IQBAL a biography by Khurram Ali Shafique

Nonfiction is considered boring and tedious reading but not when it is written by someone as gifted as Khurram Ali Shafique, who uses pen like flute and through that what flows is always relishing and mesmerizing.

I had read the first two volumes of Iqbal's biography and was keenly waiting for the next part and when I got this 3rd volume before the Eid holidays I knew that these Eid holidays would certainly be more than just holidays. All those who have read Khurram Ali Shafique know that he not only surprises readers with his profound insights and an unusual and remarkable way of looking at things but at the same time he crafts his lines so beautifully like a skilled curator that captures the readers’ attention till the last word is written and even after that point reader remains intoxicated for a long long time.

IQBAL: volume 3 , the middle period, is a voluminous undertaking, a book that spreads to 944 pages of immaculate research, beautiful narrative and ingenious insight. The book is divided into 9 chapters of unequal length and has been given a title which provides essence of the period that was under consideration. Each chapter is written point wise like the previous two volumes and each point is given a number and a point contains a complete event, a thought or a description. It is sometimes a lengthy paragraph and sometimes just a sentence but still it narrates a complete picture in itself. The complete book comprises of 1459 such eventful points.

The chapters have very interesting titles which corresponds to the basic current underling the period which they belong to, the list is:
1-Khudi ka nashamen (January 1914 to June 1915) خودی کا نشیمن
2-Ma ka mazar (July to August 1915) ماں کا مزار
3-Nizam uddin Auloia ki Basti September 1915 to August 1916 نظام الدین اولیا کی بستی
4-Milat ka Derbar September 1916 to June 1917 ملت کا دربار
5-Taqdeer ki Mahfil July 1917 to April 1918 تقدیر کی محفل
6-Goethe ki Dersga April 1918 to November 1920 گوئٹے کی درسگاہ
7-Abe Hayat ka Chashma November 1920 to April 1922. آب حیات کا چشمہ
8-Samrna April to September 1922 سمرنا
9-Hafiz ka Mekhana September to December 1922 حافظ کا میخانہ

Once 9 chapters end one wish that more was there to be read as the pleasure that the 807 pages provided and built a feeling of enormous interest in the life of a genius that Iqbal was, the Appendix appears. This is as interesting and useful as the preceding nine chapters were and the book thus culminates on a very satisfying note but with a promise that the best is still to come as the next book deals with the prime period of Iqbal and is titled Daur e Urooj and so very rightly promises that the best is still to come.

Rashid Minhas- a biography

The book is the most moving biographical account of pilot officer Rashid Minhas Shaheed (1951-1971) Nishan-e-Haider. This is the first full biography of Rashid Minhas, written by the most stylist modern day writer of Pakistan, Khurram Ali Shafique and is a first publication of Al-Fattah Academy.

The book beautifully captures the formative years of Rashid Minhas , which are so important in understanding his personality and his ultimate decision that has made him the eternal hero, and then progresses like dramatic movie with lively characterization, beautiful narratives of places and exciting cadet life. This all builds up into one of the most sad climaxes with crashing of flight 166.

I personally loved the letters Rashid Minhas wrote to his younger brothers during his training days. These letters show genuineness and maturity of his ideas. He was an idealist but thoroughly practical person as well. The book sizes him on all aspects of his personality, his likes and dislikes, his favorite personalities, heroes, films, books and food.

The book is a great tribute to the sacrifice of this hero and his ideals and at the same time a lesson that life is not the name of mere surviving but life is living according to one’s ideals and if not possible then dying for these.

A Perpetual Love Affair

I am greatly fascinated by her; I simply love her sight and all places and abodes where ever she resides is like a sacred sanctuary to me. My love affair started with her at my adolescence, she was so young and beautiful than, she has maintained her youth and majesty and grown even prettier. To her overwhelming and startling beauty, grace has been added. Her acquaintance is like a treasure to me an insurmountable treasure that she fosters.

