The inconvenience of Iqbal

Every November 9, Pakistan brings Allama Iqbal out of his grave for a few ceremonial hours.

His portrait appears behind podiums. Schoolchildren recite his verses. Ministers speak reverently of selfhood, courage and the soaring falcon. Television anchors summon his dream into their studios. By evening, the wreaths are wilting and the country has returned to the habits that would have horrified the man it spent the day praising.

Ameer-ul-Islam Hashmi asked the question that hangs over this annual performance:

Iqbal, tere des ka kya haal sunaun?

Iqbal, how shall I tell you what has become of your land?

The poem reads like a letter written by someone standing among the ruins of a magnificent promise. Its images are borrowed from Iqbal's moral universe: the farmer, the falcon, the believer, the sword of conviction. Each returns diminished, exhausted, strangely unrecognisable. Together they offer a portrait of Pakistan that grows more uncomfortable with every passing year.

Hashmi begins with the farmer, worked to death, and asks where he might find an ear of wheat to burn. The allusion is unmistakable. Iqbal once imagined setting fire to the crop of a field that failed to feed its cultivator. Today the farmer tills the soil, feeds the cities, endures the weather and absorbs the shocks of an economy designed elsewhere. Those who work hardest remain nearest to hunger. Those who decide how wealth is distributed remain safely insulated from its absence.

There is something indecent about a country where honest labour offers so little protection against humiliation. A teacher takes a second job to survive. A labourer borrows money to buy medicine. A family debates whether its child can afford another year of education. Meanwhile, fortunes rise in airconditioned rooms, aided by connections that require neither brilliance nor industry. Privilege passes from one generation to another with an efficiency our public institutions can only envy.

Then comes the falcon.

Iqbal's shaheen belonged to the mountains, to solitude, to the dangerous exhilaration of flight. Hashmi finds it perched upon a royal dome. That single image captures the shrinking of our national imagination. We have turned ambition into access. The brightest young minds learn early that a telephone call can outweigh a qualification, a surname can open a locked door, and the art of pleasing powerful people can carry one further than the courage to challenge them.

Our children memorise poetry about soaring above the stars and grow up watching mediocrity promoted above merit. Eventually, many take their dreams abroad. Those who leave are accused of abandoning the motherland by people who have made the motherland so difficult to inhabit.

Hashmi's accusation grows sharper when he turns to faith:

Everyone calls himself a Muslim, yet the character worthy of that name is nowhere to be found.

Religion fills our public life. It shines from billboards, echoes through speeches and animates endless contests over who possesses the purest credentials. In private, a different creed often governs. The employer delays a poor man's wages. The shopkeeper cheats the customer. The official humiliates the petitioner. The prosperous congratulate themselves on their piety while keeping an elaborate distance from the suffering at their gates.

We have perfected the public performance of righteousness and made morality a negotiable private arrangement. A society can survive many things. The casual separation of belief from conduct slowly hollows out its soul.

Yet the poem's most devastating line concerns the country itself:

Yeh des hai sab ka magar iska nahin koi.

This land belongs to everyone, yet no one truly belongs to it.

Everyone claims Pakistan. Politicians claim it in the name of democracy, powerful institutions in the name of stability, religious authorities in the name of faith, and the affluent through their unquestioned entitlement to its best opportunities. Each speaks fluently of sacrifice. Each has an impressive vocabulary for explaining why the greater share must be borne by somebody else.

The poor are advised to be patient. The middle class is told to tighten its belt. The young are instructed to show loyalty. The powerful speak gravely of national hardship from behind gates that keep its consequences out.

Even our language has learned to cushion cruelty. A delayed hearing becomes procedure. A favour becomes facilitation. Fear becomes prudence. Silence becomes maturity. We are constantly inventing respectable names for things we would recognise instantly as wrong if they happened to us.

Iqbal's khudi demanded a self capable of standing upright before power. Our social education begins with the opposite lesson. Know your place. Avoid trouble. Find a patron. Keep your head down. The young discover that truth requires permission, while obedience opens doors. A country that trains its people to seek protection from authority will struggle to produce citizens willing to hold authority accountable.

It would be convenient to blame this entire spectacle on our rulers. The poison circulates much further. It lives in the man who speaks passionately of equality while treating the waiter serving him as though dignity were a privilege reserved for his own social class. In the professional who condemns corruption and quietly calls an influential friend to bend a rule. In the drawing room where national catastrophe becomes an evening's entertainment, forgotten as soon as dessert arrives.

We recognise injustice most clearly when we are its victims. When it grants us an advantage, our eyesight deteriorates.

And so Iqbal Day comes again. The speeches will praise his courage. The ceremonies will celebrate his ideals. The schools will recite the falcon's flight. All the while, the distance between his words and our lives will widen.

Hashmi asks how he can describe this land to Iqbal. Perhaps the hardest truth is that we already know the answer. The poet's dream survives in marble, portraits and memorised verses, while the society entrusted with it grows accustomed to indignity.

The saddest possibility is that Iqbal, returning to his beloved land today, would find his words everywhere and his convictions almost nowhere.

And the most frightening possibility is what we would do if he began to speak.