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Translation

⸪
A Translation of Jaun Elia’s Preface of Shāyad
Hamza Iqbal | orcid: 0000-0003-1078-5959
Department of Comparative Literature, University of Texas
at Austin, Austin TX, USA
[email protected]

Apne ḳhilāf faiṣlah ḳhud hī likhā hai āp ne

Hāth bhī mal rahe haiñ āp, āp bahut ʿajīb haiñ

You are the one who has decided against yourself

Yet you are the only one regretting it, so strange you are
—Pirzada Qasim

Abstract

Arguably the most “popular” Hindi-Urdu poet today, Jaun Elia involuntarily migrated
from his hometown of Amroha in 1957 and soon after started his literary and intellec-
tual activities in the foreign sprawling landscape of Karachi. He served as an editor and
publisher of a literary journal titled Inshā’, produced scholarly works, and translated
important philosophical and theological texts from Arabic and Persian into Urdu. But
Jaun’s most sincere investment remained towards the craft of poetry, particularly to
the ghazal, which he wrote prolifically and recited routinely at local and international
mushāʿarahs till his death in 2002.
The dibāchah (prologue-essay) from his first poetry collection, Shāyad, that was pub-
lished only when Jaun was approaching sixty, is a formidable—even if at times formally
complex—example of modern Urdu prose. This translation of the prologue-essay is not
only intended to introduce Jaun’s philosophical, ideological, and aesthetical influences

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160 Iqbal

to the broader English-speaking publics but also to provide an aperture to those sym-
bolic flashes from the poet’s biography which he wished to share with his readers.

Keywords

Partition – North Indian Ashrāf – Qasbatī Nostalgia – Popular Culture – aesthetics –

Translation Theory – Performance and Reception

Translator’s Introduction

In the prologue essay of his poetry collection Shāyad (Perhaps), Jaun Elia estab-
lishes at the outset that the poetry which follows is that of a “failed man” and
soon after also mentions that the reason for his destructive life was that since
his childhood his ideological father did not teach him “practical ways” of liv-
ing, but told him that only knowledge and books were the most worthwhile of
possessions. There would be very few poets in any language who would begin
their first poetry collection in such a manner.
The following is the translation of the whole prologue essay of Jaun Elia’s
first poetry collection, Shāyad. The prologue is taken from the seventh edi-
tion, which was published in 2017. In the brief note of “gratitude” dated
February 26, 1991, that features in this edition, Mumtaz Saeed says that this
is the “ʿavāmī (common) edition” of Jaun’s first poetry collection, and before
this there was a “deluxe edition that was published in March of 1990.” Thus,
1990 is when the collection was published for the first time and Jaun Elia, to
use his own term, became a ṣāḥib-e dīvān (a poet with a published collection).
To mark this occasion, a mushāʿarah (poetic symposium) by the name of
Jashn-e Jaun Elia (Celebration of Jaun Elia) was held in Dubai in the same year.
Furthermore, according to the Mairaj Rasool’s introductory remarks in the same
seventh edition—whom Jaun recalls fondly in this preface and who seemed
to have been associated with an entity called, ‘Elia Academy’ in the locale of
Gulshan-e Iqbal in Karachi—the year 1992 alone saw the publication of the
third and the fourth editions of Shāyad due to the title’s immense popularity.1

1 There is also a kulliyāt (complete collection) of Jaun that was compiled in 2015 by Fārūq
Argalī from Delhi titled Kulliyāt-e Jaun Eliā: Shāyad, Yaʿnī, Gumāñ, Lekin, Goyā. Unfortunately
though, not only does the collection very conspicuously list the wrong year for Jaun’s birth
(1914 rather than 1931), but in its preface, the editor also erroneously claims that the first
edition of Shāyad was published in 1995, not 1990.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 161

Jaun Elia was born on December 14, 1931 in the neighborhood of Lakra in
the qaṣbah (small town) of Amroha in Uttar Pradesh, India to an erudite and
scholarly household. His larger family includes names like Rais Amrohvi and
Syed Muhammad Taqi (elder brothers of scholarly, journalistic, and politi-
cal repute in Pakistan), Kamal Amrohi (filmmaker who made the legendary
movie Pākīzah), and Sadequain (probably the finest painter to come from
Pakistan), among others. He arrived in Pakistan in the 1950s still a young man
and remained active as a poet and writer for most of his life.
Jaun had separated from his immediate family, but during his later life he
had some adherents, disciples, and students in matters of poetry and thought
who would often visit him. There is at least one disciple, Khalid Ahmad Ansari,
who deserves credit for publishing four of Jaun’s five poetry collections and the
collection of essays after Jaun’s death, granting Urdu readers access to works
that could have quite easily been lost, given Jaun’s self-acknowledged reckless
demeanor. On the other hand, some of Jaun’s admirers see the fact that he
published only one collection of his poetry during his lifetime as an indication
that the perfectionist in him would not have wanted to get anything published
that was not up to his mark. This issue may come across as somewhat peculiar
and definitely raises an interesting question: should a work of art solely remain
within the domain of its creator, or should it be “out there” for the public to
interpret and appreciate?2 This debate continues amongst some staunch Jaun
admirers, so much so that a few of them do not even wish to seek a placatory
resolution to the matter.
For an Urdūvālā (speaker/lover of Urdu), it is rare to not have heard of Jaun
Elia; it would be even more rare for them to know him or know of him and not
have an opinion about him and/or his poetry. In the past few years, thanks to
the rise of social media, Jaun Elia has come to occupy hearts of hundreds of
thousands of admirers on both sides of the subcontinental border who often
organize events that foreground readings and performances of his poetry.
Scholars from both East and West have recently begun to critically look at his
writings, and universities have started to offer exclusive courses on his poetics.
It is fascinating that the structural shift away from books and magazines in
favor of digital platforms such as Facebook and Youtube, etc., seems to have
significant bearing upon the popularity and reception of an Urdu poet in con-
temporary South Asia. This is particularly true for Jaun whose poetry began to
substantially circulate through the online availability of videos of mushāʿarah

2 The latter is in line with Barthes’ preference for a “dead” author, the former with the opening of
Benjamin’s celebrated essay on translation: “In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form,
consideration of the reader never proves fruitful … No poem is intended for the reader, no pic-
ture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience” (“The Task of the Translator,” 253).

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162 Iqbal

recordings from Karachi, India, and Dubai in the 1980s and 1990s. A recent
article by Anand Taneja corroborates this phenomenon. Taneja writes,

Jaun is the most popular poet in urban India right now. His popularity
is not restricted to Muslims or those who can read Urdu script. With
the proliferation of cell phones and cheap data plans, which have given
young people access to global flows of information and culture to cre-
atively explore their gendered, classed, and racialized subjectivities, there
has been vastly increased access to an embodied archive of Urdu poetry.
Recordings of Jaun’s mushairas from the late 1980s and 1990s are widely
available on the Internet, and young Indians in unprecedented numbers
are encountering his poetry as Urdu poetry has always been meant to be
encountered—as an oral, performative form. There is a flourishing mar-
ket for Jaun-inspired art and merchandise.3

To his fans then, Jaun Elia’s appeal lies as much in his mushāʿarah antics as
much as it does in his sahl-e mumtanaʿ verses. It is, in fact, arguable that the
two go hand in hand: the simplicity and accessibility of his ġhazal verses imme-
diately pulls at the heartstrings and the eccentricity and amusement in the
recitational performance is potent enough to leave a long-lasting impression
upon the minds and hearts of his listeners. The former may possibly have to
do with the slightly less formal Karachi-esque lexicon he comes to embrace—
which at least seems to be the case in his chosen recitations—but the latter
most likely would have been due to his own penchant for theatricality, espe-
cially in his younger days, as he mentions at the beginning of Shāyad.
However, what often gets overlooked—or worse, even gets lost—in all of
this is the solemnity that constituted the poet’s thought. Jaun Elia was first
and foremost a scholar, philosopher, and a translator whose intellectual scope
stretched from Greek philosophy, pre-Islamic poetry, and Islamic history to
medieval Islamic philosophy, German, Idealism, and World Literature in the
twentieth century. He translated significant works of Western and Islamic
intellectual thought like Aristotle’s Categories, parts of the anonymous his-
torical Islamic magnum opus Iḳhvān uṣ-Ṣafā (The Brethren of Purity) such as
its treatise on Numbers (or Risāla fī al-ʿAdād), Porphyry’s Īsāġhūjī, as well as
Nāṣir-e Ḳhusrau Qubādiyānī’s4 Gushāyish o Rahāyish into Urdu. These titles
were never formally published by Jaun, and even after my investigation in

3 Taneja, “Hindustan Is a Dream,” 80–81.

4 Nāṣir-e Ḳhusrau was one of the most important Persian poets of the eleventh century who is
famous for his celebrated prose work, Safar-nāmah (Book of Travels).

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 163

Karachi which involved meeting Jaun’s publisher, friends, and family in sum-
mer 2019, it was not clear who might be in possession of these (except for the
last one).5
Aqeel Abbas Jafri, a journalist for the BBC and an enthusiast follower of
Jaun’s, writes in an Urdu op-ed, “There is no doubt that Jaun’s [popular] verses
that are directed towards the beloved are what captivates the youth,” and thus
contribute to his popular reception in cyberspace. But it is “to Facebook’s
credit,” Jafri continues, that

Jaun Elia has become the most popular Urdu poet of today. Some of these
youths have assumed Jaun’s physical appearance and demeanor, while a
few other uninformed ones are occupied with the idea of proving them-
selves his parallel. However, these youths are not really inspired by Jaun’s
lexicon, his imagination, and his ability of poetic performance [or ora-
tory]. What inspires them is his appearance and his manner of poetry
recitation in his state of intoxication … I advise these youths to first read
literature, study poetry and philosophy, learn how to write and perform
a word, have a dialogue with their [inner] self in solitude, and then read
Jaun. Then, a new Jaun Elia will be revealed to them.6

The translation of this prologue-essay of Shāyad is one of the first steps towards
reading, engaging, and comprehending Jaun on his own terms of philosophi-
cal, cultural, and expressively historical and global confluence. This selection
of prose is intended to introduce the various aspects of Jaun Elia’s philosophi-
cal and poetic thought. This piece of prose, which is both philosophical and
poetic, can be taken as, among other things, Jaun’s views of his own philosophy
and poetry, as well as philosophy and poetry in general.
The prologue-essay is a careful yet mediated and highly suggestive explora-
tion of the terrain of historical experience and identity in both a pre-colonial
and a post-colonial society. The essay serves as a mini bildungsroman and
touches upon a significant number of moments that constitute Jaun’s auto-
biography. He begins the essay with a discussion of his education in Amroha,

5 All the titles listed above are mentioned under “other books of the author” on the back cover
of Shāyad, but only the last one is sitting in the Shia Imami Ismaili Tariqah and Religious
Education Board Library that is located in the neighborhood of Garden East in Karachi,
where Jaun lived with his brothers for some time. As per my conversation with the librar-
ian there, Jaun’s translation of Gushāyish o Rahāyish written in his own handwriting—is
the property of the library because Jaun was summoned and paid for the task. Members
of the public can go visit and view the translation, but it is not available for borrowing, and
the library does not plan to publish it.
6 Jafri, “Jaun Elia.” Translation mine.

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his association with theatre, and his encounter with Communist and Marxist
political thought in his youth through friends and siblings. It also reveals bouts
of doubt and self-analysis, reflections on the Islamic social milieu in Amroha,
long and lyrical discourses on the author’s political and poetical inclinations,
staggering displays of Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, and European erudition, and pro-
digious displays of memory, transcultural imaginings, and historical musings.
The introduction is a powerful work that seamlessly achieves formal complex-
ity while defying genre classification. I offer in the following pages a succinct
reading of some features of the text but also of Jaun’s personal and literary life,
which is itself treated here as a text of some complexity.

Jaun—A Communist Poet!?

Both Communism and Marx remained important for Jaun throughout his life,
yet one cannot count him amongst the company of poets such as Faiz Ahmad
Faiz and Habib Jalib. Like Faiz and Jalib, Jaun was arguably a staunch revolu-
tionary (on paper), but unlike them he had a more quietist approach towards
translating political dissent into praxis—i.e., putting his words into action.
Neither was he a leftist in the same vein as some of the most prominent figures
from the Progressive Writers Movement. Jaun may have been Marxist, but he
was a lot more than that—even as he continued to dream and express his hope
for “a political democracy along with a social republic,” as he calls it towards
the end of this prologue essay. It is especially fascinating how he humanizes
Marx, saying,

This person … who, in his semi-starved state, used to think about the cure
for the suffering of all people of the world and who one day died while
restfully sitting in his noble and praiseworthy posture of contemplation.
When we discuss this beloved and wise old man of history and his lively
and enrichingly philosophical perspective … Communism, and through
his perspective, when we wish to have a panacea for the inert life of our
peoples then we are labelled rebels and traitors by the new Western
imperialist framework and its local intermediaries.7

Such treatment of Marx by an Urdu ġhazal poet is intriguing, if not outright

novel. But the claim that “for some strange reason, everybody has overlooked
the important fact that Elia was a Marxist poet whose poetry was highly
influenced by communist ideals” is a bit excessive.8 Firstly, and as I have sug-
gested, a lot of aspects of Jaun’s poetic and philosophical thought have been

7 Elia, Shāyad, 37–38.

8 Salim, “Jaun Elia: A Communist Poet.”

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 165

overlooked—not merely his Communist inclinations. Secondly, the “strange

reason” for this missing analysis may not be all that strange if one remem-
bers that Jaun was not exactly politically active in comparison to some of
his contemporaries. That does not mean Jaun was not politically or socially
conscious—and some of his essays suggest he may have even been hyper
conscious—but in calling him not politically active, we mean that he did not
go out on the street, or get arrested, beaten or exiled in the way others did.
I argue that Jaun was a communist to the same extent that he considered
his father to be one: “He was not a political man, rather a scholar and a poet.
Had he been political he would have been a communist,” he says of his father.9
This is due to Jaun considering communism or socialism the most appropriate
and just amongst all possible social and political systems of governance. He
says, “Insofar as the social system of communism is concerned, I believe in it
with all of my rational, poetic, and ethical positions. I cannot imagine that any
noble figure from the past would have advocated a capitalist system. Had Jesus
been alive could he have tolerated the capitalistic structure? Would Prophet
Muhammad (PBUH) and his chosen companions prefer to even breathe in any
capitalist society?”10 The profoundest relation that a poet has, in fact, accord-
ing to Jaun is with beauty:

Belief systems tend to have an adverse relation to unconditional beauty,

good, and art, and beliefs do not have an unconditional relationship with
beauty and art. In my capacity as a poet, I reject the alleged ‘totalities’ of
belief systems. … Beauty is not “aspatial” or “atemporal.”11

This partially exhibits Jaun’s commitment to ideologically strong progressive

thought, yet which never really assumed a formidable or noteworthy stance of
political and physical resistance. However, this is not to say that he did not suf-
fer. He did, but it may not only have been directly at the hands of the capital-
ists or the State. He suffered due to his own rebellious, anarchist, and skeptical
disposition too, as he confesses in his essay. This disposition may have been
partly constituted by unrealizable social and political futures (towards a uto-
pian progressive and a just society), but also a curious, knowledge-seeking soul
who remained occupied with the goal of a shared philosophical wisdom. The
other part of his suffering came from his personal life experiences. In addition
to communist ideals that the nation-state of Pakistan failed to realize, Jaun’s

9 Elia, Shāyad, 16.

10 Elia, Shāyad, 25.
11 Elia, Shāyad, 35.

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other ideals concerning rationality, religion, and ethics had been disrupted by
modernity—and thus, were just as unrealizable in Pakistani society.
For instance, we encounter two contrasting views on the topic of knowledge
and education in Jaun’s writings. One is from 1963 in the conclusion of an essay
titled “Ḳhāke” (Sketches), in which Jaun laments the lack of sincere intellectual
engagement and pursuit of knowledge in the Pakistani society. He writes,

The basic thing is that we do not possess any profound view of life/
existence. … We cannot even do justice to intellect, let alone to our
faith. … This society developed civic settlements but it has banished
its intellect and conscience. … However, it would have to adopt a semi-
ascetic frame of mind, otherwise it will never be able to gain the bounties
of insight and wisdom and the existence of this society will merely remain
a non-serious spectacle.12

And in another concluding remark from an essay called “T̤alabah” (Students)

from the year 1990, he writes:

Here, students run towards universities; they endure the taxing calami-
ties of life in their desire to get knowledge at all costs, but what happens
with them? What happens is that they are turned back instantly, right
from the door, as if [the pursuit of] knowledge is some plague and it
must be stopped. But what is all this? These are things by which one is
both angered and shocked. But there is nothing to gain from anger, nor
is there any consequence to our shock. It is only appropriate that we get
accustomed to these things and remain quiet and listen to the advice of
the person who remarked that [the capacity for] feeling everything so
intensely is a sign of an illness.13

It is clear how Jaun, who may have held onto some hope and optimism in his
early thirties has only become disillusioned as he is approaching his sixties.
Perhaps such are the emotional trajectories of most impressionable idealists
who are not willing to compromise on their ideals; the only thing for them to
feel in relation to the world and its discontents is disappointment and despair.
While a fellow Marxist such as Horkheimer may have remarked, “I do not
believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive

12 Elia, Farnūd, 202.

13 Elia, Farnūd, 436.

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importance,”14 for Jaun there was no such hope, only despair. The following
couplet from our poet somewhat indicates his pertinent sentiment:

Ḥāṣil-e kun hai yih jahān-e ḳharāb

Yahī mumkin thā itnī ʿujlat meñ15

This wretched world is what is the result of kun [Be (at once) God’s
command to bring about creation]
What else could have been possible but this in such haste

The couplet gestures at several possible ways it could be rendered interpreted.

