Pak Tea House

 by Khaled Ahmed

 Aap-Beeti/Paap-Beeti;
By Saqi Farooq;
Akademi Bazyaft Karachi 2008;
Pp176; Price Rs 300

Saqi’s gravitation to Habib Jalib was natural in a way too because he saw the anarchist in him where others saw a revolutionary, and the quarrels that took place were incidental to the way they related

You don’t know what kind of irreverent sinner you are up against in this book till I have told what he did in his earlier book titled Hajibhai Paniwala. This was also the main poem in the collection and Paniwala was not the shopkeeper who sold water but he was so called because there was water in his testicles. He sat squatting with his enormous waterlogged genitals in front of him covered with cloth like a table; in fact, he packed the spices on top of them.

What kind of animal is Saqi Farooqi? Reading his life of paap (sin) I am put in the mind of Henry Miller’s work. If he is a self-publicist showcasing his sins like Josh, then the difference between him and Josh is that he is a constantly self-deprecating picaro who insults because he doesn’t respect himself. In the process, he puts a two-pronged poker through Urdu’s tight sphincter and violently shakes up the contents of its clotted colon. The result is a lot of flatulence of platitudes through which Saqi walks with his nose tweaked in his fingers, followed by some very fresh explosion of funny expressions in the style of Perelman. (more…)

BOOK REVIEW: A non-futile life in bureaucracy by Khaled Ahmed

 Fard-e-Hayat;
By AK Khalid;
Allied Press Lahore 2006;

He went on to do his MA in History and Persian, and collected those tough degrees in Persian and Arabic known as Adeeb Fazil, Munshi Fazil and Maulvi Fazil. A cowherd from Gujrat had come to Lahore with nothing in his pocket and had walked away with the city’s best degrees

Abdul Karim Khalid is a tall dapper man in his eighties who became famous abroad…pointedly, not in Pakistan…for writing the best critical book on the wrong imposition of ushr in Pakistan: The Agrarian History of Pakistan. He did that as a result of the expertise accumulated by him as member Punjab Revenue Board for ten years at the end of a hardworking career in the Punjab Civil Service. The autobiography is a proof of what you can squeeze out of an otherwise dull life if you have the memory of a genius.
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by Akmal Aleemi

In all the years that I have lived in America – 35 to be exact – and in the four years since Ahmed Bashir died at the age of 81 from liver cancer, I never once dreamt about him, except some days ago. I dreamed that I was walking out of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. with my wife, Mumtaz. I ask her to wait for me in an area where there are several food outlets and to meet me in half an hour at the main entrance. I go out looking for my car which I had parked at some distance. I notice a group of people sitting out on a kind of porch. Among them, I see Ahmed Bashir, the intellectual, journalist and novelist, whom I used to call Lala. I was a friend of his talented younger brother, Akhtar Aksi, who died in his youth in Lahore in the 1950s.

In the dream, Ahmed Bashir sees me, smiles, but says nothing. I sit down in front of him and ask, “Lala, I have read Dil Bhatkay Ga . You call it a novel but it is a mix of journalism and fiction. Why?”

He seems to want to answer my question but fails to do so. I suddenly realise that he cannot talk. Then with some difficulty and much effort, all he says is, “Master Madan.” Master Madan was a boy prodigy who died in his teens but whose voice continues to haunt us through the few recordings he left behind. I remember that Mumtaz is by now waiting for me and I leave. (more…)

First Chapter of Bhutto’s recent book courtesy the NYT

‘Reconciliation’

 By BENAZIR BHUTTO

 The Path Back

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 by Khaled Ahmed

Pasnawisht aur Pas-e-Pasnawisht
By Prof Dr Pervez Perwazi; Naya Zamana
Publications Lahore 2007;
Pp640; Price Rs 600

This book is some kind of a treasury of memoirs. It is incredible how Prof Perwazi is able to track down anything smelling of autobiography. He is tough on people with inflated egos, but kind to people honestly writing impious truths

