The News on Sunday: Your name cannot be dissociated from the Nai Nazam movement. How do you see it in retrospect?

Abdul Rashid: The so-called movement of '60s of my immediate seniors? Let me take the bull by the horns. In 'Maakhiz' Iftikhar Jalib announced the advent of the poet-critic. He was the one who invited and faced most of the wrath and ill-humour of the literary establishment. Formerly we had Wazir Agha in that role, but his poetry did not show any relation with his time, place, temperament, or any strongly visible aesthetic that could draw people to his poetry. Jalib had a lifelong passion for linguistics and the tools available to language to effect a change in a context. He had not gone to the extreme that poets of language had by using mathematical symbols and synergetic graphic signs and linked chains of sound effects almost independent of meanings, in the belief that genuine novelty doesn't depend on content.

However, the poem was a shock and disaster for the poet. Jalib's understanding of literature was deep and he was a widely read critic. However, his interest changed over years from the extreme left to near-the-left hypotheses -- and poetry was supposed to help effect visible changes in society through political education.

TNS: But it wasn't as if Iftikhar Jalib was alone.

AR: Yes, there was Jilani Kamran. He was the most clear-headed of poet- critics. His bias towards the sufic tradition and moral interpretation of culture excluded him from the so-called coterie of principled modernists. He is an extremely fascinating poet in his own right. Zahid Dar, a thinking poet, and a straightforward and very accomplished one, soon left the scene to shut himself up in his own self. Apart from these two, I personally favour two very consistent poets -- Aftaab Iqbal Shamim and Mohammad Salim-ur-Rehman.

TNS: These poets, your immediate seniors, were followed by poets and friends of your own age group. Today they seem to have been wiped off the scene. Your comments on this phenomenon?

AR: I have a special admiration for Sarmad Sehbai. His poetry matured early; it exudes power and strength -- a poet with an urban bias. Afzaal Ahmad Sayed is another important poet. His prose poems have diverse origins. He needs a wider audience. Ahmad Hanesh is another poet characterised by his explorations in Indian mythology and oriental soul searching.

As for female writes, I would choose Kishwar Nahid and Fehmida Riaz. Others I have not read in depth.

TNS: Aren't you forgetting Anis Nagi?

AR: No, I was coming to the phenomenon called Anis Nagi. One has to discern the true tone from the false colours he espouses. Earlier, he tried to explain what modernity is. What is its mythology, etc. He deserves applause for translating important poets like St. John Perse. Not satisfied with his poetry, he is now writing novels reflecting his anti-poetic attitude. His fierce uncompromising temperament towards everyone makes him a sore thumb in the literary scene.

Tabassam Kashmiri has diverse interests. He is a senior poet -- credible, clear, effective, but he also has a flair for research. He seems to harbour nihilism. His attitude is dragging his work down.

TNS: You have shown tremendous respect for Majid Amjad, dedicating a number of poems to him. Do you think he is a major poet?

AR: The posthumous attention paid to the poetry of Majid Amjad needs sociological analysis. He is one of the poets who can claim perfection of form in expression. He is the one point to which, after his death, all opinions have converged, to acknowledge him as an absolute master of form deserving a wider readership. The extraordinary unity of thought and feeling in his poetry is the hallmark of his genius.

TNS: In Urdu, long poems are seldom attempted. You've been trying your hand at them.

AR: It has always been recognised that the development of Urdu has been lopsided. Only the ghazal is being shown attention. All experience has to conform to the ideal of ghazal and hence a lot of it has to be sacrificed.

I've always had this bias towards the long poem, in contrast with short ones. It needs extended narrative faculties and other rhetorical techniques. It assumes taking the whole world as your subject matter, along with objective data. It involves a better grasp of verification to hold interest, and a different kind of challenge.

There are book length poems like James Merill's colossal poem 'The Changing Light at Sandover' and Thomas McGrath's 'Letter to an imaginary friend', Nazim Hikmat's 'Human landscape from my country'. At various times in my life I had made some sort of effort to write in this genre, beginning with the series 'College nama', a poem about Iqbal. A view of the bombardment of Baghdad, 'Anwar Adeeb ka leay', an elegy on the death of Iftikhar Jalib, and a book length autobiographical poem titled 'Kaisay guzray yay din raat'. I tried to use in constructing my long poems whatever I learnt from the experience of the prose poem.

TNS: A man of letters cannot stay isolated from his sociopolitical environment. How do you see world around you?

AR: With every passing day, we are brutally reminded that we are living in a world of unilateralism, where political hegemony is the key word and capitalism plunders the world with ever greater consistency and ferocity. Globalisation as an idea is giving way to frustration, and to the monopolistic control of the resources of the third world. Unjust wars have shaken faith in the pure goodness of humanity; we are in thrall of the clash of civilizations. A different kind of resistance is emerging, one that requires an ordinary man to take a stand in world affairs. Our destiny is linked with everyone else's, not only economically but also politically and culturally.

TNS: Coming back to literature, how do you evaluate trends in Urdu literature as a whole?

AR: The theoretical basis of literature has been enriched by the influx of social science theory. The privacy of literature as a medium of privileged expression has been smashed -- and we live under the shadow of what has been developed elsewhere in other sciences. Pure literary criticism looks naive and elementary. One of the reasons of the upsurge of travel literature and anti-biographical writings has been the glaring fact that fiction and poetry have become too bookish. The emergence of travel literature itself proves the theory that cross-cultural influences are a reality of our lives. This phenomenon is resulting in common bonds of humanity, making us more compassionate and allowing tolerance to take root.

TNS: The modernists around you have been a bit casual in their commitments and literary pursuits -- do you agree with this perception?

AR: My complaint to the early generation of modern poets is that many intelligent well-informed poets with vigour and talent in abundance simply did not try to commit themselves to paper and stopped writing after a slim output. Anwar Adeeb, Rahat Nasim Malick, Abid Ameeq, for instance. Salah-ud-Din Mehmood did not publish any collection in his life time.

TNS: Do you think the relatively new 'prose poem' has hit standardised parameters?

AR: As far as the prose-poem is concerned even poets in America, where at present a large number of writers are devoted exclusively to this genre, haven't a very clear idea. This form can take you into areas of unexpressed or unassimilated experience like a storm. A bigger storm should have been expected in Urdu, which didn't appear. I don't have a very high opinion of prose-poetry as it is being written. But as a young form it has chances to grow and mature.

TNS: How did you become the first to bring out a book of prose-poems?

AR: I was in Karachi in 1974. I had a chance to meet Qamar Jamil and Ahmed Hashmi in the company of young budding writers like Fatima Hassan, Shahida Hassan, Seema Orakzai, Azra Abbas, Anwar Senrai and many others. I had the opportunity to listen to their extended recitations of prose-poems. Raees Ferogh and Sarwat Hussain were also involved in this project at that point in time. Qamar Jamil was stressing that it was the only form expressing our time and condition. To me it was nothing more than an exaggerated attempt of going over board. I was confronted with another problem. The poetry I was reading -- I admit I am a very avid reader of poetry with an unsatiable hunger for more and more poetry -- it seemed that my mind and expression was still not free to explore the themes I was dealing with. Even the themes seemed inadequate and preposterous. The new form provided me with an opportunity to rope in subjects, thoughts, ideas, which otherwise would have remained illusive. My collection of poems appearing in 1974 was also a turning point in my career.

TNS: The condemnation of ghazal was a dominant theme with the modernists. How do you see this?

