CAPITAL CULTURAL SCENE: 'He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again'

The bright and sunny Eid holidays were a treat for all of us. However, the Eid caught one unprepared as it came so suddenly and there was an element of surprise and urgency this time. I sometimes wonder the root behind the culture of wearing new and bright clothes on Eid, the Eidi that one dishes out and the justification for both.
The event was a presentation on 'Literature and Human Rights,' organised by the Centre for Democratic Development, Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, given by Professor Dr M.A Siddiqui (Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hamdard University).
Professor Siddiqui quoted Iqbal in his talk and said that the Muslims are not the chosen race of God, chosen community or have the chosen religion. If one doesn't attain modern knowledge, rest assured there would be the principle of selection because of it, one won't remain in this world, the civilisation will become extinct.
This was part of a lecture given by Allama Iqbal, published in1904. Japan's victory over Russia was viewed by the Indians as a victory by an Asian country and there was a great sense of achievement and sharing of supremacy with the Japanese.
Iqbal has said many a times and he quoted ' there is no escape from the fact that the flame of civilisation and the knowledge is in the West. We should benefit from that and we should become as good, confident and competent as the Western world.' This statement does not mean that one is forsaking one's religion, one can remain very much a religious scholar.
Modernity began with Sir Syed with the realisation of the need to promote the concept of rights. Marxism has its genesis in Plato. All schools of thought trace their genesis to Plato. Had he been alive today he would have said that slaves are slaves and they are meant to do menial work. Alexander's India was this land which is now Pakistan, as it is observed that when the great historian writes about India he doesn't mention Chennai, Bombay or Bihar.
The Arian took one thousand years to cross Ravi river; they were so much in love with this region. They had devotional songs for the valley of Rayana ie Swat. The whole religious scripture, the book of wisdom on the chosen powers of Vedas and the Veneshes is Vedanta, concept of mysticism.
So Vendentic, Veneshes and then Vedas. Muslims have learnt a lot from the Hindu philosophers. For this he referred to a book written by a scion of Deoband monastery, Barbara coming out with a very beautiful treatise on Deoband. If one can read about Taleban then one should also read about Deoband as this gives a modern interpretation of Islam.
She has claimed that Deoband was a gift from the British, the land was given free, Muslims were asked to have a proper faculty, proper departments, curriculum, hostel facilities, the idea was to study liberalism and it remained a liberal institution in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
In a society if one is demanding rights and asserting that nothing less than all rights that have been enshrined in the UN Charter and in the great document of 1948, then these rights should be given to the people as these are the rights that sum up 2005 years history of mankind and the benefits connected with it. So the progressive movement started with Faiz, Rashid, Abdul Rehman, Ayub Nazar, Zia Jallundri, Zaheer Kashmiri and the countless others.
In 30s and 40s these writers did a great service for the development of progressive ideas. The literature was divided into two types at that time that either one was a progressive or not. Most of the writers belonged to the progressive group.
Then came Pakistan and the concept of modernism. Modernism has shades of reason behind it. After the existentialists, one would think that reason has a place of its own. It is only with the post modernists that the reason has become redundant. Promoters of gender rights have reservations but there is a room for consensus in reaching an intermediary position, avoiding the extremes.
Even Allama Iqbal said that someone whose family has gone hungry for three days should not be punished but released. People said that he was going against the injunctions of the Qura'n but he was of the view that he was going with the spirit of the Qura'n.
Only the exemplary punishments have been quoted and the vast area has been left to deal case by case on merit. Two schools, progressives and the traditional or conventional, have existed all along. Rights are those that have been advocated by the progressive writers enunciated in the charter and the ideologies. Literature is the genesis of rights.
Sub-continental literature is nothing but a struggle to achieve rights. All of this has been translated into government bills and acts. The rights as expressed in our literature should be looked into. For this Faiz said, 'Aiyee Haath Uthain Hum Bhi, Hamain Rusm-e- Dua Yaad Nahin. 'Translated, he says, ' I don't know how to pray, how to invoke the blessings of God, but lets do it, I will try to pray to God.'
It is one quote that describes the sentiment of the movement and it was very much liked by all. If literature is the preserve only of 5% people then only 5% know that it is where the rights have been asserted and demanded. The French were at the forefront, the Germans and the English following in struggling for the rights of the working class. Five commissions have been set up in England to suggest the ways and means for the eradication of poverty.
Charles Dickens is a heavily quoted writer in the reports of these commissions and these reforms are not advocated through the parliamentarians. The voice of the writer has never been very strong but it has made its impact.
