The other Jaun Elia-I
By Zameer Abbas
The popularity
of Jaun Elia (1931-2002) as a poet has risen in recent times. Despite his
intellectual versatility, he was not as well-known during his lifetime as he is
today mainly because he resisted getting his works published for a long time. However,
the newly increased interest in Jaun Elia has overly been focused on his
poetry; mostly the rhythmic, catchy and mesmerizing verses recited by him in
Mushairas.
That Jaun Elia was a bohemian poet is evident from a
bare reading of his sample kalaam, now available in print, e-books and of late in innumerable audio and
video clips on YouTube. This easy access has spread his poetry among public at large, especially the youth, who
upload and share it on social media. His online fans are based all around the
world and not just Pakistan. Nonetheless, this poetry-centric approach to
reading and understanding
non-conformist poet has eclipsed his works in prose. Most, if
not all, of the new Jaun enthusiasts
consider
him a poet only.
Given the richness
of his thought in both poetry and prose, consideration of Jaun
only a poet doesn’t do justice to his ingenuity. On deeper reading, he
comes out as an individual with many personas: all fickle and stable at the
same time. This contradiction in terms was a distinctive part of his
personality as narrated by dozens of his friends, contemporaries, close
relatives, confidants and admirers. This two part series will touch upon the
other Jaun Elia, as opposed to the popularly known poet.
Jaun could not become only a poet simply because his household and social surroundings
were diverse intellectual breeding grounds, poetry a small part of it. In his
own words: “the time around my birth was marked by discussions around Aristotle
on the one hand and on Heraclitus and Democritus on the other. Amroha was alive with debates on whether God existed”.
Such debates are unimaginable in today's increasingly intolerant world. During
his lifetime, Jaun wrote about many things ranging from his role as an actor in
the drama club he founded to his loss of conviction in the cherished beliefs he
inherited. His poetry is a panorama on philosophy, nihilism, love, lust, nostalgia,
Muslim irrationality, criticism of society, existential angst, promiscuity,
communist idealism and above all, his guilt about not being able to live as he
wished to, perhaps like all the great artists who dream a different world other
than the one they live in. However, this didn’t prevent Jaun from thoughtfully
writing about these topics. If his poetry made brief references to philosophy,
his prose unfolded the theme and explained it in everyday terms. If he made fun
of a religious bigot in a stanza, his essays expanded with a historical
perspective.
Let us consider the unique observations and derivations
of Jaun Elia on Islamic rationality; the tradition that emphasizes a greater
role for human reason in understanding Islamic injunctions in Quran and Sunnah.
Like many scholars of Islam who lament the loss of intellectualism and closing
of the Muslim mind, Jaun emphasized
free inquiry and philosophical discussions as the way forward.
He was critical of the religious fundamentalists who,
in his view, had always conspired to stifle fresh thinking and punished those
who had dared to challenge their parochial views. He called such narrow-minded
clerics “zulmatoon kay murabbbi” (the mentors of darkness), “khizaan parast” (pro fall) and “ dushmanan-e-Jamal” (enemies of beauty)
while violently opposed to enlightenment of mind. The metaphors he used for religious bigots and retrogressive Muslim
leaders in society are terse, derisive, meaningful and expressive especially in
the poem “Shehr-e-Ashoob” in Shaayad, his first book of poetry. But Jaun
being Jaun, went beyond criticizing them and reminded how a culture of debate
and inquiry marked a certain period
of Islamic
history until traditionalist thinking took over. His choice to be a student of
both Deobandi and Shia teachers showed his open-mindedness when it came to
accepting sectarian differences. Such cross-sect education is unthinkable today,
generally for all the Muslims and particularly for those who attend religious
schools or madaaris. This is not to deny sectarian differences during Jaun's time, but his magnanimity to rise
above those differences, as is expected of any scholar.
Jaun’s deep knowledge of both Arabic and Persian, the
languages of almost all classic Islamic scholars, enabled him to comment on many
of the topics rarely
discussed by later day Muslim scholars. A cursory look at the
books/treatises he rendered in Urdu for Ismaili Tariqah and Religious Education
Karachi shows the depth of his understanding of the languages of Islam. The titles included “Hasan Bin Sabah”,
“Analytics”, “Geometry”, “Ismailism in Yemen, Syria and Iraq”, “Rasail-e-Ikhwanus-Safa”
and many more. Unfortunately, most of the listed works are not available for
public reference.
Jaun went
beyond a mere translation and subjected these scholarly thoughts to critical
interpretation in Urdu, his mother-tongue and lingua
franca of the Muslims of sub-continent, making the undiscussed Islamic thoughts publicly available. His discursive
understanding and commentary on philosophers like George Berkeley, John Stuart
Mill , David Hume, Avicenna, Ghazali etc
remains unmatched in modern Urdu
literature.
Jaun would have appreciated what Robert Reiley has
argued in his book “The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide
Created the Modern Islamist Crisis”. Reily argues that the abandonment of
philosophy and logic has triggered the Muslim decline. This theme has been
taken up by Jaun in many of his essays and stanzas. The “unthought”, as the
Algerian scholar Muhammad Arkoun put it, in Muslim psyche has been underlined
by many other reformist scholars of past and present like professor Fazlur
Rehman, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, Maulana Wahiduddin and Fatima Mernissi, to name a
few.
Jaun’s recipe for revival of Muslim thought reiterates
opening of mind for new thoughts and a
rationalistic re-interpretation of the scripture as the Mu’tazila scholars of 8th
to 10th century had taught. Controversial as it may seem, Jaun considered Mu’tazila thinkers to
be “always unique in that they protected and revived the oldest intellectual
heritage left behind by Semitic thinkers
at
a time when Islamic history was dominated and defined by politics alone;…they introduced Hellenic and
Roman modes of thinking to Islamic circles through an organized movement; (ideas
which were) only discussed in the premises of the shrines of Antakya and
Alexandria".
He seemed to agree with what Fazlur Rehman called the “intellectual suicide”of
Muslims because “ “(they) had deprived themselves of philosophy and thus fell
in deprivation of fresh ideas”. Jaun praised the Abbasid caliphs who made Mu’tazila
ideology “the state philosophy”.
In short, Jaun
Elia was more than a poet. His ideas about revival of rationality in Islamic
thought resonate with many modern scholars. I will briefly discuss his distinctive views
on philosophy in the next piece.
An earlier version of this piece was published in High Asia Herald. That link is somehow not accessible so i posted it here. ---Zameer