Here the poet refers to the Problem of Evil which poses the question whether
the world contains an undesirable state of affairs that provides the basis for an
argument that makes it unreasonable to believe either in the existence of God
or, more likely in this case, in His omnipotence. If He is omnipotent, then why
has He created a flawed or broken world ( jahān-e ḳharāb)? The second line
blames the undesirable state of affairs not on the Creator, but on time, either
because God had no control over it, or because He did not want to devote
much of it to this world. In this regard, the couplet gestures towards the exis-
tence of deistic God who hurriedly creates and then abandons the universe.
In any case, the poet beautifully associates the incidence of such an imperfect
space (ḳharāb jahān) with insufficient time. Alternative, the second hemistich
could be interpreted as God’s own response to the said state of affairs. On this
reading, the first line is the poet’s incendiary question: “So this wretched world
is the outcome of [your] kun?!” The second is God’s response, “What else was
possible [for me] in such a hurry?” In either situation—one where the poet
provides an explanation for the imperfection of God’s creation, or the other
where God Himself descends upon earth to respond to the poet’s charge—He
is being put to task by the poet.
Jaun was a master of the mushāʿarah; he knew exactly what his audience
wanted, and he gave it to them. And he may likely have had the insight of what
was going to happen in the soon-to-come digital era, where he would have
listeners that would be able to hear him as if they were able to see his obvious
sensational demeanor as he would be reciting his poetry. This above couplet
is a remarkable mushāʿarah verse too, as the first line barely lends itself to the
guesswork of what follows. Yet, in several of the video recordings available on
YouTube where Jaun recites the larger ġhazal it comprises, “Sar Hī Ab Phoṛiye
Nadāmat Meñ” (Now I Can Only Bang My Head in Regret), he does not include

14 Adorno and Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto,” 43.

15 Elia, Shāyad, 123.

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this couplet. The exclusion could merely be an aesthetic choice, or perhaps a

calculation based on the sensibilities of audiences from whom putting God to
task could have been somewhat controversial.
Be that as it may, I contend that Jaun, who was a keen student of history,
found himself an anachronism in his day and age. For example, Ḳhāke, he
begins the essay, “Ḳhāke” by presenting a street view of the market in Athens
from Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates is discoursing on beauty with his stu-
dents, including Plato and Aristophanes. Jaun then goes to late eighth-century
Baghdad and describes his experience of listening to Jaʿfar Barmakī’s critique
of Aristotle. Jaun’s wife, the illustrious Urdu feminist writer, Ẓāhidah Ḥinā,
speaks to Jaun’s anachronistic sense of self in a fragment:

Due to not establishing a relationship with the realities of life and liv-
ing primarily in an intellectual/bookish environment, Jaun Elia ended
up creating an imaginary world from his early age. He was a resident of
Damascus, Tell al-Deylam, Baghdad and Basra. His conversation was with
the Barmecides (Omar n.d.) and the Buyids.16

Within the Shāyad prologue essay itself, Jaun describes events from Islamic his-
tory as if he witnessed them with his own eyes, or so says Shamil Shams, a jour-
nalist at Deutsche Welle, based out of Bonn, Germany and a student/disciple
of Jaun from the 1990s. Furthermore, Shams contends that Jaun could care less
about recognition or popularity from his age or society; he cared more about
inhabiting other spatio-temporal realms in and through his thought instead.17
By disciple, Shamil meant that he had spent many evenings in Karachi with
the poet after developing first an acquaintance and then a friendship with him.
But all this happened after the publication of Shāyad, the book that single-
handedly brought Jaun Elia to the fore and in the hands of the youth of that
time. Shamil was one such youngster. Some other youngsters who consid-
ered Jaun their ustād (teacher/mentor) went on to find prominence in their
own right as writers and journalists. They are still contributing to Jaun’s rising
popularity among young people today by hosting conversations and writing
articles on the poet. A few names amongst these are include Peerzada Salman,
Hammad Ghaznavi, and Khalid Ahmad Ansari.

16 Ḥinā, “Apnī Karbalā kī Talāsh Meñ,” 327.

17 Shamil Shams, interview by author, Bonn, Germany, July 12, 2019.

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The Case of Amroha

From Jaun’s excursive, and episodic introduction, emerges the narrative of a sub-
ject formation which may be seen as an illustration of the trajectories and crises
of the North Indian ashrāf (nobility, elite) in the course of the twentieth century,
especially the migrations and violence in the wake of the Partition. Indeed, Jaun’s
account in Shāyad affords us a reading of his own particular trajectory: a “tradi-
tional” educational regime of the madrasah in the midst of the “modern” social
conditions of a colonial qaṣbah, generating a unique subjectivity and “type” of a
North Indian ashrāf that is visibly “modern” in significant ways. However, when
Jaun arrives in Pakistan after the Partition, he finds himself an indeterminate fig-
ure in this even more modern world where he is not a member of the traditional
intelligentsia, nor the religious elite as a Sayyid, and yet where he is able to gar-
ner some literary authority owing to his brothers’ already established reputation.
Thus, one of Jaun’s sincere preoccupations in the prologue essay is his upbring-
ing in the North Indian qaṣbah of Amroha.
According to Shamil, Jaun could never really accept Karachi as his own.
“Amrohe meñ zindah the vuh Amrohe meñ hī rahte the,” (He was alive in Amroha,
could only inhabit Amroha). It is clear that, one of Jaun’s major intentions in
the prologue essay is to paint several pasts in different hues: the past of Jaun
Elia, the past of the subcontinent, the past of the global working-class, and
the pasts of philosophy and religion. The past of Amroha—or his immedi-
ate past that is not even past for him—remains among the most important.
As he mnemonically recounts tales from his boyhood in the prologue essay,
evoking specific historical registers five or six decades later, he illustrates his
own intense relation and preoccupation with his past, and his disposition as
a nostalgic subject. For undoubtedly, his poetry is brazenly tinged with, to use
Boym’s term, reflective nostalgia. Even though Jaun moved to Karachi and
lived there for many decades, he could not fully adopt it as his own. “Until the
end of his life he pined for his hometown Amroha,” writes Taneja.18 Amroha
had seeped into Jaun’s veins. The catastrophic event of Partition created an
active abode for nostalgia and memory in the imagination of a generation
of Urdu writers across different genres, and Jaun very much belonged to that
generation;19 for him, there was a clear and determined relationship with his

18 Taneja, “Hindustan Is a Dream,” 83.

19 Writers such as Intizar Husain in the genre of the novel, Nasir Kazmi in his ġhazals,
and Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi in his satirical short stories have all dealt with nostalgia in
their own unique ways. For a detailed treatment of nostalgia in the first two, see Naqvi,
“Mourning Indo-Muslim Modernity.”

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170 Iqbal

past which continued to shape his present experience both as an individual20

and as a poet:

Thā jo Darbār-e Kalāñ bhī uskā Naubat Ḳhānah uskā thā

Thī mere dil kī jo rānī Amrohe kī rānī thī

Hers was the Darbār-e Kalāñ as well as the Naubat Ḳhānah21

She who was the queen of my heart was also the queen of Amroha

We see here that the beloved, for Jaun, is intertwined with his native town.
This is part of the tradition in which the lover identifies himself through (and
sometimes even as) his beloved, and when that beloved happens to be associ-
ated with a town/city, then the lover is advertently identifying oneself with and
through this city. This trend has been significant in the Urdu literary milieu
at least since the time of Naz̤īr and Mīr. As Ali Khan affirms, “there was an
increasingly strong connection with the city as a marker of identity, a feeling
strengthened by the decline of their hometowns,” due to conquest—or, as in
Jaun’s case, the Partition—which led to the involuntary displacement of many
poets from their native cities in North India.22
In another ġhazal, which appears to hold a narrative through itself, Jaun
expresses his devotion to Amroha in an unusually nostalgic manner. He says,

Mat pūchho kitnā ġhamgīñ hūñ, Gangājī aur Jamnājī

Maiñ jo thā maiñ vuh ab nahīñ hūñ, Gangājī aur Jamnājī

Bān nadī ke pās Amrohe meñ jo laṛkā rahtā thā

Ab vuh kahāñ hai? Maiñ to vahīñ hūñ Gangājī aur Jamnājī23

Do not ask how grief-stricken I am, O Ganges and Yamuna

I am not what I used to be, O Ganges and Yamuna

The boy who lived by the Baan River in Amroha

Where is he now? I am right there only, O Ganges and Yamuna

20 In an interview I had with Jaun’s daughter on 22nd January 2020 in Karachi, she told me
that he, unlike any other member of his family, would often recalcitrantly insist upon
returning back to Amroha decades after moving to Karachi.
21 Elia, Gumān, 160. Both Darbār-e Kalāñ and Naubat Ḳhānah are the names of neighbor-
hoods in Amroha.
22 Mahmudabad, Poetry of Belonging, 154.
23 Elia, Lekin, 180.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 171

The poet here addresses the holiest of the two rivers in Hindustan as he tries
to communicate the despondency of his dispossession. Stating he is “not what
he used to be,” implies that this profound despair is not his default state but
a consequence of vaqt kī pāgal āndhī (or “the mad tides of time”) a phrase he
uses in a subsequent couplet not included here. In the second hemistich, the
poet claims that he himself is still “right there” in Amroha, but does not know
where that little boy, his other self, is. This cognitive dissonance, if we could
call it that, or this schism in a post-colonial subjectivity, this Pessoan duplicity
or even multiplicity of the self, is modern but surely not new; for Jaun, it was so
deeply ingrained that we see it exhibited throughout his poetic oeuvre.
In contrast to Amroha, in Jaun’s regard, there is Karachi. Shamil recited an
unpublished couplet to me which he saw as indicative of how dismissively
Jaun thought of Karachi, the terminal of his involuntary exile.

Maiñ aur is shahr kī t̤araf ātā?

Asp-e vaḥshat ne bad-rikābī kī

Would I have ever come towards this city?

It really was a result of my horse’s frantic wobble

The poet’s arrival at this undesirable place was a result of the mischief or
frenzy of his horse. Of course, the horse is often a metaphor for life in general
in the the ġhazal world, and can be read as such in this couplet too. Ghalib
reminds us,

Rau meñ hai raḳhsh-e ʿumr kahāñ dekhiye thame

ne hāth bāg par hai nah pā hai rikāb meñ

The steed of this lifetime/age is in motion—let’s see where it would halt

Neither is the hand on the reins, nor the foot in the stirrup.24

While Ghalib’s steed is still in motion, it appears Jaun’s horse has come to an
unwanted stop.
The emotional space between Amroha and Karachi in Jaun’s work shows
us the complex enmeshment of nostalgia and despair. And this nostalgia
and despair are not for a precolonial city but, for a pre-partition town or a
qaṣbah. As Raisur Rehman argues, “Qaṣbatī nostalgia in the early modern era
held tight to the ideals of the larger Islamic world but gradually encompassed

24 Pritchett, “Ghazal 98, Verse 4.”

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172 Iqbal

local Indian society and its influences.”25 These influences of local Indian
society comprised the practices and rituals of the āshrāf in qaṣbah towns
such as Amroha, which had ties to the region’s Gangā-Jamunī tahżīb (Ganges-
Yamuna culture).
Jaun makes this nostalgic despair a condition of his own being. He inter-
nalises it to an extent that his despair becomes an intimate part of his person-
ality that he comes to embrace, desire, and thrive in. The poet remarks:

Maiñ ḳhud yih chāhtā hūñ kih ḥālāt hoñ ḳharāb

Mere ḳhilāf zahr ugaltā phire koʾī26

I myself want conditions to deteriorate

That someone goes on to speak ill of me

This shiʿr (couplet) is not merely a frivolous provocation for attention or pes-
simistic melodrama. Since there was no way for Jaun to redress the suffering
that arose from his spiritual, existential, and social disillusionment, he chose
to indulge in it and make it his second nature. Yih ġham kyā dil kī ʿādat hai?
(Is despair a habit of the heart?) asks the poet, before he responds to himself
with a cautious, nahīñ to (no, not really).27 Instead of a simple nahīñ, which
could have made the answer straightforward and reassuring, the addition
of the word “to” here—at least within the contemporary Urdu idiom Jaun
overwhelmingly utilizes—hints towards an ambivalence, if not an outright
self-deception.
I assert that this couplet, and this entire ġhazal must not be read with the
assumption that any phrase that includes “nahīñ” actually serves an empa-
thetic refutative function. On the contrary, any native Hindi-Urdu speaker
can understand the nuanced ambivalence in “nahīñ to” very easily, especially
in the context of this particular ġhazal. The fact that the lover-poet ques-
tions despair’s place in the heart is itself superficial. Of course, his heart is in
despair just by virtue of him being the lover-poet of the ġhazal world where
everyone—God, raqīb (the poet’s rival in love), and the beloved, is out to abuse
the poet’s tender heart with their brutal actions. To illustrate an example, in
the nursery rhyme “Johnny Johnny Yes Papa,” Johnny outrightly denies eating
sugar when asked by his father, yet his father suspects Johnny is lying and even-
tually we learn that he is right. The poet is guilty of the same self-indulgence

25 Rahman, Locale, Everyday Islam, and Modernity, 210.

26 Elia, Shāyad, 130.
27 Jaun Elia, Yaʿnī, 136.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 173

and weak attempts at deception, but his indulgence is not in sugar but in his
own despair, and he lies not to his father or any authority figure, but to him-
self. “In Urdu one does not ‘feel’ grief but ‘eats’ grief (ġham khānā).”28 Should
not there be some nuance, then, some room for ambivalence, some interstices,
when the matter at hand is a little more sober as it is about grief and not sugar?

