahore later, and are buried there. They had the same Arabic teacher (Mir Syed Hasan) and were recognized multi-lingual scholars. During his days as a student, Faiz once recited verses from the Qur’an to start a school-event chaired by Iqbal. Some interesting biographical details they share!
Faiz loved Ghalib, and he even used some Ghalib phrases as his book titles (Naqsh-e-Feryadi, 1941, to name one); he respected Iqbal for his philosophy and poetry. A lot has been written on Ghalib and Iqbal – including by Faiz himself, a widely recognized member of that rarefied group.
Faiz didn’t just write in Urdu, he wrote a lot in English, and on a wide range of socio-political, cultural, literary topics. This is apart from translating some of his own Urdu poems in English and writing one long poem in English, ‘The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl’, published in ‘Civil and Military Gazette, Lahore (3 March 1961): It has distinct Faiz-in-Urdu flavor [details in my book, ‘In English, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’, pages 413-419;
http://www2.xlibris.com/books/webimages/wd/51828/book.htm ] :
In Pakistan as elsewhere in Asia
and Africa, time past is time present
And in the past - the past
which neither man nor history remembers -
there was no time.
Only timelessness! …..
[Complete poem, pages 413-416 in my book]
There are no questions on his facility with English; it was recognized early in his student days (1929). On this, Shaer Mohammed Hameed, a friend and class-mate of Faiz from Government College, recalls this story, included in the Introduction to Faiz’s Shaam-e-Shahr-e-Yaaraan: “Prof. Langhorn was head of the English Dept. He graded our Third year exam papers. When we got our results back, some students noticed Faiz got 159 marks, and asked the professor how come Faiz got 159 out of total 150 marks. The professor told him, ‘Because I could not give him more’. [From translation in my book, page 442]. Of course, we cannot forget a few other facts about Faiz’s proficiency in English: After his MA (Hons.) in English (1932), he was a Lecturer in English at MAO College, Amritsar (1935); married a British (Alys George) in 1941; was Chief Editor of Pakistan Times (1947-1958) and Chief Editor of Lotus, a quarterly in English-French-Arabic for Afro-Asian Writers, based in Beirut (1978 till months before his death in 1984).
A collection of his English writings has been published in 2005: ‘Culture and Identity’, compiled and edited by Sheema Majeed. Among other things, it includes three insightful essays by Faiz on Iqbal (pages 164-183), one of them being a “transcription of recorded speech,” date/time unspecified. Selected comments, extracted from these, follow:
1. Although, says Faiz, “there are any number of studies on the thought, philosophy, message and various other aspects of Iqbal’s works, but so far as I am aware very little analysis has been done of his poetic technique or the secret of his poetic magic. For this the poet himself is partly responsible because, as you are aware, there are a number of injunctions in Iqbal’s works imploring his readers to ignore his poetry and to concentrate on his message … Iqbal was a philosopher, a thinker, an evangelist and even a preacher, what gave real force and persuasiveness to this message was his poetry.” To underscore this point, Faiz adds that Iqbal’s “prose lectures, excellent as they are, have hardly a fraction of the readers that his poetry has, and hardly command a fraction of the influence that his poetry has wielded,” for generations in more than one country.
2. Faiz says: “Iqbal was himself deadly opposed to art for art’s sake and therefore, we cannot study his art or his style or his technique or his other poetic qualities in isolation from his theme because even though there is a steady progression in his style yet all these styles were fashioned according to the themes which he was trying to put across… [T]he evolution of his style is parallel to the evolution of his thought.” Besides “a strong contrast” in Iqbal’s “style and the expression” between his early and “mature and later works,” Faiz sees “a sense of solemnity and earnestness” throughout Iqbal’s entire work. What lies under this is Iqbal’s “persistent desire to know and to explore the secrets of reality, the secrets of existence.”
3. In addition to this ‘persistence’, what Faiz also sees is an evolution in “stylistic element” of Iqbal’s poetry.” Faiz thinks this evolution progresses through four phases:
(a) “Ornate, florid, Persianised, as in “Kis qadar lazzat kishod uqda-e-mushkil main hai / Lutf sad hasil hamari saee bay hasil main hai” or “Gaysoay Urdu abhi minnat pazir-e-shana hai / shamma yeh saudai dil sozi-e-parwana hai’ [Baang-e-dara]. In his early work, Iqbal “talks about himself, about his love, about his ‘grief’, about his loneliness, about his disappointments. In early pieces, Iqbal’s “style is also disjointed, it is varied, sometimes simple, sometimes disjointed,” and a number of poems during this phase (on the sun, the moon, the clouds, the mountains, the rivers, cities, etc) seem to have no running theme, “no connection between them.” This lyrical period ` lasted till about 1905.
(b) Then from himself, he progresses to the Muslim community, to the Muslim world, as in the latter half of Bang-i-Dara. From the Muslim world he goes further to mankind and from mankind to the universe.” This is a phase in which “his thought determines the style and the expression which he uses,” from “ornateness and ornamentation to austerity, from diffuseness to precision, from rhetoric to epigram,” and from “personal subjective observations and experiences to the collective sentiments and experiences of his country – his nationalistic, patriotic phase.” “In his later works, all the ornamentation has been cut out. There is no imagery or hardly any imagery. There is hardly any element of the sensory or the perceptive. The approach is purely cognitive and intellectual, austere and precise. This is a process of reduction, or what I might call contraction. The other is the process of expansion. This process is in the thought, in the theme.” As “his own whole thought is welded into one monolith, his style becomes monolithic],” and “almost uniform” … [and] practically keeping the same pace and the same level. One has to also view this phase in the midst of the growth and intensification of collective anti-imperialist sentiment and nationalist fervor in the country. His long philosophical poem in Persian, “Asrar-e-Khudi” initiated his lasting quest on khudi.
(c) Another development that Faiz terms “transition in emotional climate,” is best illustrated by ‘Mohabbat -to- Ishq’ transition, or “progression from sentiment to passion” – an “acquired trait that merely makes you love certain things [mohabbat]… about which [there] is an innate fire, which is all-consuming [Ishq].” In his early work, Iqbal talks often about Mohabbat, but you rarely see that in his later poems where he dwells mostly on Ishq. Unlike his early poetry, his style in later works is “unadorned,” and “austere” with no ‘frills’. This stylistic evolution, Faiz thinks, “is a very fascinating subject and very little study has been done on it.”
(d) In his later poetry “natural phenomena and external objects” like the moon, stars, sun and even Shaheen (eagle) are no longer just objects but have become ‘symbols’ evoking some theme, or metaphor for Iqbal. Faiz says, “I don’t think he has ever described what Eagle [his ‘Shaheen’] looks like; Iqbal turned it into a metaphor that illustrates an Iqbal theme; same with ‘firefly’, the sun or the moon -- “disjointed” objects and phenomena of an earlier phase, now intellectually, emotionally integrated into an increasingly cohesive theme. (To be continued)
