My father maintained constant contact with him although he had joined the army and always spoke very highly about him ! Gordon College was actually the family college for us with two uncles as its students and some six other close relatives ! One uncle taught here also .
No doubt Professor Khwaja Masud a great teacher and a great progressive !
Agha H Amin
The collection of articles presented in this book as a series of Lessons retells our history, as Howard Zinn says, not from the "side of the executioners," or the side of the exploiters, but as lived by the heroic fighters who staked their lives on the altar of freedom and liberty. Passionately they unveil the hidden historical treasures of our past when people rebelled against authority, fought magnificently, sometimes winning, sometimes sacrificing their lives to rouse the masses from a khoub e garoan.
Fierce conflicts of interest make history, conflicts between dictators and dictated, rich and poor, landlords and peasants, capitalists and workers. For the working people of our country history has meant violence, hunger and continued exploitation. Carlyle who regarded history as the biography of great men implied otherwise when he summed up the seminal causes of the French revolution: "Hunger and nakedness and nightmare oppression lying heavy on twenty-five million hearts: this… was the prime mover in the French Revolution; as the like will be in all revolutions, in all countries." Millions of discontented working people are the real motivating force of our history, and a factor which no one may ignore. This is where progressive politics begins, as Lenin says, "where the masses are."
The Lessons give a simple but powerful political message: that the interests of the ruling class, the wily rulers, who have "built frightening security establishments to batter and subdue the working people," are not the same as those of the working people who struggle from day to day to make ends meet! And "each of us must struggle to change the oppressive system that condemns the working people of our country to life-long oppression." Every person must challenge unfairness wherever he finds it. Mobilization is to the working people what capital is to the capitalists. The need of the hour, therefore, is unity—unity among the working people and those fighting on their side.
The Lessons purposely draw from a wide spectrum of sources covering our freedom struggle, our religion and the lives of inspiring revolutionaries of the world, to give the reader a palette with enough hues to rekindle the Spirit of Revolution and inspire the will to struggle for a future without oppression. Yet, the Lessons metamorphose with ease into a singular cry to the Pakistani intelligentsia who are "beholden to the teeming millions of poverty-stricken working people," to stand on the side of the working people, to "take out the medieval imprint (of feudalism) on our thoughts, .. improve the condition of the working people,.. spread progressive ideas throughout society." That is how change will work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That is how we may end this winter of our ill fortune and discover ourselves. That is how we may make the Quaid's dream of Pakistan a vibrant reality.
In the intense revolutionary fervor of the sailors of Talwar, fearless sacrifices of fighters like Bhagat Singh, life-long, unceasing struggles of people like Dada Amir Haider, in the dimmed eyes of this "rain-soaked cloud of sawan" longing for the dawn, we find inspiration, optimism and guidance for action. Retelling their stories is to keep alive the sparkling memory of their resistance; and to remind us of the recurring capacity of the people to rebel and assert their humanity even in times of deep pessimism.
In our apocalyptically unequal and broken society illiteracy, poverty and hunger are rampant, bigotry and dogmatism hold sway, problems mount and the grief of the people deepens, screaming how far we have strayed from the Quaid's vision of Pakistan without injustice and exploitation. By revisiting and restoring the Quaid's vision of Pakistan the Lessons show us a way back to achieving the ideal for which our freedom fighters struggled hard and long.
They show that Quaid-e-Azam and Allama Iqbal abhorred theocracy, and condemned obscurantism; they drew inspiration from the past, but revolted against living in the past; and stood steadfastly for freedom, equality, justice and tolerance. In these values they give a firm footing to the foundation of our nationalism.
The Quaid was explicit about the role of religion in the state: "Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims—Hindus, Christians and Parsees—they are all Pakistanis and will play their rightful part in the affairs of Pakistan."
The Quaid envisioned a Pakistan with deep and genuine concern for the working people. He believed that social emancipation must go hand in hand with national liberation, because the real aim of freedom is the uplift of the working people. The Quaid had unshakeable belief in the working of democracy. He visualized a people's government, because he had faith in the invincible might of the working people—the prime movers of history. Militarism is at the opposing pole of democracy. It has not learnt from the sordid events that culminated in the break-away of Bangladesh, nor from its machinations that culminated in the emergence of the Taliban—our right-wing middle class' fascist vanguard. It fragments and divides civil society, undermines the social fabric and "relentlessly gnaws away the sinews of our body politic." That is why the proper functioning of democracy requires the military's subordination to the political leadership, without which, militarism uninhibitedly pursues domestic ventures and across the borders that are doomed to fail. Democracy demands tolerance, compromise, a readiness on the part of the citizens and the leaders to accept divergent views, and a willingness to live and let live.