What Is a Poet?
It is considered significant when such poets as Shelley, Keats, or Baudelaire—
those who are known as poets first and foremost, then as critics or writers—
offer a formulation of the question “What is Poetry?” Jaun’s own writings
reflect his remarkably powerful and socially aware prosaic sensibility, yet he
is chiefly considered a poet and most people who know of him hardly have
an idea about his other writings which range from philosophical to political.
Quite often, these writings also reflected on the importance of arts and lit-
erature in a developing post-colonial society such as Pakistan, where issues
such as literacy, health, and justice have always been especially pressing. In
the prologue-essay, Jaun addresses a similar question regarding art and aes-
thetics. To the question, “What is a Poet?” Jaun provides a broad characteriza-
tion. In doing so, he rejects Kant’s claim that drama is superior to poetry and
in Aristotelian vein, puts poetry above history and other fields of knowledge
including philosophy itself. Thus, Jaun lays out an all-encompassing theory as
well as praxis for poesis (the practise of creating of art/poetry) through his
detailed discussion in the prologue essay which names ‘beauty’ as the supreme
ideal which a poet always ought to have in sight.
Even though I have clearly stated that Jaun was primarily a poet and second-
arily a critic, it could be fruitful to contrast his views on poetics and the arts
with those of other more formal critics, such as Āzād and Ḥālī in the nineteenth
century all the way to Zore, Askari, and Ehtisham Husain in the twentieth cen-
tury. But such work is beyond the scope of this essay. The primary reasons to
discuss Jaun’s views on poetry here are to acknowledge their existence and to
locate their origins. It is more likely that as a poet, he did not pay much heed
to these questions himself (to what Kant and Aristotle might have said about
poetics, for example) when writing a ġhazal. And yet, he chooses to discuss
them in the prologue essay maybe out of some sense of purpose, or simply to
make a show of his scholarly aptitude. On the other hand, a survey of Jaun’s
earlier writings from the late1950s and early 1960s included in his essay collec-
tion, Farnūd, reveals that he indeed followed critics like Āzād and Ḥālī in his
early years which is to say that he partook in the exercise of bashing classical

28 Pritchett, “The Sky in an Ant’s Egg,” 57.

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174 Iqbal

Urdu poetics. For example, in 1959, Jaun writes a polemical piece titled, “Urdū
ke Rasāʾil aur Masāʾil” (Urdu’s Magazines and Issues) in Inshāʾ, the Urdu literary
magazine he founded with his brothers, on the state of Urdu language. Among
other things, the piece berates the state of literary and knowledge production
in Pakistan at the time, and Jaun starts it off by trashing the classical poets and
the genre of the ġhazal. The article is worth translating it in its entirety, but in
the interest of space and time, I will only include an excerpt here. Jaun begins:

In his world-famous treatise, The Republic, Plato instituted a system of

knowledge and learning according to which kids from the ages of three
to six were to be taught by way of tales and fables.29 The editors of Urdu
magazines and journals deserve praise, for too they have planned the
same curriculum for their readers. Accordingly, our circumstances are
such that our literary knowledge and literary publications are all adoles-
cent. Look anywhere and you will see the materialization of the likes of
Dīvān-e Dāġh30 and Fasānah-e ʿAjāʾib.31 How big of a poet was the poor
Mīr Taqī that today every literary magazine is only publishing ġhazals
upon ġhazals, as if to commemorate the ġhazal [genre] in his honor.
All that is “literary” in these literary magazines has been reduced to the
ġhazal and the literary criticism of the ġhazal. But for any thoughtful,
insightful, and progressive community, this reality ought to be a cause of
concern. After all, what era are we living in? Do we want to live in this era
or not? Could any civilization survive merely with the aid of literary nar-
ratives (Afsānoñ), ġhazals, and so-called “critical essays?” Can any soci-
ety be content with such a state of literary production in the twentieth
century?

29 It is not The Republic but Plato’s last and longest dialogue, Laws, where the education and
upbringing of three-to-six-years olds’ is under discussion.
“Children of this age have games which come by natural instinct; and they generally
invent them of themselves whenever they meet together. As soon as they have reached
the age of three, all the children from three to six must meet together at the village tem-
ples, those belonging to each village assembling at the same place” (Plato 1967 & 1968).
These years were intended to allow children to socialize and learn their language and
aspects of culture as well as hear tales, fables, and myths and legends of the gods and
heroes. Perhaps this is how Jaun thinks of the Urdu audiences of his time, as his caustic
remarks reflect.
30 The dīvān of the ġhazal master, Dāġh Dihlavī.
31 Fasānah-e ʿAjāʾib is an early nineteenth-century Urdu dāstān (a narrative genre, usually a
fictive romantic account) written by the Lakhnavi poet and Ghalib’s contemporary Rajab
ʿAlī Beg Surūr.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 175

Not only is our literary production entirely worthless and penniless with
regards to literary and scholarly standards, it is also hostile to knowledge.

Towards the end of this article, Jaun somewhat tones down on his critique
but becomes didactic—one of his main aims in this article, and in the whole
enterprise of the Urdu magazines that he published and edited:

The entries which we have been publishing as scholarly can hardly

be considered scholastic; for example, “Momin kā ʿishq (The passion
of Momin)” or “Ġhālib kā samājī shuʿūr (The social consciousness of
Ghalib).” If you insist upon calling them scholarly then go ahead, but
for how long [should this be the allowed to continue]? Now, you cannot
render any scholarly services by revealing what is hidden in the societal
wisdom of Ghalib. For that, we would have to cultivate social conscious-
ness ourselves and relinquish literary conservatism and traditionalism
and make our monthly literary magazines representatives of a conviction
that is based upon the tenets of scientific realism, far-sightedness, issue-
resolution, community-formation, and perseverance and innovation.32

There is much to unpack here. From his evocation of ideas of antiquity to his
attempt at infantilization of his contemporaries, from his contempt of the tra-
ditional poetics of the ġhazal to his preoccupation with the social reform of his
fellow language-speakers and compatriots. Much of Jaun’s rhetoric about clas-
sical poetics and the need for reform in Urdu’s literary production had already
been established by his predecessors such as Sayyid Aḥmad Ḳhān, Āzād, Ḥālī,
ʿAbd ul-Ḥaqq, Zore, and Kalimuddin Ahmad. Some of these luminaries of
Urdu were repulsed by colonization, actively participated in the decolonial
and freedom movements, and advocated the expulsion of English language;
yet they were still followers of the didactic British Raj ethos, who spat on their
own “decadent” past in their desire for a utopian progressivist future. Jaun Elia
too was one such figure, at least for a little while.
But perhaps the most striking feature of Jaun’s polemic here is his belittle-
ment of figures such as Mir and Ghalib and their literary footing. Despite these
ġhazal poets par excellence being somewhat sacrosanct standing in the Urdu
literary tradition, Jaun scathingly criticizes Urdu’s interpretive community for
its preoccupation with them, and with the ġhazal genre itself.
But this scornful critique Jaun makes in the late 1950s is nowhere to be found
in the current prologue essay from 1990. Moreover, the fact that he eventually

32 Elia, “Urdū ke Rasāʾil aur Masāʾil,” 9, 11. Translation mine.

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176 Iqbal

becomes popular at mushāʿarahs due to his ġhazals means that he eventually

broke with his predecessors and stopped banishing the genre to the historical
annals of Indo-Muslim decadence. He, in fact, like Faiz, continued to write in
it with its “rigid meter and rhyme schemes, and its set themes centered around
the experience of separation from the beloved.”33

Reception of Jaun Elia after Shāyad

A close look at Jaun’s introduction to Shāyad and Jaun’s other writings points
towards his philosophical prowess, and we have already established his
immense popularity as a singular poet in the Hindi-Urdu speaking world. Yet,
Jaun does not enjoy the same stature as other great poets from the previous
century such as Rashed and Faiz. This is partly because the latter two were
more strategic and fortunate in building their legacies than Jaun. In fact, Jaun
struggled to build a legacy for himself even within his own family, as he was too
unstable to assume any kind of personal or familial responsibilities as a hus-
band or a father. The beautiful couplet by Dr. Pirzada Qasim with which I open
this essay can easily be applied to Jaun. At the mushāʿarah event of Jashn-e
Jaun Elia, Qasim opened his poetic recitation with the following remarks,

At times my heart feels like engaging in soliloquies and it was during one
such instance, that I wrote this ġhazal. But this ġhazal is as such that if
brother Jaun were to engage in a soliloquy, then he too would write some-
thing like it … You will encounter his visage [in the ġhazal] and perhaps
I’ll appear in some places as well.34

Qasim’s remark is so explanatory that it barely warrants any explication. Both

Qasim and Jaun were good friends, so must have been aware of the intri-
cate matters of each other’s lives. Moreover, it is unsurprising that at this
mushāʿarah, specifically held to celebrate Jaun Elia, Qasim chose to recite a
ġhazal which would relate to some fragment of his friend’s life as easily to any-
one else’s—which is what the polysemic nature of a ġhazal couplet entails.
Getting back to question of reception, Jaun never had any influential bene-
factors or lobbies working on his behalf—neither during his life nor after his
death—to lure publishers, critics, or even general audiences towards him. The
modest fame he acquired during his lifetime and his tremendous posthumous
popularity are entirely due to his own poetic aptitude and, as Aqeel Abbas Jafri
and Anand Taneja argue, due to the rise of social media, “cell phones and cheap

33 Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, 217.

34 Qasim, “Pirzada Qasim Jashn-e-Jaun Elia Dubai 1990.” Translation mine.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 177

data plans.” I was told by Khalid Ahmad Ansari, another devotee of Jaun Elia’s
who used to visit him often, that Jaun was a poet whose life was his poetry,
and whose poetry was his life. Ansari also detailed how Jaun, as sagacious as
he could be, was also exceedingly disordered when it came to his poetry. He
would not know (or not care) where his excerpts or scrolls would go; often he
would lose them, and a lot of his poetry has been wasted or stolen due to his
careless temperament. To mitigate this, Ansari would note down what Jaun
read or recited in his presence. Ansari went on to claim that when Jaun saw
his handwriting, he liked it so much that he told Ansari to copy his poems in
registers (notebooks). When Ansari was to meet Jaun again a few years later,
he took it upon himself to preserve those poetry registers. This allowed Ansari
to publish Jaun’s subsequent poetry and prose collections after his death. A
significant portion of Jaun’s extant work has endured to this day because of
Ansari. But if it were not for Shāyad, which garnered Jaun so many admirers,
and the efforts of those admirers and friends from that time, the publications
of Jaun’s subsequent poetry still may not have been possible. Towards the end
of our conversation, one of Ansari’s parting thoughts was to epitomize Jaun as
a poet par excellence, a poet first and foremost, as if to say, “Ṣahīḥ maʿnoñ meñ
ek shāʿir jis ke liye sab se ziyādah aham us kī shāʿirī jo so ke uṭhtā thā to ek-do
ġhazaleñ likhne ke liye hotīñ thīñ” (A poet in the true sense of the word, for
whom his poetry was the most important thing. A poet who would wake up
from sleep and he would have a ġhazal or two ready to be jot down).35
On the other hand, Jaun was an unabashed pessimist—albeit a reluctant one,
as the prologue essay essay suggests—who thought that humanity was doomed,
and incapable of asking the right meaningful questions, let alone knowing their
answers. While he believed that life was not worth the headache that comes with
it, the task of ending it was also rather inconvenient, so he carried on living
with a profound sense of an inveterate dissatisfaction and an inevitable despair.
But instead of simply drowning in that despair, he aestheticized it enough to
actually thrive in it—maybe because, like Kierkegaard, he knew that the “pro-
found anguish” which persists in the heart of a poet could be translated into
beautiful shiʿrs36 or music which could then reverberate in the hearts of hun-
dreds of thousands, long after the poet himself has ceased to exist.37

35 Khalid Ahmad Ansari, interview by author, Karachi, Pakistan, June 28, 2019.
36 Or “songs,” in Hebrew as Jaun himself suggests essay the word shiʿr comes from in the
prologue essay.
37 “What is a poet?”, asks Kierkegaard, and then goes on to answer, “an unhappy person
who conceals profound anguish in their heart, but whose lips are so fashioned that
when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music (Kierkegaard
“Diapsalmata,” 35).”

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178 Iqbal

Conclusion
A couple of years ago, one of the great pop icons of Pakistan, Sajjad Ali, beauti-
fully rendered this very sentiment about Jaun Elia in his song, “Lagaya Dil.” The
lyrics of the song are inspired by a ġhazal of Jaun’s. Sajjad sings:38

Agar paṛhne lago to Jaun paṛhnā

Baṛe shāʿir paṛhe aisā paṛhā na‌ʾiñ

If you wish to begin reading poetry, then start with Jaun

For we have read many a great poet, but never read one like him

By opening up Shāyad’s prologue essay to an English-speaking public as an

exemplary selection of Jaun’s prosaic oeuvre, I as a translator endeavor to pro-
vide an adequate idea of Jaun’s philosophical and poetic thought, for inevitably
the prose is both philosophical and poetic, and both about his own philoso-
phy and poetry, and philosophy and poetry in general. It is a testimony to the
remarkable extent to which this eclectic scholar could think and write which
has not been common among contemporary Urdu poets. At the same time,
translation is by nature interpretive and to this end, this translation is an inter-
pretation of an essay which hopes to provide an “echo of its original” intentions
(to use a phrase from Walter Benjamin). Jaun is not easy reading, and certainly
not easy translating through some linear translation model. As translators and
scholars, we should be wary of reductive translation systems (especially per-
taining to literal translations) and interrogate the process of translation itself,
both theoretically and practically. As a final note, I wish to record my great
debt of gratitude to my mentors and friends, Dr. Akbar Hyder, the late Asif
Farrukhi, Wafa, and Elham for their invaluable advice and suggestions in this
task, and to make it known that any discrepancies that remain herein are my
responsibility alone.

38
Ali, “Lagaya Dil (Official Video).” The original couplet by Jaun that inspired Sajjad’s song
goes:
Bichaṛ ke jān tere āstān se
Lagāyā jī bahut par jī lagā na‌ʾiñ
After having to separate from your house/shrine O love
I tried very hard consoling my heart, but it didn’t work (Elia, Shāyad, 176).

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 179

Jaun Elia’s Preface of Shāyad

This is my first collection of poetry, or perhaps my first admission of defeat,

which is being published after a delay of about twenty-nine or thirty years. This
poetry is that of an unsuccessful man. Why should I be ashamed in admitting
that my existence was in vain? I should have also gone in vain. For a son whose
overly ideological and idealist father did not teach him any practical ways of
living but instead taught him that knowledge is the greatest virtue and books
the greatest wealth, how else would his existence have been if not in vain?
Some twenty-nine or thirty years ago, I promised my childhood friend,
Qamar Raẓī that only he would publish my first poetry collection, but I did not
fulfil my promise. After that, in 1971, my nephew Shamman (Mumtāz Sayyid)
along with Muḥammad ʿAlī Ṣiddīqī compiled and handed over the materials of
my poetry collection so I could get it published, but I did not fulfil their wish
either. Thenceforth, Zāhidah Ḥinā undertook the most effective procedure:
she got all my naz̤ms and ġhazals that she could get her hands on, but I did
not provide her with the rest of the materials and hence, her efforts too were
ineffectual. Several years after that my brother and friend Miʿrāj Rasūl made a
noble plan to publish it but due to ten years of my infernal insomnia and men-
tal fits, I was in no condition to be able to compile my collection ……
You must be wondering why I insisted upon not having my poetry pub-
lished. The reason for it is my feeling of guilt and spiritual agony, a report of
which I shall provide later ……
Here, I would like to recount the names of those who have been kind to
me. My benefactors, my beloved and revered benefactors who sympathised
and provided consolation during the time of my catastrophic and excruciating
malady. If they had not sympathized with and consoled me, neither Aristotle’s
and Shaiḳh ur-Ra‌ʾīs’39 logic, nor the logic of Bacon and Mill could have saved
me from committing suicide …… Those dear and honorable names are as fol-
lows: The Honorable40 Professor Karār Ḥusain, my esteemed brother Sayyid
ʿĀbid ʿAlī Shāh, dear friend Ḥasan Imām Jaʿfrī, cherished Eqbal Mehdi (the
famous painter), my affectionate brother Miʿrāj Rasūl, beloved Sult̤ān Kāz̤mī,
dearest of dear Shams ud-Dīn Ṣiddīqī, friend in times of need41 Jamāl Aḥsānī,
venerable Manz̤ūr Aḥmad (Dhaka), Mr. Jamīl ud-Dīn ʿĀlī, my like-minded
[friend] Nadīm Aḳhtar, friend Ḥafīz̤ Bahlīm, and brother Aḥmad Alt̤āf.

39 Title of Ibn-e Sīnā (Avicenna).

40 Qiblah o Kaʿbah, literally the utmost respectful form of address.
41 Mūnis-e shām-e bezārī, literally, a friend in wearisome evenings.

