Akbar S. Ahmed is an eminent former Pakistani bureaucrat turned diplomat, poet, anthropologist, filmmaker, researcher, Islamic scholar and teacher. He has taught at prestigious universities like Cambridge, Princeton, and Harvard, and presently he occupies the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington. He has a vast but variegated experience of serving in the Tribal Areas and Balochistan. Among a miscellany of illustrious writings, he also has to his credit a graphic novel on the Quaid. His compilation ‘Mataloona–Pukhtun Proverbs and Mizh–A Frontier Classic’ is a step forward to understanding Waziristan and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan.
‘Mataloona-Pukhtoon Proverbs and Mizh-A Frontier Classic’:
In the foreword to the work, the compiler explains that it comprises two small books first published by OUP in the 1970s; the first is a collection of Pukhtun proverbs (original and translated) while the second, a monograph on the Mahsud tribe by Sir Elvyn Howell (1877-1971), a British scholar-cum-civil servant posted to Waziristan in the first decade of the past century.
The dictionary defines a proverb (‘masal’ in Urdu and ‘matal’ in Pukhto) as ‘a condensed but memorable saying embodying some important fact of experience that is taken as true by many people’. Thus it is a representer of values embedded in the language, culture, custom, peculiar habits, morals and traditions of a people inhabiting an intra-contiguous geographical entity besides reflecting a great deal of their ‘social thinking’ (as viewed by Shoaib Sultan Khan, a renowned pioneer of rural uplift in the region). The compiler claims that he spent ‘many an evening looking for the most exact translation of each Pukhto proverb or finding the nearest equivalent from other cultures; there are Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and Spanish proverbs and there is even Shakespeare. The diversity of sources establishes the scope, span, and sophistication of the Pukhto proverbs’.
Sir Olaf Caroe of Sussex (UK) (1892-1981), a one-time Governor of the NWFP has written the Preface to the book. Cracking an anecdote relating to his tenure of service in the area, once his teacher of the Pukhto language Qazi Rahimullah of Abdara told him that ‘an ability to quote the apt matal– proverb is one way to the heart of the Pukhtoon. And so it proved once with an angry Mohmand jirga at Shabqadar, who turned from scowls to smile when told that patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet’. (Translation of a Pukhto proverb).
The book is a compendium, as it were, of as many as 153 mataloona in their native as well as English versions. The compiler seems to have taken pains to collect, edit, and correlate those to contemporary multilingual but cross-cultural jargons where necessary, bespeaking his vast but variegated learning and experience.
Part II of the book is titled ‘Mizh’ which is a monograph on government’s relations with the Mahsud tribe by Evelyn Howell, Resident in Waziristan (1924-26). It is purported to be a confidential document which stipulates ‘how to deal — or not to deal — with tribes in the modern world’. The compilation is thus meant ‘to dispel the idea that Pukhtun culture somehow lacks cultural sensitivity and sophistication’. The writer politely vilipends those public functionaries serving in that region who have ‘little idea of Pukhtuns’, deeming them as ‘backward and primitive’. He cites the example of Howell and Caroe who being aliens learned the local language and tried to adjust themselves to the creed, custom, and culture of the native populace. As notable exceptions, he mentions the names of Ghulam Qadir Khan Daur, Sahibzada Riaz Noor, and Ejaz Rahim as scholar-administrators of repute having served in Frontier Province (now KPK) for lifetimes. The latter two for their savvy literary-cum-administrative insight and acumen are likened to Howell and Caroe by the compiler who himself being an ace scholar-administrator, had had a distinguished service career in the NWFP and the adjoining Tribal Areas besides Balochistan, graduating to Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK and finally diverting to professorship at some top-ranking universities of the world.
‘BIBI MUBARIKA AND BABAR’:
Sahibzada Riaz Noor is also a famed ex-civil servant turned poet with two verse collections in English to his credit, the first being ‘The Dragonfly & Other Poems’ while the second, an epic titled ‘Bibi Mubarika and Babur’.
This is a palingenetic epic in English, in the Homeric tradition. An epic may be defined as a long narrative poem about events in the past, often involving gods or kings and queens. The chief actors in the ‘drama’ are the Mughal Emperor Babur (1483-1530) and his Pukhtun wife Bibi Mubarika (m. 1519) (d.1531), a scion of the Yousafzai tribe.
Famed writers and intellectuals Akbar Ahmad and Ejaz Rahim have contributed thought-provoking forewords to the monumental work. Sahibzada Riaz Noor in Akbar Ahmad’s opinion seems to have been enamoured by Babur’s valour and strategic skills, poetic genius, versatility, cultural and architectural pursuits, and last but not least, his humanity.
Ejaz Rahim views this work as an ensemble of ‘craft, realism and romanticism, imagination and empathy, and a constant strand of humanism’. Sahibzada Riaz Noor, according to the former has ‘picked up aesthetic courage in choosing a tale from Mughal annals to produce an epic full of human significance and contemporary relevance, as well as philosophical universality’. The use of quatrain as a vehicle of expression lends the poem an air of interlingual proximity to the reigning oriental languages viz. Urdu, Persian and Arabic.
The poem bears an inimitable splendour of description and delineation of natural scenery and human character. Grace and generosity were the hallmark of Babur’s character. Bibi Mubarika, his fifth spouse, was a paragon of temperance, self-esteem, and fidelity. The poem is rich in imagery, sentiment, and a historicist stance generic to its theme. The quadrilateral structure and shape of its stanzas with unrhymed lines of varying length consorted with the rhythmic nuances of accent and stresses in changing metrical patterns add to the sonic splendour, as also the contextual import, of the poem.
The epic as a poetic form has traversed across the ages encompassing Homer (‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’), Valmiki (‘Ramayana’), Vyasa (‘Mahabharata’), Ovid (‘Metamorphoses’), Virgil (‘Aeneid’), Ferdowsi (‘Shahname’), Dante (‘Divine Comedy’), Milton (‘Paradise Lost’), Byron (‘Don Juan’), Hafeez Jalandhari (‘Shahnama-e-Islam’) down to Ejaz Rahim (‘Gardens of Secrets Revisited’) and Shibzada Riaz Noor (‘Bibi Mubarika and Babur’) in different languages of the world. Ejaz Rahim is of the view that ‘Sahibzada Riaz Noor achieves success through three elements—convincing characterisation, artistically portraying the ambience of the times, and skilful fusion of poetic form and language’. He goes on to say that ‘the great challenge of writing an epic today is that it must not only recall or recover the past but also allure and convey a sense of the present’, and that ‘an epic is not a mere recollection; it has to be a rebirth, a renaissance’.
All said, the two books are likely to attract keen readers to read and appreciate in both their resemblance as well as divergence.
