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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.
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