Faiz Ahmad Faizਫ਼ੈਜ਼ ਅਹਿਮਦ ਫ਼ੈਜ਼

Faiz Ahmad Faiz was born on 13 February 1911 in Kala Qader village, in what was then Sialkot district in Punjab and is today Narowal district in Pakistan; the village has since been renamed Faiz Nagar in his honour. He came from a Punjabi Jatt family of the Sidhu clan, and his father, Sultan Muhammad Khan, was a prominent barrister who had worked in British government service and written a biography of the Afghan ruler Amir Abdur Rahman. The family was based in Sialkot city, and it was there, in the schools and literary gatherings of that city, that Faiz grew up.

Education in Sialkot and Lahore

Faiz began with religious studies at a mosque school in Sialkot, where his teacher was the scholar Muhammad Ibrahim Mir Sialkoti, then attended the Scotch Mission School and Murray College in Sialkot. At Government College, Lahore, he took an honours degree in Arabic, and at Oriental College he completed a master's degree in English literature in 1932. He began teaching in 1935, lecturing in English, first in Amritsar and from 1937 at Hailey College of Commerce in Lahore. In 1936 he became the first secretary of the Progressive Writers' Movement, and between 1938 and 1946 he edited the literary monthly Adab-e-Latif. His first collection, Naqsh-e-Faryadi, appeared in 1941 and announced a new voice in Urdu poetry, one that joined the classical love lyric to the politics of a colonised people.

Soldier, editor and the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case

During the Second World War Faiz served in the British Indian Army, commissioned in 1942 in the public relations wing, rising to lieutenant colonel and receiving an MBE in 1945, before resigning in 1947. In the new state of Pakistan he edited the Pakistan Times and the Urdu daily Imroze, and became a vice-president of the Pakistan Trade Union Federation. In March 1951 he was arrested in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, accused with military officers of plotting against the government of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. He spent about four years in prison. The years behind bars produced two of his finest collections, Dast-e-Saba and Zindan Nama, and fixed his image in the public mind: the poet who would not bend.

What is Faiz's most famous poem?

Faiz's best known single work is probably Hum Dekhenge, 'We Shall See', written in 1979 against the military rule of General Zia-ul-Haq and sung, famously, by Iqbal Bano at a packed Lahore concert in 1986, in defiance of the regime. Its promise that the crowns of tyrants will fall turned it into an anthem far beyond Pakistan, and it is still sung at protests across South Asia, in Punjab on both sides of the border. His poem Subh-e-Azadi, written in August 1947, took the opposite mood: a dawn of freedom that had not turned out as hoped. Poems such as Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat show the other Faiz, the lyric poet of love and loss, and it is the joining of the two, romance and resistance in one voice, that made him unique.

Exile, return and honours

Faiz's later career carried him across the world. He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962, the first Asian poet to be so honoured, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He served as an aide to Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and after Bhutto was overthrown and executed, Faiz lived for some years in self-exile in Beirut, editing the magazine Lotus, before returning to Lahore in 1982. He had married Alys Faiz in 1941, and their two daughters are Salima and Muneeza. Pakistan awarded him the Nishan-e-Imtiaz after his death, in 1990.

Death in Lahore and his place in Punjabi hearts

Faiz died in Lahore on 20 November 1984 and was buried in the Model Town Graveyard. He wrote in Urdu, and his formal education was in Arabic and English, yet Punjab claims him without hesitation: he was a son of Sialkot soil, his themes were the dignity of ordinary people, and his verse has been sung in Punjabi homes for generations, set to music by singers across the subcontinent. Few poets anywhere have been loved equally by scholars and by crowds. His birth centenary in 2011 was marked across Pakistan and India with conferences, commemorative stamps and new editions of his collected work. In the words his admirers return to most, his poetry insists that suffering is real, but so is the morning that follows it.