Baithak Desi Jun 22: Alys Faiz, Kaiser Haq, Ibn Khaldun, News & Views, Cartoons

Alys faiz's story is the story of a lifetime of commitment. From being a young woman who wanted to fight alongside the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, she became the woman behind revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz; Alys now finds herself still angry at the social injustice in the world, still fighting on behalf of the oppressed in her regular columns for Viewpoint and She, as well as in her work with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and other organisations. Alys campaigned for the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance in 1961 and for peace in the Gulf thirty years later, in 1991; Alys collected signatures for peace in 1952 and again for peace in Afghanistan in 1988. A single interview cannot possibly do justice to her extraordinary, varied and active life. Hers has above all been a challenging life, involving adaptation to an alien culture and society; living with a man whose greatness and political commitment led her to make huge personal sacrifices; carrying on his work in the loneliness of bereavement.REVIEW: The force behind Faiz



A Professor of English at Dhaka University, Kaiser Haq is the leading English language poet of Bangladesh. It is good to see that he has brought out a new collection Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems 1966-2006 which also reveals his development as a writer. The book is divided into several sections, but the most rewarding is the substantial first part, ‘New Poems 2002-2006’ which is replete with spectacular imagery.

In ‘Windows’ he writes of an urban landscape with ‘buildings like ghost ships/in the gathering dark’; in the vivid ‘Monsoon Poem with Prose Postscript’, he says ‘One could imagine Purgatory/a vast shanty town’ as torrential rain beats down and ‘moist air wraps/you like a winding sheet.’ While ‘Battambang’ is one of the most powerful and moving poems in this collection, it conjures up a terrifying desolate landscape and a madwoman who is the embodiment of both sorrow and hope. Reviewed by Muneeza Shamsie


The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History;
By Ibn Khaldun; Princeton University Press 2005;
Pp465; Price $26.95 paperback;
Available at bookstores in Pakistan

We all know that Ibn Khaldun gave the concept of asabiya, or group feeling, to the science of history writing; but what we don’t know is that he applied it to everything that ever happened in human civilisation. And the wonder of it is that the theory works! As a Muslim and as a trained jurist (qazi) he derived it from the principles of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). The principle of fiqh he took was ijma (collective opinion) and secularised it, so to speak, into asabiya. He was a great philologist and was a lover of Arabic. He ended up doing with asabiya, a negative word, what Iqbal did with khudi (self), equally a negative word. Like khudi in Iqbal, asabiya is the key to Ibn Khaldun’s thought. Book review: Khaldun’s doctrine of ‘group feeling’ —by Khaled Ahmed


News & Views

Minocheher Pestonjee Bhandara (March 14, 1938 — June 15, 2008). Cowasjee
“I have so much stuff in my head,” -Anjum Niaz on Bhandara
Kala Kola Klub Kontinues —Khalid Hasan
News kay mutabiq: MD PTV sacked, new chairman takes over

Maxim - Today's Cartoon