Prof Perwazi has read almost all the Urdu memoirs ever written and is something of an expert on what memoirs ought to be judged on the touchstone of classics written in Western literature. Autobiography is an act of ego. You write it because you want to write about yourself, which means you think you are worth writing about. Whose self is worth writing? Someone who has done great deeds or was witness to great deeds done by others. Yet, a memoir is irreducibly an act of justificatory egoism. And Prof Perwazi is a deflationary treasurer of the egos that get flaunted in books. He is in fertile ground because autobiography has always been the most popular genre in non-fiction. (more…)

by Aasem Bakhshi

Is there a crucial difference between someone who kills in order to die and someone who dies in order to kill? - [Talal Asad]

Alasdair MacIntyre - while making a ‘disquieting suggestion’ in the beginning of his chef-d’oeuvre ‘After Virtue‘ - hypothesized that what we chiefly possess as a vocabulary of morality can best be understood as ’simulacrum of morality’ rather than the actual and true morality. He argued that we are so confident of the absolute objectivity of this contemporary moral paradigm, which guides and constitutes our language, reasoning and transactions, that any transposed hypothesis would most certainly seem utterly implausible, at least at first glance. In short, that we are being betrayed by the very language we use is a proposition that is not acceptable to us.

In these heavily nuanced Welleck Library Lectures on Suicide Bombing, Talal Asad not only vindicates MacIntyre’s thesis but also contributes in reshaping the ongoing narrative regarding terrorism and war. (more…)

Jihad’s Long Journey 

Read an excerpt from Ayesha Jalal’s book.

PARTISANS OF ALLAH
By Ayesha Jalal
(Harvard, 373 pages, $29.95)

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Salman Rushdie’s latest novel is set in Akbar’s court and Renaissance Florence. NIRPAL SINGH DHALIWAL on how his glossy take could have used more grit

THE MUGHAL EMPIRE has an inordinate pull on the contemporary imagination. After a succession of assaults on India beginning in the 11th century, the Mughal dynasty had established itself over north India by the 1500s, and at its height in the 1700s, controlled all but the southernmost tip of the subcontinent. The empire has today become a byword for opulence and aestheticism. Akbar, the 16th century Mughal emperor is a central figure in Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, a book that flits between Renaissance Europe and Akbar’s court, and the cultures in between. (more…)

Contibution from Mohammad Taqi
Today, is, the death anniversary of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
 
The judicial murder of ZAB 29 years ago, still serves us as a reminder that a tamed judiciary in the hands of the junta, is a lethal weapon that can be unleashed against popular leaders and the will of the people.
 
One also needs to remember the brave judges like KMA Samdani,Safdar Shah and Dorab Patel,who stood their ground in the face of a brutal martial law but declined to accept the fabricated evidence and hang ZAB.
 
Justice KMA Samdani has been an inspiration all along. He encouraged us to participate in the pro-judiciary movement in Pakistan last year. He was the first judge to release Bhutto , as he found the evidence flimsy, and in the process had to resign from the Lahore High Court.

Bhutto’s famous book If-I-am-Assassinated by Bhutto can be accessed here
 

Book Review by Fiona Torrens-Spence

Author: Fauzia Minallah

In the past travel writers have been dismissive of Islamabad, passing it off as ’sterile’ and ‘dull’; somewhere to be got through before visiting the real Pakistan. And the local joke ‘Islamabad, twenty minutes from Pakistan’ also belittles the country’s capital city by implying it is essentially foreign to the rest of Pakistan; a soulless, high rise city full of diplomats and other feather bedded foreigners.

As Fauzia Minallah writes, Islamabad and its surrounding villages have both a soul and an immensely long and fascinating story. It is sometimes hard to locate historic sites and harder still to find information about them so I wish that I had been able to read Fauzia Minallah’s book before living in Islamabad as I know I have seen many sites around Islamabad, such as the prehistoric shelter which can be seen from the Kashmir Highway, and entirely missed the story behind them.

