k k aziz -khalid ahmed
The unspoken ideology of Pakistan is a visceral disregard for learning. The state has thought of war more often than knowledge. Its people are mostly illiterate and those who are literate have grown up ingesting the lethal jahiliyya of state indoctrination. Charlatans rule the collective mind in the name of religion. Without a base of genuine shared knowledge Pakistanis have learned to agree on very little. It is a society that has begun tribalising itself back into the Dark Ages after celebrating its fifty years in existence in 1997. It doesn’t write back to KK Aziz. The truth is it has no answer to give. It is just that KK Aziz has outlived his era. Pakistan is simply waiting for him to die. That’s why no one writes back to him.
No one writes back to KK Aziz
Khaled Ahmed’s A n a l y s i s
Prof KK Aziz’s two-volume study of Islamic art is finally out. Each volume is over 600 ages and the book is in a larger-than-usual format to accommodate thousands of reprints and photographs that he has decorated the volumes with. He says it is, in many ways, the first time someone has taken a closer look at the inspiration behind Muslim painting, architecture, calligraphy, weaving (carpets), etc, at this scale; although he recognises the earlier studies by Guenon, Schuon, Burkhardt and Nasr. It took him 24 years to complete a work that was touched off inside him by the Cordoba mosque which he visited in Spain in 1980.
Pakistan’s greatest living historian with 37 works in print is a prisoner of proof. He writes nothing without proof, which he usually carries with him – years of diligent copying and photocopying from the libraries of the world. Embedded deep inside his positivist science, he is also an intensely emotional person. When he fell ill and had to be hospitalised in August 2004 – and noone came to his help – he had tears in his eyes. But he was more moved by the way he was treated by the state of Pakistan in connection with his magnum opus The Meaning of Islamic Art (Al Faisal Publishers).
KK Aziz’s peripatetic passions: He was subjected to excruciating emotional stress by General Zia after he came to power and found Aziz as the head of the National Commission of Historical and Cultural Research in Islamabad poring over the preparatory works of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report. He was hounded out of the country in 1978. He found a teaching assignment (Religion Politics and Society in Asia) in Khartoum (Sudan) but found the library in the university there completely inadequate. He was lecturing on South Asia in Heidelberg in 1982 when he began his contact with global scholarship on Islamic art. He spent six months studying the subject, then luckily moved to Heidelberg from Khartoum in 1983. He discovered that some of the best European minds had been attracted to Islamic art.
Aziz was drawn not only to the symbolic aspects of Islamic art; his grasp of world history also gave him an insight into its functional-social aspects. He was taking notes at feverish speed. He came back from Heidelberg in 1984 only to realise that some of the references needed revision, but was soon relieved to find that he had been asked by Heidelberg to come for another stint as a visiting professor in 1987. That clinched it, and he finished his manuscript in 1989. He was looking around for a publisher when in 1990 the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London invited him to work there. (The result of that was two big volumes on Aga Khan the Third with Kegan Paul Publishers.) He was in the neighbourhood of Cambridge where he could indulge his passion for Islamic art. He returned to Pakistan after his tenure at the Aga Khan Institute and rewrote the Islamic art manuscript till the new version was complete in 1994.
No one interested in Islamic art: Since he had a big work in hand, Aziz thought he could perhaps persuade someone in Pakistan to fund its typing. No one came forward despite several appeals made by him to the various powerful lobbies pretending to care for culture. He was no flash in the pan. His work was known in South Asia and all over the world, but still there were no takers. He typed the nearly 2,000 large pages of it sitting up in front of his word processor, working six hours a day in his late seventies. In 1994 when he offered the book to Ms Kaniz Yusuf then heading the National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research in Islamabad it was immediately accepted with the remark that no Pakistani scholar had even attempted such a work. The Institute signed a legal contract with the author on the publication of the volumes.
He was in England in 1994 when he received the communication from the Institute that it was unable to get his 300-page bibliography (volume three) typed because no typist was available to the Institute then in the midst of preparing an 8-volume history of Pakistan by the year 1997. Aziz wrote back asking for the notes on bibliography to him in England so that he could get them typed there. No reply to this was received from Islamabad. One director of the Institute, Hamadani, wrote him in 1966 that he had taken over as director but said nothing about the book. Then in 1998 some officer of he Institute wrote to say that poor Mr Hamadani had died but that he could not say anything on his own about the book.
Institute of Historical Research rejects history: In 1999 another letter from the Institute said that no new director of the Institute had been appointed. Aziz wrote back saying he no longer trusted that the Institute would abide by the contract it had signed with him and so he wanted his manuscript back. To this there was a deafening silence. He asked the Institute to approach the Ministry of Education in order to get the manuscript released or at least the handwritten bibliography on cards of which the author had kept no copy. No reply. By the beginning of 2000 Aziz was back in Lahore and wrote once again to the Institute, but to no avail. So he wrote to the much talked about education minister Ms Zubaida Jalal, requesting her to look into the matter.
