Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Based on Wikipedia: Faiz Ahmad Faiz

In 1951, one of the most beloved poets in South Asia sat in a prison cell, accused of plotting to overthrow the Pakistani government. His crime? Attending a single meeting where military officers discussed a coup. Faiz Ahmad Faiz would spend four years in various prisons, moved from cell to cell because the government feared his influence even behind bars. Yet these years of imprisonment produced some of his most celebrated poetry—verses that would eventually earn him a Nobel Prize nomination and make him, in the words of Russian admirers, "our poet."

This is the story of a man who wrote love poems that doubled as revolutionary manifestos, who served the British Empire as a decorated military officer before becoming one of Pakistan's most prominent Marxists, and whose words still echo through protest movements across South Asia today.

The Making of a Polyglot Poet

Faiz was born on February 13, 1911, in a small village in Punjab that would later be renamed Faiz Nagar in his honor. His family belonged to the Tataley clan of Jats, an agricultural community with deep roots in the region.

His father's story reads like a novel in itself. Sultan Muhammad Khan began life as a shepherd's son, descended from Afghan migrants. Through sheer determination, this peasant's child taught himself enough to eventually study law at Cambridge University. By the time Faiz was born, Khan had become a prominent barrister working for the British government and had published a biography of an Afghan emir. He spoke seven languages: Urdu, Punjabi, Persian, Arabic, English, Pashto, and Russian.

The elder Khan moved in rarefied intellectual circles. He was known to participate in gatherings with Muhammad Iqbal—the philosopher-poet whose ideas would later inspire the creation of Pakistan itself. Young Faiz grew up in a home where poets and writers regularly assembled to discuss literature and ideas. This was his inheritance: a father who had climbed from shepherd boy to Cambridge-educated barrister, and an intellectual atmosphere saturated with poetry and progressive thought.

A Brief Encounter with the Madrasa

Following Muslim tradition, Faiz's family initially sent him to study Islamic texts at the local mosque. His teacher was Muhammad Ibrahim Mir Sialkoti, a scholar of the Ahl-i Hadith tradition—a reformist movement within Sunni Islam that emphasized returning to the original texts of the faith rather than following later legal interpretations.

The arrangement didn't last long.

Faiz arrived at the madrasa in neat clothes, transported by horse-drawn carriage. The other students sat on straw mats on the floor, children from impoverished families who found this wealthy newcomer's presence uncomfortable. They ridiculed him. According to his close friend Dr. Ayub Mirza, Faiz came home one day and told his father flatly that he would not be returning.

His father didn't argue. Instead, he enrolled Faiz at the Scotch Mission School, run by a local British family. This small decision—pulling a young Muslim boy from religious education and placing him in a British-run institution—would shape everything that followed.

Faiz nearly completed hifz, the memorization of the entire Quran, but abandoned it due to eyesight problems. He would later express regret about leaving this study unfinished. Throughout his life, religious imagery and references would permeate his poetry, even as he embraced Marxism. This tension—between the spiritual tradition of his upbringing and the materialist philosophy he adopted—gave his work a distinctive quality that resonated with readers across ideological lines.

The Education of a Revolutionary

At Government College in Lahore, Faiz fell under the influence of teachers who had shaped the previous generation of South Asian thinkers. Professor Mir Hassan, who taught Arabic, had also been a teacher of Muhammad Iqbal. This created an intellectual lineage: the same hands that had guided Iqbal now guided Faiz, though the two poets would take their shared influences in quite different directions.

Faiz earned his bachelor's degree with honors in Arabic in 1926. He continued to a master's degree in English literature, completing his thesis on the poetry of Robert Browning in 1932. The same year, he finished a first-class degree at Punjab University's Oriental College.

It was during these college years that Faiz met the men who would redirect his life toward communism: M.N. Roy and Muzaffar Ahmed. Roy was one of the founders of the Communist Party of India and had been a delegate to the Communist International in Moscow. Ahmed was another founding member of Indian communism. Through them, Faiz joined the Communist Party.

By the time he completed his education, Faiz could write and think in Urdu, English, Arabic, French, and Persian. He was a product of both Islamic learning and British colonial education, of classical poetry and modernist ideas, of spiritual tradition and revolutionary politics. This unusual combination would define his voice.

The Progressive Writers' Movement

In 1936, something remarkable happened in South Asian literature. A group of writers founded the Progressive Writers' Movement, dedicated to using literature as a tool for social change. They rejected art for art's sake. Literature, they believed, should address poverty, inequality, colonialism, and the struggles of ordinary people.

