Sunday reads

I recently read a piece I’d like to share: about the life of Bacha Khan and how he initiated an anticolonial school, the Azad School in Utmanzai, in 1921. It was a Pashto-medium institution where Manmohan Singh, the former Prime Minister of India, also studied. Nehru and Gandhi visited the school as well — Nehru in 1937 and Gandhi in 1938 — delivering speeches and spending time there. Due to his dissent against the British, he had to spend about 37 years in jail out of his 93-year life.

The Genius of Bacha Khan

“Most geniuses have one masterwork for which they are famous.  For Che and Fidel, that work was surely the Cuban Revolution and its international humanism, just as it was for Lenin, the Russian.  For CLR James, we can list “The Black Jacobins” as an extraordinary work of genius, as well as the underground Marxist group he co-led, known as the Johnson-Forest tendency.  For Selma James and many other women of the 1970s Marxist Feminist movement, it was about recognizing the economic contributions of housework and children and establishing organizations that advocated for fair compensation for caring and reproductive labor.  Their slogan, ‘invest in caring, not war’, remains the blueprint. For Spivak, it has been to chart a path for activism while working beyond Eurocentric Logocentrism.

The list is long, but I never thought that a tall, six-foot-three, broad-shouldered, soft-spoken Khan from Utmanzai, Hashnagar, a mere graduate of King Edward’s School, Peshawar, would, before he turned 30, have three works of genius to his name. Abdul Ghaffar Khan, honorifically known as Badshah Khan (King of the Khans) and also Bacha Khan, a title bestowed upon him at the mere age of 27, created three masterpieces. In order of creation, they were: Anjuman-i-Islahul Afaghina (The Society for the Reform of the Afghan), Pakhtun magazine, and the greatest non-violent organization the world has yet known, the Khudai Khidmatgar.  Here I want to write only of the first, Anjuman-i-Islahul Afaghina. “

I’m also reading another book today — Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s book on how to read Iqbal, available on Rekhta. I’m thinking of writing a full-fledged review of it. The main thesis is that most critics read Iqbal for his philosophy rather than his poetry, reducing him to a moral or political thinker. Faruqi insists that poetry should be valued for its beauty and emotion, not for conveying “truths.” Iqbal’s greatness, he argues, lies in his poetic imagination — his fusion of Arabo-Persian, Indo-Sanskrit, European, and Urdu traditions — rather than in his didactic or ideological content.