Author Topic: LAHORE Celebrated birth of Faiz Ahmad Faiz  (Read 1879 times)

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LAHORE Celebrated birth of Faiz Ahmad Faiz
« on: February 21, 2009, 11:02:28 AM »
LAHORE Celebrated  birth of Faiz Ahmad Faiz

LAHORE THE month of February 2009 is being celebrated as the month of birth of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, a world acclaimed poet, a journalist, a thinker and a diehard advocate of human rights and human freedom.

All over the country, intellectuals, teachers, poets, students, artists, men and women of common origin are paying tribute to Faiz for his optimistic poetry filled with pain and sorrow and an ever-present hope of a better tomorrow.

There are special sittings being held in various educational institutions and special programmes have been organised to highlight Faiz�s life and works. The literary forums all around the country including the provincial metropolis are echoing with Faiz�s revolutionary poetry while his verses are being sung by many renowned and acclaimed singers of the country.

In his poetry, he combined themes of love, beauty, and political ideals into a vision of a better world and goodness. Faiz�s first language was Punjabi but he gained fame with his poems written in Urdu. Due to his opposition to the government and military dictators, Faiz spent several years in prison and was forced to go into exile at different times in his career. Next to Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), Faiz is one of the best-known poets of Pakistan. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in Sialkot in the Punjab, then a part of India under British rule. His family was well-to-do landowners.

Faiz�s father was a prominent lawyer, who was interested in literature, and whose friends included several prominent literary figures including Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1873-1938), the national poet of Pakistan. Faiz received his education at mission schools in Sialkot in English language, but also learned Urdu, Persian, and Arabic.

In his first poems, Faiz wrote already at school. He studied English and Arabic literatures at Government College, Lahore, completing his MA in 1932 and in English, and in Arabic from Oriental College, Lahore. Besides formal studies, very important for Faiz�s development was participating in the activities of literary circles, which gathered at homes of established writers. After graduating, he worked as a teacher from the mid-1930s in Amritsar and Lahore.

In the 1930s, Faiz came under the influence of the leftist Progressive Movement. Under the leadership of Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1973), authors were expected to follow the dictates of the socialist realism, but by the 1950s, the movement had ceased to be an effective literary force. During World War II, Faiz served in the Indian army in Delhi, and in 1944, he was promoted to the rank of Lt-Colonel. After the Islamic republic of Pakistan was established in 1947, the country experienced an era of chronic political instability, heightened by tensions between Hindus and Muslims. With the division of the subcontinent, Faiz resigned from the army and moved to Pakistan with his family. Alys Faiz, whom he had married in 1941, later published a book of memoirs, Over My Shoulder (1993), about her life as a British expatriate living in Pakistan. Alys died in 2003.

Faiz became editor of the leftist English-language daily, the Pakistan Times. He also worked as managing editor of the Urdu daily Imroz, and was actively involved in organising trade unions.

In 1951, Faiz and a number of army officers were implicated in the so-called Rawalpindi Conspiracy case and arrested under Safety Act. The government alleged that Faiz and others were planning a coup.

He spent four years in prison under a sentence of death and was released in 1955. During this period, Alys Faiz worked for the Pakistan Times to support family. Faiz became the secretary of the National Council of Arts, and in 1962, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. During his years in exile, he was the editor of the magazine Lotus in Moscow, London and Beirut. In Pakistan, his poems, which renewed the traditional romantic imagery of Urdu poetry, gained a huge popularity. Faiz also supported the use of regional languages of Pakistan in education, the media, and literary expression. After a period of exile in war-torn Lebanon from 1979 to 1982, Faiz returned to his home country.

He died in Lahore on November 20, 1984.

Faiz�s first collections of poetry, Naqsh-e-Faryadi (1943), Dast-e-Saba (1952), and Zindan Namah (1956), were politically motivated, and included some of his most famous poems based on his prison experiences. In spite of his Marxist beliefs, Faiz did not burden his poems with ideological rhetoric.

He fused classic traditional forms of poetry with new symbols derived from Western political ideas. His selected works are:

� Naqsh-e-Faryadi 1943

� Dast-e-Saba 1952

� Zindan Namah 1956

� Mizan 1964

� Dast-e-Tah-e-Sang 1965

� Harf Harf 1965

� Sar-e-Vadi-ye-Sina 1971

� Poems by Faiz 1971 (translated by VG Kiernan)

� Rat di Rat 1975

� Sham-e-shahri-Yaran 1978

� Mere Dil, Mere Musafir 1980

� Nuskha-Hai-Wafa 1984
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If you born poor, its not your fault....But if you die poor, its your fault...."Bill Gates"