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180 Iqbal

The year was 1986; I had been in a wretched state for ten years. I used to
sit, frightened, in one corner of a dimly lit room. I would feel afraid of lights,
sounds and people. One day my dear brother Salīm Jaʿfrī came to see me. He
had arrived in Karachi from Dubai a few days prior and upon seeing me said,
“My brother Jaun, I will not let you lead this life of retreat and avoidance; since
my youth you have shown me the dreams of revolution, triumph of the com-
mon people, and of a classless society.” I told him, “Do you have any idea what
torment have I have been afflicted with year after year? My mind is not a mind
but hot embers. My eyes are such that they throb like wounds and if I try to
focus on a paper to read or write even for a few seconds, I feel as if I have the
ailment of conjunctivitis and I am being made to read hell while actually living
in hell in a summer month. That, however, is a different matter; I have still not
given up on my dreams. My eyes burn, but the waves of the cool springs of my
dreams still touch my eyelids.”
Salīm told me that he had come to invite me to the mushāʿarahs of Dubai
and the Emirates in order for me to come back to the assemblage [of poets].
Upon Salīm’s severe insistence I had to go to Dubai in March of 1986, and
this is how I reappeared on the Dubai scene. One evening at Salīm’s house in
Dubai, Salīm, dear friend Manṣūr Jāved and myself were having some personal
time. Suddenly Manṣūr said, “Jaun! I want your draft [manuscript].”
Perhaps it is the case that due to the affinity that comprises some rela-
tions, some moments, some rather personal moments, prove to be extremely
definitive. Those [aforementioned] moments were of such a kind. I heard what
Manṣūr Jāved’s lips uttered and abided by what his eyes told me. The responsi-
bility of getting the collection printed fell upon Salīm but I did not let this plan
to be materialized in 1986 nor in 1987. After the unceasing persistence of them
both, however, I finally sat down with my dishevelled pages in 1988.
There hardly could have been another poet in a more miserable state than I
was when commissioned [by my friends] to compile my poetry collection. My
state was and is far more excruciating than that state of the honorable tenth
century writer and thinker Abū Ḥayyān al-Tauḥīdī42 who, having become tired
of his circumstances and disillusioned with his unbearable efforts to gain the
favor of the “philistine nobles” of his time, had the drafts of his books burnt
during the last moments of his unsuccessful life.
Now I had to decide on what naz̤ms and ġhazals should be included in
this collection. I did not decide this myself, instead left the decision to Jamāl
Aḥsānī, Nasīm Aḳhtar, and Mumtāz Sayyid. When they made up their mind I,

42 Al-Tauḥīdī (932–1023) was an Arabic litterateur and philosopher from Baghdad and was
probably of Persian descent.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 181

along with dear brother Anīq Aḥmad, reviewed it and agreed with them ……
The most important stage that was now afoot was of converting the “unpub-
lished” into “published.” This important and gruelling task was embraced by
Shakīl ʿĀdil Zādah. If it wasn’t for Shakīl, this collection could not have been
printed. It is he who played the most significant part in making me a pub-
lished poet.43 He along with other colleagues from his workplace worked day
and night for several weeks. Amongst these, Ikrām Aḥmad, Az̤har ʿAbbās Jaʿfrī,
Sayyid Ḥasan Hāshmī, Sayyid Afẓāl ʿAlī, Sayyid Bābar ʿAlī, Yūsuf Memon, Ilyad
Aḥmad, and Ṣābir Ḥusain remained at the forefront.
Almost everything regarding collecting views for the magazine which Salīm
Jaʿfrī is publishing at the occasion of the launch of this poetry collection, to
making photocopies of the [publication’s] draft is being done by my poet and
writer friend and younger brother Mr. Manz̤ar ʿAlī Ḳhān Manz̤ar; and my child-
hood friend Qamar Raẓī has constantly cooperated with him on this. Without
Manz̤ar ʿAlī Ḳhān’s efforts, it would have been impossible for the magazine to
have been published. The purpose of cleaning up the draft was undertaken by
Qamar Raẓī and dear Nafīs Bazmī. On behalf of Manṣūr Jāved, Salīm Jaʿfrī, and
myself, I express my heartfelt gratitude to them. There is unlimited love and
respect for ʿAnīq Aḥmad in my heart.
At last, I wish to thank Imām ʿAlī’s44 servant and the city’s well-reputed lib-
ertine, Sarfarāz Aḥmad Ḳhān Yūsufza‌ʾī who provided me with such an ecstatic
atmosphere that my mind was able to undertake creative endeavors.
The preface I had initially written for my collection had exceeded 225 pages
and yet it remained incomplete; it was not possible to finish and print it in
the appointed time. In the given situation, the great Anvar (Anvar Shuʿūr)45
deemed it appropriate that I summarise this incomplete preface and hence
only a summary of it is being presented here.
I was born in the invigorating, emblematic, and heartening town of the two
rivers Ganga-Jamna, Amroha. No one knows its temporal origin, but there is a
popular saying in Amroha that goes, “Amroha is a royal city, subsistence here
is difficult, whoever leaves it though, is unfortunate.” …… I do not know if the
first maṡnavī 46 poets of North India India—Sayyid Ismāʿīl Amrohvī or Shaiḳh
Ġhulām Hamdānī Muṣḥafī, Nasīm Amrohvī, Rais Amrohvi, Syed Muhammad

43 Ṣāḥib-e dīvān, literally a poet with a collection, a significant feat in itself in this culture.
44 Sāqī-e Kauṡar, literally, the cupbearer of Kauṡar, the river in paradise according to the
Qurʾān. This is one of Imām ʿAlī’s titles.
45 A popular contemporary Pakistani poet.
46 A poetic genre in Persian and later Urdu which could have as many couplets with dif-
ferent qāfiyah (or rhymes) but the couplets themselves have the same rhymes. Rumi’s
maṡnavī is the most prominent in this tradition.

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182 Iqbal

Taqi, Syed Sadequain Ahmed, Muḥammad ʿAlī Siddīqī, or Eqbal Mehdi thought
of themselves as unfortunate upon leaving Amroha, but me …… anyway.
That was an Eastern-style home. The coping of its wall would begin con-
templating the sun from the early hours of dawn. The house would always be
illuminated with the light of intellect and ink. The tradition of literature and
poetry had been present in our household for many generations. Sayyid Shafīq
Ḥasan Eliyā had three brothers and all siblings were poets: Sayyid Nafīs Ḥasan
Vasīm, Sayyid Anīs Ḥasan Ḥalāl (father of Kamal Amrohvi47), Sayyid Vaḥīd
Ḥasan Ramz, (and Gadā48), and my father. My grandfather Sayyid Naṣīr Ḥasan
Naṣīr was also a poet. He only used to write musammaṭ.49 My father’s grand-
father Sayyid Amīr Ḥasan used to compose poetry in both Urdu and Persian
and was also a unique prose writer. Sayyid Amīr Ḥasan’s grandfather Sayyid
Sult̤ān Aḥmad was a student of Sayyid ʿAbd ur-Rasūl Niṡār Akbarābādī, one of
the most well-guided of disciples of Mīr Taqī Mīr.50 Our neighborhood elder
Sayyid Abdāl Muḥammad brought him from Delhi to Amroha, and he spent
the rest of his life in our old chamber and was buried on the western side of
the grave of our ancestor. Muṣḥafī51 would come to meet him once every seven
or ten days. He writes in his Tażkirah-e Hindī Goyāñ (Notes on Hindi Speakers/
Hindi-Urdu Poets):

Mīr Sayyid ʿAbd ur-Rasūl Niṡār is a man of worldly vision and intellect
who is originally from Akbarabad. The town of Amroha saw the poetic
beginning of this ascetic. He would visit to discuss a poem or verse that
would warrant discussion every seven or ten days.

When I stepped into adulthood, I found the offices of poetry, history, theol-
ogy, astronomy, and philosophy open for business in my house from morn-
ing till evening. Thus, I began to feel the energy of philosophical discourses
and intellectual exchanges. The centre of all these activities was our father,
ʿAllāmah Sayyid Shafīq Ḥasan Eliyā. He was a composite of many branches of

47 Famous Bollywood director perhaps most known for his hit-movie Pakeezah. He was
Jaun’s first cousin.
48 Perhaps the other taḳhalluṣ (or poetic name).
49 A kind of a stanza in Urdu naz̤m with a fixed number of lines.
50 Perhaps this is why Jaun traces his poetic lineage to Mīr and looks up to the great poet
almost religiously.
51 Shaiḳh Ġhulām Hamdānī (taḳhalluṣ Muṣḥafī; Muṣḥaf means a book and is usually
referred to the Book of Qurʾān) was a contemporary of Mīr and one of the masters of the
Urdu ġhazal. He is also credited as being the first to give the name “Urdu” to the language.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 183

knowledge and knew a lot of languages such as Arabic, English, Farsi, Hebrew,
and Sanskrit. He used to write from dawn till dusk, almost with the belief that
his writings would not get published. He was particularly fond of astronomy
and had a healthy exchange of letters with England’s Greenwich Observatory’s
scholar and expert Bertrand Russell,52 as well as the director of an observatory
in South Asia, Narsiyan. For about fifty-four to fifty-five years, he derived delight
from the amusing tasks of writing and compiling. He was not just a man of the
pen but of the brush too. Other than astronomical maps, he had drawn maps
of the destinations of Imām Ḥusayn’s journey of Karbala as well as the grounds
of the events of Karbala; these maps had hundreds of references to dates and
the corresponding executions. Eqbal Mehdi, who happens to be my nephew, is
the sole inheritor of my father’s craft with the paintbrush. During his last days,
my father gave away his paintbrush and other related things to Lallan (Eqbal
Mehdi) only. After Dante, perhaps he [Jaun’s father] was the first man who
had provided an artistic proof of having any business with the centre and the
fringes of the universe. He had sketched a map of hell and heaven and in this
map, he exhibited the most concealed and inmost beauty and glory of his exis-
tence in a commendably affective way. He inserted all the compassionate and
kind colors of his inner self53 and attributes54 in heaven. And for hell, he used
extremely offensive, cruel, and unsightly colors, and through their shades—as
well the extensiveness of the longitude and latitude of those shades—he cre-
ated a strange kind of intensity in this map. Everyone who knew him, knew
that he had never been enraged in his life even once; but I think that he had
certainly been angry at least once and that [depiction of] hell was his anger.
This two-dimensional hell has become three-dimensional for the benefit of
his skeptical, agnostic, and infidel son Jaun Elia, who is burning, flaring, and
scorching in its deepest circle and yet is incapable of turning to ashes.
In contrast with the majority of people in the Muslim aristocracy of Amroha,
my father was ardently against ethnic superiority and class discrimination. One
significant thing is that he did not have any conception of personal possession.

52 One of the most well-known British philosophers of twentieth century. Russell was a pro-
lific writer of epistles who wrote and received thousands of letters from across the world,
so an exchange between him and Jaun’s father is plausible. I searched the Bertrand Russell
Research Center at McMaster University in Canada, where many of his letters are housed,
but was not able to locate any from Shafīq Ḥasan Eliyā to Russell (or vice versa).
53 Żāt-e żāt, literally “self of the self.” I have used inner self in the sense of implying that
which is most primordial in a manner that is somewhat reminiscent of primordiality in
Heidegger.
54 Ṣifat-e ṣifāt, literally “attribute of attributes.”

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184 Iqbal

He did not even count things of his basic and necessary use amongst his per-
sonal possessions and considered anyone who maintained and/or articulated
ideas such as “my bed, my quilt, my pillow, my box, my cupboard,” to be utterly
uncultured and dishonorable. On the contrary, the words that would often
come from his mouth were: “our world, our solar system, and our galaxy.” He
was not a political man, rather a scholar and a poet; had he been political he
would have been a communist.
Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter etc. were discussed at our house so
often as if these planets were members of our household. Uranus was newly
discovered around this time. Father used to talk about this treasured entity
so much that mother had become frustrated with it. Other than the prob-
lem of the movement and mechanics of the earth, father did not have any
concern with any problem or matter on the earth whatsoever. During my
childhood, I would worriedly wonder if this attitude of my father towards
life would destroy our household; it used to disquiet me from inside. Being
in this predicament for many years, I wrote a hajv55 on my father of which I
remember the first stanza:

With such capacities of tongue and mind, in his worn-out garments

In a torn quilt, he pretends to be a scholar
[His] problems are as such that even the meaning of life is misplaced
Who’s the one with the capacity of comprehension, Mr. Smarty-pants?56

It was one winter afternoon during my boyhood when my father took me to

the northern room. I do not know why, but he was quite somber; I got sad too.
He stood next to the window on the western side of the room and asked me to
make a promise to him. I asked, “Tell me father, what promise?”
He said, “That when you grow up you will definitely get my books published.”
I said, “Father I promise that when I reach adulthood, I will most definitely
get your books published.”
But I could not fulfil the promise I made to my father; I could not grow up.
And almost all his books went to waste. Only a few dispersed manuscripts
remained. This is the very sense of guilt due to which I have not only avoided

55 A genre of Urdu poetry for satirizing, dispraising, or lampooning someone or something.

56 Zabān o żahn kā baḳhyah, zadah zadah jāmah
phaṭī hūʾī hai du-lāʾī bane haiñ ʿallāmah
Vuh masʾale haiñ kih mafhūm-e zindagānī gum hai
Hai kis ko fahm kā yārā janāb-e fahhāmah.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 185

getting my poetry collection published, but also been averse to its idea [of get-
ting my book published].
Just like my father’s siblings, we too were four brothers till last year: Rais
Amrohvi, Syed Muhammad Taqi, Sayyid Muḥammad ʿAbbās, and myself. My
eldest brother [Rais Amrohvi] was the greatest and brightest flower amongst
father’s and mother’s offspring.57 That flower was targeted by bullets. His mur-
derer was perhaps conscious of his rank,58 and that is why he targeted his
[brother’s] brain. What else was my brother [Rais], other than a brain?
During my childhood and boyhood my brother’s poetry was at its peak. He
used to write romantic and revolutionary naz̤ms and was a raging sea of poetry.
Calling him unusually intelligent and beautiful would hardly be saying any-
thing significant about him. When he used to talk about ʿUrfī’s59 beauty and
eloquence, I used to feel as if ʿUrfī was talking about himself.
My second brother, Syed Muhammad Taqi, used to write poetry, but his
actual field was philosophy; till this day, I have not seen a man who read more
than him. He was an erudite scholar. Both my brothers were patriotic com-
munists and used to wear clothes made of khaddar.60 Had I reached puberty
around that time I would have also been a patriotic communist. My third
brother, Sayyid Muḥammad ʿAbbās was always ready to learn the recipes for
bomb-making so he could bomb governmental buildings. He used to tell me
stories of Indian revolutionaries and played the most significant part in my
abhorrence towards the English colonizers. Hardly anyone can imagine the
amount of knowledge I gained from my brothers.
My eighth year was the most significant and eventful year of my life; that
year, two of the most important incidences occurred. The first incident was
that my narcissistic ego suffered defeat, that is to say, I fell in love with a killer
girl.61 The second incident was that I wrote my first couplet.

57 Phulvārī, literally a flower bed.

58 Martabah-shinās.
59 ʿUrfī Shirāzī, one of the Persian poetic masters of sixteenth century who came to India
and served at the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great.
60 Khādī or khaddar was the term conventionally used in North and Central India to refer
to varieties of coarse cotton cloth that was hand woven using hand-spun yarn. It was the
preferred cloth of Indian nationalists during the colonial period after being symbolized
as “local” in the face of “foreign” by Gandhi (See Emma Tarlo’s Clothing Matters).
61 Qattālah laṛkī. Such adjectives are not used literally but metaphorically in this tradition
to indicate the killer beauty of the beloved or the fact that they are customarily cruel
towards the lover.

