ALLAMA IQBAL TEY SERAIKI VASAIB by Zahoor Ahmad Dhareeja; pp 144; Price Rs.100 (hb); Publishers, Jhoke Publishers, Daulat Gate, Multan.
Dhareeja belongs to a learned religious family and his grandfather was associated with Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi and the Deenpur institution (Dhareeja has also published a book on Ubaidullah Sindhi). With that background, he points out some prejudices prevailing in the south where one group of left writers and intellectuals does not accept Iqbal as a poet and thinker because he belongs to central Punjab, while the other left group does not give any importance to Iqbal because of his religious views or ideology. Dhareeja in his foreword disagrees with both views and asserts that the assessment should not be on the basis of language, class or region.
Well said by Dhareeja, the editor of only Seraiki daily Jhoke, who is fighting for separate identity of the language/dialect spoken in the south Punjab. But he says that during the period of Iqbal there was no Seraiki issue and the language had different names like Multani, Bahawalpuri, Dervi, Jatki, Lehndi and Shahpuri etc. These are the names given by people and enforced by British administrators/writers who wrote books and small dictionaries of dialects like Shahpuri Punjabi or Western Punjabi, Prof Shaukat Mughal named as Seraiki Lughat and translated it into Urdu.
This was the period when Prof Sheerani wrote his thesis “Punjab Main Urdu”, which took expressions in all south Punjab as part of Punjabi. It was declared that Punjabi was the mother of Urdu or Urdu was the developed form of Punjabi, meaning thereby that Punjabi was a backward language but it was the same language the poetry of which was much liked by Iqbal.
Two statements have been attributed to Iqbal when he was on his death bed. Both statements are attributed to Dr Javaid Iqbal, the younger son of the poet. Javaid says “his father used to read poetry of Khwaja Farid during his last days, and he had the Diwan of Farid placed under his pillow”.
The second statement is that close to death, Iqbal asked someone to recite Kafi of Bulleh Shah. This is also attributed to Dr Javaid. The one thing is clear that Iqbal well-understood the language used by Khwaja Farid and for him this was not a new or strange language and that is confirmed by his interview he gave to Punjabi monthly in 1930, the year he reinforced the idea of a separate state for the Muslim majority areas in India. In that interview Iqbal had asserted that Punjabi poetry was full of mystic trends, while Urdu was no match to that. Urdu has only two mystic poets.
Iqbal referred to many of the poets from the south, including Ali Haidar, whose couplet he also quoted off hand. Sufi Tabassum also stated that Iqbal was all praise for the mystic verses of Khwaja Farid and he was sorry that more work should have been done so that he should be known in other areas and languages.
Contrary to Iqbal’s advice Seraiki writers and intellectuals have further narrowed down the reach of Farid’s poetry by presenting him as the only great poet of Seraiki, the language Farid never owned. He publicly said that the language spoken in his area (Bahawalpur) was Punjabi (authority Maqabeesul Majalis). This is one point which should be seriously taken up by writers, intellectuals, political workers and teachers of the south to whom this original quotation has been sent by post by the Pakistan Punjabi Adabi Board.
Many of the articles included in the book are reviews on books written on Iqbal. Stress is on how Iqbal was obliged by the personalities from the south and among them most important was Nawab of Bahawalpur who presided over the condolence reference for Iqbal in Lahore under the auspices of the Anjuman Himayat-i-Islam. Dhareeja specially refers to the monetary aid given to educational and health institutes established by Muslims in Lahore. Dhareeja has in his three or four articles repeated the services of Nawab of Bahawalpur and has included the Qaseeda (eulogy) Iqbal had written for the Nawab.
Dhareeja has exhaustively introduced the scholars from the south who have worked on Iqbal, including Jagan Nath Azad, Mahr Abdul Haq, Shakir Shujabadi, Dilshad Kalanchvi, Dr Tahir Taunsvi etc. Apart from other things, one common element between Farid and Iqbal was that they had no close friends:
TA’ALEEM AND HAMARI QOUMI ULJHANAIN by Arshad Mahmood; pp 204; Price Rs.300 (hb); Publishers, Saanjh, Book Street, 46/2, Mozang Road, Lahore. E-mail sanjhpks@gmail.com
This collection of articles in Urdu on educational problems refers to the cases of great Muslim philosophers, scientists and sociologists who were rejected, persecuted and declared non-believers by the rulers or by the writers and intellectuals, the story again and again repeated in Muslim societies. In our times how Abdus Salam was almost forced to leave the country and there are many others who have earned great honour in other lands. The most striking examples are Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi up to Habib Jalib. All were condemned by the establishment and instead Muhammad Hasan Askari, Javaid Iqbal, Nasir Kazmi, Jamiluddin Aali and Qudrat Ullah Shahab were patronised by the establishment. Go through the files of the government literary magazine Mah-i-Nau and the picture would be clearer.
It was Imam Ghazali who dubbed the great and original scientists and philosophers like Ibn-i-Haisham, Ibn-i-Rushd, Al-Farabi and Ibn-i-Seena as kafirs. Non-believers or Murtad needed to be killed, according to some interpretations of Quranic verses.
That is why Bulleh Shah said: Arshad Mahmood has thoroughly discussed the problems of education and close-mindedness of the rulers and the teachers and the thinkers hired by the government, thus this book leads us to think and rethink our education system for which the Quaid planned 6 per cent of the GDP. — STM