Remembering Iqbal in Washington

Iqbal will have been dead exactly 70 years this year, but one tends to think of him in terms of the immediate rather than the distant, and he continues to be remembered with affection, but affection tinged with a sense of awe because of the tremendous power and sweep of his genius.

Faiz called him the “sweet-voiced wanderer who transformed wildernesses into living cities and abandoned taverns into halls of good cheer”, whose “song lives, like a lamp that the blowing wind cannot put out, like a candle that lives on beyond the morning.”

It was here in Washington the other day that Iqbal’s memory was invoked at a small gathering, curtsey Abul Hasan Naghmi, Radio Pakistan Lahore’s once famous Bhai Jan. He had taken advantage of the presence in town of Syed Taqi Abidi, an Indian-Canadian physician, who has written a book on Iqbal’s ailments based on his research, the poet’s letters being the primary source.

Iqbal was not a well man, especially in his last years. Over the course of his life he suffered from one thing or another. Ironically, his genes were good though because there was longevity in his family. According to Dr Abidi, Iqbal should have lived at least for another 20 years. And had Iqbal been born in the latter part of the last century than in the latter part of the one before, modern medicine would not have let him die seven months short of his 61st birthday.

One thing is clear. Iqbal did not like doctors and, as he writes in one of his letters, he is like a child who hates to drink the bitter medicines that are given to him. He had little faith in allopathic medicine and much preferred the herbal and traditional kind. He was a great believer in the efficacy of what the famous Hakim Nabeena of Delhi, under whose treatment he remained for many years, prescribed. He also had himself seen by the celebrated Hakim Ajmal Khan.

But Iqbal’s various ailments were beyond the ken of traditional healers and, as Dr Abidi shows, for over 30 years, those who attended on him included Dr Mathura Das of Lahore, Dr Abdul Basit of Bhopal, Dr Muhammad Yusuf, Dr Abdul Qayyum, Dr Jamiat Singh and Lahore’s famous German physician Dr Seltzer.

Dr Abidi has gone through 1,450 of Iqbal’s letters and found 251 of them descriptive of the various diseases and ailments that assailed him for a good part of his life, especially the final pain-filled years. Iqbal was a great believer in the development of traditional Islamic medicine and hoped that it would undergo some revolutionary change.

Dr Abidi, who has practised medicine for 30 years, is wonderstruck at the calm and confident way in which Iqbal received news of the presence of a tumour in his chest after an X-ray examination performed by one Dr Dick, a Lahore radiologist. A few hours after he was told, he wrote to Syed Nazir Niazi asking him to have a word with Hakim Nabeena. Two hours before his death, he refused to take an opium-based painkiller saying he did not wish to die in a half-conscious or unconscious state. Only a few hours before the end, Iqbal spent time discussing with the woman principal of an Islamic school in Lahore the best way to bring the message of the Quran to her students.

A list of Iqbal’s ailments worked out by Dr Abidi makes chilling reading. A lesser man would have given up and succumbed to them much earlier. He had heart and renal disease, gout, immature cataract, liver congestion, bronchial asthma, shortness of breath, laryngitis and oral problems that dogged him all his life. In the last two years, his voice kept getting progressively hoarse. And yet this titan packed more into his 60 years than it would take others centuries to even comprehend, much less express in undying verse and prose.

Dr Abidi is indeed a remarkable man. Married to an Iranian, who does not speak a word of Urdu, as don’t their children, he converses with them in Farsi, while he writes his books, of which there are many, in Urdu. Before Dr Abidi spoke about Iqbal, the host Naghmi recalled that 35 years ago when he came to Washington, there weren’t many in this town who were interested in Urdu. But an entire generation of Pakistanis had grown up here since, which was divided into two groups: one understood a bit of Urdu, while the other could speak Urdu but was unable to read it. They wrote Urdu in Roman letters.

If the practice grew, as it is likely to, we would be like Turkey where thousands of books written in the Arabic script lie in libraries with no readers. To that I can add that some of the more with-it of our Pakistani youth not only cannot read Urdu but are quite proud of it. I cannot help quoting Faiz, who once said that if you do not know your own language, you will remain ignorant of other languages too.

Dr Abidi said Urdu is becoming an “aural language” whereas it should be a language of the eyes. There are 600 million people in the world who understand Urdu but the Urdu script is slowly dying. In India, for instance, I can narrate from my own experience, that in the entire city of Lucknow, I could find only one sign in Urdu — and that too was a crumbling one which said that the place where it hung used to be the site of the famous Maktaba Nawal Kishore. I looked for a bookshop that would sell Urdu books but all I found was a small place with a couple of hundred used books that were coming apart.

Dr Abidi, to whom I return, described himself as “a physician by profession and a patient of the Urdu language by choice”. He said on no other poet had more books been written than on Iqbal. He listed the number at 4,500, compared with Ghalib (1,600), Mir (350) and Anis (225). He also said that the largest number of commentaries on the Quran were to be found in Urdu.

Dr Abidi said Iqbal smoked a huqqa for 35 years at least and in Europe he must have smoked cigarettes. He wasn’t much for exercise and preferred to recline on a bed to read and converse. He was simple in his eating habits and would take whatever was brought to him. Once, the story goes, someone said to him, “Dr sahib, whenever I’ve had the pleasure of breaking bread with you, it is always cauliflower and meat. That must be your favourite dish.” “Not really,” Iqbal replied, “but that is all Ali Bux knows how to cook.”

What a man!

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent