I wanted to share something that floored me. Through Sahil Bloom, I came across this poem by Kahlil Gibran, and it struck me with its simplicity and depth. As an aside, it is worth remembering that Gibran was deeply inspired by Ê»Abduâl-BahĂĄ, whose vision of unity and spiritual renewal touched many thinkers and artists of his time.
For the Commentariat, itâs worth noting that one of the 20th centuryâs greatest poets had Muslim antecedents: Gibranâs maternal great-grandfather converted from Islam to Christianity, a reminder that conversion did happen, and that traditions were more porous than the common perception that âMuslims can never leave Islam.â
Today (well, technically yesterday, since itâs past 12) is Pakistanâs Independence Day. I personally felt no extraordinary zeal or zest for the land of the pure. Is it my lack of patriotism (sun), my anxiety about belonging (moon), or rising sedition? (Please pardon my astrological metaphors; recently learned from a friend.)
I neverâof course, I am exaggerating; thatâs what poets do anywayâfelt much for my own birthday. Perhaps I am still unable to grasp the importance (or the dread and brevity) of the flow of time.
If time is creativity unfolded, I donât feel progress. If it is a movie playing with no rewind, I still lack the desire to go back.
âFor Ghalib, life is an unending search. Neither the holy of holies in Mecca nor even the attainment of paradise is the end of it.â ~Ralph Russell
Weâve all heard of that crooked genius, Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan Ghalib â whether through our school Urdu courses (unfortunately encountered at an age when our consciousness is still unripe) or through pop culture. Sometimes itâs his well-known fantasy for mangoes; other times itâs when someone shares a couplet whose slightly convoluted vocabulary immediately earns it the label of âa Ghalib shayrâ; and other times, his destitution and scrambling for a pension.
As a Gen Z myself, I can say that most of todayâs youth are largely alienated from the Urdu language, let alone Persian. And of course, this doesnât mean weâre reading Byron or Eliot instead; rather, itâs the excess of TikTok. Decoding Ghalib feels like a Herculean task for us. This dilemma not only distances us from a rich poetic tradition but also from the timeless lessons it has nurtured.
Recently, Iâve been traveling a lot for my formal project: assessing the governance framework of 46 HEIs (universities) in Pakistan. Weâre looking at the de jure autonomy of universities (in governance, finance, staffing, academics, and research) versus the de facto reality. Where, like many other sectors, higher education is overregulated.
Weâre struggling a lot. Universities are mushrooming (95 in 2002 to 269 in 2024) without any meaningful output, just producing PhDs like rabbits (177 in 2002 to 3489 in 2024). Result: not a single Pakistani university ranks in the global top 350.
Iâve visited different universities. (inter-alia):
Riphah International University, Islamabad â a private HEI. The I-8 campus is small, but with multiple campuses they cater to around 30,000 students. Whatâs interesting is how deeply Islamic morality is embedded in their institutional values. Itâs the only university (out of the 8â9 Iâve visited so far) whose vision and mission are explicitly integrated with Islamic principles. They even have around 10 credit hours dedicated to teaching morality. Quite remarkable in this era of modernity and expediency. Continue reading Quite Hectic Days
There is no context to this poem; it was a pure exodus of emotions. An expression / defence of romanticism in this capitalist, postmodern, post-ideological world.
The context of this poem is a bit complex. I wanted to experiment with some poetic gymnastics to venture into new terrain, like writing from the perspective of non-living things. So I chose The Communist Manifesto. Such a paradoxical choice, I must say in hindsight.
The copy I still possess.
I first (and sadly, the last time) read it many years ago, sometime in 2019, when I was in my second (and final) year before university (though I never actually went to university, another detour we can explore some other time). I was at Edwardes College then (see the post “Against Platonic Love”for more details).
The idea for the poem surfaced after watching a dogfight â intellectually speaking â between the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj ĆœiĆŸek and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. If you havenât already, I recommend watching their full debate.
Fatima Ijaz, born in Karachi, studied linguistics in the United States and currently serves as the editor of The Pandemonium Journal. Her debut poetry collection, The Shade of Longing, offers a complex interplay of memory, language, and abstraction, often resisting closure and certainty.
In the preface, she articulates a powerful and poignant idea that serves as a compass for the bookâs aesthetic and emotional journey:
âThe contemplation of the past involves an evocative presence of a surreal presentâŠIn doing so, you are in a heightened state of present-past â a double consciousness that is more than the sum equal of its partsâ
This is, in many ways, a deeply Hegelian thought. One is reminded of the famous assertion in The Phenomenology of Spirit that:
âThat the True is actual only as system, or that Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit-the most sublime Notion and the one which belongs to the modern age and its religion. â
In essence: the memories, she is talking about, are sort of in itself objects (fixed) and also subjects (variableâdependent on the person recollecting).