In Pakistan, education is the sector where maximum attention needs to be paid. As education becomes common and widespread amongst the people, the more they will be aware of the rights that are being denied to them, the more they will organise themselves to struggle and raise a voice for those rights. Lack of education is influencing most areas and it foretells a disaster in the future. The role of Urdu writers in the advocacy of human rights has been overwhelming and substantial. In the 19th and 20th centuries the progress and development of all the literatures in the subcontinent have resulted in rights becoming beautiful aesthetic statements.
I covered an event the previous week on the celebration of Yasser Arafat's life long achievements when he was alive rather doing an obituary. Pakistan and India Forum for Peace and Democracy organised it at the Civil Junction, Islamabad. Eminent literary scholars such as Ahmed Faraz, Professor AH Nayyar, Sarwar Bari, and Kishwar Naheed all said a few words commemorating the only leader in the Islamic world that has commanded respect and love of the countless millions.
His life is an example to emulate by all including the bankrupt leadership of this century. And an Israeli - the veteran Uri Avnery, has paid by far the best tribute to Yasser Arafat's life-long struggle. Raza Ali read out excerpts from his statement on the occasion but I reproduce the whole as it says it all. Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist who has advocated the setting up of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
He served three terms in the Israeli parliament (Knesset), and is the founder of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc)
VIEW: Yasser Arafat - the man and his people -Uri Avnery
The armed struggle against Israel was almost ludicrous but it put the Palestinian cause on the world agenda. It must be stated frankly:
Without the murderous attacks, the world would have paid no attention to the Palestinian call for freedom. Yasser Arafat was then invited to make his historic speech to the UN General Assembly: "In one hand I carry a gun, in the other an olive branch" Wherever he may be buried for now, the day will come when his remains will be re-interred by a free Palestinian government in the holy shrines in Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat was one of the generations of great leaders who arose after World War II?
The stature of a leader is not simply determined by the size of his achievements, but also by the size of the obstacles he had to overcome.
In this respect, Arafat had no match in the world: no leader of our generation was called upon to face such cruel tests and to cope with such adversities as he.
When he appeared on the stage of history, at the end of the 1950s, his people were close to oblivion. The name Palestine had been eradicated from the map. Israel, Jordan and Egypt had divided the country between them. The world had decided that there was no Palestinian national entity, that the Palestinian people had ceased to exist, like the American Indian nations - if, indeed, it had ever existed at all.
Within the Arab world the 'Palestinian Cause' was still mentioned, but it served only as a ball to be kicked around between the Arab regimes.
Each of them tried to appropriate it for its own selfish interests, wile brutally putting down any independent Palestinian initiative.
Almost all Palestinians lived under dictatorships, most of them in humiliating circumstances.
When Yasser Arafat, then a young engineer in Kuwait, founded the Palestinian Liberation Movement (whose Arabic initials in reverse spell Fatah), he meant first of all liberation from the various Arab leaders, so as to enable the Palestinian people to speak and act for themselves.
That was the first revolution of the man who made at least three great revolutions during his life.
It was a dangerous one. Fatah had no independent base. It had to function in the Arab countries, often under merciless persecution. One day, for example, the whole leadership of the movement, Arafat included, was thrown into prison by the Syrian dictator of the day for disobeying his orders. Only Umm Nidal, the wife of Abu Nidal, remained free and so assumed the command of the fighters.
Those years were a formative influence on Arafat's characteristic style.
He had to maneuver between the Arab leaders, play them off against each other, use tricks, half-truths and double-talk, evade traps and circumvent obstacles. He became a world-champion of manipulation. This way he saved the liberation movement from many dangers in the days of its weakness, until it could become a potent force.
Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, the Egyptian ruler who was the hero of the entire Arab world at the time, became worried about the emerging independent Palestinian force. To choke it off in time, he created the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and put at its head a political mercenary, Ahmed Shukeiri. After the shameful rout of the Arab armies in 1967 and the electrifying victory of the Fatah fighters against the Israeli army in the battle of Karameh (March 1968), Fatah took over the PLO and Arafat became the undisputed leader of the entire Palestinian struggle.
In the mid-1960s, Yasser Arafat started his second revolution: the armed struggle against Israel. The pretension was almost ludicrous: a handful of poorly-armed guerrillas, not very efficient at that, against the might of the Israeli army. And not in a country of impassable jungles and mountain ranges, but in a small, flat, densely populated stretch of land. But this struggle put the Palestinian cause on the world agenda.
It must be stated frankly: without the murderous attacks, the world would have paid no attention to the Palestinian call for freedom.
As a result, the PLO was recognised as the "sole representative of the Palestinian people", and thirty years ago Yasser Arafat was invited to make his historic speech to the UN General Assembly: "In one hand I carry a gun, in the other an olive branch."