I would recommend any visitor to Islamabad to invest in a copy of her book, particularly if they will be living in Islamabad for long enough to get out and about and explore. The book has the best map of Islamabad and surrounding areas which I have yet seen. The map explains the city’s grid system and how it extends beyond the currently developed areas and shows the location of the places she describes in such a way that it would be comparatively easy to find them on one’s own. (Maps of the surrounding areas of Islamabad were non-existent when we lived in Islamabad which filled me with sadness as I am a very visual person.) Her book also has a very good timeline which puts the sites she describes into a historical framework.

Fauzia Minallah’s book has beautiful photos of Islamabad and reproductions of the paintings of the well-known Islamabad artist, Gulam Rasul illustrating the exceptional beauty of “the garden city” and its surrounding villages. The photography and arrangement of the art work is a tribute to Fauzia Minallah, who is a well known artist in her own right successfully exhibiting throughout Pakistan and Europe. (more…)

By Ishtiaq Ahmed

My article ‘Street theatre in Delhi’ dated Saturday, March 31, 2007, evoked strong emotions in India and Pakistan because the veteran writer Krishan Chander’s name had been mentioned in connection with the play I saw performed. Many of us are hugely in debt to him for inspiring in us a humanism, which has survived all the traumas of the late twentieth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century we are still convinced with quixotic zeal that the pen is superior to the sword, and therefore it should be wielded in behalf of those who have no means to defend themselves against armed bullies and their patrons.

Krishan Chander died working at his desk in Mumbai on March 8, 1977. He had just started to write a satirical essay entitled Adab baray-e-Batakh (Literature for a duck), and wrote just one line ‘Noorani ko bachpan hi sey paltoo janwaron ka shock tha. Kabootar, bandar, rang barangi chiriyaan…’ (Since childhood Noorani was fond of pet animals such as pigeons, monkeys, multi-coloured birds…’) but before he could complete the sentence he succumbed to a massive heart attack.

I remember the news of his death was received in Stockholm by us with great anguish. Only a few weeks earlier, on an impulse entirely, I had written to him after reading one of his latest stories in which he had mentioned Mohni Road Lahore, where he once lived in the late 1930s and until he left Lahore sometime in the early 1940s for Delhi to take up a job with All-India Radio. I urged him to visit Lahore where some of his best friends were still to be found. He was needed to preach his message of peace again in Lahore. He wrote back a very moving reply dated February 21, 1977. In it he wrote, among other things:

‘Lahore is a place where I was born, where I was educated, where I started my literary career, where I achieved fame. For people of my generation it is difficult to forget Lahore. It shines in our heart like a jewel — like the fragrance of our soul’. (more…)

by Aasem Bakhshi

Hayy ibn Yaqzan is a classic by Ibn Tufail - a Spanish Muslim philosopher, physician and scientist from 12th century. Simon Ockley’s translation can be found here in pdf. A better and modern translation is by Lenn Goodman but it is not available on the internet unfortunately.

Its a story of a boy, the nature of whose existence was shadowy to an extent that there are two completely rivaling accounts of his origins. One account ascribes his origin to spontaneous generation, deducing from intricate details of matter that eventually evolved into life. The other account is necessarily a legend, a human drama in which a royal infant grows up away from society and culture. The boy represents an ideal man with an innate desire to ‘know’. Being totally isolated from ‘intelligent’ life he gradually becomes morally conscious. He discovers shame, jealousy, aspiration, desire, eagerness to possess and practical reasoning with time and as his doe foster mother gets old, he learns to love and realises death as she dies.

Its an extended (but not tediously protracted) philosophical narrative, encompassing all forms of knowledge and discovery. To know is necessarily an obligation for Hayy ibn Yaqzan. He desperately seeks to understand his being in time and locate his space in cosmos. His search guides him through various disciplines of knowledge; for instance anatomy, physiology, metaphysics and spirituality. Discovering the unity of cosmos and its boundedness through reasoning, he discovers God and through his self imposed [quasi] ascetic ‘code of conduct’ he finds a way of his salvation and felicitousness.