Reading this book feels like discovering a cache of love letters written in a fever of emotion, letters meant for someone dearly beloved. But just before mailing them, the writer realizes how insufficient they are. So she burns them all, and what emerges from the ashes are these poems: not just expressions of feeling, but indictments of language itself. A complaint, perhaps, that language lacks the fidelity to truly capture the depths of human experience.
By acknowledging the futility of language, she leans into abstraction. She chooses uncertainty over certainty and, the infinite over the finite, and invites the reader to participate in meaning-making. The gaps in her verse are not absencesâthey are openings. The reader is asked to bring their own memories, their own hauntings, to fill in the silences.
In the poem âEcho of a word, x memory,â the structure is minimal yet haunting. A single wordââ(stray)ââis repeated eight times on one line, and this continues for thirteen lines. The effect is disorienting, hypnotic. Memory here is not narrative, it is reverberation, a stutter echoing in an unreachable corridor of time.
Celestial imagery recurs throughout the collection (stars, suns, moons) often to widen the emotional and metaphysical frame. She reaches for the planetary to express the personal, as in lines like:
âThe face of the sun is smeared with the curseâ
âI saw the shadow moon hunt down oblivionâ
âLanguage emerges out of this exchange between fiery sun and eternal skyâ
âThe moon becomes a cosmic mirror on such…â
Another recurring anthropomorphic presence is that of bones and the black crow, symbols that oscillate between the sacred and the ominous.
âthere wasnât an ounce of regret in my bones / I knew I had practiced the art â and thus â the sacrifice.â
âThen there is the stubborn case of the black crowâŠâ
In the poem âTear-Drop,â regret and remorse seep through the lines:
âIt does not matter, because I can touch / The midnight with my azure-blues / Perhaps the blame is on the harpsichord / Perhaps itâs on one of us / The black consciousness has entered / and there is no un-doing it.â
Her languageâor rather, her suspicion of languageâremains central. The âshadeâ she refers to is not just the shadow of longing but also a hue: the specific color of yearning that permeates the book. Itâs a longing that refuses to be pinned down, named, or resolved.
In the penultimate poem, the titular piece, she writes,
âDo you think we become in the end / characters of our own stories? Do we finally / own them enough to discard them, have the infinite power / to reform our mind of its strange habitat?â
This is a moment of quiet brilliance. One could read this as a critique of ideologyâfirst acknowledging the narrative scaffolding of the self (âIâ) and then, in almost Lacanian fashion, gesturing toward the Real (one of Lacanâs three registers). To âdiscardâ the story is to momentarily crumble the illusion of coherence.
Jacques Lacan (French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist)
Shade of Longing is not a book that yields itself easily. It is not meant to be understood in one sitting. It is a space to dwell in, misread, reread, and reinhabit. Like ghosts or witches watching from the periphery, these poems linger long after the final page is turned. Their magic lies not in answers, but in the haunting questions they leave behind.
The context of this poem is an interview of the legendary Urdu poet Ahmad Faraz (1931â2008) with Naeem Bukhari. Faraz is regarded as one of the true heirs of Urdu’s laminal poetic tradition and celebrated for his bold, progressive stances and romantic verses that deeply resonated with the masses.
Though I personally rank him second to Faiz Ahmed Faiz (his contemporary), due to the universality, conceptual depth, and themes Faiz cultivated in his poetry, what I love about Faraz is his radical romanticism and mastery of language. Especially since he hailed from Kohat, a non-Urdu-speaking city in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, this is particularly remarkable.
Two literary giants of NWFP/KP: Ahmad Faraz (right) lights a cigarette for Ameer Hamza Shinwari.
Another interesting connection between Faraz and myself is that we both attended the same institution, the prestigious Edwardes College. For those who donât know, Edwardes College was established in 1900 and has produced generations of intellectuals and cultural figures, including Prithviraj Kapoor, the pioneering Indian film and theatre actor/director/producer; Dr. Khan Sahib (Dr. Abdul Jabbar Khan), the first Chief Minister of West Pakistan (The famous Khan Market in New Delhi is named in his honour.)
Edwardes College Peshawar
Coming back to the interview:
NB: Temperamentally aap ek romantic aadmi hain?
(Translated: Are you, temperamentally, a romantic person?)
AF: Haan, bilkul hoon. Main ek bharpoor ishq ka qail hoon. Ek mukammal insaan ke ishq ka. Main Aflatooni ishq (jo frustration ka ishq hota hai) ka haami nahi hoon. Us mein aap apne wujood ka aadha hissa zaya kar dete hain. Is liye aap mukammal mohabbat de hi nahi sakte kisi ko, jab tak apna poora wujood uske hawale na kar dein. Toh main ek mukammal insaan ki tarah, mukammal ishq chahta hoon. Jiske liye rona ho, jiske liye hansna ho, jisko aap yaad karein. Jo aapke wujood mein poori tarah sama gaya ho.
