MEETING Prof Dr Ibrahim Mohammad Ibrahim As-Saiyyid once again was a pleasure. An Egyptian scholar of Urdu, Prof Ibrahim received a doctorate from Lahore’s Punjab University. Now he teaches Urdu at Girls’ Branch, Faculty of Humanities, Al Azhar University, Cairo where he is the head of Urdu department.
Known for his love of Pakistan and Urdu, Prof Ibrahim speaks and writes impeccable Urdu and his Arabic background gives him an enviable command on certain Urdu expressions that have their origin in Arabic. We had met before during some international conferences, but welcoming him in Karachi was something we at Karachi University had always been looking forward to. He was in the city last week to present his research paper at the international conference on Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, organised by Karachi University’s Urdu department.
Dr Ibrahim informed the participants at the conference that teaching of Urdu had begun in Egypt as early as 1938 when Cairo University introduced Urdu as a subject. But now seven Egyptian universities are teaching Urdu and the works of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Allama Iqbal are an integral part of curricula there. In fact the Arabic translations of Iqbal’s ‘Shikwa’ and ‘Jawab-i-shikwa’ have always haunted Arabs.
At Al Azhar, he informed this writer, the female section is segregated but both at male and female campuses a large number of students opt for Urdu and in some academic years the total number of students studying Urdu at elementary level goes well past 100. This is quite encouraging considering that it is very, very hard to find Urdu books, both basic readers and literary works, in Egypt and the teachers at the institutions offering Urdu have to struggle to find works recommended for higher classes, Dr Ibrahim added. Though sometimes some Pakistani scholars and writers cooperate and donate Urdu books, he said in his usual cheerful manner.
Prof Ibrahim had brought some Arabic books with him. One of them amazed me. It was an Arabic translation of Mumtaz Mufti’s famous Urdu book Talaash. Before I introduce the Arabic translation, it would not be out of place to share an interesting fact here: Dr Ibrahim is Egyptian and holds a PhD in Urdu. His wife Dr Tabassum Minhas is Pakistani and she holds a PhD in Arabic. One can well imagine the atmosphere at their home in Cairo, as discussions on Urdu and Arabic languages and literatures must be a part of everyday life. Their children speak both Urdu and Arabic fluently.
The husband-wife duo has done a wonderful job of translating into Arabic Talaash (search, literally), a work that is as strange as it is interesting. Talaash is Mumtaz Mufti’s last book. Published posthumously in 1996, it is, as put by Dr Najeeba Arif in her book Mumtaz Mufti ka fikri irtiqa, “a sum total of the writer’s 90-year life experiences and essence of his ideas and ideology” (page 513).
The Arabic translation of Talaash is titled Rahlat min-al-bahas. The Arabic translation was first published in 2006 and the second edition appeared in 2017. The appearance of second edition is surprising because Dr Ibrahim thinks that the reading habits in Egypt are generally on the decline and now people prefer internet, TV and other things to books. One reason, he says, is that books have become very expensive in Egypt. The book primarily deals with a topic purely spiritual — it shows how the writer tried to find a way to spirituality and how in his quest for God he came across some contradictions in Islamic societies. But the famous quote summing up Arabic publishing goes: Egypt writes, Lebanon prints and Iraq reads. So it proves that Egypt writes and still reads too. Or maybe, the interest in spirituality in Egypt has not waned after all.
Mumtaz Mufti was a short story writer and novelist. But his book Talaash is much different, though it is written in his usual tongue-in-cheek and irreverent style that annoys some and attracts many. He was in search of facts that do exist but cannot be verified as they belong to a mysterious world, a world beyond perception. In his book Alakh nagri Mufti Sahib takes the reader to the invisible world where mystics like Sain Allah Bakhsh and other mysterious characters appear and unbelievable events take place. ‘Alakh’ literally means ‘unseen or invisible’ and ‘nagri’ means ‘a town’.
Mufti was a non-believer early in his life. But Mufti’s journey from being a sceptic to a saint-like mystic is as wonderful as his life: full of uncertainties and adventures. Talaash is an endeavour to understand Sufism and that unseen world that Sufis dwell in.
The Arabic translation of Talaash not only reflects that Mumtaz Mufti has quite a following in other parts of the world but also that Dr Ibrahim is in search of a world that is unseen but does exist, a world that Mumtaz Mufti wrote a lot about, especially in his books Alakh nagri and Talaash.
Mumtaz Mufti died in Islamabad on October 27, 1995.
Published in Dawn, October 24th, 2017
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