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186 Iqbal

I have been slapped due my desire for her

Take a look at the redness of my cheek62

The day the first incident took place was neither any day of the week nor any
day of the month. That day was one that was beyond the 365 days of the year;
it was a day without any date or a calendar. In fact, it was a day of “absolute
time”63 …… given that a day of “absolute time” could even be conceived. The
manner I adopted for expressing my love was exceedingly odd; if I would
see that the girl was coming towards me, I would turn my gaze elsewhere.
However, this meant, “Hey girl, I am in love with you.” The thing is, I used to
consider the act of expressing love extremely base, and during my good days I
never undertook this base activity.
Plotinus has written in one place, “I have a lot of regret over the fact that
I am found after/by virtue of being in a body.” During those days, I used to
think in this ludicrous manner too. The figure I had created of my platonic love
always used to smell of frankincense and other incenses.
Here is a tale of that one day when that girl came to our house. I was having
lunch at that time. I instantly gulped down my morsel the moment I saw her,
for I felt that the deed of chewing in front of the beloved was terribly uncouth,
inaesthetic, and gross. I often used to feel embarrassed thinking that some-
times upon seeing me she would think that in my body, in the slender body of a
boy like me, there was such an impure and unromantic object as the stomach.
If you observe a statue of any historical hero or goddess and imagine that in
their life, the body of a personality like theirs would have had a stomach as well
as intestines, then your mind would be shocked too would it not?
During that time, I had heard a few couplets from someone in my house
[I cannot exactly recall from whom] but these couplets played an efficacious
yet a destructive role during my whole youth and kept me off-track from my
path for many years. The following are those couplets:

The wedding in their house coincides with my dying

The walls were stamped with blood

62 Chāh meñ us kī tamānche khāʾe haiñ

Dekh lo surḳhī mire ruḳhsār kī
63 Zamān-e mut̤laq yā dahr. Jaun himself calls it “absolute time” in parentheses. Intriguingly,
one could think of this ‘time’ apropos to Benjamin’s Jetztzeit (time of here-and-now)
wherein the time or moment is out of the “continuum of history.” See Benjamin, “On the
Concept of History.”

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 187

Till his last breath Rasā64 remained quiet

His life perished but the secrets did not disappear

It is due to her that I am somewhat disturbed65 during my last breath

How could death have induced sweat on my forehead?

The aroma of henna emerges as I spit blood

I have the same slab66 upon which your henna67 is crushed68

Through these couplets, the poet appears to be such a youth who gave his life
spitting blood due to tuberculosis. I used to think of tuberculosis as an aes-
thetic, poetic, heroic, and a revolutionary [disease]. Usually, ingenious and
thoughtful youngsters with revolutionary inclinations would lose their health
and acquire tuberculosis as a result of the intensity of their feelings and their
bohemian69 and promiscuous70 lives. This era was the era of Imagism71 and
not only intelligent young men but adventurous young women were immersed
in its advent too. During this era, rebellious and revolutionary youth were con-
sidered ladies’ heroes and would wear shirts and trousers72 made of khaddar
along with slippers. Their hair would typically be long and dishevelled.

64 A famous Pakistani poet and probably a friend or an acquaintance to Jaun.

65 Munfaʿil, from infiʿāl, literally an act which causes a blush; shame. The sense, however,
could also be that of affected and/or disturbed.
66 Sil means a flat slab of stone used for grinding, but it is also a word for tuberculosis (TB).
Jaun himself suffered from TB and often referred to the act of spitting blood in his cou-
plets, almost to the point of romanticizing it. He was a fan of Keats for both his romanti-
cism as well as his death due to the disease.
67 Mehndī.
68 Merā marnā un ke ghar shādī huʾī
ḳhūn ke chhape lage dīvār per
Marte dam tak Rasā rahā ḳhāmosh
Jāñ ga‌ʾī rāzdāriyāñ na ga‌ʾīñ
Ham un se nazʿ men̄ kuchh munfaʿil haiñ
Pasīnah maut kā kaisā jabīñ par
Thūktā hūñ jo lahū, bū-e ḥinā ātī hai
Jis pah mehndī tirī pistī thī vahī sill hai mujhe.
69 Bo-sīmīn.
70 Be-band o bār, from Farsī.
71 Taṣvīriyat-pasandī. It is likely that Jaun is referring to the twentieth century
Anglo-American poetic movement.
72 Kurtā pājāmah.

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188 Iqbal

The revolutionary disease of tuberculosis was an animating73 guarantee

of a young death. I was of the opinion that only leftist members of Congress,
members of Muslim League,74 Aḥrārī75and modest youth could bear the brunt
of dying of natural causes. No revolutionary young man would want to even
endure such humiliation. I used to feel as if there was a peculiarly allegorical76
and melancholic beauty in dying young. The thing is, at our house there used
to be a lot of discussion on ʿUrfī’s beauty, eloquence, and early death and these
factors made ʿUrfī an incomparable spectacle of beauty and perfection in my
eyes. I used to intensely long for a premature death during that time as well.
Although that desire of mine could not be fulfilled, I got to indulge in the flavor
of TB by a beautiful coincidence after arriving in Pakistan.77
The time between my childhood and youth was rather politically charged;
Congress’ and Muslim League’s movements were at their peaks. In the shadow
of Stalin’s adopted stance due to the problem of nationalisms, the Communist
Party of India decided to aid with the demand for [the nation of] Pakistan.
Hence, a lot of communists had joined the Muslim League and so did two of
my older brothers. Asrār ul-Ḥaqq Majāz and Maḳhdūm Muḥī ud-Dīn sang
Pakistan’s anthems. My brother (Syed Muhammad Taqi) wrote a booklet by
the name of “Pakistan through Stalin’s Eyes.”
Today it is said that Pakistan was made for Islam. But if Pakistan was made
for Islam, at least the Communist Party could not have supported with the
demand for Pakistan. There is another thing which warrants our attention
here: if Pakistan was created for Islam, then it would have been a religious mat-
ter and for that reason, the Muslim League’s topmost positions would have
gone to some religious scholar; the title of Qāʾid-e Aʿz̤am would have been
reserved for some respectable priest. By its temperament, the Muslim League
movement was not a party for ecclesiastical78 politics, and for that reason, the
majority of Muslims wholeheartedly supported Mr. Muhammad Ali Jinnah
over India’s cleric, Maulānā Abū’l-Kalām Āzād. The thing is that the Muslim
League, especially the students of Aligarh (who desired jobs after their

73 Jāñ-parvar, from Farsī.

74 Congress and Muslim League were two major political parties of the Indian subcontinent.
Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, was a member of the Congress before he joined the Muslim
League.
75 Members of the Ahrār Movement, or Majlis-e Aḥrār-e Islām (a.k.a. M.A.I., or the “Society
of the Free Men of Islam”), a religious political party founded in 1931 in Punjab.
76 Marmūz.
77 Jaun implying that he acquired a potentially fatal disease after migrating to Pakistan
could be taken as suggestive of how he felt about his adopted country.
78 Kalīsāʾī.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 189

education) were best representatives of landowners, feudal lords, moderate-

sized traders, capitalists, and West-oriented individuals. These people were
neither religious nor irreligious. They used to refer to clerics as “Mullā” in a spe-
cifically humiliating manner and it was ʿAllāmah Iqbāl who had taught them
this word …… The truth is that the Muslim League was largely an economic
and a social party …… which Islamicized a shared common language of the
Indian subcontinent. I have severe grievances against the Muslim League, for
it made my [mother] tongue [Urdu] a spectacle of an ahistorical history. Alas!
Other languages of the subcontinent may have this ribald farce played upon
them too.
Before and a few years after the Partition, I closely knew two groups of
religious scholars: Shia scholars and Deobandi scholars. Shia scholars were
of the view that only a government whose chief is incorrupt79 and verifi-
ably from God80 could be considered an Islamic government. On the other
hand, no country [or society] of a Muslim population, no matter how pious
and restrained their leader, could be considered an Islamic government in any
shape or form. The point is that these [religious] scholars were in favor of a
secular government. For both practical and ideological purposes, this was their
judgement both politically and religiously.81 These gentlemen were of the view
that talking about politics went against their prestige.
Deobandi scholars [on the other hand] tended to favor nationalist politics.
Today, this seems quite strange. I’ve had the honor of straightening the shoes
of these scholars. In no way were these people of a worldly disposition. They
used to lead spiritual lives and had adopted the life of poverty and asceticism
voluntarily, and I am their humble disciple in matters of Arabic literature and
philosophy. I became their only urban student who was studying Arabic litera-
ture and poetry out of personal proclivity. Am I aware of the median of these
scholars’ asceticism? When I used to hear that these were corrupt people, I
would feel extremely enraged: you are free to wholeheartedly disagree with
your ideological opponents, but at least do not hurl abuses at them.
Before the Partition, the collective attitude of religious scholars towards
the communists was rather different than that which surfaced afterwards.
Renowned communist Sajjad Zaheer’s82 dutifulness and merit were not
doubted by clerics and followers of Ġhufrān Maʾāb, Firangī Maḥalī, ʿAbaqāt,

79 Maʿṣūm more in the sense of pāk (pure) than innocent.

80 Mansūs min Allāh.
81 Faiṣlah and Fatvā.
82 Prominent Marxist and Urdu writer, famous for laying foundations of the Progressive
Writers Movement.

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190 Iqbal

and Najm ul-Millat. Neither was there any disagreement amongst Deobandi
scholars over the substantial wisdom and the considerate demeanor of the
acclaimed revolutionary of our region, comrade Dr. Ashraf. How could it
have been the case that the Deoband School would reject the laudable per-
sonality of Dr. Ashraf, as well as draw the line of revocation over the name of
Maulānā ʿUbaidullah Sindhī,83 their own illustrious son and the predecessor of
Dr. Ashraf?
We used to have a rather open-minded notion about secular [irreligious]
youngsters in our milieu. Upon listening to their rebellious and rejectionist
ideas, [religious] scholars would smile and advise them to continue to read in
order for them to arrive on the straight path. The most unfavorable thing that
was said of these atheistic youth was that they had read so much that it had
become indigestible. In my surroundings, beautiful and ugly things were con-
sidered rational but not unlawful;84 that is, “reason” was responsible for estab-
lishing things as good or bad and not the [Islamic] law. The law would consider
only those affairs as reasonable or unreasonable which “reason” itself would
deem as such. The law was committed to accept that which was determined by
‘reason’; it was not the other way around. The hadiths that were usually heard
in this domain were:
1) The ink of the scholars is better than the blood of martyrs.
2) A nonbeliever scholar is superior to an ignorant believer.
3) The hadith which you feel is against “reason” should be thrown against
the wall.
This conversation in no way means that that society was a robust and an exem-
plary one. Obviously, it had reached its natural age and was breathing its last,
for it was a society of “aristocrats,” i.e., of the Shaikhs, Syeds, Mughals, and the
Pathans. And these “nobles” would contemptuously call their deprived, back-
ward, working-class Muslims “baseborn.”
These downtrodden “baseborn” were considered the subjects of the nobles
for centuries but they were finally awakening due to the political and social
movements. The majority of these [subjects] were nationalists, meanwhile the
“nobles” were part of the Muslim League; this meant that the war had started.
Because the noble class had enjoyed privileges for centuries, it was more
educated, cultured, and creative. I have described the collapse of its reign in
my following couplet:

83 An eminent revolutionary pan-Islamic thinker from the Deoband school.

84 Sharʿī, i.e. according to the Islamic code of conduct.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 191

Strange were the doors and windows of thought

For they remained in their thought while falling too85

I was twelve years old in 1943. During this time, I sometimes used to write poetry,
and at other times used to write imaginary letters to my beloved ṣūfiyah86 in
the juvenescent manner of Khalil Gibran’s87 feelings and imagination. Those
letters which were securely kept in my diary carried expressions of my platonic
but narcissistic love; [but] also specifically contained discussions on the idea
of driving the British out from India. I thought that one main cause for my
constant despair, my bitterness, restlessness, weariness, and indignation was
subjection to the British imperialism.
I still somewhat vaguely remember the crux of one of those letters of mine,
and here I will try to re-present an expression and convey the sense of that
letter’s actual expression and the actual sense with its now forgotten form and
significance:

My beautiful beloved meaning! Much love to your forehead, eyebrows,

and eyelids. The previous letter I had dispatched to you was for the
address in Alexandria but Sidi Elia Abu Madi88 wrote to me from Cairo
saying that your family had relocated there. Now, I am writing this letter
for Cairo’s address.
We Indians are leading a life in a prison. The foreigners will never free
us. What do we even do? They have planes, cannons, and tanks. I don’t
understand how will we be able to kick them out of Hindustan?
I wish for two pleasures together: the sight of you and the downfall of
these Englishmen. Visit the Shrine of Raʾs ul-Ḥusain89 and pray that you

85 The ʿajab dhyān ke dar o dīvār

Girte girte bhī apne dhyān meñ the
If Jaun had not explained the context of this particular couplet, one could easily look for
multitudes of other interpretations within it; however, the fact that he does provide the
context does not preclude other interpretations.
86 Literally, followers of Sufis, however the name’s conspicuous relation to the Greek word
sophía (wisdom) is unambiguous.
87 The great Lebanese-American writer and artist of early twentieth century.
88 Lebanese-Egyptian and then American poet and journalist writing in Arabic whose
poetry achieved popularity through his expressive use of language, his mastery of the
traditional patterns of Arabic poetry, and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary Arab
readers. He was friends with Khalil Gibran.
89 Literally, the Shrine of Imām Ḥusain’s Head. This refers to places where Imām Ḥusain’s
head is claimed to be buried or kept. There are monuments called Raʾs ul-al-Ḥusain in

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192 Iqbal

and I could attain greater prosperity. Perhaps you might have an idea as
to how much I miss you. Kindly give my best to El Khoury90 and kiss one
of the tresses of your hair from me.

ṣūfiyah, my ṣūfiyah!
May God be your protector!
Your anarchist Jaun

During this time, I came to be obsessed with drama. The reason for this was
that one drama club of our community which was called Bazm-e ḥaqq-numā.91
This club was created towards the end of the nineteenth century. Truth be told,
with its equipment and spectacles, this club was no less than the theatricals of
Bombay and Calcutta in any way. The club’s plays were performed in the mid-
dle of Rabīʿ ul-Avval or in the summer months after crop’s harvest and their
subject matter was mainly Islamic history. In view of these plays, I can say that
I haven’t just read Islamic history but witnessed it as well while sitting amongst
hundreds of people. The view from the sixtieth Hijri or 680 AD. was right in
front of my eyes when black-turbaned ʿUbaidullāh ibn-e Ziyād along with
Muslim ibn ʿAmr ul-Bāhilī, Sharīk bin Aʿvar Ḥāriṡī and others, entered Kūfah at
night. Ibn-e Ziyād’s troops slaughtered the leader of Tavvābīn,92 Sulaimān ibn-e
Ṣurad ul-Ḳhuzāʿī and his companions. I witnessed Amīr Muḳhtār uṡ-Ṡaqafī
and Ibrāhīm ibn-e Mālik ul-Ashtar along with Mavālī and the troops of Shaubī
as they are avenging the blood of Ḥusain. Abū Muslim ul-Ḳhurāsānī. Abū
Salamah Ḳhallāl. The event of the brutal murders of Muḥammad un-Nafs uz-
Zakiyah and his brother Ibrāhīm at the command of Caliph Manṣūr unfolded
right in front of my eyes. Barmecides, Naubakhts, Daylamites, and Buyids were
all known to me. Abū us-Sarāyā, Basāsīrī, Fatimid Caliph Al-Mustanṣir Billāh,
Ibn Killis, Badr ul-Jamālī, and Ibn ul-ʿAlqamī were not denizens of some previ-
ous centuries but people from the time of my own youth. I have seen them
discoursing with and marching amongst each other.

different cities such as Aleppo in Syria, Ashkelon in Israel etc. Here Jaun is referring to the
one in Cairo where Al-Hussein Mosque stands today, which in itself is a major pilgrimage
site for both Shiites and Sunnis.
90 It is unclear which al Khoury Jaun might be referring to here. The possible contenders are
Fares al-Khoury, the staunchly nationalist Syrian politician who was against Syria’s union
with Egypt and the other is Bechara El Khoury, the Lebanese President who was against
the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon. Both, however, do not seem to have a direct
connection to Cairo or Egypt and hence, the attribution remains open.
91 Literally, an assembly or a group that reveals truth.
92 Literally, Penitents.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 193

I imitatively followed my elders, and formed a drama club too, which I

named after myself. I was its director and my friend Qamar Raẓī was the man-
ager. I used to have the most important character in the plays as if I was the
hero in them. I first gained recognition outside of my neighborhood as the
most famous actor before I was acknowledged as a poet. I wrote a play as well;
its name was “A Deadly Dagger”. Subject-wise my plays used to be a reflection
of the eras of the Umayyads, the Abbasids, and the Fatimids.
The resounding and collective naz̤ms I once wrote, were largely influenced
by the time I was associated with the stage. In fact, I think a lot of my ġhazals’
dialogic tone is also a form of remembrance of this time period.
Kant has on some occasion, perhaps in The Critique of Pure Reason, des-
ignated Western drama as the greatest manifestation of poetry. At one time,
I was an admirer of acting, Rām Līlā,93 and drama, but here I would like to
humbly say that by its essence and with respect to the genre of poetry, drama
falls into the second category. I am apologetic about the upbeat manner of my
discourse, for since my youth, I have regarded impudence and dogmatism as
obscenities of the mind.
However, my argument is that drama is the art of embodying thought into
action, but this [process of] embodying and transmuting thought into the form
of an action results in thought losing its energy. When thought is transformed
into action through drama, it is annexed from a fixed space and time; that is to
say, it is annexed from a whole, and [as a result,] an extensively generalizable
thought comes to be confined within a particular space, a particular time, and
a particular phenomenon.94
From 1943 to 1946, I remained engrossed in drama day and night while I
continued to write poetry somewhat simultaneously. In 1946, the whole
society got divided into two after the elections between the Muslim League
and the Congress. In the light of the circumstances during this time, Bazm-e
ḥaqq-numā ceased producing its plays while a much more sensational play was
on the cusp of being staged on the grand stage of Indian history. My dramatic
activities also ended due to its influence and the whole atmosphere [around
me] was overwhelmed by the political crisis of this time.
Ultimately, the country got divided. After the fourteenth and fifteenth of
August, a new subcontinent came into existence. There were celebrations
for Independence, yet all I could see was darkness in the midst of hundreds
of thousands of lamps. This was not the Independence that I had dreamed

93 The Hindu Festival of Dussehra (Dasahrā), which often includes the depiction or perfor-
mance of Rām’s victory over Rāvan.
94 Maz̤hariyat.