Islam prepares the ground for such a cast of mind through the injunctions la ikrah fiddin (there is no compulsion in religion) and lakum dinakum wa li din (for you, your religion; for me, mine). As Iqbal says, "the acceptance of social democracy … is a return to the original purity of Islam." If a society lacks tolerance, then civil society cannot flourish, and democracy is endangered. Engulfed in a sea of hypocritical religiosity as the mullas would have us believe we forget that Islam is a permanent revolution, its grand narrative reflected in the principles of adl and ihsan, a thirst for ilm, and tolerance and pluralism. As Iqbal says, to be a Muslim is to "step on to the scaffold of love." Love for the suffering humanity is what marks a true Muslim.
"The motivating force in the permanence of Islam's revolution is the spirit of Islamic culture which regards the world as dynamic and evolving.. According to the Quran, change is a great sign of God: Kullo yoman, howa fi shan (every day has its own glory)." A changing world naturally, requires a creative and imaginative response. Old views wither in an ever-evolving dynamic world demanding with iron necessity new responses and new challenges. Islam is a faith in which God provides the riches to solve new problems. Then, obviously, the driving spirit of Islam is iconoclasm, "the destruction of false gods." Hazrat Imam Hussain broke the idol of autocracy; Mansoor-al-Hallaj that of orthodoxy; And the struggle goes on, in Iqbal's words, between the "Chirag-e-Mustafavi and Sharar-e-Bulahabi" with Hazrat Imam Hussain's ultimate sacrifice for integrity, constancy and commitment, serving as a paradigm for all those who would like to see Islam in its pristine glory.
Historians have chronicled the stories of the great bearers of the Chirag-e-Mustafavi, who staked their lives on the altar of progressive change that history fosters from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Gramsci to Rosa Luxembourg, Che, Ho Chi Minh and Nelson Mandela. They kept ablaze over the ages the Spirit of Revolution—that burning desire for progressive change resonating in the flaming words of the International; that eagerness to build an egalitarian society, that is renewed and celebrated by working people of the world on the first day of every May, and resounds in the gathering momentum of mass movements of the working class.
The stories of the Chicago workers whose sacrifices are commemorated on May Day, and of the lives of inspiring leaders are retold here with more urgency to be reinterpreted and used to help shape our present and future. Their lives are lessons in revolutionary philosophy, theory and practice, strategy and tactics, ideological hegemony, humanism, passion and organizational discipline, which are all necessary tools to forge a new way to progressive change. They are lessons of great men and women who believed that eradicating the misery of the working people is worth fighting and dying for.
By bequeathing these lessons on to others with clarity of heart and spirit this book both draws attention to these magnificent progressive traditions, and preserves them, so they may continue to inspire future generations to struggle for the noblest cause in the world—the liberation of the working people from tyranny and exploitation.
The Lessons are drawn from the lifetime of struggle for truth of my father, Khwaja Masud, who was proud of our revolutionary past and had supreme faith in our country's future without exploitation and poverty. During his eventful life he prepared several generations of Pakistanis for responsible citizenship, imparting knowledge, developing critical thinking skills in them, and inspiring them to make the world a better place. His legacy endures, rising phoenix-like in these Lessons to passionately urge yet another generation of Pakistanis to arm themselves with the Quranic injunctions of tadabbur, tafakkur and taaqul; with Allama Iqbal's Ijtihad to regain the imaginative èlan of Khwarizmi, Omar Khayyam, Al Beruni and Tusi; imbibe Faiz's revolutionary romanticism and the dedication of world revolutionaries; hark back to the fervent cry of Hazrat Abu Zhar Ghaffari for the dispossessed, the disinherited; beckon to the purity of Tahira, whose unlimited commitment to truth tore apart all veils and left Orthodoxy crest-fallen, to a "future without orthodoxy and to a time when women will march shoulder to shoulder with men to wipe off the tears of a grieved humanity."
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