He told Ms Jalal that his book had gathered dust for five years at the Institute which was not willing even to answer letters begging it to return his bibliography. He wanted her to conduct an inquiry into why the institute and the education secretary himself had not replied to his letters. More than a month passed. Ms Jalal did not deign to reply. Perhaps she was busy with greater issues of the nation’s education. He wrote her another letter asking her at least to return the bibliography, but she did not reply. Then he wrote to his old friend and renowned lawyer, Sharifuddin Pirzada, and put the case in his hands. Pirzada at least wrote back saying he would ask the education minister to abide by the contract signed with the author of the book. Nothing came of that promise too.
The Minister has no time: In 2003, Aziz wrote to the new director of the Institute, Dr Riaz Ahmad, telling him that since he was now going to publish the book himself, the Institute should kindly return his hand-written bibliography running to approximately 300 pages. Dr Riaz Ahmad did not reply either. Finally letting go of the matter and reconciling himself to printing the book without the bibliography, he wondered why the government of Pakistan was so averse to seeing his work on Islamic art in print. Anyone who gets to see his finally published two volumes today will wonder too. Ms Kaniz Yusuf, who contracted the book, could have told him the truth after being relieved of her job at the Institute as a PPP protégée, but she simply forgot about a person who is easily the most important living Pakistani in the discipline of history.
The saga of the book on Islamic art reminds one of what happened to KK Aziz’s father, Sheikh Abdul Aziz who died in 1965. (He was one of the three ‘sheikh’ roommates in England studying for law in 1905; the others were Allama Iqbal and Abdul Qadir.) Sheikh Abdul Aziz was a scholar in his own right who wrote on history and literature but whose work was neglected. He got his text of Hir ready but no one was interested in publishing his lifetime’s work. Finally, Dr Muhammad Baqir in Lahore took it and published a defective version, removing from it Sheikh Abdul Aziz’s scholarly introduction, which he (Dr Baqir) later published separately as his own. Prime minister Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, his old pupil, promised to help but forgot. In Pakistan people in power forget scholars. And Pakistan is being punished for their philistinism.
Books inside KK Aziz: KK Aziz has a large number of books inside him, struggling to see print, but the man is in declining health and no one is willing to help. (The writer got someone to approach Governor Punjab Khalid Maqbool with the request that he be made professor emeritus and given an honorarium to enable him to get his books out; but nothing as usual happened.) His books in the press are: In search of Islam in an Islamic State: Pakistan, 1947-1997, Toronto University Press, Toronto. The Aziz Ahmad Memorial Lecture delivered at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Toronto, in September 1999.
A Bibliography of Islamic Art, National Institute of Historical & Cultural Research, Islamabad. Correspondence: Letters written to and by K. K. Aziz, 2 volumes, AlFaisal Nashiran, Lahore. Sarod-i-Harf: Urdu Sha’iri ka Dusra Intikhab, AI-Faisal Nashiran, Lahore. Sukhanha-i-Guftani: Intikhab-i-Shir-i-Farsi, Al-Faisal Nashiran, Lahore. Autobiography, Volume I.
Before he is struck down by illness, caused by the back-breaking secretarial work he has to do to put his own books together, KK Aziz might succeed in completing some of the books that are in the works: Autobiography. Vol. II. The Punjab Academia: Teaching Staff of the University of the Punjab and the Colleges of the Province, 1864-1947, 4 volumes. Muslim India at Cambridge, 1864-1947. Islamic Scholarship at Cambridge: Three Studies. Ahmed Shah Bokhari: A Study. Some Notes towards the Making of a Dictionary of Muslim Indian National Biography, 1800-1947, estimated 6 volumes. Islamic Poetry: Its Place in Muslim Civilization estimated 2 volumes. The Mosque of Cordoba: A Celebration of Islamic Culture in Spain, estimated 2 volumes. Shorter Works of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, estimated 2 volumes. Who Was Who of the Islamic World, 632-2000. The Murder of Heritage: What we have done to Our Historical Legacy. Punjabi Language and Culture: An Obituary Notice.
But he might not. And who cares?
The unspoken ideology of Pakistan is a visceral disregard for learning. The state has thought of war more often than knowledge. Its people are mostly illiterate and those who are literate have grown up ingesting the lethal jahiliyya of state indoctrination. Charlatans rule the collective mind in the name of religion. Without a base of genuine shared knowledge Pakistanis have learned to agree on very little. It is a society that has begun tribalising itself back into the Dark Ages after celebrating its fifty years in existence in 1997. It doesn’t write back to KK Aziz. The truth is it has no answer to give. It is just that KK Aziz has outlived his era. Pakistan is simply waiting for him to die. That’s why no one writes back to him.