AR: The controversy surrounding the condemnation of ghazal in the '60s should be studied in its immediate context. Spokesmen of modern poetry rejected ghazal, as it meant bringing in traditional attitudes and reflexes and cliches which were not representative of the time. Whatever changes were introduced were insufficient, as compared with the open-minded acceptance of the poem as being inclusive of all life, a flexible form of expression and able to accommodate all shades of feelings. The ghazal was able to captivate the audiences in mushairas and cater to the needs of the people who attended mushairas for fun, for catharsis, fellow feeling and mental relief. Ghazal writers were the direct critics of modernists. A kind of animosity, verging on hostility, followed for a time. Conservative magazines of the time also supported the ghazal. But soon, many ghazal writers themselves started writing poems that absorbed influences from the prevailing atmosphere.

There are people who declare Nasir Kazmi the only important ghazal poet. This is a myopic view.

TNS: How about the poets who are your juniors? Do you see brilliant going on things among them?

AR: From the poets of your generation, those who have talent to grow into important new voices are Nassir Ahmed Nasir, Ali Mohammad Farshi, Farrukhyar, Rafique Sandelvi, Jawed Anwar, Moeen Nizami, Waheed Ahmad, Zeeshan Sahil and Azhar Ghauri.

When Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in his address to the UN on Sept 20 held up a copy of Noam Chomsky's 'Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance' (2003) and recommended it as essential reading to understand contemporary world politics, he could have been talking about 'The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad', for which Chomsky, Eqbal's long-time friend, wrote the foreword. Chavez identified "the hegemonic pretension of the North American imperialism" as "the greatest threat on this planet" to the survival of the human race.

Chomsky also gave the main address for this collection of Eqbal Ahmad's writings (Columbia University Press, 2006) at the book's launch in Cambridge, USA, on September 28. John Trumpbour and Emran Qureshi of the Labor & Worklife Program at the Harvard Law School, who organised the event, didn't publicise the event too aggressively because of the hype Chavez had generated for Chomsky. The hall did get quite full, but they didn't have to turn anyone away at the door. The venue may have had something to do with this. Chomsky, a linguistics professor now retired from the neighbouring MIT, is rarely invited to Harvard. Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowtiz criticises Chomsky for being too 'black and white' but often has to concede the basic truth of the points Chomsky makes.

Chomsky's critics say he doesn't provide original analysis, but he himself notes that he merely provides information that is already available, often from official sources like the U.S. State Department and the U.N. He drew on such sources for his talk titled 'Confronting Empire: Eqbal Ahmad's Legacy and the Contemporary Crisis'. Habitually low key, he doesn't need great oratorical skills -- the information he juxtaposes is startling enough even for the reasonably well-informed. The 'international community', he finds, is essentially the US and its allies. Then, today, we are witness to an "unusual historic event' -- the destruction of a nation" as Israel punishes the Palestinians for "a terrible crime they committed: in the last free election they voted in the wrong people".

Israeli attacks mean "Israeli and US attacks, since the USA supports Israel with weapons as well as diplomatic and ideological support". The recent round of aggression was preceded by the Israeli forces' capture, on June 24, of two Palestinian brothers, "a far more severe crime than kidnapping soldiers" that Hezbollah committed on July 6, its first aggressive act in months.

Chomsky believes that the real reason for the Israeli (US-Israeli) aggression is that the Hezbollah provides the only meaningful support for Palestinian rights. Another reason is to eliminate Lebanese deterrents that stand in the way of an attack on Iran.

He notes that the aggression has two consequences: first, it deters negotiations; second, it makes the dissidents and reformers within the society more vulnerable, as regimes under attack tend to become harsher. Shirin Ebadi and others testify to this.

Such aggression also targets culture and historical memory, which Eqbal Ahmad held central to politics. So do the aggressors, as evidenced by their systematic destruction of museums, libraries, and the living intellectual centres of Baghdad and Beirut, "the streets where freewheeling exchanges took place, in bookshops and cafes, even under Saddam."

The mainstream media in the USA sidelines such information. They have also sidelined Chomsky for years, which is why he is better known outside the country. When the big media does give him space, it is grudgingly provided -- as in the present instance when Chavez left them no choice. Usually, they also give space to critics to counter him.

The alternative media struggles to fill the gap, like Amy Goodman's www.democracynow.org, and David Barsamian's www.alternativeradio.org, the latter based in Colorado. Barsamian, that great archivist of discussions and talks by progressive intellectuals like Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Eqbal Ahmad, flew in for the book launch to record the event. He has collected several of Eqbal's talks and discussions in CDs and books, like 'Confronting Empire' and 'Terrorism: Theirs and Ours'.

Ahmad was Senior Fellow at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies in Washington (1972-1982), and the first director of its overseas affiliate, the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. His political stance, particularly on Palestinian rights, kept him out of mainstream academia. Hampshire College, a small private institution, in 1982 awarded him a professorship in Politics and Middle East Studies. Pakistani students in the area, who took his classes, revered him.

Another of Eqbal Ahmad's friends, his 'college buddy' from the 1950s at Princeton University, Stuart Schaar, has also paid the price for his support of the Palestinian cause, sidelined in the mainstream academia as Eqbal himself was. Schaar read extracts from his forthcoming biography of Eqbal for which he visited Pakistan in 2004, where he found 'the legacy of a global peacemaker'. Since retiring from Brooklyn College where he taught history, he spends most of his time in Morocco and Tunisa. Schaar and Eqbal studied Arabic together at Princeton and he talked of Eqbal's "photographic memory" when it came to poetry. Schaar described Eqbal's excitement at finding an Arabic poem that helped him to better understand Arabic grammar.

Poetry was one of Ahmad's passions, and he was particularly fond of Ghalib and Faiz whom he would recite endlessly and translate for those around him, perhaps due to his interest in the progressive Islamic traditions and the separation of the religious and worldly powers. Preoccupied with how to achieve this, Ahmad believed that forced change "robbed the people of their soul, and that a backlash would come". This belief underlay his efforts for Khaldunia, his dream of a liberal arts university in Pakistan named after the great 14th century Arab historian and scholar Ibne Khaldun. However, no government allowed this to take root.

Margaret Cerullo, Ahmad's colleague from Hampshire College and one of the book's editors, talked of two main turning points for Eqbal. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and the Arab states failed to respond, he predicted that this "would turn up the heat of Islamic outrage". When the USA accused Iraq of unlawful seizure of land and development of nuclear weapons in 1991 and fought the Gulf War, Ahmad noted that these charges could also be laid at Israel's door, but no one ever suggested invading it.

She talked about his theory of the "logic of counter-insurgency" and his argument that the gap between coercive military occupation and the determination of the occupied would only lead to a spiralling of violence and even genocide -- an argument that has been all too well illustrated in present-day Iraq.

Cerullo recounted small, symbolic protests that must be supported, like the Iraq veteran who hangs up banners with the U.S. casualties in Iraq from different spots every week, "since the Boston Globe wouldn't publish" these figures, and the people who gather in front of government buildings every day to protest Guantanamo. She remembered "so many times when Eqbal said to me, 'Margaret, we must do something'." Those who knew him can probably hear him say those words in his voice, with his particular intonations.

During the discussion session, there was a question about the "Salvadoran option" and the appointment of John Negroponte as Director of US National Intelligence -- an appointment that Chomsky said was appropriate for a "leading terrorist", who had lied to Congress in order to deny State crimes in Honduras. The 'Salvadoran option' of course, was a euphemism for the mass slaughter, after the Catholic bishops in El Salvador started going back to the Gospel, "a radical pacifist doctrine".

What about Eqbal's stand regarding the Ahmadis? He was clearly against their persecution. Bhutto had got Parliament to declare them as 'non-Muslims'. General Zia took this a step further by having Pakistani passports declare the holder's religion, and by making Muslim applicants sign a statement denouncing Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as an imposter. When applying for his passport from the New York embassy, Eqbal refused to sign the statement. Afraid of the international scandal that would ensue if this was made into an issue, the Pakistan government granted him the passport.