At the age of 35, when he had not communicated with anyone except himself, he meets Absal; an anchorite refugee from a land of coventional ‘true believers’. Absal is a perfect model of a religious man, a zealot who has learnt many langauges to gain mastery of scriptural exegesis. His first reaction is a deep sense of fear for his faith as he encounters an exotic being i.e. Hayy. But his fears are dropped soon as he comes to know that Hayy do not have a clue of any langauge. In good faith he tries to teach him to speak and communicate in order to make him aware of knowledge and religion. However he soon discovers that Hayy is already aware of the ‘truth’; to envision which, his own (Absal’s) intellect bears nothing except revealed symbols.

Hayy formally proselytizes judging Absal’s good intentions and the veracity of his message and as the duo associate with one another, Absal introduces Hayy to his culture and people. As Hayy gets familiarised with this civilisation, two basic questions continue to puzzle him in great deal. Firstly, “Why people must need symbols to assimilate and express the knowledge of the Divine?” and continue understanding matters of Divine world literally. Secondly, being completely oblivious to ritualistic sense, he continues to wonder why there is an obligation to indulge one’s self in rituals of prayer and purity.

Though he never regrets submitting himself (in good faith) he kept on wondering why people of this ‘religion’ consume more than their body needs, possess and nurture property diligently, neglect truth by purposefully indulging in passtimes and fall an easy prey to their desires. He finally decides to accompany Absal to his land, thinking that it might be through him that people encompass the true vision and ‘realize’ truth rather than ‘believing’ it with their seemigly narrow kens.

What follows is a tale of a neophyte philosopher teaching people to get above their literalism and open another eye towards reality. His audience on the other hand, recoil in their apprehensions and being intellectual slaves to their prejudices close their ears. He consequently realises that these people are unable to go beyond their usual appetites and proclivities. He also grasps that masses of the world are only capable to recieve through symbols and regulatory laws rather than being receptive to unstained and plain truth.

Both men return back to their isolated world but this time Hayy as the teacher and Absal as his disciple. They continue searching their ecstasies until they met their ends.

Besides being a surpassingly great philosophical romance, its a unique story told by a philosopher who characterised himself as an autodidact. It was a fictional thought experiment to bridge gaps between reason and revelation, struggling to make it known that rejecting any of theses would mean rejecting a part of truth and trying to laydown a perpetually self evolving construct where reason is necessarily the caliph of revelation. A must read for all the times and a tradition that should always be kept alive.

When Benazir Bhutto was assassinated she was putting the final touches to her hard-hitting memoirs. In this world exclusive extract, she makes shocking allegations from the grave – and urges reconciliation between Islam and the West

Like most women in politics, I am especially sensitive to maintaining my composure, to never showing my feelings. A display of emotion by a woman in politics or government can be misconstrued as a manifestation of weakness, reinforcing stereotypes and caricatures.

But when I stepped down onto the tarmac at Quaid-e-Azam international airport in Karachi on October 18 last year, I was overcome with emotion. After eight lonely and difficult years of exile, I could not stop the tears pouring from my eyes.I felt that a terrible weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It was a sense of liberation. I was home at long last. I knew what I had to do. (more…)

Book review by Beena Sarwar for Himal Magazine

Truth destroys all rosy notions of what a remembered war should be. War becomes a time where the expected becomes the remote and extremes rule the day. The Year That Was is not going to be an effortless read for many because it demythologises 1971, predicts Afsan Chowdhury in his eloquent foreword. Ishrat Firousi returns that period to the domain of ordinary people and their recollections. War becomes a series of personal experiences against the backdrop of a societal nightmare. (more…)

by Soniah Kamal

*Of Pakistani origin, Zulfiqar Ghose is one of the first novelist and poet to be published internationally to great acclaim, however, at age 73 the prolific Ghose finds his work going unpublished and his literary agent telling him ‘If you were a 27 year old beautiful woman, I could easily sell your first novel. But for a man…writing his umpteenth novel, forget it!’ Ghose is not yet disenchanted by the publishing industry, but I’m quite upset on behalf of all 27 year olds with unpublished books in tow who, while meeting the specified age, fail to be beautiful too…

