ISLAMABAD, Dec 16: The government has neither placed any restriction on literary expressions nor has it stopped intellectuals from creative writing, National Assembly Deputy Speaker Sardar Yaqub Khan said here on Thursday. After all it was a poet-philosopher who inspired the Muslims of the subcontinent to struggle for Pakistan, he said in his presidential address at a meeting held jointly by the Pakistan Academy of Letters (PAL) and Shah Latif Cultural Association to observe the eighth death anniversary of Sheikh Ayaz, the eminent Sindhi poet and intellectual.

Sardar Yaqub paid homage to Sheikh Ayaz as one of Pakistan’s most celebrated and influential Sindhi poets after the Sufi poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, and referred to other men of letters of the country as “inheritors of the tradition of Allama Iqbal”.

“A poet dreamt of Pakistan and you have the duty of building Pakistani nationalism and sharing love with the common masses and inspiring them to respect each other in the spirit of tolerance,” he told the gathering of intellectuals.

Senate’s standing committee on cabinet chairperson Ms Tanvir Khalid said Sheikh Ayaz wrote about adversities of common man.

“We owe it to him to have all his works translated in the principal languages of the world,” she said urging the PAL and the Sindhi Adabi Board to address the task.

PAL chairman Iftikhar Arif in his welcome address said Sheikh Ayaz created literature of high order both in Sindhi and Urdu languages. Though he was persecuted for his forward-looking ideas, his works rejected elements who wanted to create divisions between human beings, he said.

National Language Authority chairman Prof Fateh Muhammad Malik said Sheikh Ayaz did not believe in discriminating between one Pakistani language and another. In fact he employed the same kind of lyricism in his poetry as found in Ghalib and Iqbal.

Aftab Soomro, Hashim Abro, Badal Chandio, Prof Ansar Memon, Dr Abdullah Wadhayo Baloch and Zahid Jatoi also paid homage to the great poet.

Sheikh Ayaz (1923-1997) was a prolific writer in Sindhi and produced 70 volumes of poetry, short stories, essays and journalistic opinion pieces. He also wrote two books in Urdu and a poetic edition of Shah Abdul Latif’s monumental work Shah Jo Risalo.