Faiz Ahmed Faiz

1911  - 1984 

Faiz was acknowledged long ago as the greatest Urdu poet after Iqbal. Even those who were critical of his progressive social and political beliefs could not deny him that position, although they always qualified their praise of him by regretting that such a good man should have fallen among the Communists.

Primary Education: Faiz was born in a respectable and literary environment and was a very promising student with a religious background. Started memorizing the Holy Quran at the age of four and in 1916Started his formal education. Passed his Matriculation Examination in the 1st Division from Murray College, Sialkot and during this period learnt Persian and Arabic from Allama Iqbal's teacher, Shamsul Ullama Moulvi Syed Meer Hasan.

College Education: Passed his B.A. (Honors) in Arabic from the Government College, Lahore and  then M.A. in English from the same College in 1932. Passed his M.A. in Arabic in the 1st Division, from Oriental College, Lahore.

Employment: Lecturer in English at M. A. O. College, Amritsar in 1935, then at Hailey College of Commerce, Lahore. Joined the Army as Captain in 1942 and worked in the department of Public Relations in Delhi. Was promoted to the rank of Major in 1943,and Lieut. Colonel in 1944.

Resigned from The Army in 1947 and returned to Lahore, where,  In 1959 appointed as Secretary, Pakistan Arts Council and worked in that capacity till 1962. Returning from London in 1964 he settled down in Karachi and was appointed as Principal, Abdullah Haroon College , Karachi. Editorship of the monthly magazine Adabe-Latif from 1947 to 1958.

Worked as Editor under the Progressive Papers Ltd, of the Pakistan Times, the Urdu newspaper Imroze and the weekly Lailo-Nihar. In the 1965 war between India & Pakistan he worked in an honorary capacity in the Department of Information. Acted as Editor of the magazine Lotus in Moscow, London and Beirut.

Prison:  In March 9th, arrested under Safety Act and charged in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case, and having borne the hardships of imprisonment for four years and one month in the jails of Sargodha, Montgomery (now Sahiwal) Hyderabad and Karachi, was released on April 2nd, 1955.

Legacy

He was a keen student of various traditions of classical poetry in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and English among others and had realized at an early age that it was the content and not the form which was basic in the art of poetry, that originality had little to do with formal experimentation and was primarily a matter of a profound understanding of human existence in its totality and wholeness.

Faiz takes Ghalib's plea for a deeply philosophical coordination of the poetic profession as his premise to refute the arguments of the aesthetes of his time for whom poetry was merely peripheral activity. But he goes further and comments that Ghalib's definition of creative vision is incomplete, because the poet is not only required to see the ocean in the drop, but also has to show it to others.

That is why, apart from being a great revolutionary poet, he was a great love poet, and there was no distinction between the two, love and revolution had become identical in him.

Faiz Ahmad Faiz is the voice of the conscience of the suffering humanity of our times. A voice which is a song as well as a challenge, which has a burning faith and cries out against the agony of its era, a constant endeavor and the thunder of the revolution, as well as the sweet recital of love and beauty. This had particularly affected the colonial economy of India. Thus, according to Faiz:

He does not agree with the doctrine of art for art's sake, or of existentialism that artistic and social values are things apart. Referring to the poet Keats's famous lines that beauty is love and love is beauty and a beautiful object is an eternal source of joy, Faiz says that, notwithstanding what Keats may have felt, beauty can only be eternal when it is creative, when it inspires the onlooker's enthusiasm, thought and action with promoting more beauty. For Faiz, the testing power of beauty is in its creativity. Beauty is not mere artistic value, it is also a social and moral value:

This agony of love is not only a part of the human condition but it is a relationship which extends from one end of the world to another. Faiz  love for humanity is free from the prejudices of race, color or nationality. The new literature of protest suggests a radical change and, in the words of Faiz, it confers on us the power of "forcefully spurning the hand of the killer". It does not accept defeat because it is convinced that darkness should and must end.

Publication

• Naqshe Faryadi, 1941

• Daste Saba, 1953

• Zindan Nama, 1956

• Mizan, a collection of literary articles,1956

• Daste-Tahe-Sang, 1965

• Sare-Wadiye Seena, 1971

• Shame-Shehr Yaran, 1979

• Merey Dil Merey Musafar, 1981

• Nuskha-Hai-Wafa, 1984

• Pakistani Culture, Urdu & English 

Awards

The real award for a poet is the love and appreciation of his fans. Faiz stands among those who enjoy both at one and the same time. Besides he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963, as the first Asian poet.

Before his death in 1984 he was also nominated for the award of Nobel Prize, but his association in later life, with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Movement, and the Editorship of Lotus, deprived him of the award because the Zionist element in the controlling body of the Nobel Prize is strong.