Only the person who has faith in

himself can be faithful to others

Erich Fromm-German psychoanalyst/ socialist

Back in the late 1970s, our school life was rudely interrupted by the martial law of Gen Zia ul Haq. The summer of 1977 was quite fun. We did not have to go back to school later that summer (I forget when schools reopened) and Pakistan Television (the only TV channel in those days) started broadcasting programmes during the day. Normally there was only an evening transmission starting at around 5pm and ending somewhere around 11pm with perhaps only 30 minutes or so of children’s programmes in between. But in the summer of 1977, we got to watch fun programmes like Star Trek and Hawaii Five Oh during the day while not having to go to school. I do remember soldiers in the streets and an occasional tank rumbling around but as young children, we were mainly concerned about enjoying our time off from school. The reality of Pakistan’s most brutal martial law to date would not sink in until much later.

As time went on, in addition to other things, one change that I noticed was that some of the kids in our school started taunting me with two mystifying labels. In the school yard and in classrooms, I would be called dehria and comminst. I was puzzled because I had no idea what either of these words meant. It was only much later that I realised that I had been bestowed these titles thanks to our nana, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Until then, to all of us grandchildren, he was just a kindly old man who would appear intermittently in our lives, take us to eat Chinese food and bring us little gifts from time to time; like the little wooden Matryoshka dolls from Russia (the Soviet Union, at that time) which we always enjoyed playing with.

The good thing about being labelled a dehria (atheist) and communist was that I developed an interest in studying philosophy and political economy at a young age.

When I wrote my nana Faiz’s biography, Love and Revolution, (published in 2016), I made a point of including a brief section on his religious beliefs (as I understood them during my research). Of course, no one accuses me now of being an atheist or a communist (at least to my face), but in a culture as steeped in religious belief as ours, people are still curious about Faiz’s views on religion since he is Pakistan’s leading poet and public intellectual.

On a visit to the USA recently, at the annual summer meeting of the Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America (APPNA), I had a chance to pose this question to Pakistan’s leading modernist theologian and Quranic scholar, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, who happens to hold a soft corner for Faiz and his poetry.

Faiz’s religiosity (or lack thereof) was a subject of much debate in some circles, throughout his life. It could not be otherwise, since religion remains a pervasive part of everyday life in Pakistan and India and for that matter, across the entire economically underdeveloped Third World. This, of course, as Marx pointed out long ago, is a consequence of the helplessness of those who have no recourse in the face of an unjust social and political system. Faiz, as a socialist, was often accused of being irreligious, even though his deep knowledge of religion and faith is evident from his poetry and his writings. This started with his early childhood tutelage in Arabic and Islam, as is traditional in all Muslim households. In an interview, he recounted how he memorised the first four chapters of the Quran but then had to stop when he developed eye problems. He also expressed regret that he had not been able to continue and memorise all of the Quran.

Faiz always described himself as attracted to the sufi version of Islam as preached by Muslim mystics. Even today, the vast majority of Muslims in India and Pakistan adheres to this version of their faith. Amongst the great Sufi mystics, Faiz singled out Rumi as his spiritual guide, once humorously deflecting a question in jail about what religion he belonged to by saying that his religion was the same as that of Rumi.

A story is told of how Islamic scholars belonging to various sects once descended on Rumi. They demanded to know which sect out of the seventy-two known to them he believed in. Rumi calmly replied that he agreed with all seventy-two. The group, which was bent on picking a fight with the old man, persisted, insisting that this meant that he was an infidel and a fire-worshipper, to which Rumi promptly replied that he agreed with this as well.

In response to a question about the supposed ‘superiority’ of an ‘Islamic’ economic and political system (a question that still lingers in Muslim countries), Faiz had this to say: “The real question is: what exactly are you calling an ‘Islamic system’? There are many Muslim countries in the world today, each with a different social and political system: Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia. So what is this ‘Islamic system’ that no one can see? Moscow [in the former USSR] and China are in front of you, everyone can see for themselves. In those countries, people can get an education, they have jobs, they have food to eat and the daily comforts of life. Can you tell me which Muslim country in the world today offers even a fraction of that to its inhabitants? So how is their system better than the system in China or the USSR? This has nothing to do with the ‘Islamic system’ being inherently wrong. It’s just that the system that has been devised in these Islamic countries is terribly flawed. So instead of criticising China and the USSR [for being ‘un-Islamic’], what we should be criticising are the governments in our own countries who have failed to create a workable system.”

— To be continued

The writer is a psychiatrist and a Trustee of the Faiz Foundation Trust