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194 Iqbal

of. This blood-soaked Independence was not what I had imagined even dur-
ing the worst conditions of my mental state. We all thought that after the
Independence, the Indian subcontinent would transform into a paradise but, in
reality, we were just starting the smouldering era of burning in Independence’s
inferno.
I have had a nihilist and an anarchist disposition from the very beginning,
and I was never given to withstanding any rules or laws; one of the psycho-
logical reasons for this was also that all rules and laws were agreeable to the
English government and its intermediary feudal lords, landowners, Hindu and
Muslim civil servants,,95 and [other such] light-headed nitwits.
It was after Partition that I began to compose poetry in earnest. For poetry,
I am a student of my father, and my Farsi and Arabic teacher, Maulānā Sayyid
ʿIbādat Ṣāḥib Kalīm Amrohvī. This phase was the beginning of my political
consciousness, where I would spend time with Brother Chamman (Nāzish
Amrohvī96) every day. He was the President of the Muslim Students Association
of Amroha and belonged to the left arm of the Muslim League. He was an
exceptionally broad-minded individual and a humanist. There is a tale from
early 1948 when he [Brother Chamman] read a book which came from the
library of Brother Sadequain Ahmed (famous painter). The title of that book
was Naʾe Adabī Rujḥānāt (New Literary Inclinations) and it was consolidated
by Dr. Ejaz Hussain who was the teacher of Professor Ehtisham Hussain.97 This
book transported Brother Nāzish somewhere else entirely merely in a span of
a few days; and from there he arrived on the path of communism. He gave me
this book to read and, truth be told, it was through this book that I came to
understand the literary and political significance of the Progressive Writer’s
Movement. During the same time, Brother Chamman taught me the first book
of logic and I, who used to gaze at philosophy voyeuristically, gradually came
to walk on its path. Around the same time, all three of my elder brothers left
for Pakistan.
It was Brother Nazish who was my teacher of politics, and it was indeed
he who showed me the path of communism. I am a skeptical and agnostical
human being, and I do not even insist upon any of my ideas. It is possible that
your views are accurate and mine are erroneous, but insofar as the social sys-
tem of communism is concerned, I believe in it with all of my rational, poetic,
and ethical positions. I cannot imagine that any noble figure from the past
would have advocated for a capitalist system. Had Jesus been alive, could he

95 Rāʾe Bahādur and Ḳhān Bahādur respectively.

96 One of the major leaders of communist politics in post-Partition Pakistan.
97 One of the most prominent literary critics associated with the Progressive Writers’
Movement.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 195

have tolerated the capitalistic structure? Would Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)

and his chosen companions prefer to even breathe in any capitalist society?
The societies of the past nobles had been rather socialist. During this era, I
considered all my sayings or claims as the ultimate judgements98 and also pos-
sessed intense dogmatism and certitude. However, during the same time, a
strange idea transpired in my mind which I felt was incredible and totally per-
sonal. The idea was that the construct of money ought to be terminated. Under
the aforementioned idea’s influence, here are a few couplets from a ġhazal
I wrote in sometime between 1949 and 1950::

Do not refresh the story of nothingness

The tress of existence is newly curled

Idolatry is a conspiracy fabricated by the people of the sanctuary

For very recently, God too has become an idol

If a song is the voice without law

The constitution of highs and lows would not emerge

The couplet of this ġhazal which I want to highlight is this:

Where there is neither gold nor any price for Yūsuf

Create such a market where no money is required99

Parvardhan said the same thing that we should create a market where there is
neither gold nor any price for Yūsuf. He proposed the idea of keeping money as
a medium of usage and removing it as a medium of exchange.
Slowly and gradually, I was drowning in my readings of philosophy. My
misfortune was that before anyone else, I got acquainted with the British ide-
alist philosopher Berkeley.100 His view was that we do not cognize an object
because it exists; it only exists because we cognize it—meaning if we, after

98 Qaul-e faiṣal.
99 kar nah afsānah-e ʿadam tāzah
zulf-e hastī hai ḳham bah ḳham tāzah
kufr ahl-e ḥaram kī sāzish hai
hai ḳhudā bhī ṣanam ṣanam tāzah
naġhmah gar ik navāʾe be-qānuñ
ho nah āʾīn-e zer o bam tāzah
ho jahāñ zar qīmat-e Yūsuf
kar vuh bāzār-e be-diram tāzah
100 George Berkeley, who propounded the view of Idealism, which suggested that reality con-
sists exclusively of minds and their ideas.

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196 Iqbal

reading a book, lock it in our cupboard and it ceases to be a representation

to our cognition, then the book will immediately become non-existent and it
will have no existence remaining in the universe wheresoever. This was a very
ideal101 situation, and my quixotic mind would get fascinated by it. But despite
such fascination, my mind would get confused. I would open the cupboard and
find the book in a helplessly compelling way and then when I would close the
cupboard, I would return the book back to non-existence. This idealistic effort
was instantly intolerable to my mind, but by providing proof of his extraor-
dinary ideological kindness, Berkeley had made it digestible for me to some
extent. The prime advantage102 of this was that the moment when you locked
the book in the cupboard, it would become non-existent, as it had ceased to
be a presentation to someone’s (subjective) cognition, and thus, it was present
only in a mental chasm.
Despite reading all volumes of T̤ ilism-e Hoshrubā, Kūchak Bāḳhtar, Bālā
Bāḳhtar,103 and Bustān-e Ḳhayāl,104 I was not entertained by Berkeley’s sacred
and idealistic legerdemain and his insistence upon the incidences of the book’s
sudden and momentary existence and non-existence. At last, I got a chance to
read David Hume’s ‘A Treatise of Human Nature.’105
It was the famous communist thinker and Progressive writer from Delhi,
Dr. ʿAbd ul-Alīm,106 who suggested that I read Hume. I was already dispossessed
from this world; after reading Hume’s book, however, I was excommunicated
from religion too. The savoir-faire with which Berkeley invalidated matter was
still less potent than the dexterous planning Hume employed to destroy the
battlegrounds of my mind, my will,107 and my soul.
Hume demonstrated yet another skill; he rendered groundless the principle
of causality. This skill had been exhibited by the esteemed Imām Ġhazālī from

101 Of or pertaining to the philosophy of Idealism.

102 Ifādah-e ʿāliyah.
103 All parts of the Ḥamzah-nāmah (The Adventures of Amīr Ḥamzah).
104 By Mīr Taqī Ḳhayāl.
105 Mabādī-e ʿIlm-e Insānī.
106 Professor ʿAbd ul-Alīm (1906–1976) was an Urdu writer and Marxist critic. He had gradu-
ated from Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi and had a PhD from Humboldt University in Berlin,
where he had joined the Indian Association of Central Europe with Dr. Rām Mānohār
Lohiyā (Indian Independence activist and a socialist leader). A socialist and a close asso-
ciate of Jayaprakāsh Narāyan (another prominent Indian Independence activist and
socialist leader), he participated in freedom struggle and was arrested several times. He
was one of the founding members of the Congress Socialist Party and later also served
as the Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University (1968–1974). At one time, he was
also the general secretary of the Progressive Writers Association (See Ramnath, “The
Progressive Writers Association,” and Coppola, “Premchand’s Address”).
107 I am choosing to translate the nafs as “will” here.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 197

our Islamic scholastic theology family108 far before Hume. Hume, however,
was not the one to dethrone ‘reason’ from its seat of authority. It was my elder,
respectable Imām Ġhazālī, who fulfilled this widely acceptable and societally
popular duty of this sacred and venerable deed—this deed which had been
anxiously awaited by the Islamic world since the fourth decade of the age of
Imām Abū ul-Ḥasan Ashʿarī109 who was the grandson of Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī.110
After the destruction of my matter, my soul, and my mind, I had fallen into
an oppressive skepticism. My certitude and dogmatism met with a dreadful
end. [What were left] were a deplorable skepticism, this passion for a girl from
my neighborhood—in fact for many girls from the neighborhood as well as
those from the wider city—the agony of my inability to express this passion,
the continuous occurrence of a well-ordered devastation of homes, streets,
and neighborhoods, and me.

The entire street remained deserted in the in the vigilance of the breeze
of extinction
In the portico and the courtyard of the house, only a shadow was alive111

I began to acquire knowledge and engage in cultural activities in the midst

of this sadness, which made the task of spending time (i.e., existing) some-
what less laborious. Up until that point, I had spent my life with two beliefs:
one was a metaphysical one and, the other, a historical one. But now my mind
was getting robbed of this convenient state of metaphysical belief. The logi-
cal results of Western and “Greco-Arab” philosophy rendered me incapable of
being able to derive any benefit from the rational and emotional remedies112 of
the Necessary Being,113 that were provided by Aristotle’s muḥrik-e avval (Prime
Mover) and by the nomenclature of Arabic philosophy.
My mental health had become discordant, and I began to feel less drawn
towards the gardens and jungles of my city. The dense sky of the summer nights
had ceased to compliment my imagination. Someone once asked Pythagoras,
“What is your view on God?”, to which he responded that the matter is very
complex and one’s age is not proportionately sufficient to answer it.

108 ʿIlm ul-kalāmī ḳhānvādah.

109 Eponymous founder of Ashʿarism. The foremost theological school of Sunni Islam.
110 One of Prophet Muhammad’s companions.
111 Sārī galī sunsān paṛī thī bād-e fanā ke pahre meñ
ghar ke dālān aur āngan meñ bas ik sāyah zindah thā
112 Dād-rasī.
113 Vājib ul-vujūd, or God.

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198 Iqbal

While the playful tresses are getting curled there

My life is getting curtailed here114

My biggest problem had to do with the agony of being deprived of faith.

Skepticism was never a propitious state to be in, but according to a quote by
Voltaire, belief was overly ridiculous. Yet, despite my restless condition, I had
no issue with using the elixir of “ridiculous faith.” My predicament, however,
was that this elixir was only available with vendors of philosophy, and I did
not possess the strength to go look for it in their various shops at the expense
of my reputation. The problem was gnostical and universal and, according to
Bacon,115 so intricate that it could not be contained by logical suppositions.
The matter was about a metaphysical explanation for the universe, and Kant
was right in suggesting that metaphysical issues cannot be proven with logical
reasoning and also that religion and God are beyond the reach116 of ‘reason’.
Despite my intense Skepticism, I could say that it was not possible to imagine
the existence of a mind from our planet Earth—from any planet of our galaxy
in fact—which could expand upon the meaning of the word ‘God’. The issue
does not have to do with the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of Sayyid Jaun Eliyā
Ḥasnī ul- Husainī;117 but has to do with logic and philosophy,118 the exalted
mother and supreme father of the tribe of wisdom, respectively. It is better to
take this problem to an intellectual who possesses the most rightful claim to
provide any definite resolution on the matter. Here, I would like to mention
an “authority” on theology called Plotinus who effortlessly composed poetry
at the expense of philosophy his whole life. This elder is of the view that it
is not even proper to say about God that He119 exists; He is even higher and
beyond existence, He is the utmost pure of all. Ḥaẓrat ʿAlī too has instructed
on the negation of (God’s) attributes. He says, “The Perfection of His purity is
to deny Him attributes,”120 which means that the quality of purity is such that
through it, the attributes can be negated because every attribute is a proof that
it is separate from the entity (to which it is attributed), and each entity is a

114 Us t̤araf zulf-e nāz pur- ḳham hai

Aur idhar apnī zindagī kam hai
115 Francis Bacon (1561–1626); English Philosopher regarded as the father of Empiricism.
116 Dast-ras.
117 Ḥasnī ul-Ḥusainī is the kind of Sayyid who is from Imām Ḥasan’s progeny on his father’s
side and Imām Ḥusain’s progeny on his mother’s side.
118 Tafalsuf is Arabic for “philosophizing.”
119 That is, God.
120 “Kamāl ul-Iḳhlāṣ lahū nafī uṣl-ṣafāt anhū,” from the first sermon of Nahjul Balagha. See,
Sharīf, al-Raḍī, Nahjul Balagha.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 199

proof that it maintains a separate Being121 from its attribute. Therefore, anyone
who believes that the essence (of God) is something other than His attributes
assumes a Being who is equal to that essence and thus evokes the notion of
dualism. The representatives of philosophical mysticism122 have maintained
the same position and said that God is exempt from Being and non-Being.123
Here, I will also point towards the sermons of Ḥallāj.124 The meaning of pres-
ent125 is to get confined in the ten maxims of Aristotle, twelve quotes of Kant,
and (perhaps) seventy sayings of Hegel. To my knowledge, there is no philo-
sophical system in the world which has been able to successfully [and satisfac-
torily] explain [the notions of] the Present and Being. In a literal and circular
manner, we can only describe Being in one way, in fact it will be more appro-
priate to say that we can only describe one synonym for it (Being), and that is
essence, and is extraneous to it. In view of my philosophical inquiry—and cer-
tainly very limited inquiry—I can say that till this day there has been no expla-
nation of Being other than this. When we say that God is present, then we deem
Him an essence. We take the conversation further and suggest that everything
present is an entity126 and each entity is present. Reality127 and Being are synon-
ymous. So, when we say that God is present, it means that God is an entity. But
if that is not what it means, then there can only be one meaning of this, which
would be that God is a non-entity. A non-entity could have two connotations:
one non-present and the other, something present which is not an entity but
something else. What is that something else? This is the very question which
needs to be answered by all the representatives of metaphysical philosophy.
Philosophy argues with Being and the Being of Being and science deals with
the phenomenon of Being. The universe in which I opened my eyes was totally
different from this current universe; that universe was of Aristotle while at

121 Vujūd; This word could also be translated as existence however it appears that the philo-
sophical frameworks Jaun would be most comfortable with would use Being.
122 Or Sufis.
123 ʿAis aur laisa, where ʿais is that which exists and laisa—along with its lā (i.e., negation)—is
that which does not exist. See, Steingass, The Student’s Arabic-English Dictionary, s.v. “ʿais.”
124 Manṣur-e Ḥallāj, one of the “best known” Sufi martyrs in the history of Islam, who was
charged and then executed for supposedly claiming divinity by way of making the theo-
pathic utterance Anāʾl Ḥaqq (“I am the Truth”). See the entry on him in Encyclopædia
Iranica (Mojaddedi, “Ḥallāj, Abuʾl-Moḡiṯ Ḥosayn”).
125 Maujūd. This could be translated as an existent as well, but I have applied the same rea-
soning here as I did for vujūd. See note 83.
126 Shai.
127 Shaiʾyat. Related to Realism, also Objectivity.

