Urdu poetry is the most beautiful there is for me; strange, given that I am much more at home in English, read much more in English, yet Urdu goes to the heart like nothing else. I remember the pang of pride I felt at my Ivy League university when I was introduced to an extremely well-known professor, one whose name will be familiar to most readers, and he twirled his fingers in my hair (in a fatherly, not a creepy way, I hasten to add) and said that he had always wished he knew Urdu because he had heard that the poetry is beyond compare. It is.
The reason this comes to mind is that there was a little online kerfluffle about Faiz’s Hum dekheynge ‘We will see (it)’, which is sung at many Kashmiri protests, I understand. Faiz wrote it when Zia came to power, the dictator, back in the days when dictators looked like dictators and took to themselves the visible symbols of power. In 1984, Faiz died. In early 1986, Iqbal Bano, one of the greats, came to Lahore’s Alhamra theatre and sang this poem. Faiz’s grandson writes about the performance here, how there was a release of rage and joy at the song, and the roof nearly fell in when she got to the lines ‘their crowns shall fly away and their thrones shall fall’, how she sang it again, and this time it was recorded and the tape smuggled to Dubai and distributed.
That was a dark time in Pakistan for those who were thoughtful, and this is another dark time in Pakistan. I daresay it felt as hopeless then as now, when we face a shadow tide, and the words of Faiz are sung on Coke Studio.
A quick translation, and I apologise for errors. It should give the gist, though. The actual title is Wa yabqa wajh-o-rabbik, a Quranic phrase meaning ‘The face of your Lord’, but it is better known as Hum dekheynge which I translate as ‘we will see it’ though it’s actually ‘we will see/witness’.
We will see it
Indeed, we will see
That promised day
A promise written on the eternal slate
We will see itWhen the mountains of tyranny
Blow away like cotton wool
Under our feet, the feet of the oppressed
This earth will throb, it will throb;
Upon the heads of our rulers
Lightning will crash down, it will crash
We will see itFrom God’s own Kaaba
The idols will be removed
We, the people of faith, who were barred from the holy place
Will be seated in high places
All the crowns will be blown away
All the thrones will fall
All that shall remain is the name of Allah
Who is unseen and yet is present
Who is both the seer and the seen
The cry will rise, I am Truth
I am that, and so are you
And the creatures of God will reign
I am one, and so are you
We will see it
Indeed, we will see it
We will see it
The poem is full of revolutionary Islamic references. In the second verse it refers, for instance, to a Quranic surah or chapter, one of the most striking, about the Day of Judgement: ‘when people will be as scattered moths/ and the mountains like carded wool/ And those whose scale are heavy/ shall be in a state of bliss/ and those whose scales are light/ shall have a deep pit for their dwelling’ (Al-Qariyah, 110.4-9). Second, there is a reference to what is commonly termed the Conquest of Mecca: the peaceful return of the Prophet (pbuh) to Mecca, when he removed the idols from the Kaaba and for the first time in many years those who had been driven from the city, forbidden to enter the sacred spaces, the Muslims, were allowed to worship there. And third is the reference to the cry of Al-Hallaj, one of the greatest moments in Islamic history. Al-Hallaj, a Sufi, who in a moment of ultimate union with God, said: ‘I am the Truth’ – an al-haq, and was executed for blasphemy, for taking to himself one of the 99 names of God. This, of course, resonated for the audience in the Alhamra because the dictator was Zia ul-Haq, a name meaning light of Truth.
Irritatingly, there are a number of errors in the many, mostly Indian, accounts of the poem. I may have also propagated some of them, especially as I refer to the translations online and trust them more than my own understanding, but there are some points I know for sure to be wrong or at least unlikely. For instance, there were certainly not 50,000 people in the audience at Alhamra, which has a capacity of a few hundred people, Faiz did not get into trouble at this point as he was already dead, and I am suspicious of the detail of the subversive black sari worn by Iqbal Bano.
Edited to tweak the translation a little bit.