No one writes back to KK Aziz
Khaled Ahmed’s A n a l y s i s
Prof KK Aziz’s two-volume study of Islamic art is finally out. Each volume is over 600 ages and the book is in a larger-than-usual format to accommodate thousands of reprints and photographs that he has decorated the volumes with. He says it is, in many ways, the first time someone has taken a closer look at the inspiration behind Muslim painting, architecture, calligraphy, weaving (carpets), etc, at this scale; although he recognises the earlier studies by Guenon, Schuon, Burkhardt and Nasr. It took him 24 years to complete a work that was touched off inside him by the Cordoba mosque which he visited in Spain in 1980.
Pakistan’s greatest living historian with 37 works in print is a prisoner of proof. He writes nothing without proof, which he usually carries with him – years of diligent copying and photocopying from the libraries of the world. Embedded deep inside his positivist science, he is also an intensely emotional person. When he fell ill and had to be hospitalised in August 2004 – and noone came to his help – he had tears in his eyes. But he was more moved by the way he was treated by the state of Pakistan in connection with his magnum opus The Meaning of Islamic Art (Al Faisal Publishers).
KK Aziz’s peripatetic passions: He was subjected to excruciating emotional stress by General Zia after he came to power and found Aziz as the head of the National Commission of Historical and Cultural Research in Islamabad poring over the preparatory works of the Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report. He was hounded out of the country in 1978. He found a teaching assignment (Religion Politics and Society in Asia) in Khartoum (Sudan) but found the library in the university there completely inadequate. He was lecturing on South Asia in Heidelberg in 1982 when he began his contact with global scholarship on Islamic art. He spent six months studying the subject, then luckily moved to Heidelberg from Khartoum in 1983. He discovered that some of the best European minds had been attracted to Islamic art.
Aziz was drawn not only to the symbolic aspects of Islamic art; his grasp of world history also gave him an insight into its functional-social aspects. He was taking notes at feverish speed. He came back from Heidelberg in 1984 only to realise that some of the references needed revision, but was soon relieved to find that he had been asked by Heidelberg to come for another stint as a visiting professor in 1987. That clinched it, and he finished his manuscript in 1989. He was looking around for a publisher when in 1990 the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London invited him to work there. (The result of that was two big volumes on Aga Khan the Third with Kegan Paul Publishers.) He was in the neighbourhood of Cambridge where he could indulge his passion for Islamic art. He returned to Pakistan after his tenure at the Aga Khan Institute and rewrote the Islamic art manuscript till the new version was complete in 1994.
No one interested in Islamic art: Since he had a big work in hand, Aziz thought he could perhaps persuade someone in Pakistan to fund its typing. No one came forward despite several appeals made by him to the various powerful lobbies pretending to care for culture. He was no flash in the pan. His work was known in South Asia and all over the world, but still there were no takers. He typed the nearly 2,000 large pages of it sitting up in front of his word processor, working six hours a day in his late seventies. In 1994 when he offered the book to Ms Kaniz Yusuf then heading the National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research in Islamabad it was immediately accepted with the remark that no Pakistani scholar had even attempted such a work. The Institute signed a legal contract with the author on the publication of the volumes.
He was in England in 1994 when he received the communication from the Institute that it was unable to get his 300-page bibliography (volume three) typed because no typist was available to the Institute then in the midst of preparing an 8-volume history of Pakistan by the year 1997. Aziz wrote back asking for the notes on bibliography to him in England so that he could get them typed there. No reply to this was received from Islamabad. One director of the Institute, Hamadani, wrote him in 1966 that he had taken over as director but said nothing about the book. Then in 1998 some officer of he Institute wrote to say that poor Mr Hamadani had died but that he could not say anything on his own about the book.
Institute of Historical Research rejects history: In 1999 another letter from the Institute said that no new director of the Institute had been appointed. Aziz wrote back saying he no longer trusted that the Institute would abide by the contract it had signed with him and so he wanted his manuscript back. To this there was a deafening silence. He asked the Institute to approach the Ministry of Education in order to get the manuscript released or at least the handwritten bibliography on cards of which the author had kept no copy. No reply. By the beginning of 2000 Aziz was back in Lahore and wrote once again to the Institute, but to no avail. So he wrote to the much talked about education minister Ms Zubaida Jalal, requesting her to look into the matter.
He told Ms Jalal that his book had gathered dust for five years at the Institute which was not willing even to answer letters begging it to return his bibliography. He wanted her to conduct an inquiry into why the institute and the education secretary himself had not replied to his letters. More than a month passed. Ms Jalal did not deign to reply. Perhaps she was busy with greater issues of the nation’s education. He wrote her another letter asking her at least to return the bibliography, but she did not reply. Then he wrote to his old friend and renowned lawyer, Sharifuddin Pirzada, and put the case in his hands. Pirzada at least wrote back saying he would ask the education minister to abide by the contract signed with the author of the book. Nothing came of that promise too.
