The revolutionary Pakistani poet Ahmed Faraz, whose name is synonymous in South Asia with modern Urdu poetry, died Aug. 25 in Islamabad. He was 77.
The cause was kidney failure, said his son Shibli Faraz.
He was earlier reported to have died while being treated in a Chicago hospital after a fall in Baltimore, but he returned to his homeland, where he died.
Popular among both the cognoscenti and the general public, he was one of the few poets from the subcontinent whose verses were read as well as sung. He was in great demand at the mushaira, social gatherings — usually after dusk — at which Urdu poets recite their poems.
Often compared to legends of the past like Mohammad Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mr. Faraz was as popular in India as he was in his own country.
He enjoyed a near cult status in the pantheon of revolutionary poets. In India and other countries outside Pakistan, he was best known for his ghazals — poems expressing the writer’s feelings, especially about love — which were popularized by leading singers like Ghulam Ali, Mehdi Hasan, Runa Laila and Jagjit Singh.
A passionate voice for change and progress, Mr. Faraz was usually at his best when writing the poetry of love and protest. His romantic poetry made him particularly beloved by the young; the establishment was not so fond of his verses mocking and at times exposing the authorities.
An advocate for the poor and downtrodden, Mr. Faraz raised his voice against capitalists, usurpers and dictators. In the 1980s he went into a six-year self-imposed exile in Canada and Europe during the era of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, whose military rule of Pakistan he had condemned at a mushaira and whose power seemed to drive him to heights of inspiration.
“That was the worst phase for our country’s writers,” he once said of the general’s rule. “Yet it also provided ample food for thought for the poet and made protest poetry so popular in Pakistan.”
Mr. Faraz, who was also closely associated with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party, wrote some of his best poetry in exile, including “Dekhtay Hain” (“Let Us Gaze”) and “Mohasara” (“The Siege”). In all, he had written 13 volumes of Urdu poetry.
Ahmed Faraz was the pseudonym of Syed Ahmad Shah, who was born in Nowshera village near Kohat in Pakistan on Jan. 14, 1931. His father, Agha Syed Muhammad Shah Bark Kohati, was a leading traditional poet.
He studied at Edwards College in Peshawar and was greatly influenced by progressive poets like Faiz and Ali Sardar Jafri. They became his role models. He obtained his master’s degree in Urdu and Persian from Peshawar University. He subsequently taught the two languages there, though he began his career as a scriptwriter with Radio Pakistan.
Mr. Faraz’s first volume of poetry, “Tanha Tanha,” was published in the late 1950s, when he was an undergraduate student, and became a huge, instant hit. He had a tendency to create controversies about himself or about various issues. He spoke against marriage, saying it was “a sort of prostitution through a contract on paper.” He also said Urdu was “a dying language,” prompting outrage among Urdu speakers.
In 1976 Mr. Faraz became the founding director general of the Pakistan Academy of Letters. He was its chairman in 1989 and 1990. His last official job was as the chairman of National Book Foundation based in Islamabad.
Mr. Faraz advocated peace between India and Pakistan and emphasized personal bonds over geographic boundaries. He is survived by his wife and three sons.
Awarded one of Pakistan’s greatest civilian honors, the Hilal-e-Imtiaz, in 2004 for his literary achievements, he returned it in 2006 after becoming disillusioned with President Pervez Musharraf’s government.
“My conscience will not forgive me if I remained a silent spectator of the sad happenings around us,” he said at the time. “The least I can do is to let the dictatorship know where it stands in the eyes of the concerned citizens, whose fundamental rights have been usurped.”
Peace and Justice Post 
What is to be done?
October 6, 2008Paul D’Amato sets Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? in the context of the struggle to build a socialist organization in Russia.
Socialist Worker, September 29, 2008 | Issue 681
IN DECEMBER 1895, Vladimir Lenin, then a young Russian Social Democrat, was arrested in St. Petersburg and spent the next four years in Siberian exile. He had been the leader of a local social democratic circle for two years.
Socialist Worker writers introduce ten of the most important writings by leading thinkers in the revolutionary socialist tradition.
In exile, he spent part of the time working on a massive work analyzing the nature of Russian capitalism. On the practical side, he hatched a plan to produce a national newspaper that could unite around it the scattered, isolated groupings of Russian revolutionaries throughout the empire into a single all-Russian Social Democratic Party.
An attempt to form a national party had been made at the first national Russian Social Democratic conference in 1898, but it was small and unrepresentative, and most of its participants were arrested immediately after the conference took place.
It did, however, produce a manifesto that encapsulated the orthodox view of the majority of Russian Marxists at the time, including Lenin: “The further east one goes in Europe, the meaner, more cowardly and politically weak the bourgeoisie becomes, and the greater are the cultural and political tasks that fall to the proletariat.”
Lenin’s plans bore fruit; the periodical Iskra (the Spark)–which gathered as editors both the most prominent young leaders, such as Lenin and Julius Martov, but also the founders of Russian Marxism, such as George Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod–was able over a period of three years, from 1900 to 1903, to win over the majority of Russian committees to Lenin’s proposal for the all-Russian party.
Lenin outlined his plan in a number of articles in Iskra. The first step, he said, was an all-Russian political newspaper. “Without it,” he wrote, “we cannot conduct that systematic, all-round propaganda and agitation, consistent in principle, which is the chief and permanent task of Social Democracy in general and, in particular, the pressing task of the moment, when interest in politics and in questions of socialism has been aroused among the broadest strata of the population.”
This passage gives a hint of the urgency of Lenin’s call; he believed that the working-class movement was advancing by leaps and bounds, and that the socialists, with their purely local, agitational work, usually centered around lending assistance to workers’ economic struggles, were lagging behind these developments. The working class, he wrote, “has demonstrated its readiness, not only to listen to and support the summons to political struggle, but boldly to engage in battle.”
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THE TASKS of the Iskraists, therefore, were not purely organizational or technical. Lenin and his cohorts were waging a political fight against other trends in the movement–namely, the trend known as “economism,” centered around a newspaper called Rabochaya Mysl (Workers Thought), but also the eclectic trend around the newspaper Rabochaya Dyelo (Workers Dawn), which seemed unable to take a firm stand on anything.
In Lenin’s opinion, the economists made a virtue of the socialist movements’ weaknesses, arguing that the task of socialists was merely to support workers’ economic struggles. The elitist assumption was that workers weren’t ready for political agitation.
The economists, argued Lenin, were the Russian variant of the German “revisionists,” led by Eduard Bernstein, who famously wrote that the movement was everything and the final goal nothing. In Russia, Lenin argued, the economists were attempting “to narrow the theory of Marxism, to convert the revolutionary workers’ party into a reformist party.”
Lenin’s beef with the Dyelo group was that it downplayed the danger of economism, alternatively criticizing and flirting with their ideas. The Dyeloists also were uncritical of terrorism, and though it is rarely acknowledged by Lenin’s critics over the years, Iskra spent some time engaging in a polemic in favor of the methods of mass struggle and against individual terror, on the grounds that this tactic “disorganizes the forces, not of the government, but of the revolution.”
For Lenin, the main imbalance was between the rapid growth of class struggle–strikes, even general strikes, and May Day demonstrations–while the organization of socialists that could provide a national leadership and unite the disparate struggles into a common front against the autocracy was lacking. Worse, there were political trends in the movement that saw this as a perfectly fine state of affairs.
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Tags:exile, Iskra, Russian capitalism, Russian Marxists, socialist consciousness, socialist movement, Vladimir Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, working class struggle
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