Egypt, Delhi and Faiz

As the protests in Egypt continued, Faiz’s famous poem took wing in Delhi’s mobile text-sphere: Sab taaj uchhale jayenge, Sab takht giraye jayenge, Hum dekhenge…

Only a fortnight ago, Pakistan’s Sufi singer Sain Zahoor had brought the house down with his rendition of “Allah hu” at the literature festival held annually in Jaipur.

Earlier that day, Kamila Shamsie had been ever-so-delicately questioned by a young man about the state of play in Pakistan after the Taseer murder. “Without compromising your position, can you tell us about your views on the blasphemy laws?” he asked.

Shamsie was clear. “Anybody who has heard me this morning will know that me and my mother are against the laws as they have been passed,” she said.

Both Shamsie and the young man were on the same side, but it speaks volumes of the journeys both nations have travelled since that fateful day in August 1947, that one needed to ask the question and the other to answer it.

Sometimes the Indians were gawking at the Pakistanis. They looked the same, really, with their colour of skin and hair and language, but there was a yearning about them that made them different. Perhaps the colour of intensity is different in India, much more about 9 per cent growth and the size of the flat you’re buying in Gurgaon. But if you’re living on the edge of a precipice, as Mohammed Hanif and Daniyal Mueenuddin explain so eloquently, then the journey is filled with stories.

No matter. The Jaipur festival redeems itself every year precisely because it offers an open space for people from all over the world to argue their prejudices.

The idea of free speech is an old one, only many of us still need reminding it’s a fundamental right. The reported remarks, for example, by the new chancellor of the Darul Uloom seminary at Deoband, Ghulam Mohammed Vastanavi, have taken so many turns that nobody knows what the real truth is. Some say he exonerated Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi for his role in the anti-Muslim pogroms of 2002, while Vastanavi has said the media misunderstood his comments.

Vastanavi’s supporters say the new ‘mohtamim’ wanted to radically modernise an institution that has preferred to bank on nostalgia rather than the pilgrim’s progress.

After all, the Deoband seminary earns Rs200 million a month, both from domestic and foreign sources, so where does all the money go?

The answers are there to see in the ‘kuchas’ and bylanes and squares of Cairo, as religion meets politics to overthrow a dictator who has ruled with an iron hand in the name of secularism.

It’s time to reread Faiz. There’s no one better these days to express the euphoria, as well as the fragility, of the moment.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 6^th, 2011.