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200 Iqbal

the same time …… also, of Democritus.128 Two problems were most substan-
tial in our academic environment of Amroha; the first problem was whether
God was present or not. And the second problem had to do with politics. Two
questions were important here: Was the most pro-human system Western
democracy or communism? This question was under consideration before the
Independence (of India), as well as two to three years after. Here I am reminded
of Amroha’s most famous communist, most profound atheist, and my brother
Syed Muhammad Taqi’s revolutionary companion, comrade Muṣavvir Ḥusain,
and through him, I am reminded from the time of either my childhood or my
youth of one panegyrical assembly129 (for Prophet Muhammad PBUH). That
assembly consisted of poetry on a given rhyme scheme130 and its ground was,
“Mufāʿilun faʿilātun rose in the glass, youth in the glass.”131 In this assembly,
my blood-spitting brother Muṣavvir who was suffering from the ailment of the
young revolutionary men, tuberculosis, read an elegiac poem, a verse of which
I remember to this day:

That dust which was bloodied on the Day of Āshūrāʾ132

Had been preserved by Prophet (Muhammad PBUH)133 in a glass

The thing I learnt as a result of my imperfect study and as a benefit of these aca-
demic gatherings was that discourse is nothing whatsoever, except a historical,
social, and psychological conditioning which cultivates conditions towards
the adoption of a particular opinion or a doctrine. All these discourses are the
same, yet one is Jewish, one Christian, one Muslim, and one Hindu. Someone
says there is one Creator134 of the universe while someone else denies it. My

128 The “laughing philosopher” from the antiquity because of his emphasis on the value of
“cheerfulness.” He was an important philosophical opponent to Aristotle. See the entry on
Democritus in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Berryman, “Democritus”).
129 Maḥfil-e naʿt. These gatherings, by virtue of their title, are mainly devoted to recitation of
poetry that is in praise of the Prophet of Islam.
130 T̤arḥī.
131 The words mufāʿilun faʿilātun are meaningless by themselves but denote one kind of
a prosody measure or bahr (simply put, a metrical patter or a meter) amongst others,
through traditions of Arabic and Farsi poetics which have continued into Urdu.
132 The tenth day of the first month of Islamic Calendar 61H (680 AD) on which Imām Ḥusain
was martyred in the Battle of Karbala.
133 Risālat Ma‌ʾāb from words, Risālat (Prophethood) and Ma‌ʾāb, which literally means
“endowed with” but can also mean a center point or repository. This is one of the titles of
Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and attributed to the one of the greatest Urdu marṡiyah-go
(eulogist), Mīr Anīs.
134 ʿIllat-e Shāʿirah.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 201

impression is that a universal system of reason and logic is not possible. Had
we possessed the noble ability of confession, we would admit that we do not
even have the ability to ask the question, let alone the eligibility of getting the
answer. The only fundamental and essential135 questions we can raise about
the universe, for the most part, are, Where does it begin, What is its essence, its
reality, and What is its furthermost limit?136 Is this not our sheer misfortune
that all such questions of ours are not only unanswerable but also inexplicable
and incomprehensible? I ask you, whether you might be a philosopher or a
physicist,137 if you could (satisfactorily) describe these questions ……………
Here, it is important to mention Logical Positivism.138 Logical Positivism con-
siders it a deformity to even consider the meaning139 of a metaphysical import
such as a “meaning”. By putting forth this viewpoint, they (the logical positiv-
ists) themselves do not even possess any inferior inclinations, such as deriv-
ing pleasures from being credited140 for [providing] any “thought-provoking
epiphany(ies)”141 to the Western and Eastern philosophical schools of thought.
In reality, they wish to draw attention to the gravity of the issue’s form; and in
this regard they are justified.
The issue is that the sentences pertaining to metaphysical and semi-
metaphysical questions are certainly correct with respect to etymology and
syntax (or linguistics),142 but they have no relation to or affinity with meaning.
Consider the following sentences:
1) There is no before or after in Eternity.
2) Being is a simple143 reality.
3) Immutable entities144 are those truths of the contingently possible enti-
ties that hold validity within the knowledge of the Truth.145

135 Jauharī.
136 Ġhāyat-e quṣvā.
137 T̤abʿīyatī sāʾins-dāñ.
138 Mant̤iqī iṡbātiyat. Logical Positivism was philosophical movement that arose in Vienna in
the 1920s and was characterized by the view that scientific knowledge is the only kind of
factual knowledge, and all traditional metaphysical doctrines are to be rejected as mean-
ingless. See Creath, “Logical Empiricism.”
139 Mafāhīm.
140 Ḳhat̤-andoz.
141 Ishtiʿāl-angez bashārat.
142 Ṣarf o naḥv.
143 Basīt̤.
144 Aʿīan ṡābitah. One of the central concepts in Ibn ʿArabī’s philosophy which refers to the
things which are nonexistent in themselves but are known to God as “fixed entities”
(aʿīan ṡābitah). See Ibn-e ʿArabī’s ul-Futūḥāt ul-Makkiyah (or Ibn al ʿArabi, The Meccan
Revelations).
145 Or are actualized within the knowledge of Truth (ʿilm-e Ḥaqq).

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202 Iqbal

Within these three sentences, the first two are concerned with metaphysics,
while the third one is representative of Sufism.146

…
I got deprived of my certainties as a consequence of studying philosophy. After
that, my condition was such that if one right angle was equal to two acute
angles, then that may very well be, for I could care less. During that time, I
arrived at the conclusion that giving one explanation for the universe was per-
haps not inevitable; or maybe it was my desire that it should be not inevitable.
I continue to think, and not merely for the sake of thinking but to reach some
outcome; and the outcome that I have reached thus far is that all matter147 and
all things are actually ‘events’ which are occurring uninterrupted within the
final divisions of space and time. Collectively, this universe is an event which is
occurring uninterrupted on a grand scale. That thing which cannot be situated
spatially and temporally is non-present. God cannot occur or be situated spa-
tially or temporally, hence He is Non-Present. I do not remember which Muslim
thinker was it who said that calling God “Present” is utterly incompatible with
His holiness. Present is a tense of the passive participle and using it for God is
engaging in blasphemous chutzpah of the worst kind.148

146 Falsafiyānah taṣavvuf. An alternative translation would be ‘philosophical mysticism/

spirituality.’
147 Shuyūn. This is a loaded term, for it could mean relations, states, modes, potentialities,
as well as forms or matter. I take Burhan Ahmad Faruqi’s explication from his book, The
Mujaddid’s Conception of Tawhīd, where he suggests that “Shuyūn is plural of Shān, liter-
ally state, condition, rather an exalted condition or state. The word occurs in a verse of
the Qurʾan 57:29 (119).” Faruqi actually gets the chapter wrong for it is not chapter 57 but
55 where his intended phrase is situated. It is noteworthy that Dr. Faruqi, who was born
in Jaun’s hometown Amroha, was a major religious scholar in Pakistan and had done his
PhD dissertation (the aforementioned text on Mujaddid) at Aligarh Muslim University
under the tutelage of the great philosopher from the subcontinent, Sayyid Z̤ afar ul-Ḥasan.
As for shuyūn, the word is also used in the Sufi lexicon, wherein it denotes the stages of
sulūk (journey of spiritual development) towards God.
148 There is a famous couplet by Jaun where the poet says,
Ai Ḳhudā jo(kahīñ nahīñ maujūd)
Kyā likhā hai hamārī qismat meñ
Prima facie, this couplet would appear to reject the existence of God (and this is how it is
often perceived) however, based on Jaun’s explication of the word maujūd (Present) here,
the only appropriate way to affirm the existence of God (and thus to invoke Him or refer
to Him) is by denying that He is Present. That is exactly what the couplet is doing here;
by saying that God is not Present in any spatial or temporal plane, the poet affirms His

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 203

For about 3,000 to 3,500 years, cultured nations and societies have shared
a mutual pursuit of providing a justification for the universe and its manifes-
tation to some satisfactory standards. I do not get it though ……. Why should
there be just one justification for the universe and its manifestation? Another
thing that really vexes me is whether there is a purpose behind the universe
or not. I often wonder about the purpose behind the births of Aristotle and
Hitler. If the Himalayas were situated in the South instead of the North, what
difference would that have made? If there was no line of hair above the navel,
what bodily arrangements would have been adversely affected? I have seen the
appearance of hair on the shins of some of my beloveds but found the calves of
a few others completely hairless; I have found some of my lovers’ navels deep
and others’ flat. As a poet of the entities, ‘the lover and the beloved’, I am most
certainly not responsible for thinking about the rationales behind these spec-
tacles, but as a thinking disinterested149 individual, I have the right to raise the
question: why is this the case? Of which order should we consider this disorder
a consequence?
Contradiction is the reality and essence of things; but the universe is not
divided between the uncovered and the covered. The universe has neither an
exterior nor an interior. The extrinsic identity150 of the universe is the universe
itself. The universe is the name of an eternal bareness. These issues are jointly
held by philosophy and poetry but here one should remember that while all
issues of philosophy are those of poetry, not all issues of poetry are those of
philosophy. Philosophy only raises logical or conceptual questions, meanwhile
poetry is concerned with issues pertaining to all: reason, creativity, emotion,
and desire.
According to philosophy, the universe’s arranged order of potentialities
does not take into consideration any scenarios of when a given tomorrow will
be better than yesterday. It is only poetry which bestows upon an individual, as
well as a society, any hopes of a pleasant future.151 Here, one could also say that
poetry is an expression of creative and artistic trickery and deceit.

existence. The second line of the couplet, then, instead of sounding like a contradictory
question, in fact, becomes a rather straight forward inquisition.
149 Ġhair-jażbātī.
150 Huviyat.
151 It seems Jaun is following Aristotle here as one is reminded of the distinction that
Aristotle draws between poetry and history in his Poetics where poetry is superior to his-
tory because “it relates what may happen” (Aristotle, 17).

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204 Iqbal

In my environment, poetry was not considered a part of prophethood but

the whole of it. According to my father, poetry occupied the rank of a divine
melody,152 sacrosanct recitation, and saintly rhythm.153
The word shiʿr (couplet) comes from Arabic and is the root for shuʿūr (wis-
dom). But the reality is something else. Shiʿr is the Arabized version of the
Hebrew word, shir which means a song or a sweetness and melody in voice.154
In my view, the meter is the most basic condition for a shiʿr. I am not aware of
any historical figure who wrote the noblest and most melodious prose, and
who, even idiomatically, was considered a poet.
The ancient and the modern experts have not deemed meter the basic con-
dition of a couplet. The station of Quraysh’s poetic manifestations is exemplary
among the stations of poetic manifestations of the ancients. Quraysh deemed
the Qurʾān poetry and considered Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) a poet. I grew
up hearing about Quraysh’s beautiful taste; 155 however, from the time when
I began to consider myself a poet, I was unable to understand their claim,
although I did understand what they may have meant when they called the
Qurʾān poetry. Actually, by saying this they were praising the beautiful arrange-
ment of the Qurʾān; otherwise, it was the poetic metricality which they for ages
had regarded as poetry.
We appreciate Platonic dialogues or Nietzsche’s writings as if they are
poetry. The truth is that one is a manner of praise while the other is an idiom,
and we should not confuse156 the two (between poetry and prose). From antiq-
uity through the present day, unmetrical prose has not been called poetry even
idiomatically, at least not in my knowledge.
I can never conceive of poetry without meter and melody; and this is not
merely a psychological issue but also an ethical one. It is a psychological issue
since we have collectively and in accord deemed and called a particular man-
ner of writing, ‘poetry.’ So, when we hear that there are forms of writing other
than this particular form we think of as poetry, and when we consider the most
creative example of prose as a kind of poetry, then we forget the entire lesson

152 Āhang.
153 Tarnīm.
154 Jewish English Lexicon, s.v. “shir,” accessed October 16, 2022, https://jel.jewish-languages
.org/words/517.
155 Ḥusn-e żauq.
156 Ḳhalt̤-malt̤.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 205

of Isagoge.157 Our logical wisdom is dealt with a blow and all methodologies158
of our logical definitions159 are rendered meaningless.
And this is an ethical issue because between us there exists a covenant
according to which we would not name or remember Plato, Demosthenes,160
Quss bin Sāʿidah,161 Badīʿ uz-Zamān Hamadānī,162 Saʿdī of Gulistan, Oscar
Wilde, and Mīr Amman163 as great poets but consider them masterful (prose)
writers. If I start saying from tomorrow onwards that Tolstoy, Dostoevsky,
Ratan Nāth Sarshār,164 Premchand, and Manto were phenomenal poets then I
am not sure how the conversation between us would be able to progress; and
how would our liaison be able continue in the case that you were a woman.
This issue is ethical also because by reciting some good or bad naz̤m or ġhazal,

157 That is, the “Introduction” to Aristotle’s Categories by Porphyry, a Neoplatonist philoso-
pher and a student of Plotinus. Isagoge literally means an introduction. Jaun could also
be referring to al-Abharī’s Īsāġhūjī. Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī’s Īsāġhūjī, a text in the field of
logic, however was in itself an abridged translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge and, as such,
an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories (Terrier, “Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī”). According to
Terrier, al-Abhāri’s Īsāġhūjī includes elements of Aristotle’s larger work Organon, and
Carmela Baffioni informs us that “the Greek commentators had organized the Poetics and
the Rhetoric as the final parts of Aristotle’s Organon,” which came to the Arabs via the
Syriac tradition (“Aristotle, Arabic: Poetics”). Al-Abharī’s Īsāġhūjī is a condensed transla-
tion of Porphyry’s original which itself is a commentary on Aristotle’s Five Terms.
As I suggest in a previous footnote, the distinction between poetry and philosophy
that Jaun is trying to make is significantly Aristotelian. Thus, it is quite likely that there
were many introductions to ‘Logic’ written by Medieval Islamic thinkers (e.g., Avicenna),
including the one by al-Abharī (which is only eight pages and is itself a commentary on
Porphyry and not even a stand-alone text) but all commenting upon or influenced by
Porphyry’s Introduction. It is possible that Jaun had the al-Abharī one in mind (but there
is hardly any way to confirm that), although it is highly likely that Jaun read the actual
Isagoge by Porphyry because while he doesn’t mention al-Abharī anywhere, he does men-
tion and directly quote Plotinus (Porphyry’s teacher) within this essay. Porphyry is the
reason we have the writings of Plotinus at all, since Porphyry compiled them into the
collection called The Enneads. Of course, these texts were translated, and quite often by
anonymous translators, into different languages including Arabic.
158 Minhājiyāt.
159 Taʿrīfāt.
160 A prominent Athenian statesman and an orator from the fourth century BC.
161 A pre-Islamic orator who lived in the sixth century AD.
162 An Arab writer and inventor of the maqāmah genre, “a set of adventures narrated in
rhymed prose (sajʿ), but also including original poetry.” (Malti-Douglas, “Badīʿ-Al-Zamān
Hamadānī).”
163 Mīr Amman from Delhi was best known for his Urdu translation of Amīr Ḳhusrau’s
famous Persian text Bāġh o Bahār (Garden and Spring), also known as Qiṣṣah-e Chahār
Darvesh (The Tale of Four Dervishes).
164 An Urdu novelist of late nineteenth century.

