by Mubarak Ali Lashari
With conventionality to Shaik Ayaz’s 13th anniversary, going year and welcoming New Year as the Year of Shaikh Ayaz in Sindh, the question often comes to mind in every sane person related to literary circles and literature that what are facts that turned Ayaz to religion? What are the backdrop phenomena which caused a such a great poet, thinker, prose writer to rethink and revisit his dogmas? In context, little genuine attention was paid to him; individually he has been under sword or some appreciated him and welcomed to the Right Path. But unfortunately, little thoughts were vested over his turn academically, psychoanalytically, literary, and educationally.
Ayaz, who was well known for his worldly igniting verses, inspiring and appealing to youths and calling for revolution and saying that “Earth is everything for me rather than Paradise”, orating that no more precious life is than serving and loving man, beloved, earth turned to say what is this world? We can have look at his couplet that,
بهشت ڇاهي، دوزخ ڇاهي، ڇڏي اهي ويچار،
مٺري مٺڙي ننڊ پرينءَ جي پاسي ۾ ڪر يار.
Put the ideas of heaven and hell aside
Friends, take a sweet sleep with love
Beside
In the context of above couplet, the poetry of Ayaz is teeming with these dogmas and ideas. These things definitely have not been emanated from a dream but necessarily from the well thought mind and intellects. Therefore, there is little space to ignoring them saying that it was an accident f more than 40 years of composing fiery poems for worldly exaltation and adulation and then knowing the ‘True Path’.
Not only his poetry is rich with such poetical expression but also his opinion regarding socialism and communism in which he once said that ‘I am not follower of socialism or communism I do not see any alternative to this, of this caliber and quality’ is clear example of all those igniting poems that he was well conscious of what e used to compose. That was hidden expression and his liking the communism altogether. Similarly, he visited personally the body of Comrade Lenin, the land of Marx, Mao, Chi and he composed the well known verse ‘a few people are like history’ for Fidel Castro and Chi Guevara. He termed the life of Chi as lion’s one day over Jackal’s hundreds. Those examples radiate his bent of poetic mind.
Furthermore he was not only a born-poet and writer but he acquired the reflective insight into the world literature, philosophy, history, religion, culture and politics. Hence he was for ever and a day in conversation with icons of the world history and philosophy and sharing his thoughts with them. Sometimes reader would be seeing him in his writings in conversation with Mansoor Halaj, sometimes, Socrates, sometimes, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, Charles Darwin, Kaali Das, Meera Bi so on and so forth. Yet the person of Ayaz’s stature could not resist to the diversion to discarding all the previous works and thoughts and disowning the lofty poetry sought refuge in religion?
Another important question can be dealt in this connection that was it not the era to deconstruction? After the fall of USSR, almost quarter of the world went out of the inspiration and the dream of change. The fortification against the American and European capitalism seemed to be under the plunge and the crises of economies, poverty, ill gotten market of the developing world was in diminishing condition and USSR could not save herself so was not in a position to prop up any movement. Was not this the era of backdrop and disappointment? Yeats’s ‘things fall apart and centre can not hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ was enough for Ayaz to take for granted the realistic position and look back? Was the mourning of T. S. Eliot ‘wasteland’ and ‘loss of generation’ working behind? Was not the phenomenon of postmodern deconstructionist elevation? Did he foresee the breakdown of belief systems, birth of hyper reality, discarding the meta-narratives, birth of global culture, not one truth but truths, not one reality but realities in terms of loosing centre? If all of these worked well in the prospect that is it not irony that the person of Shaikh Ayaz’s height could not survive the influence who used to say that I am the poet of past of past and of future of future? This actually was not the turning of a person but was the turning of the whole era and period. Let’s look at its insight, academically, philosophically, psychoanalytically, culturally, nationally, internationally, instead of marking it as simple disappointment of Ayaz or his refuge into religion.