The Minister has no time: In 2003, Aziz wrote to the new director of the Institute, Dr Riaz Ahmad, telling him that since he was now going to publish the book himself, the Institute should kindly return his hand-written bibliography running to approximately 300 pages. Dr Riaz Ahmad did not reply either. Finally letting go of the matter and reconciling himself to printing the book without the bibliography, he wondered why the government of Pakistan was so averse to seeing his work on Islamic art in print. Anyone who gets to see his finally published two volumes today will wonder too. Ms Kaniz Yusuf, who contracted the book, could have told him the truth after being relieved of her job at the Institute as a PPP protégée, but she simply forgot about a person who is easily the most important living Pakistani in the discipline of history.
The saga of the book on Islamic art reminds one of what happened to KK Aziz’s father, Sheikh Abdul Aziz who died in 1965. (He was one of the three ‘sheikh’ roommates in England studying for law in 1905; the others were Allama Iqbal and Abdul Qadir.) Sheikh Abdul Aziz was a scholar in his own right who wrote on history and literature but whose work was neglected. He got his text of Hir ready but no one was interested in publishing his lifetime’s work. Finally, Dr Muhammad Baqir in Lahore took it and published a defective version, removing from it Sheikh Abdul Aziz’s scholarly introduction, which he (Dr Baqir) later published separately as his own. Prime minister Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, his old pupil, promised to help but forgot. In Pakistan people in power forget scholars. And Pakistan is being punished for their philistinism.
Books inside KK Aziz: KK Aziz has a large number of books inside him, struggling to see print, but the man is in declining health and no one is willing to help. (The writer got someone to approach Governor Punjab Khalid Maqbool with the request that he be made professor emeritus and given an honorarium to enable him to get his books out; but nothing as usual happened.) His books in the press are: In search of Islam in an Islamic State: Pakistan, 1947-1997, Toronto University Press, Toronto. The Aziz Ahmad Memorial Lecture delivered at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Toronto, in September 1999.
A Bibliography of Islamic Art, National Institute of Historical & Cultural Research, Islamabad. Correspondence: Letters written to and by K. K. Aziz, 2 volumes, AlFaisal Nashiran, Lahore. Sarod-i-Harf: Urdu Sha’iri ka Dusra Intikhab, AI-Faisal Nashiran, Lahore. Sukhanha-i-Guftani: Intikhab-i-Shir-i-Farsi, Al-Faisal Nashiran, Lahore. Autobiography, Volume I.
Before he is struck down by illness, caused by the back-breaking secretarial work he has to do to put his own books together, KK Aziz might succeed in completing some of the books that are in the works: Autobiography. Vol. II. The Punjab Academia: Teaching Staff of the University of the Punjab and the Colleges of the Province, 1864-1947, 4 volumes. Muslim India at Cambridge, 1864-1947. Islamic Scholarship at Cambridge: Three Studies. Ahmed Shah Bokhari: A Study. Some Notes towards the Making of a Dictionary of Muslim Indian National Biography, 1800-1947, estimated 6 volumes. Islamic Poetry: Its Place in Muslim Civilization estimated 2 volumes. The Mosque of Cordoba: A Celebration of Islamic Culture in Spain, estimated 2 volumes. Shorter Works of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, estimated 2 volumes. Who Was Who of the Islamic World, 632-2000. The Murder of Heritage: What we have done to Our Historical Legacy. Punjabi Language and Culture: An Obituary Notice.
But he might not. And who cares?
The unspoken ideology of Pakistan is a visceral disregard for learning. The state has thought of war more often than knowledge. Its people are mostly illiterate and those who are literate have grown up ingesting the lethal jahiliyya of state indoctrination. Charlatans rule the collective mind in the name of religion. Without a base of genuine shared knowledge Pakistanis have learned to agree on very little. It is a society that has begun tribalising itself back into the Dark Ages after celebrating its fifty years in existence in 1997. It doesn’t write back to KK Aziz. The truth is it has no answer to give. It is just that KK Aziz has outlived his era. Pakistan is simply waiting for him to die. That’s why no one writes back to him.
posted by temporal at 11/01/2005
2 Comments:
Where can I purchase a copy of Hir published by Muhammad Baqir. I would appreciate your help. Best regards, Harpreet Singh
Harpreet:
sorry bud, i don't know
i can only offer a suggestion....write to Khaled Ahmed (the writer of this article care of the friday times, lahore and ask him this query)
the friday times group is alos associated with vanguard publications..
Post a Comment
<< Home