Service

On the morning of January 27, 1966, on my seventh birthday, I was handed a postcard from my father, Mir Ijaz (Tony) Mahmood. He had fought like blazes in the 1965 war and, in the span of a few weeks, succeeded in wounding himself, carrying his bleeding subaltern to safety, routing and capturing enemy troops, winning two medals for valour, and graduating from his beloved 4th Frontier Force Regiment to raise a new battalion (the vaunted 23rd Frontier Force Regiment, recently deployed in Waziristan). In early 1966, he was on a French language course at the Sorbonne: why the Pakistan Army needed French-speaking officers still eludes me.

On one side, the postcard had that classical shot of a tourist boat making its way under one of the bridges the ancient city of Paris has elegantly tossed across the River Seine.

On the other side, the postcard had a note from my father:

“Many happy returns of the day. May you always be of service to Pakistan.”

These words, so naturally penned and so genuinely received, acted as a baton of responsibility on a track that has not readily admitted of service.

My father was a member of the singular “IMA-PMA” cadet training program: cadets who had joined the unified Indian Military Academy in 1946 and graduated from the first cohort of the Pakistan Military Academy in 1948.

For both the first generation of Pakistanis, to which Jinnah belonged and Iqbal has been inducted, and the second generation of Pakistanis, to which my father belonged, the concept of “service to Pakistan” was sufficiently clear.

As Jinnah had envisioned, Pakistan would be a pluralistic Muslim state, and would enable all Muslims, in the full diversity into which their faith had flowered over fourteen centuries, and all Hindus and Christians to live and progress in harmony. As Iqbal had envisioned, Pakistan would enable Muslims to realise their khudi, their individual selfhood, and in doing so bear witness to the oneness of God.

But, even if the concept of Pakistan was clear, we have failed to serve that concept.

My father died and was buried recently in Dhaka. My wife’s father, a Bengali intellectual, had also died in Dhaka. He had been killed in 1971 by the very army my father served.

We never found his body.

In the Dhaka of 1971, we also killed, without administering rites of burial, our service to the ideals of Jinnah and Iqbal: we had treated the people of East Pakistan neither as equal citizens, nor as individual Muslims.

My father quietly left the army he loved so much in 1972.

Each time I visit Pakistan, I am staggered by the profound service commitment of the people I meet – social workers, soldiers, teachers, government servants, homemakers and merchants. I cannot help but realize how the country of my birth is kept alive by the daily service of its people.

Yes, the instinct to service is alive and well in Pakistan. But service has become privatised: we serve in a narrow, private capacity; or we serve wildly divergent causes. Some of us serve those from our baradari, some of us the Wahabi interpretation of Islam; we serve, and we clash in the objects of our service.

How may I fulfill my deceased father’s imperative: “may you always be of service to Pakistan”?

How may we all serve the inclusive, generous and passionate Pakistan that Jinnah and Iqbal had envisioned?

Individuality

My father left this world, at the age of 86 years, with little accomplished in terms of what mattered to him least: wealth and social position. But he left this world with much accomplished in terms of what mattered to him most.

He cherished engaging with people in their vernacular, and mastered Punjabi (the language of the home), English (the language of the world), Persian (the language of poetry), Urdu (the language of the nation), Pashto (the language of the frontier, where he spent his formative years as a soldier), and French (the language of sophistication).

He loved Urdu poetry, and would recite Ghalib and Iqbal for the duration of our drives between Abbottabad and Rawalpindi. He was equally taken by early 20th century English prose and was adept in reciting Churchill and Wilde.

He wrote two picaresque books of his adventures in Pakistan and around the world.

He loved sports, and played polo for Pakistan, hockey for his regiment, cricket for the Government College Lahore, and reached the top tier of amateur squash in the country. He had a passion for bridge, and made up in erratic flair what he lacked in terms of systemic depth.

He was a past master in the military details of the conflicts that have shaped the past two centuries. He enjoyed women on an episodic basis, and had two marriages and a modest succession of satisfactory affairs.

And, he retained always his soldier’s panache: in his 70s, he gathered a posse of soldiers and policemen and handily rescued his kidnapped father-in-law from one of the infamous brigand wadis of Sindh.

My father was an individual, and what Shereen and Amina, my sisters, and I learned most from him was that, at its truest level, individuality is only achieved through complete honesty.

To be an individual, you must have the personal honesty to search inside yourself and understand the wellsprings of your passion and, painfully, the limits of your being.

To be an individual, you must have the intellectual honesty to fight against the current, to speak your mind, to live if need be at the margins of society.

Honesty is the discipline through which we achieve individuality.