From the interview conducted by Asif Farrukhi for Dawn newspaper:

‘I am not disenchanted with publishing. My last novel The Triple Mirrors of the Self came out in 1992. It was a complete flop. I had thought that it was my most ambitious novel, but it was not even reviewed. It sold about 200 copies in the London edition. My publishers were supportive. They pushed it and tried to revive it by bringing out a paperback edition.’
‘When a book dies this way, it becomes public knowledge. The novels I have written since then are with my agent and nobody is reading them. An American publisher looked at Triple Mirrors and said that it is too good to be published. The British publisher told me, ‘Zulfi you know what your problem is? You don’t write badly enough!’ So what am I supposed to do, he muses questioningly.’

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Our contributor, Soniah Kamal’s short story ‘The Breast’ is included in the captioned anthology published by Harper Collins, India. In the recent months, Soniah was busy with her academic pursuits and will be writing for Pak Tea House regularly.

Incidentally, after having edited this collection, I have become an ardent devotee of the internet and the huge world it opens up. I have managed to stay in constant touch with the women who have contributed to this collection – something that I could never have done in the old days of snail mail.

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temporal 

The first ever-commissioned play to be telecast in the subcontinent in November 1964 was written by Enver Sajjad. He was bestowed with Pride of Performance in 1989 for his valuable work in literature. And he got the ECO Award of Excellence 2004 in history, literature and culture. His screenplay are so deftly written that a prolific writer like Ashfaq Ahmed once confessed that he learned to write screenplay from Enver Sajjad

I was at Riaz Rafi’s studio apartment one evening. Rafi as he likes to be called is an artist with a nagging conscience. I was in the midst of doing an in-depth profile of him. (project shelved indefinitely–cannot get permission to use some quotes.) (more…)

Raza Rumi

Decades of imperialism have left Afghanistan and its people devastated. But the fall of the Taliban, and the much touted “liberation” of Afghanistan, has produced a new spate of novels, films and other artistic media dealing with the “Afghan victim.”

And when I say “Afghan victim,” I mean a nauseating overdose of burqa-oppression, Taliban brutality and other “Oriental” tragedies. Not only are these subjects sexy – they tie into the global imperatives of terror and Islamism – but they also artfully exonerate the “aggressor,” whether it is the Soviets, US imperialism or NATO. As such, the bulk of this new subgenre of fiction addresses the Western, English-speaking world; writing about reluctant and not-so-reluctant fundamentalists sells “Over There.” Meanwhile, literature is turning into a grand extravaganza of marketing, prizes, commoditization and short-lived shelf lives.

Feryal Ali Gauhar’s second novel, No Space for Further Burials, attempts to break free of many of these stereotypes. A trained economist, filmmaker and former UN Goodwill Ambassador, Gauhar opts to publish her book in India , not a Western outlet. More importantly, No Space inverts the oft-hackneyed themes of displacement, war, America and the suffering Afghans, ultimately treating these grim motifs by focusing on the sanity – and insanity – implicit within personal narrative. (more…)

WHY do we employ trite epithets to describe Saadat Hasan Manto? He was a ‘genius’; he was a ‘gifted’ writer; he had an ‘uncanny ability’ to hold a mirror up to nature; he was ‘able’ to see society stark naked, etc. The answer to that question is: we can’t do better. It is virtually impossible to praise Saadat Hasan Manto enough. He can only be looked up to as someone who had a bold love affair with truth.

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by Aasem Bakhshi

Iqbal’s philosophy would remain alive in the form of these lectures as students all over the world would continue to explore the innumerable dimensions of this single most important work on Islamic theology during the last century

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by temporal

“Arey Larkay, go to the fourth room, third shelf from the right and fourth from the top, and bring me the seventh book from the right.”

I looked in amazement as the servant whom he always referred to as Larka or larkay reappeared in a few minutes with an autographed book by historian and critic Qazi Abdul Wadood of Patna. Mushfiq sahib turned the pages, stopped at a page and read me some lines backing up what he was saying.

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