Faiz was appointed the movement's first secretary by his fellow Marxist Sajjad Zaheer. The movement would become one of the most influential literary forces in twentieth-century South Asia, spanning what would become India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Its members wrote in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and other languages, united by their commitment to social justice and their belief that literature could change society.

In 1938, Faiz became editor-in-chief of "Adab-e-Latif," an Urdu literary magazine whose title translates roughly as "Belles Letters" or "Fine Literature." He held this position until 1946. In 1941, he published his first collection of poetry, "Naqsh-e-Faryadi"—"Imprints" in English.

The Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who became a close friend of Faiz, once said something revealing about him: "In Faiz's autobiography... is his poetry, the rest is just a footnote." This was both a compliment to Faiz's verse and a comment on how Faiz understood himself. He was, above all, a poet. Everything else—the politics, the prison terms, the exile—was context for the poems.

The Soldier-Poet

Here is one of the stranger chapters in Faiz's life: the communist poet became a decorated officer in the British Indian Army.

On May 11, 1942, with World War Two raging across multiple continents, Faiz was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 18th Royal Garhwal Rifles. His advancement was swift. Within two months, he was acting captain. By the end of 1943, he was acting major. By late 1944, he held the local rank of lieutenant-colonel, working as an assistant director of public relations for the North-Western Army.

For his service, Faiz was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (Military Division) in the 1945 New Year Honours. The communist revolutionary received a medal from the British crown.

During this period, Faiz served alongside Akbar Khan, a left-wing military officer who would later become a general in the Pakistani Army—and who would soon drag Faiz into the most dangerous episode of his life.

After the war ended, Faiz stayed briefly in the army, reaching the rank of acting lieutenant-colonel in 1945. But in 1947, the world Faiz knew shattered and reformed. The British Raj ended. India was partitioned. Pakistan came into existence. Faiz chose the new nation.

Then came the 1947 Kashmir War between India and Pakistan. Whatever Faiz witnessed during that conflict convinced him to leave military life entirely. He submitted his resignation and turned to journalism.

The Editor and the Unions

In 1947, Faiz became editor of the Pakistan Times, one of the country's leading English-language newspapers. In 1948, he became vice-president of the Pakistan Trade Union Federation, known by its initials PTUF. He was building parallel careers in journalism and labor organizing, both platforms for advancing progressive ideas.

Faiz believed in what he called internationalism—the philosophy of the global village, decades before that phrase became a cliché. In 1950, he joined Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan's delegation to the United States, leading a business delegation and attending meetings at the International Labour Organization (that's the ILO, a United Nations agency focused on labor standards) in San Francisco. He led PTUF delegations to Geneva and became active in the World Peace Council, an international organization that critics called a Soviet front but which Faiz saw as a genuine vehicle for global cooperation.

Through all of this, Faiz remained a communist. In 1947, he had co-founded the Communist Party of Pakistan along with Sajjad Zaheer and Jalaludin Abdur Rahim. His ties to the Soviet Union were open and longstanding. The Soviets would eventually call him "our poet."

But his popularity never translated into political power. As one observer noted, Faiz and other pro-communists "had no political role in the country, despite their academic brilliance." They were influential in literary circles, in universities, in newspapers—but not in the halls of government. The Communist Party was banned, operating in shadows, and Faiz carefully navigated around this prohibition.

Years later, when an interviewer directly asked Faiz if he was a communist, he gave a characteristic response: "No. I am not. A communist is a person who is a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. The party is banned in our country. So how can I be a communist?" It was a lawyer's answer—technically accurate, philosophically evasive, and delivered, one imagines, with a slight smile.

The Rawalpindi Conspiracy

In 1948, Pakistan and India had fought their first war over Kashmir. Pakistan failed to capture the region it claimed, and this failure frustrated military leaders deeply. Even Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, reportedly had serious doubts about Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan's ability to protect the nation's integrity.

Within this atmosphere of military disappointment and political tension, a conspiracy took shape.

The plot's architect was Major-General Akbar Khan, Chief of General Staff—the same left-wing officer Faiz had served alongside during World War Two. On February 23, 1951, a secret meeting convened at General Akbar's home. In attendance were communist officers, Communist Party members including Sajjad Zaheer, and Faiz.

What exactly was discussed? Accounts vary. General Akbar allegedly assured Faiz and Zaheer that under a new government, the Communist Party would be allowed to function openly and participate in elections. But according to Zafar Poshni, a communist who spoke about the meeting decades later in 2011, "no agreement was reached, the plan was disapproved, the communists weren't ready to accept the General's words, and the participants dispersed without meeting again."