For much of my life, I imagined that my father’s emphasis on individuality derived principally from his, and his father’s, Western orientation, and secondarily from the circumstance of being born into a Kashmiri-Punjabi family that had the social luxury to encourage its offspring to do what they will.

It was only after September 11, 2001 that I began a thorough study of my Muslim faith. I found, deep within the heart of Islam, the call to individuality. I had always imagined that Islam required the submission of individual conscience to communal judgment.

As I delved deeper into the meaning of Islam, I began to realise how completely wrong I had been.

Among my various guides to the Quran and the Hadith – the historians and the biographers, the schools of Sharia jurisprudence, the sufis, the medieval scholars ranging from Al-Ghazzali to Ibn Tammiyah, and the modernists – I found our own Allama Iqbal to be exceptionally illuminating on the question of individuality in Islam.

Few Pakistanis ever bother to read Iqbal’s The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam; I cannot recommend this slim book more highly.

Iqbal emphasises that God has a direct relationship with each individual, that all life is individual, that God has imbued a spiritual essence in each individual human being.

“[Islam] demands loyalty to God, not to thrones. And since God is the ultimate spiritual basis of all life, loyalty to God virtually amounts to man’s loyalty to his own ideal nature” [page 147].

The individual bears witness to God by realising his or her own spiritual essence, and it is the individual’s own self-willed path of spiritual realisation that God, and God alone, will judge.

Nations and communities are constructs of this world; they live and perish in this world; it is only the individual spirit that transcends to the hereafter.

“It is one of the most essential teachings of the Quran that nations are collectively judged, and suffer for their misdeeds here and now” [page138].

According to Iqbal, our Prophet (peace be upon him), as the final prophet of God, opened up the possibility and the imperative for the individual to summon all sources of knowledge – divine revelation, inner experience and nature and history – to realise his or her spiritual essence:

“[T]he Prophet of Islam seems to stand between the ancient and the modern world. In so far as the source of his revelation is concerned he belongs to the ancient world; in so far as the spirit of his revelation is concerned he belongs to the modern world. In him life discovers other sources of knowledge suitable to its new direction. … In Islam prophecy reaches its perfection in discovering the need of its own abolition. This involves the keen perception that life cannot for ever be kept in leading strings; that, in order to achieve full self-consciousness, man must finally be thrown back on his own resources. … [T]he Quran regards both ‘Anfus’ (self) and ‘Afaq’ (world) as sources of knowledge. God reveals His signs in inner as well as outer experience, and it is the duty of man to judge the knowledge-yielding capacity of all aspects of experience” [pages 126-127].

Our path to nationhood, and to spiritual fulfilment, lies in the maturation of our individuality and our self-consciousness.

Love

When my father died, we were assailed not by an outpouring of grief, but an outpouring of stories.

Not commiseration from friends and family, but stories of his individual relationships with each member of each human network.

Not grief from nephews and nieces, but stories of how he had encouraged this one to draw, that one to become more self-confident, this one to overcome her sense of loss of a parent, that one to play better tennis.

Not simply prayers from serving and retired soldiers, but details of how he had infected them with his love of service and his love of the army, and taught them to search for their larger personality within the unlived lines of their lives.

Stories from a Bengali electrician who he exhorted to greater exactitude, from a tableeghi Pakhtun who he helped build a career, from an English art dealer with whom he shared his love of Impressionism, from a Singaporean businessman who he had taken up as a bridge partner.

Stories from his grandchildren; one of who took to calling him ‘grandbrother’ in order to align the nomenclature of their relationship to its reality.

We are all parents and spouses and cousins and colleagues; the only slivers of genuine meaning derived from such relationships. I think my father was genuinely meaningful to so many people because he lovingly connected with each person, as one individual to another, and helped spark in each some sense of possibility, some affection, some humor, some happiness, and always some recognition of individuality.

My father loved life and he loved people. Individuality unbounded leads to anarchy and terror. Individuality embedded in service and love leads to a meaningful life and a nurturing community. No one can say how God will judge my father, but perhaps He will take into account my father’s service, his individuality, and his love.

Jinnah did not create Pakistan because he wanted to wage war on India; he created our country so that its people could serve each other more effectively.

Iqbal did not call for a homeland for Muslims so he could impose a unitary vision of Islam; he made the call to inspire each individual to spiritual self-realisation.

The people of Pakistan have been blessed by the vision of Jinnah and Iqbal.

We would do well to understand these men more fully, and to incorporate their thinking into our lives. I will strive to do so, with the proximate example of my father.

Service. Individuality. Love.