Her feel, her contours, the scent of her smell all combined makes her the most ravishing, most exotic and highly desirable. Her beauty is not just skin deep she has added other dimensions to her serenity , her exalted beauty transcends all known barriers of time and space. She coexists with me despite various differences of opinions and sometimes with even divergent and opposite views.

What ever I hide from myself I see in her and whatever others hide from me I discover all in her, she is like a mirror to me, a mirror that see's within and also without, I call her my BOOK.

Book talks to me and I frequently indulge in conversation with her. During reading, I often, start reading into her which makes me the co-author of the Book. I have always maintained that Book is written by three writers, one who pen's the script, second the character which is being scripted, third is the reader who is not a passive but an active author of book, as book evolves with the participation of reader, it grows outside and also inside the reader, a most astonishing and rare phenomenon something incomparable with other things but only equal to that miraculous human spirit.

The First Rain

Pehli Barish (The First Rain) is an incredible poetic work of one of Urdu’s most popular and eminent poet Nasir Kazmi (1925-1972). Pehli Barish was published posthumously in 1975, although it was completed in 1972 before his death, but Nasir Kazmi was reluctant to its publication then, as he was of the view that his readers were not yet ready for this experiment which was new in form and content.

In Pehli Barish we see Nasir Kazmi in a new and completely different mode, much more mysterious and symbolic. The poems of Pahli Barish which consists of 24 Gazals (poems) and 219 Ashaar(couplets) are in form of a complete story line. Each Couplet and Poem though complete in itself is also part of a bigger picture that leads to a complete story. Pehli Barish is a journey, a search of a friend, a lover, a home, a paradise that is found, lost and regained. More this is a search of Self, which the poet finally discovers after losing everything but the remembrance of God brings peace, solace and ultimate realization that this journey was an experience and it has to end one day, but it ended finally after the true companion was found.

This is metaphorically very rich Book, although very simple as you read along but this simplicity leads you nowhere if the metaphors are not understood. These metaphors are from mythology, religion, literature, and human evolution and are beautifully and artistically vulcanized by the poet and thus he presents one of the most beautiful collages of poetic excellence that breath and pulsates like an organ.

The first rains that this grand poem brought is still drizzling somewhere inside my unconsciousness and soaking the untouched, unattended and unreached myths and realities of my being,The First Rain, to me means a Search. A Search after receiving the bliss from the first drop of rain that created Life and recognition of Life.

A Life of One's Own

Marion Milner (1900-1998), was a British author and psychoanalyst, and a pioneer of introspective journaling. At the age of 26 she began to keep a diary, this was because it slowly became clear to her that, her life was not as it ought to be, although from external point of view it was going very well, since she was earning her living in interesting work, having a full leisure life and plenty of friends. The book ‘A Life of One’s Own’ grew out of this seven years diary and this amply exhibits what journaling and dairy writing do. Following are excerpts from this book which was first published in 1934.

“When I first began, at the end of each day, to go through what had happened and pick out what seemed best to me, I had quite unexpected results. Before I began this experiment, when I had drifted through life unquestioningly, I had measured my life in terms of circumstances. I had thought I was happy when I was having what was generally considered ‘a good time’. But when I began to try and balance up each day’s happiness I had found that there were certain moments which had a special quality of their own, a quality which seemed to be almost independent of what was going on around me, since they occurred sometimes on the most trivial occasions. They stood out because of a feeling of happiness which was far beyond what I had ordinarily meant by ‘enjoying myself’, and because of this they tended to oust all other concerns in my daily record.”

“By keeping a diary of what made me happy I had discovered that happiness came when I was most widely aware. So I had finally come to the conclusion that my task was to become more and more aware, more and more understanding with an understanding that was not at all the same thing as intellectual comprehension. I had come to realize that it was not, after all, a question of a life of consciousness as against a life of natural impulse; for without consciousness, for me at least, there was no freedom of natural expression, but only a clash of haphazardly acquired conventions and welter of opposing and misunderstood ideals. Without understanding I was at the mercy of blind habit; with understanding, I could develop my own rules for living and find out which of the conflicting exhortations of a changing civilization was appropriate to my needs.”

