Hasan Askari was amongst those few critics of Urdu who drank deep from the fountain of western philosophy and wisdom. But after prolonged study and profound contemplation, he marched beyond the west and its philosophy.

This does not mean, as some critics would have us believe, that he rejected the west totally or asked his readers to stay away from western philosophy. Rather, he assimilated western philosophy and tried to go ahead or beyond that. In one of his essays, Askari Sahib asked three questions:

1. Is it possible for us in the existing circumstances to hold eastern values and create a peculiarly eastern literature?

2. Is it possible for us to be completely western in our ways and create a literature similar to that of the west?

3. If both of the above are impossible, is a confluence of both eastern and western cultures in life and literature possible?

As pointed out by Jamal Panipati in his book Nafi Se Isbaat Tak, after answering in the negative all three questions Askari Sahib wrote that the east is left with one choice and that is to assimilate the west and then try to find its own course of action.

Anybody who reads Askari Sahib is often puzzled by his total metamorphosis. From an Askari who was thoroughly impressed by the French writers’ symbolism and eulogised progressivism, the new Askari he carved out disagreed with them all, including the Modernists, and finally spoke for Pakistani literature and an Islamic literature. This drastic change did not occur overnight. Askari, being a voracious reader and a thinker by nature, had been reading and thinking hard all his life. Progressive writers condemned him but he said that the contemporary western aesthetic and artistic values had, after denying everything, reached a new phase where the west was rising above nihilism.

Askari Sahib discovered Rene Guenon during his long mental journey.

Rene Guenon was a French philosopher. Born in France in 1886, Guenon went to Paris for university education. At that time, Paris was a playground for spiritualists and theosophists from ‘mysterious’ places such as India and China. He joined those spiritualist groups briefly but soon found that they could not satiate his spiritual thirst. Guenon launched his own magazine Gnosis, which used to publish studies on Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism and criticise pseudo-spiritualists. Once, he met a Swedish painter who had converted to Islam after reading Abdullah Ibn-i-Umer’s commentary on the Quran and was carrying out research on Ibn-i-Arabi. Guenon embraced Islam in 1912, adopted a Muslim name – Abdul Vahid Yahya – and settled in Cairo in 1930. He wrote 25 books, which were admired by even the Modernists and the surrealists. Originally written in French, most of his books have been translated into English.

Reading Guenon in the original French, and taking cues from him, Hasan Askari reached Ibn-i-Arabi and finally Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi. Guenon was Askari’s mentor and shaped his way to his final intellectual destination.

The limitations of these columns do not permit me to delve into the details of how Hasan Askari shaped a new literary theory and how he influenced an entire generation of writers, critics and intellectuals. In a nutshell, he founded the Traditionalist school of thought in Urdu criticism and the bigwigs of Urdu criticism such as Saleem Ahmed and Jamal Panipati are products of that school.

Born on November 5, 1919, in UP’s Meerut district, Muhammad Hasan Askari obtained a masters’ degree in English from the Allahabad University in 1942. His debut job was as a script writer at All India Radio, Delhi but he soon joined Delhi’s Anglo-Arabic College as a teacher and then taught English at Meerut College. Askari Sahib migrated to Pakistan in October 1947 and with Saadat Hasan Manto, launched the Urdu literary magazine Urdu Adab. It did not survive beyond two issues. In 1950, Askari Sahib came to Karachi and worked as Mah-i-Nau’s editor from January to June 1950. Then, he joined Karachi’s Islamia College and remained associated with it till his death on January 18, 1978.

His literary career began with short-story writing but he soon began writing philosophical and critical essays. His literary column ‘Jhalkian’, published from 1944 to 1957 in Saqi, a prestigious literary magazine edited and published by Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi, gained great popularity as it introduced many literary theories, stirred many controversies and raised many questions.

He experimented with the themes and forms of the short story and was amongst the ones who fine-tuned the stream of consciousness technique in the Urdu short story. His ingenuity and intellect caused quite an uproar on many occasions but such was his influence that even those who opposed him could not resist his fresh and indigenous theories – only to see him rejecting them himself after a while in favour of new ones. When he said that Urdu literature was decadent, there was a reaction but it gained currency and ultimately became a cliché. Then he said that Urdu literature was static, which again caused hue and cry, then became fashionable to say so, before becoming trite.

Askari Sahib translated several literary western masterpieces into Urdu. From English he rendered Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick, Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, and Shiela Cousins’ To Beg I am Ashamed. From French, he translated Gustav Flaubert’s Madam Bovary and Stendhal’s Le Rougue et le Noir. From Urdu, he translated into English Mufti Muhammad Shafi’s book Distribution of Wealth in Islam and Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi’s book Answers to Modernism. He intended to translate Mufti Muhammad Shafi’s Muaarif-ul-Quran, a commentary in eight volumes on the Quran, into English and had nearly finished the translation of the first volume when he died.

Jazeere and Qayamat Hamrakab Aae Na Aae are collections of his short stories. His critical essays have been published in five volumes: Insaan Aur Aadmi, Sitara Ya Badban, Waqt Ki Ragni, Jhalkian and Takhleeqi Amal Aur Usloob. Jadeediat Ya Maghrabi Gumrahiyyon Ka Khaka is a treatise on the follies of western philosophy, adapted from Rene Guenon. Askari Sahib was an iconoclast and demolished many a western literary idol. But he gave and popularised the idea of Urdu literature’s traditions, its continuity and its cultural unity. A few years ago, Lahore’s Sang-e-Meel Publications published his collected works in two volumes.

— drraufparekh@yahoo.com