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206 Iqbal

we do not expect that you would call someone a marvelous writer or a sto-
ryteller. So then why does one who is generally writing rather artless165 and
flawed prose wants us to call them a poet?
I think I shall put this debate aside and move on. In an extremely placatory
spirit, I am going to ask that in what mode do we talk in our homes, alleys, cars,
offices, workshops, and different institutions with each other throughout the
day? In prose of course. Now, I wish to ask that if amongst us there are some
people, some clumsy people with an unusual frame of mind who wish to con-
verse with each other in a specifically artistic form then what inconvenience
do you feel in giving that form a distinct idiomatic name? In a very cursory
manner, it is this form of conversation that I call poetry.
When an aesthete of an erudite mind rises above his everyday routine and
awareness of his immediate necessities and becomes alone in himself, he
begins murmuring his silence in his own words. That act of murmuring is veri-
tably the act of composing poetry. Art forms such as poetry, painting, storytell-
ing, and sculpture manifest the idea of nature’s166 desire to rise above itself. I
can also articulate this idea by saying that art is another name of a cultivated
and impromptu167 expression of the heightened self168 of an artist. I shall
interpret/explain both love and poetry, as an extension of the self through the
aforementioned idea as well.
I just used the word “self”169 and I am suddenly alerted. The thing is, “self”
has come to be a rather mundane, existential, and an irresponsible, public170
idiom of American imagination and hence, I wish to use it cautiously. “Self”
is the name of a fixed and a dynamic condition of the conscious and uncon-
scious, and the active and passive personality that lies between the economic
and social relationships of an individual.
The spirit of the poet carries an aesthetic manifestation of human nature’s
grandeur.171 Here, a poet refers to the entity in whose spirit emotion, imagina-
tion, intellect, and passion have all become harmonious and taken the form
of a creative unity. This creative unity meaningfully assumes the form of a

165 Bhonḍī.
166 Fit̤rat.
167 Bar-jastah from Farsi. Another meaning is ‘befitting’ which could also apply here.
168 Taraffuʿ.
169 Żāt. This can also mean, ‘essence’ or ‘spirit.’
170 Restoranī. This would literally mean ‘of restaurant’ however what is being suggested here
is something that is so commonplace that it is easy to imagine a lot of people discussing
it over a meal.
171 Irtifāʿ.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 207

melodic172 whole which comprises expressive sonic unities (i.e., words) and
is thus known as poetry. It is important to mention here that generally math-
ematics is considered antithetical to all fine arts and especially poetry; I had
imagined the same at the beginning of my education, but I was deceived. The
most delicate, abstract, and representative amongst the fine arts, that is, music,
is indeed one division of mathematics. Therefore, by virtue of being rhythmic
speech, poetry is extrinsically a branch of mathematics. It could also be said
that poetry is the music of the mind and words are its instruments.
Now, insofar as the matter of a given couplet’s placement goes, it is helpful
to talk about logic—logic in any high, median, or low form of wisdom as well
as logic in any high, median, or low degree of wisdom. This conversation is
important because in our society—in fact, in all societies—poetry has often
been deemed divination173 or revelation. If poetry has nothing do with the
belly174 and the body but with the brain and the mind then it is conducive to
discuss the highest state of the mind, i.e., the logical state.
When logic becomes unprogressive175 within the progressive act of induc-
tion and deduction, then metaphysics emerges. When logic remains progres-
sive in deductive and inductive processes of production and deduction, then
science develops. And when logic assumes the form of an emotion’s spatio-
temporality in conjunction with an aesthetic tune of imagination and passion,
then poetry comes into existence. All this is to say the four elements of poetry
are intellect, emotion, imagination, and passion. Whereas science indirectly
or directly deals with emotion, religion concerns imagination, and philoso-
phy pertains to intellect, poetry is a collective of all four elements of emotion,
imagination, intellect, and passion.
One thing to also mention here is that if our wisdom has a linear relation-
ship with ‘reality’ then history, philosophy, and religion come into existence.
If it is an accidental176 relationship, then scientific fields develop. And if it is a
profound relationship upon which the future’s rays fall, then poetry comes into
existence. Only poetry is that artform which synchronizes all three: the past,
the present, and the future. It [poetry] is a result of an unusual and uncommon
manner of confession,177 of a cultivated disorder178 and of a learned passion

172 Ġhināʾī.
173 Kihānat.
174 Peṛū. Specifically, the belly below the navel.
175 Ġhair mutadarrij.
176 ʿArẓī. Another meaning could be “representational.”
177 Pażīrī. Can also mean ‘taking.’
178 Iḳhtilāl.

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208 Iqbal

of a performing mind. In poetry, the mind assumes such an unusual actual-

ity179 in a correlative proportion of emotion, imagination, and intellect that it
is able to afford leaps of intoxication while simultaneously enjoying passion’s
harmony both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Poetry longs for that two-fold individual who can innovatively deal with the
reality through both intellect and passion. We could also say that poetry is an
act of witnessing an occurrence with four eyes and experiencing a state with
two minds. Here, the question arises, that on what grounds can a poet who is a
representative of a specific art form reject and accept objects, and their mean-
ings and omnitude?180 The answer to this is through his complete wisdom in
relation with passion; because the poet has surpassed the perimeters of emo-
tion, imagination, and intellect, at last there is only one orbit left in which he
gains his distinctiveness and plays his role.
It would be appropriate at this instance to raise the question about the
nature of this role; I mean to ask, if the nature of this role is ethical or aestheti-
cal? This question is completely logical at this point.
I want to answer this question by saying that the nature of this role is ethical,
and this is an answer which cannot be expected—not at least from me. And
here I shall also reassure that I have not even the nethermost of inclinations to
shock my reader. What do I wish to say? I wish to say that with respect to art,
all ‘ethics’ that possess meaning that is either more or less than the meaning in
aesthetics, are not ethics but beliefs, and beliefs do not have an unconditional
relationship with beauty and art. In my capacity as a poet, I reject the alleged
‘totalities’ of belief systems. Belief systems tend to have an adverse relation to
unconditional beauty, good,181 and art. Hence, while the poets of ‘metaphysi-
cal truths’ could very well be worthy of statures that are higher than those of
(other) poets, the former cannot be poets because the profoundest relation
which a poet has is with ‘beauty’ and beauty is not aspatial or atemporal.
Poetic reality is not metaphysical and merely mental. Any noble poet does
not derive pleasure out of insomnia, self-infliction, and counting stars (wake-
fulness) merely for the sake of some idea or metaphor. Poetic reality—in fact,
any creative reality—is singularly ‘non-mental’ and external and a poet’s own
existence is found outside of him. If there is a reality, it is not of two kinds,
internal and external, rather there is just one reality which is both internal and
external. And it is internal also because it is external. “Self” is the result of an

179 Fiʿliyat.
180 Majmūʿiyat.
181 Ḳhair; the moral good.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 209

external self and the mind a result of an external mind.182 Knowledge can be
acquired only via the senses and only mind can be the station of wisdom, but
even this mind has no significance of its own without the senses. I have used
the word ‘significance’ very cautiously here. Intuition183 has no meaning; and
perhaps intuition could possibly even come to have some meaning but in Urdu
‘Bergson184’ has no meaning whatsoever.
We do not think within ourselves; we think outside of ourselves. We simply
cannot think within ourselves. Thinking is simply not possible without lan-
guage. And language is not only external but a product of a society and societal
relationships. This entity which was only a voice to the extent that it was asso-
ciated with any given person’s individual existence became language when it
found a collective validity.
To be considered a true poet, one requires only a testimony, and this tes-
timony can only be achieved at the time when one sees, examines, and feels
one’s “self” through an external self.
The poetical meter185 that the doors and windows of our home swayed upon
was the meter of rajaz muṡamman mat̤vī maḳhbūn.186 This meter would echo
itself in the hallways, rooms, enclosures, stairs, and courtyards of our home.
Mirzā Saudā had composed a remarkable ġhazal in this meter but that had

182 Here, Jaun seems to be indicating towards the notion of Externalism, a position within
the field of Philosophy of Mind which suggests that the internal reality or states of an indi-
vidual at least partially depend on his or her external environment. See Lau and Deutsch,
“Externalism About Mental Content” and Parent, “Externalism and Self-Knowledge.”
183 Vijdān. Can also mean ‘instinct’ or ‘conscience.’
184 Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was an important French philosopher of the twentieth century
who influenced many significant thinkers of his and subsequent generations all across
the world. Amongst the many prominent ideas that he advanced or developed in differ-
ent lights were the notions of Multiplicity and Intuition. According to Bergson, and in a
nutshell, intuition is a kind of an experience of a thing or an object which could essen-
tially enable absolute knowledge of that thing or object in contrast to knowing something
about a thing but not the thing itself. Of course, the ideas behind his proposition are
much more layered than what could be articulated in the limited space here, but for our
purposes, we can gather that Jaun seemingly does not agree with Bergson’s notion of intu-
ition and attainment of knowledge perhaps also because he is seemingly more Kantian in
his inclinations.
However, it is worthwhile to note an opening verse from a naz̤m by Iqbal—who is
pretty much a contemporary of Bergson: ‘Had you not lost your self [ḳhudī], you would
not have had to worship Bergson.’ This is suggestive of the kind of poetic and philo-
sophical genealogies Jaun occupied within the Urdu tradition. The naz̤m’s title is Ek
Falsafah-zadah Sayyid Zāde ke Nām. For more on Bergson, see Lawlor and Moulard
Leonard, “Henri Bergson.”
185 Baḥr.
186 Rajaz muṡamman mat̤vī maḳhbūn is one of the meters used in Urdu poetry.

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210 Iqbal

not become the rhythmic experience of our household; rather our home’s aura
reverberated with a ġhazal of Sayyidah Qurrat ul-ʿAin T̤āhirah187 which she
wrote in the following meter:

If I ever get to see you in person, face-to-face

I would give you the details of my grief point by point, word by word188

My father remained enchanted by this ġhazal even though he should have

hated this poetess whose ġhazal was in this meter, because that lady had aban-
doned my father’s paternal belief system for a new religion. Our rather devout
father had an intense faith in Qurrat ul-ʿAin. Sayyidah Qurrat ul-ʿAin T̤āhirah
was a Sayyid as well as a Shīʿah but had later split from Shīʿism and eventually
played a historical role in promoting her new sect but our father, despite being
very religious, was utterly irreligious in matters of poetry.
Here I am reminded of my father’s two couplets that were written in
Sayyidah T̤āhirah’s metrical pattern:

You may enthusiastically arrive uncovered at the beloved’s home

For now that same passion or gaze does not remain189

The second couplet is from a manqabat190

The countenances of Ḥasan and Ḥusain manifest the ornaments between

the east and the west191
From their [cheeks’] glow to their beards to their eyes between their faces

Due to my father’s influence, this poetical meter kept me deeply occupied.

It would instigate in me the most creative of states towards the awareness of
space and time. I wanted to write poetry in this meter too, but at that time I
was deprived of such ability.

187 A notable Farsi poetess, feminist, and one of the first converts to the ‘Babism’ that was
founded in mid-nineteenth century in Iran and is considered a predecessor to the Baha’i
faith.
188 Gar bah uftādam naz̤ar chahrah bah chahrah rū bah rū
sharḥ-e ġham-e vafā kunam nuktah bah nuktah mū bah mū.
189 Āp ḥarīm-e nāz meñ shauq se āʾeñ be-ḥijāb
ab vuh junūñ junūñ nahīñ ab vuh naz̤ar naz̤ar nahīñ.
190 An ode for Imām ʿAlī, other members of Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) progeny, or any
other revered religious figure(s).
191 Rū-e Ḥasan ruḳh-e Ḥusain, jalvah t̤irāz-e mashriqain
g̠ ̇ hāzah bah g̠ ̇ hāzah, ḳhat̤t ̤ bah ḳhat̤t,̤ dīdah bah dīdah, dū bah dū.

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 211

In that era, though, there were three prominent schools of poetry that were
active: patriotic poetry, nationalistic and revolutionary poetry, and the tradi-
tional ġhazal. ʿAllāmah Iqbāl mounted over the horizons of patriotic poetry;
the poet of revolution, Josh Malīḥābādī occupied the loftiest and most success-
ful rank when it came to nationalistic and revolutionary poetry; while Jigar,192
Ārzū Lakhnavī, Yās Yaganah Changezī, and Firāq193 were the darling represen-
tatives of the most earth-shattering kind of the ġhazal.
I wish to conclude my conversation now but there are still a few things left
which need to be expressed. We do not feel any danger in acknowledging and
respecting Dante even though he has made impertinent remarks about Prophet
Muhammad (PBUH) and Imām ʿAlī. We discuss Darwin’s and Lamarck’s194 the-
ory of evolution and write about them without fear despite religious discord
in their ideas. We securely express our views on Freud’s psychoanalytic sexual
drive theory even though his theory suggests that a child sucking on a teat195
and an old man kissing a sacred object are due to their similar sexual drive.
And minarets and domes to which we ascribe sanctity are emblems of sexual-
ity too. These perspectives and views, which could be correct or incorrect are
the perspectives of those who have never been the targets of the wrath of the
political churches of America and other capitalist countries. But one poverty-
stricken and deprived thinker from Germany who could not even get medical
treatment for his dying child, and who was not even able to buy a shroud for
him, was labelled a rebel and a traitor towards religion, spirituality, and eth-
ics by all dominions of capitalists, when all he did was scientifically illustrate
the fundamental problems of humanity. This person was Marx. And this was
the person who, in his semi-starved state, used to think about the cure for the
suffering of all people of the world and who one day died while restfully sit-
ting in his noble and praiseworthy posture of contemplation. When we dis-
cuss this beloved and wise old man of history and his lively and enrichingly
philosophical perspective …… communism, and when, through his perspec-
tive, we wish to have a panacea for the inert life of our peoples, then we are
labelled rebels and traitors by the new Western imperialist framework and its
local intermediaries.
I am feeling like a petitioner who has started to mourn and is now feeling
ashamed. No, sir, that is definitely not the case. What I want to say is that it is

192 Jigar Muradābādī.

193 Firāq Gorakhpūrī.
194 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist from late eighteenth century.
195 Chusnī.

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212 Iqbal

the responsibility of our arts and sciences196 to grab the flesh-peddlers197 of the
global capitalist system by their collars and publicly drag them. The existence
of the occupying imperialism of America and Western Europe is a disgrace to
the sophisticated knowledge and constructive sense of the notion of ‘beauty.’
The inheritors of the most excellent dreams of civilization, the good,198
proportionateness,199 beauty, and sublime humanity, who are dispersed all
across the world and whose heartbeats comprise the passionate, perceptive,
artistic, and collective concord of a universal heart, should surrender this
concord to their determined200 souls’ affective, sentimental, courageous, and
decisive unison. We are the poets and writers who dream in the open fields of
the West, East, North and South …… and in our burning hearts, kindled intel-
lect, and illuminated sight, we are leading revolution-defending lives within
the uniformity of day and night, breathing solely with an inclination towards
and in the condition of seeking an ideal guide; but it is true that sometimes we
too run out of breath.
This is a historical process that our historical thinkers, innovators, and work-
ers have covered and which we are passing through today. We have been walk-
ing, we are walking, and the most uplifting news is that a few people amongst
us will certainly reach that destination, which is ours, theirs, and everyone’s.
And those who reach it will have their eyes guided by the visionary dreams of
those such as us who could not make it there.
We are exempt from attempting to make any kinds of amendments and
annulments to our ideals. There can be no amendment or annulment of beauty
and the good. A political democracy along with a social republic has been our
ideal and it shall remain that way; and this way of thinking is also imperative.
Surely, it is.

…
I am left with very little time; even if I were left with just one second, then,
according to an electronic watch, it is an asset worth thousands of iotas which
could provide me with a covenant for my new dreams—and what other skill
do I even have besides dreaming?!

196 Dānish.
197 Qaḥbah-ḳhānoñ.
198 Ḳhair; the moral good.
199 Tanāsub.
200 Ūlūʾl-ʿAzm. This can also mean ‘adventurous’ or ‘venturesome’ in Urdu although it comes
from Arabic and literally means ‘Possessors of Determination or Constancy’ and refers to
the five highest Prophets in Islam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. See
Muntazir Qaim, “The Prophethood of Jesus.”

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a translation of jaun elia ’ s preface of shĀyad 213

We continued to wait for the clouds that were to rise from the unseen hori-
zons for we had to clean their paths, we had to cleanse those thousands of
dense trees and plants which remained dusty due to the insemination of his-
tory. With your and our tears, we had to wash the faces of those ineffectual
complainers. We had to rinse twigs and …… those birds that would be sing-
ing in rhythm of those [twigs’] movements; we had to rinse their feathers and
beaks. We had to drench the winds and clouds … and the lighting that would
flash in the clouds. We had to purify this world in which our generations have
been breathing till now. We had to clean the God, the Devil,201 and the Human
but we could not do anything ………
I want to see the epoch that came before the one in which those after me
came. My eyes and those of my companions have been scorching and burning
for an era. I wish to cool my eyes by seeing the ones who are about to come, kiss
their heads, and then close my eyelids.
They have arrived …… You arrived! I am Jaun Elia; alright, I should go now;
you kept me waiting for quite a while, and yes, there is something of yours that
I have safely kept with me. These are my crude and incomplete words—that
is, my couplets; couplets which I could not say. Maybe they will be uttered by
David, or Aḥmad,202 or Kailash,203 or maybe Manuchehr204 ……… and now, I
shall come to an end.

Translated by Hamza Iqbal

(With gratitude and thanks)

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