The other night, I watched a play in Karachi’s Arts Council called “Pawnay 14 August” (“Quarter to 14
th
August”) written by famed Pakistani playwright and actor Anwar Maqsood.
The play’s premise is simple: three great leaders of the Pakistan
Movement come down from heaven for one day to see what has become of the
country they envisioned sixty-plus years ago.
As they wait for a flight to Islamabad in the Karachi airport lounge,
they come across a variety of modern-day Pakistanis who show them that
life in the Islamic Republic hasn’t turned out as successfully as they’d
hoped. It’s a comedy with a bitter bite at the end as the founder of
Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, is unrecognisable to everyone and is
finally mistaken for the actor Christopher Lee (who portrayed him in a biopic) by a little girl with an autograph book.
One of the other figures portrayed in the play is Allama Iqbal, the
famed philospher-poet whose verses inspired the Pakistan movement. He
wrote both in Urdu and Persian, and is also known for exploring the
concept of “
Khudi”, or the self, which correlates with the
Islamic concept of the divine spark that exists in every human being.
Iqbal surmised in his great work
Asrar-e-Khudi, or
The Secrets of the Self,
that the self is the transformer of the spirit through which humans
cannot just achieve tremendous goals on earth, but actually know the
face of God.
Named as Pakistan’s national poet, Iqbal’s ideology was the
philosophical skeleton on which the flesh of Pakistan’s creation was
draped — he believed in the nobility of humankind to such an extent that
the people were moved enough to actually create a new country for
themselves. Yet, a running joke in the play was that Iqbal’s dream of a
nation for Muslims carved out of India had turned into a nightmare, a
zombie country characterised by brutality, mass confusion and
dishonesty. “Even if you saw such a dream”, moaned Mohammed Ali Jauhar,
the third of the illustrious leaders, “why did you have to tell
him (Jinnah) about it?”
Still, it’s very easy to understand what’s gone wrong in Pakistan
through the prism of Iqbal’s vision: we Pakistanis have become
disconnected from the self or at least that spark that resides within
all of us and keeps us connected to one another and to divinity. Swayed
by competing ideologies — militarism, capitalism, Islamism to name a few
— we have lost direction. Our journey to selfhood, which Iqbal said was
tantamount to human development — and collectively, the journey to
nationhood — has been interrupted, replaced by a journey in which a pure
heart is not as important as a full pocket and a self-righteous,
hypocritical façade.
Is it possible or even desirable that we as Pakistanis find our way
back to Iqbal’s vision or has it become outdated with the increased
economic and sociopolitical pressures of the modern world, the War on
Terror and the nuclear competition with India? I don’t know the answer
to this question. What I do know, though, is that if we turn our backs
on Iqbal’s philosophy, we lose the chance to see ourselves as worthy
human beings, deserving of better than the mess our country is in today.
Allama Iqbal was someone who believed in not just the potential but the
very real greatness in each and every Pakistani. And every human being
needs someone to believe in her, so that she may believe in herself and
aspire to raise herself to the heights of recreating this nation: a
newer, better version that Jinnah, Iqbal and Shaukat Ali would truly be
happy to see.
Good
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