Why Not the Best?

Colin Wilson (1931) is a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction. In 1956 at the age of 24 he wrote his first non-fictional work The Outsider, which was both praised and highly criticized. The work examines and explores the psyche of the social outsider and his effect on society and society’s effect on him through the works and lives of various artists including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T.S.Elliot, Earnest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Vincent Van Gogh, Friedrick Nietzsche and Fydor Dostoevsky. In the final chapter of this Book he justifies his belief that Western Philosophy is afflicted with a heedless pessimistic fallacy.

Three years later in an Autobiographical note he wrote an interesting insight about the ultimate question that lies behind the Outsider, which is now part of his book Religion and the Rebel:

“How can man extend his range of consciousness? I believe that human beings experience a range of mental states which is as narrow as the middle three notes of a piano keyboard. I believe that the possible range of mental state is as wide as the whole piano keyboard, and the man’s sole aim and business is to extend his range from usual three or four notes to the whole keyboard. The men I dealt with in the Outsider had one thing in common: an instinctive knowledge that their range could be extended, and a nagging dissatisfaction with the range of their everyday experience.”

The Question which each one of us is confronted with, consciously and unconsciously is: Why not the best?

It's the Spectator that Art Really Mirrors

The last post mentioned 13 Books that changed the way America is, wanted to list out 13 such books for Pakistan, which will do in some later post. This post is about those thirteen that influenced me.

Oscar Wilde in the preface of Picture of Dorian Gray speaks about art, some pickings from that would be interesting before I list out books.”The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal artist is art’s aim. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated. For these there is hope. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Those who read symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”

MY THIRTEEN
01-KHUTBAT (Sermons’) by A.A.Mududi
A foremost book about pillars of Islam, and a very precise and logical narrations of these tenants.

02-APOLOGY by Plato
Details of trial and sentence of Socrates. “ I must tell you the truth-the result of my mission was first this: I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that some inferior men were really wiser and better”

03-IBLIS O ADAM (Devil and Adam) by G.A.Perwez
Origin and Geneses paradoxes understood in light of Quran and modern empirical knowledge.

04-MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING by Victor Frankl
“Ultimately man should not ask what meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.”

05-RAAKH (Ashes’) by Mustansar Hussain Tarar
A novel classically deals with the history of Pakistan, often considered as controversial but ground breaking.

06-BEING AND NOTHINGNESS by Jean Paul Sartre
“Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away… To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.”

07-THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHTS IN ISLAM by Allama Iqbal
The seven lectures that are key to our understanding of Islam and the world around us: Past, Present and Future.

08-KAFILA E HIJAZ (The Caravan of Arabia) by Nasim Hijazi
A historical fiction, written in most admirable and lucid prose portraying early rise of Islamic polity, economy and education system.

09-LES MISERABLES by Victor Hugo
“Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

10-RAJA GIDH (King Vulture) by Bano Qudsia
An Urdu novel emphasizing that sins not only degrade and destroy the sinner morally but also corrupts his genes and travels to next generation.

11-SIDDAHRATA by Hermann Hesse
“When someone is seeking… it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything… because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.”

12-PLEASURES OF PHILOSOPHY by Will Durant
“To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.”

13-GERMINAL by Emile Zola
“He simply wanted to go down the mine again, to suffer and to struggle; “

Life in Transcription

Books are my passion, when I was at the 6th KIBF (Karachi International Book Fair) which concluded recently, it was just like finding oneself among friends, companions, teachers and guides.

It is often said that books change our perception, our way of thinking, our world view and hence the world around us. A book which is to be published in mid January 2010 “Promised Land: Thirteen Books” by Jay Parini is about those Thirteen Books that changed the way America is forever and helped to create the nation that it is.

