Abstract
One of my lines of inquiry throughout this study of Askari’s critical thought has been to try and understand the reasons behind Askari’s transformation from a relatively liberal, intellectual admirer of the West into an uncompromising Islamic scholar and passionate critic of the “modern” Western worldview. I think that Partition played a pivotal role in his transformation. The experience of Partition, the suffering, and sacrifice were life-changing events, even though Askari declared them to be a part of the birth of a new nation-state. Very early in Pakistan’s history, its foundational myth was broken. A shared religion could not be the spiritual balm that would assuage the suffering and problems of the diverse ethnic and linguistic minorities that were to live together in the so-called natural home of Indian Muslims. Urdu-speaking Muslims from north India found to their dismay that their acceptance in the land of their desire was not a given. Pakistan created its own ghettos where resentments seemed to grow or at best stagnate. In the forging of a Pakistani Muslim identity, the Indian part had to be divested. For Askari, it ultimately meant mapping or merging Urdu’s literary tradition with the Islamic tradition. This must have been a painful transition—finding refuge in an intellectual elitist Islam may have helped.
Being disappointed with Pakistan, he turned towards the “world of Islam.” Now he expected from the Arabs to bring glory to the “world of Islam.”
—Intizar Husain, “Introduction,” Aftab Ahmad, Muhammad Hasan Askari: Ek Mutal’ia 1
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Notes
What the British colonizers provided in the name of modern, secular education was what Michel Foucault has termed “governmentality.” A governmental rationality directed at regulating populations and producing subjectivities; a power that worked through a range of disciplines and practices, rather than being principally coded and represented in public law and in the form of sovereignty. See Graham Burchell, ed., “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
See Khizr Humayun Ansari, The Emergence of Socialist Thought Among North Indian Muslims (Lahore: Shirkat Printing Press, 1990), 168. Ansari cites from Akhtar Husain Raipuri’s Khudnavisht [Autobiography] the heated debates between the supporters of Hindi and Urdu and how agreement seemed impossible.
This important essay, “Pakistani Adab,” was published in the column “Jhalkiyan” in Saqi, June 1949. Reprinted in Muhammad Hasan Askari, Majmu‘a Muhammad Hasan Askari (Lahaur: Sang-e Mil Pablikeshanz, 2000), 1138–46.
See Muhammad Hasan Askari, Askarinama, Afsaney, Mazamin (Lahaur: Sang-e Mil Pablikeshanz, 1998), 317. The essay, “Pakistani Qaum, Adab aur Adib,” in the column “Jhalkiyan,” July–August 1949. Emphasis added.
See Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 4.
Sanjay Seth’s work has addressed the question of how does one critically examine the dissemination of Western knowledge in India while standing within the Western modes of thought. Also, how does one study the transformation of indigenous epistemologies when Indian indigenous knowledges exist in an altogether different paradigm? See Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
See Jean Pickering and Suzanne Kehde, eds., Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender and Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
Also see Daniela Bredi, “Nostalgia in the Reconstruction of Muslim Identity in the Aftermath of 1857 and the Myth of Delhi,” in Cracow Indological Studies, Vol. 11, ed. Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fras (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Institute of Oriental Philology Publications, 2009), 137–56. C. M. Naim’s essay, “Ghalib’s Delhi, A Shamelessly Revisionist Look at Two Popular Metaphors,” provides an unconventional view of Delhi in the nineteenth century. According to Naim, Delhi’s society in the first half of the nineteenth century was intellectually vibrant partly because of the influx of new ideas from the British and the Christian presence. The decline after 1857 is exaggerated. In Annual of Urdu Studies 18 (2003), 3–22.
See Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in Scribner’s Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Weiner (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 101–12.
René Guenon, Crisis of the Modern World, trans. Marco Pallis, Arthur Osborne, and Richard C. Nicholson (New York: Sophia Perennis, 2004), 7–8. This fall could be described as progressive materialization and the expression of the principle is pure spirituality.
See Ian Talbot, Pakistan, A Modern History, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998) 249.
See her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–111; originally published in 1988. It is regarded as a founding text of postcolonialism and raised vital questions on the nexus of power.
Isaiah Berlin’s exposition of counter-Enlightenment has been critiqued for reducing Enlightenment to basically three principles—universality, objectivity, rationality/rationalism—and assigning an overly pluralistic viewpoint to the philosophers of counter-Enlightenment. It has also been argued that in asserting that Enlightenment is indelibly stamped with Western values, critics, such as Said, have created a monolith of the West, and given it a collective notion identifying Europeans against non-Europeans. See Lynn Festa and Daniel Carey, eds., “Introduction: Some Answers to the Question: ‘What is Postcolonial Englightenment?’” in The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
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© 2012 Mehr Afshan Farooqi
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Farooqi, M.A. (2012). Resuming the Past: Bright Morning and Foggy Night. In: Urdu Literary Culture. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026927_8
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