It didn't matter. The next morning, one of the communist officers defected to the Inter-Services Intelligence (the ISI, Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency). He revealed everything. When word reached the Prime Minister, orders went out for mass arrests.

Before any coup could be initiated, General Akbar and the other conspirators were arrested. So was Faiz.

Four Years in Prison

A military court sentenced Faiz to four years' imprisonment. Because of his "influential personality," the government kept moving him between facilities—Montgomery Central Jail, Central Prison Karachi, Central Jail Mianwali—perhaps fearing what might happen if he stayed too long in any one place and built relationships with guards and fellow prisoners.

His defense counsel was Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a socialist politician who would later become Prime Minister of Pakistan himself. The case became a cause célèbre among progressives throughout South Asia and beyond.

Prison, paradoxically, was productive. Faiz continued to write, and some of his most celebrated poems emerged from these years of confinement. He wrote about separation and longing, about dawn and prison bars, about the beloved who might be a person or might be freedom itself. His prison poetry acquired a double meaning: every love poem could be read as a political statement, every political statement as a love poem.

Finally, on April 2, 1955, Prime Minister Suhrawardy—the same man who had defended Faiz in court—commuted his sentence. Faiz left for London.

But freedom was temporary. In 1958, Faiz returned to Pakistan only to be detained again by President Iskander Mirza, who accused him of publishing pro-communist ideas and advocating for a pro-Moscow government. This time, his release came through the intervention of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who lobbied the military dictator Ayub Khan on Faiz's behalf. In 1960, Faiz's sentence was commuted, and he left for Moscow, eventually settling in London.

The Later Years: Bhutto, Zia, and Exile

In 1964, Faiz finally returned to Pakistan for good, settling in Karachi. He was appointed Rector of Abdullah Haroon College and became vice-president of the Pakistan Arts Council, an organization he had been involved with since 1947.

Then came Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Bhutto was a charismatic democratic socialist who served as Foreign Minister under Ayub Khan before eventually becoming Prime Minister himself. He was drawn to Faiz—the poet's fame, his progressive credentials, his literary stature all aligned with Bhutto's vision for Pakistan. In 1965, Bhutto brought Faiz into government in an honorary capacity.

The relationship between the politician and the poet represented something about Pakistani society: the way literature and politics intertwined, the respect accorded to poets that would be unimaginable in many other countries. Faiz was not just a writer; he was a public figure whose endorsement carried weight.

But the Bhutto years ended in tragedy. In 1977, General Zia ul-Haq seized power in a military coup. Two years later, in 1979, Bhutto was executed after a controversial trial on murder charges that many considered politically motivated.

Faiz exiled himself to Beirut. He could not remain in a Pakistan ruled by the man who had killed his friend and patron. Lebanon was in the midst of its own civil war, but Faiz stayed there, writing and waiting.

The Marxist Muslim

How do you reconcile Marxism—which holds religion to be, in Marx's famous phrase, "the opium of the people"—with Islam? How does a poet raised on Quranic study and Persian devotional verse embrace a philosophy rooted in materialism and atheism?

Faiz navigated this tension throughout his life, and critics have interpreted his journey differently.

Some see him as having taken Marxism where Muhammad Iqbal left it. Iqbal, remember, was the poet-philosopher who inspired the idea of Pakistan itself. He drew on both Islamic thought and Western philosophy, calling for Muslim revival and self-determination. Faiz, in this reading, took Iqbal's concern for social justice and pushed it further left, relaying these ideas to a younger generation "more open to change, more receptive to egalitarianism, and with greater concern for the poor."

Literary critic Fateh Muhammad Malik offers a more complex interpretation. He argues that while Faiz began as a secular Marxist, his later work shows increasing religious resonance. His poems became more Islamic in tone over the years. Malik suggests that Faiz eventually embraced something like Islamic socialism—a fusion of Marxist economics with Islamic ethics. He points to Faiz's endorsement of the 1979 Iranian Revolution as evidence that the poet ultimately aimed for an Islamic, not purely secular, transformation of society.

This may be reading too much into the evidence. But the tension is real and unresolved. Faiz was a friend of the atheist Soviet Union, yet his poetry is saturated with religious imagery. He was a Marxist who expressed regret about abandoning his Quranic memorization. He criticized religious conservatives while drawing on spiritual traditions they claimed to represent.

Perhaps the most honest assessment is that Faiz, like many thoughtful people, held multiple commitments that didn't resolve into a neat system. He was a Muslim by upbringing and identity, a Marxist by intellectual conviction, a humanist by temperament. His poetry drew on all these sources without privileging any single one.

Recognition and Legacy

In 1962, the Soviet Union awarded Faiz the Lenin Peace Prize. He was the first Asian poet to receive this honor—the communist world's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. He was also nominated for the actual Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.

The Soviets' embrace of Faiz was genuine. They translated his work, celebrated him in Moscow, called him "our poet." This reflected both Cold War cultural politics—the Soviets were eager to claim Third World intellectuals—and authentic appreciation for his verse. Faiz's themes of revolution, workers' rights, and resistance to imperialism resonated with Soviet ideology, but his poetry transcended propaganda. Even critics of communism could appreciate the craft.

In 1984, Faiz died in Lahore. He was 73 years old.

Six years after his death, in 1990, the Pakistani government conferred upon him the Nishan-e-Imtiaz—the "Order of Excellence," the highest civil award in Pakistan. The communist who had been imprisoned for conspiracy against the state received his country's supreme honor posthumously. This was fitting: Faiz was always too important to ignore, even when he was too dangerous to accept.

The Poet Who Couldn't Be Silenced

What made Faiz so threatening to authorities that they imprisoned him twice, exiled him repeatedly, and moved him from jail to jail to prevent him from gaining influence even among prisoners?

The answer lies in his particular genius: the ability to write love poetry that was also political poetry, and political poetry that was also love poetry. When Faiz wrote about dawn, he might be describing a literal sunrise or the coming revolution. When he wrote about the beloved, she might be a woman or freedom itself. When he wrote about separation, he might mean romantic loss or exile from his homeland.

This ambiguity wasn't evasion—it was depth. His poems operated on multiple levels simultaneously, speaking to readers regardless of their politics. A conservative could appreciate the craft; a revolutionary could hear the call to action. The verses worked both ways.

Faiz also wrote in a tradition that South Asian audiences understood intimately. Urdu poetry has long conventions—the ghazal form, the figures of the lover and beloved, the imagery of wine and gardens and nightingales—that Faiz mastered and subverted. He used classical forms to deliver modern messages. He honored tradition while undermining complacency.

And he never compromised. Despite threats from right-wing parties, despite imprisonment, despite exile, Faiz continued advocating for workers' rights and women's rights, for socialism and internationalism. He was, as one biographer noted, "a progressive who remained faithful to Marxism."

The Double Life of Words

Consider what it means to be a poet in a society that takes poetry seriously. In Pakistan and India, poets are public figures. Their verses are recited at gatherings, set to music, quoted in political speeches. A powerful poem can move crowds in ways that speeches cannot.

Faiz understood this power. He used it carefully, crafting verses that could evade censorship through their ambiguity while still communicating clear messages to those who knew how to listen. Prison bars become metaphors for oppression. The absent beloved becomes the revolution that hasn't arrived. Dawn becomes the promise of change.

This is why authoritarian regimes feared him. You can arrest a politician and silence a newspaper, but how do you arrest a metaphor? How do you censor a love poem that might or might not be about overthrowing the government?

Faiz's technique offers a lesson about the relationship between art and power. The most effective resistance literature isn't always explicit. Sometimes it's more dangerous to write a beautiful poem that carries multiple meanings than to write a manifesto that says exactly what it means. The manifesto can be banned; the poem circulates, memorized and sung, passed from person to person in forms that no censor can control.

A Footnote Becomes History

Remember what Yevtushenko said: in Faiz's autobiography, "his poetry is the autobiography, the rest is just a footnote."

But what footnotes they are. A peasant's grandson who studied at Cambridge. A British military officer who became a communist revolutionary. A Nobel nominee who spent years in prison. A Marxist whose poetry echoes with Quranic rhythms. A man whose country imprisoned him, exiled him, and finally gave him its highest honor.

The footnotes, it turns out, are the context that makes the poetry intelligible. Faiz wrote out of a specific life, a specific history, specific struggles. His verses about dawn meant more because he had watched so many dawns from prison cells. His poems about the beloved meant more because he had been separated from everything he loved—his family, his country, his cause.

Today, Faiz's words still appear at protests across South Asia. When demonstrators in India or Pakistan want to express resistance to authority, they often turn to his verses. The communist poet who couldn't hold political office in his lifetime has become a permanent part of his region's political vocabulary.

That is the strangest power of poetry: it outlasts the regimes that tried to suppress it. The governments that imprisoned Faiz are gone. The military dictators who exiled him are remembered, if at all, as villains. But the verses persist, recited by people who weren't born when Faiz died, in causes he never imagined.

"Purify your hearts," Faiz once said, "so you can save the country." The country he wanted to save looked different from the one that exists today. But the call to purification, to commitment, to solidarity with the poor and oppressed—that call still echoes, carried forward in the rhythm of his lines.