February 12, 2002

I recently met Muhammad Umar Memon after almost a decade and a half. Luckily this time, we had some hours together all by ourselves, instead of the minutes on telephone or the superficial socializing among friends during his infrequent, hurried and very busy visits to Karachi. We reminisced about our days as contemporaries at Karachi University during the late fifties and early sixties, before he left in 1964 to get his Master’s degree from Harvard and doctorate from UCLA.

As we sat together talking about our divergent life paths and our families, my mind went back to the regular monthly Bazm-i-Adab meetings in one of the larger classroom of the Arts Faculty, attended by never less than fifty or sixty students, presided by the likes of Shaista Bayzaar (Zaidi), Anwar Ahsan Siddiqui, Umar Memon, Ghazi Salahuddin, Husain Naqi, late beloved Rafat Habeeb, and if my memory serves, Saleem Asmi. Umar Memon read his early short stories in these meetings. Rafat Habeeb had the irksome habit of asking the chairman of any meeting in which Memon was to read a short story, as to whether Memon would give a “summary” of his usually 30 to 35 pages long stories.

Listening to these stories, one would imagine a writing career for Umar Memon, but it was difficult to visualize that in another three decades, he would establish himself as a pre-eminent Urdu fiction sage and translator, in addition to being a well-known professor of Near Eastern and South Asian studies, teaching for more than thirty years at the Department of South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, the latter distinction not being a great surprise; he is the son of an internationally known and respected scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies, the late Allama Abdul Aziz Memon.

Umar Memon has by now written and edited eleven books, ranging from Ibne Taimiya’s struggle against popular religion, to a translation of Naiyer Masud’s short stories, in addition to numerous articles in learned journals of Middle Eastern and Asian studies. He has been General Editor of the ‘Pakistan Writers’ Series’ of Oxford University Press.

Being friends from our youth, we had no difficulty sliding into a rambling discussion of his impressions of Urdu fiction and related topics. As a lay reader of fiction, I had many questions to ask him and I was amazed at his patience with me, arising most surely from our bond of friendship and his indulgence in ignoring my ignorance of the larger and deeper issues of Urdu fiction.

Umar Memon feels that Urdu fiction has a great deal of potential to explore, if we are to take Western fiction as a benchmark. To him, the novel and short story have their roots in the historical experience of the West and are typically Western in character, based on a specific world view. He echoed Milan Kundera in characterizing modern Western novel as a symbiosis of contradictory elements and paradoxes, as opposed to representation of actual reality. To him, Urdu “fiction” began with daastaans, a legitimate form of fiction.

But Ruswa’s Umrao Jaan Ada and Sarshaar’s Fasana-i-Azad came as a result of the transfer of Western cultural and literary experience of the West. For historical and cultural reasons again, Urdu literature has taken to poetry more easily than to fiction. Umar Memon sees a lot that remains to be done in terms of imbuing Urdu fiction with intellectual depth, maturity, intensity of social reflection and an expansive world view in relation to society and literature.

Tracing the deeper causes of this at the level of the individual writer, Umar Memon feels that, in general, Urdu fiction writers do not work as hard as they should. In contrast, he quotes the example of Solzhenitsyn who revised his Cancer ward seven times before finally giving it for publication. In the Urdu literary milieu, there is a discernible lack of faith in fiction as a form of expression. Then, there is the lack of incentive to write fiction, due in main to low literacy and lack of perceived and desired economic benefit from fiction writing. So, most Urdu fiction writers are pursuing it as a hobby, not as a full-time preoccupation.

On the role of ideology in fiction, Umar Memon found an illustration from the different paths Sartre and Camus took, both of them basically being existentialists. Sartre had a shadow of ideology over his political beliefs and kept his existentialism supreme in his fiction, while Camus had no deliberate ideological framework of reference in either his life or his fiction. Umar Memon feels that creation of too visible and deliberate an ideological underpinning weakens literature in general and fiction in particular.

Almost naturally moving on to the Progressive Writers’ movement in Urdu, he acknowledged their positive contribution and pervasive influence in bringing a socially reflective stance to Urdu literature through their social reform agenda beginning with Munshi Prem Chand, yet found a lack of eclecticism and depth consequent upon a very high preoccupation with ideology, counting Rajindar Singh Bedi as the best representative of that movement in fiction. He regretted the marginalization of Manto and Ismat Chughtai by the Progressive Writers’ movement. He feels Manto and Milan Kundera are comparable as great writers of fiction.

Discussing major Urdu fiction writers, Umar Memon said Qurratul Ain Haider may be the first among equals in the company of Intizar Husain, Abdullah Husain and Naiyer Masud. His admiration for Qurratul Ain Haider arises from his perception of the rigorous research and study she undertakes for her fiction, although he feels that sometimes her cultural personality takes over and craft takes the back seat.

Umar Memon has a lot of time for Naiyer Masud, who, in his assessment, brings a great deal of deliberation and compactness to his narrative and logicality to his craft. He recalled how Naiyer Masud was greatly concerned about accuracy of even Umar Memon’s painstakingly careful translation of his fiction, and asked certain words and expressions to be replaced. Worried again about the risks involved in translation into another language, Naiyer Masud discouraged a French translation of his work.

As our discussion passed on to Urdu poetry, which Umar Memon thought was a more preferred form of expression than fiction in Urdu, he said Urdu poetry is derived from Persian poetry in mythology, diction and essential world view; yet it has exceeded its parent language in depth and expanse. To him, Ghalib is fundamentally an existentialist poet.

I thought it may be unfair to Umar Memon if we ended our long lunch meeting without asking for his view on what was happening to the Muslim world; after all, he is a scholar of Middle Eastern and Near Eastern studies, with most of his scholarly work in that area. He felt that if a Muslim renaissance is over the horizon, it is possibly in the glimmer of hope discernible in the intellectual ferment created by and among those who have drunk deep enough at both the Western and Eastern fountains, as they have the methodology available to enable themselves to directly approach the authenticity of their cultural and intellectual heritage.

Umar Memon thinks creativity can flourish in the Muslim world if it stops confusing the core values of Islam with the mullah’s myopic view of religion. There is a disconnect between the mullah and his original sources, as he seems to have lost touch with the rich heritage of the core values of Islam and the historical experience of Muslims. Umar Memon feels that before the colonial invasions, the divisions in Muslim society were authentic and internal. Now the elites in the Muslim world have developed increasingly without reference to local reality.

As we parted, I asked Umar Memon why he shies away from any projection of his work in Pakistan. He complained about less than accurate and indifferent reporting of his views expressed in a few literary events that he participated in. I hope this piece does not annoy him; after all he is a very dear friend.

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