For Arafat, the armed struggle was simply a means, nothing more. Not an ideology, not an end in itself. It was clear to him that this instrument would invigorate the Palestinian people and gain the recognition of the world. It would not vanquish Israel. The October 1973 Yom Kippur war caused another turn in his outlook. He saw how the armies of Egypt and Syria, after a brilliant initial victory achieved by surprise, were stopped and, in the end, defeated by the Israeli army. That finally convinced him that Israel could not be overcome by force of arms.
Therefore, immediately after that war, Arafat started his third revolution: he decided that the PLO must reach an agreement with Israel and be content with a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
That confronted him with a historic challenge: to convince the Palestinian people to give up their historic position denying the legitimacy of the state of Israel, and to be satisfied with a mere 22 percent of the territory of pre-1948 Palestine. Without being stated explicitly, it was clear that this entails the giving up the refugees' unrestricted right to return to the territory of Israel.
He started to work to this end in his own characteristic way, with persistence, patience and ploys, two steps forwards, one step back. How immense this revolution was can be seen from a book published by the PLO in 1970 in Beirut, viciously attacking the two-state solution (which it called "the Avnery plan", because I was its most outspoken proponent at the time.)
Historic justice demands that it be clearly stated that it was Arafat who envisioned the Oslo agreement at a time when both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres still stuck to the hopeless "Jordanian Option", the belief that one could ignore the Palestinian people and give the West Bank back to Jordan. Of the three recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Arafat deserved it most. From 1974 on, I was an eyewitness to the immense effort invested by Arafat in order to get his people to accept his new approach. Step by step it was adopted by the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile, first by a resolution to set up a Palestinian authority "in every part of Palestine liberated from Israel", and, in 1988, to set up a Palestinian state next to Israel.
Arafat's (and our) tragedy was that whenever he came close to a peaceful solution, the Israeli governments withdrew from it. His minimum terms were clear and remained unchanged from 1974 on: a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; Palestinian sovereignty over East Jerusalem (including the Temple Mount but excluding the Western Wall and the Jewish quarter); restoration of the pre-1967 border with the possibility of limited and equal exchanges of territory; evacuation of all the Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory and the solution of the refugee problem in agreement with Israel. For the Palestinians, that is the very minimum, they cannot give up more than that.
Perhaps Yithak Rabin came close to this solution towards the end of his life, when he declared on TV that "Arafat is my partner". All his successors rejected it. They were not prepared to give up the settlements, but, on the contrary, enlarged them incessantly. They resisted every effort to fix a final border, since their kind of Zionism demands perpetual expansion. Therefore, they saw in Arafat a dangerous enemy and tried to destroy him by all means, including an unprecedented campaign of demonisation. So Golda Meir ("there is no such thing as a Palestinian people"). So Menachem Begin ("Two-footed animal... the man with hair on his face... the Palestinian Hitler"), so Binyamin Netanyahu, so Ehud Barak ("I have torn the mask from his face"), so Ariel Sharon, who tried to kill him in Beirut and continued trying ever after. No liberation fighter in the last half-century has faced such immense obstacles as he.
He was not confronted with a hated colonial power or a despised racist minority, but by a state that arose after the holocaust and was sustained by the sympathy and "guilt" of the world. In all military, economic and technological respects, the Israeli society is vastly stronger than Palestinian. When he was called upon to set up the Palestinian Authority, he did not take over an existing, functioning state, like Nelson Mandela or Fidel Castro, but disconnected, impoverished pieces of land, whose infrastructure had been destroyed by decades of occupation. He did not take over a population living on its land, but a people half of which are refugees dispersed in many countries and the other half a society fractured along political, economic and religious lines. All this while the battle for liberation is going on.
To hold this packet together and to lead it towards its destination under these conditions, step by step, is the historic achievement of Yasser Arafat.
Great men have great faults. One of Arafat's is his inclination to make all decisions himself, especially since all his close associates were killed. As one of his sharpest critics said: "It is not his fault. It is we who are to blame. For decades it was our habit to run away from all the hard decisions that demanded courage and boldness. We always said: Let Arafat decide!" And decide he did. As a real leader, he went out ahead and drew his people after him. Thus he confronted the Arab leaders, thus he started the armed struggle, thus he extended his hand to Israel. Because of this courage, he has earned the trust, admiration and love of his people, whatever the criticism.
As Arafat passes away, Israel has lost a great enemy, who could have become a great partner and ally. As the years pass, his stature will grow in historical memory.
As for me: I respected him as a Palestinian patriot, I admired him for his courage, I understood the constraints he was working under, I saw in him the partner for building a new future for our two peoples. I was his friend.
As Hamlet said of his father: "He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again."
It would be like committing literary suicide if I dare to write or add anything more to it. So long until next week.