Books are life and wisdom in transcription. The following passage from one of my favorite French Novelist Marcel Proust brilliantly describes what a Book means:

“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”

When Life is Bitter

THE GREATEST MINDS AND IDEAS OF ALL TIME is compilation of Will Durant’s essays, compiled and edited by John Little. Following is a beautiful passage from this book on LIFE, RELATIONSHIPS and BOOKS which is worth reading and remembering:

This, then, is our Odyssey of books. Here is another world, containing the selected excellence of a hundred generations; not quite so fair and vital as this actual world of nature and human enterprise, but abounding nevertheless in unsuspected wisdom and beauty unexplored. Life is better than literature, friendship is sweeter than philosophy, and children reach into our hearts with profounder music than comes from any symphony, but even so these living delights offer no derogation to the modest and secondary pleasures of our books.

When life is bitter, or friendship slips away, or perhaps our children leave us for their own haunts and homes, we shall come and sit at the table with Shakespeare and Goethe, and laugh at the world of Rabelais, and see its autumn loveliness with John Keats. For these are friends who give us only their best, who never answers back and always wait our call. When we have walked with them awhile, and listened humbly to their speech, we shall be healed of our infirmities, and know the peace that comes of understanding.

If there is magic

LOREN EISELEY (1907-1977) naturalist, philosopher, poet was the man who showed us, how to love nature, not as a bystander or the observer but as a part of it, as one that is observed. How to love, even the small and insignificant, the big and the mighty, all as friends, nobody in this natural park was an enemy , as all were contributing towards a single and most sacred path, the path of Life, and protecting its uninterrupted glorious cycle.

LOREN EISELEY wrote several books, THE IMMENSE JOURNEY, THE FIREMAMENT OF TIME, THE NIGHT COUNTRY and THE LOST NOTE BOOKS are my most cherished treasure. I would like to share a passage from THE IMMENSE JOURNEY, Chapter, Flow of the River:

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. Its least stir even, as now in a rain pond on a flat roof opposite my office, is enough to bring me searching to the window. A wind ripple may be translating itself into life. I have a constant feeling that some time I may witness that momentous miracle on a city roof, see life vertiably and suddenly boiling out of a heap of rusted pipes and old telivision aerials. I marvel at how a sudden water beetle has come and is submarining there in a spatter of green algae. Thin vapors, rust, wet tar and sun are alembic remarkably like the mind; they throw off odorous shadows that threaten to take real shape when no one is looking.



Onec in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole enos, the enos that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort. The mind has sunk away into its beginings among old roots and the obscure tricklings and moving that stir inanimate things.



No utilitarian philosophy explains a snow crystal, no doctrine of use or disuse. Water has merely leapt out of vapor and thin nothingness in the night sky to array itself in form. There is no logical reason for existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. it is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains-if anything contains-the explanation of men and catsish and green leaves.

Equality in Diversity

M.Scott Peck , the psychiatrist, the legendary author of THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED also wrote a very significant book IN SEARCH OF STONES, which is sub-titled as "A pilgrimage of Faith, Reason and Discovery"



The Book is a complete reflection on spirituality, faith and inner quest. Here I would like to share a passage from this Book's Chapter PEACE:



We are all equal in sight of God. Beyond that, however, we are utterly unequal. we have different gifts and liabilities, different genes, different languages and cultures, different values and styles and thinking, different personal histories, different levels of competence, and so on, and so on. Indeed might be properly labeled "the unequal species." What most distinguishes us from all the creatures is our extraordinary diversity and the variability of our behavior. Equal? Just in the the moral sphere alone we range from the horribly demonic to the gloriously angelic.



The false notion of our equality propels us into the pretense of pseudo-community, and when the pretense fails, as it must for any intimacy or authenticity, then it propels us to attemt to achieve equality by force: the force of gentle persuasion followed by less and less gentle persuasion. We totally misinterpret our task. Society's task is not to establish equality. It is to develop systems that deal humanely with our unequality-systems that, within reason, celebrate and encourage diversity.