(Translated: Yes, absolutely. I believe in passionate, complete love â love for a whole person. I’m not a supporter of Platonic love, the kind that’s rooted in frustration. In that kind of love, you end up wasting half of your existence. Thatâs why you canât give someone complete love unless you offer your entire being to them. So I desire complete love, as a complete person. Love for whom you cry, laugh, miss deeply â someone who becomes entirely embedded in your existence.)
And that is how I gestated this poem. Please enjoy!
I can touch and lurch in the scent of the gated city
And prostrate upon it.
What maiden houris of the afterlife,
With a lightning appearance,
Pristine countenance,
And godly silhouette,
Could hold to the eyes of this crooked earthling
The wax of your ear,
The rusted steel nose pin,
Greyish, catastrophic hairs,
And the acned cheeks of yours?
Ah, the sensation of the earthly viscera,
The dysmorphia of every kind and sortâ
It is incomparable to the untouchable,
and the non-sensorous holiest of holies.
Icarus [2] vaporized in this
Frenzy of the soarâ
And so too the frustrated ones,
Whose beloved is exalted,
And merely and pathetically exalted
[1] taskīñ ko ham na ro.eñ jo zauq-e-nazar mile
hĆ«rÄn-e-ážłhuld meñ tirÄ« sĆ«rat magar mile We would not weep for solace, if we had the gift of sightâ If, among the houris of paradise, we found your likeness. (“`Ghalib)
[2] Icarus, a figure from Greek mythology, attempted to escape Crete using wax-and-feather wings made by his father, Daedalus. Ignoring warnings, he flew too close to the sun, causing the wax to melt and sealing his tragic fall.
I wrote this poem on May 14, 2025, after watching a deeply moving video of Robin Williams (1951â2014) hugging Koko (1971â2018). Somehow, the moment stirred something in me, and I was compelled to write.
Koko was a Western Lowland Gorilla, a critically endangered subspecies. Every year, thousands of these gentle beings are killed due to habitat loss and the illegal bushmeat trade in parts of Africa.
Robin met Koko in 2001, shortly after she had lost her closest gorilla friend, Michael. She hadnât smiled since his passing. But on this day, with Robin, she laughed freely and fully. And so did he.
After Kabir exited the WhatsApp group, the conversation between the Manavs and Furqan (who I have made Editor to encourage more DPPs) drifted, inevitably, to poetry and Punjabi. Furqan has already made two excellent contributions, A flying peacock and Lord Ganesh in a confectionary mill. Kabir did a great job in diversifying the Authorial voices on BP.
As we shape the future of Brown Pundits, I keep returning to one submerged voice in the Persianate world, particularly in Pakistan. A voice that is Westernised, undercapitalised, and culturally adrift. These are not the clerics, generals, or capitalists. These are the middle-gentry, the in-betweeners; fluent in English, wired to the internet, but uncoupled from patronage and power.
Like much of the Muslim world, Pakistan remains profoundly hierarchical. And I suspect its creative pulse, its latent genius, lies in that Westernised fringe of the lower elite: the zone between the bourgeoisie and the establishment. The boundary class. Half-in, half-out.
In a strange way, Pakistanâs obscurity may be its shield. Unlike India, an excavated society with every civilizational layer being rapidly monetised (Saiyaara is breaking records), Pakistan is a half-formed splinter. It doesnât face the same pressures of internal reckoning. That may be a blessing.
Across the Persianate world, from Anatolia to Delhi, we are witnessing a civilizational scatter. The old cosmopolis of the Gunpowder Empires (Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal) has collapsed, leaving behind cultural debris. The Persianate polity, once a unified Empire of the Mind, is now a broken archipelago.
India, by contrast, benefits from its post-colonial majority. Like Israel, it is 80% one faith; with all the confidence and coherence that brings. It has the numbers, the market, and a dominant civilizational script. The Sanskrit world, if not unified, is at least centrally anchored.
In this context, Kabir represents one pole of the Pakistani elite: articulate, English-speaking, confidently liberal but also capable of drowning out the marginal voices heâs adjacent to. And yet sadly, I donât think Pakistan is headed for any Hindufication. The trajectory is different.
Pakistan is not returning to India. It is, perhaps, becoming the lowlands of the Iranian plateau;Â a bridge nation once again, neither fully Arab nor Indic. Suspended between worlds, it may rediscover itself in that liminality.
Because sometimes, the dead poets are not gone. Theyâre just waiting for the right silence.
