WHILE going through F.S. Aijazuddin’s book, The Bark of a Pen I discovered to my benefit that books are of two kinds - those which are coercive and uncompromising and those which are accommodative and are ever ready to compromise. Books devoted to an in-depth study of a problem or a subject belong in general to the first category. They are essentially uncompromising. They demand to be read in full or not at all. No second option.
Books comprising articles of a miscellaneous nature may be put under the second category. They are not demanding in the least. They provide us with a wide choice in reading when we are bored with one kind of stuff, they try to placate us by offering something different, more in tune with our liking. That is what happened with me in the case of Aijazuddin’s The Bark of a Pen. Articles dealing with banking, business management, taxation and finance take the lion’s share in the scheme of this book. And these subjects are Greek to me. I was just going to put the book back in my shelf, but it appeared to be offering me other varieties. After all, the book is not the kind of a study of any one particular subject. It is a miscellany of articles, speeches, book reviews. So I had the freedom to make my own choice from the variety offered which, readily chid. In one article, Mr Aijazuddin tells us that at one time the then government of Pakistan had claimed the remains of Bahadur Shah Zafar, who lies buried in Rangoon.
Again, he tells us about Z.A. Bhutto’s strenuous efforts to retrieve the Kohinoor diamond “on the ground presumably that as it had been seized from the kingdom of Lahore, it should be restored to its hypothetical successor”.
Both the demands are a bit amusing. At least in case of Bahadur Shah, Mr Aijazuddin is very right in saying that “to reopen Bahadur Shah’s grave would be to do more than disturb the peace of that disconsolate spirit which deserves a rest.”
While discussing tourism in Pakistan, he makes the sad comment. “One has only to visit any monument to see that it is starved of money and equally starved of attention”. And that “those monuments attract less visitors because no one is demonstrably interested in them. The government is not, the public exchequer is not and therefore, the visitor is not.”
In one article we find an interesting account of three Syed brothers, Azizuddin, Imaduddin and Nuruddin, rising to prominence during the Sikh rule in Punjab. They adopted the prefix Faqir, thereby reminding their coming generations that “humility could be both a personal attribute and a family emblem”. But let me skip pages hurriedly so as to have access to the concluding article which, in fact, is the reproduction of an address delivered as the tenth CA Qadir Memorial. Going through it, I feel like travelling back in time and coming to a halt before a pillar as to read Ashoka’s edict as quoted here: “The king piyadasi honours all sects, monks, and house-holders, he honours them by gifts and various kinds of favours ... for he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from the attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the splendours of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect.”
At a time when communal frenzy is at its peak in India and sectarian terrorism is in the ascendancy in Pakistan, this edict from Ashoka offers much food for thought for us. But who cares? The terrorists and the rioters have no ear for such words. They have before them the stupendous task of razing the mosques to dust and targeting churches and imambargahs. They have no time to think and to feel. Aijuzzuddin quotes Dr Radhakrishnan, his favourite philosopher: “The world is a chaos today.” Taking a cue from him he tried to soar high in a philosophical way and poses a question: “In which way will it be a better world than the one we inherited? Is it likely to be a world of bigots run by bigots only for bigots? Or is there room for persons who, like Dr Qadir, sought answers to questions belief could not satisfy, questions that often articulate the unthinkable?”
Then he turns to the great souls, who, according to him, in times of crisis, such as the one we are passing through, can provide us with a safe detour to self-knowledge. They are the sufis, who “in the early years of the Muslim conquest constituted a powerful reaction against worldliness and hypocrisy. Their reaction took the form not so much of sermonizing as of the example they gave of a life of self-denial, compunction, silence, poverty, and detachment.”
I have concentrated on this article. I couldn’t help it. This single article in the book has provided me a refuge from the long drawn discussions on banking, business management and taxation. I marvel at the talent of Aizazuddin, which has helped him to divide himself neatly between business management and his favourite philosophers, Russell and Radhakrishnan. And how adroitly he has struck a precarious balance between the two.
