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Faiz Ahmed Faiz
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Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in Sialkot a hundred years ago, with official records showing February 13, 1911 as the date of birth. He shared his hometown with Pakistan’s national poet, Allama Muhammad Iqbal. Faiz’s father, Sultan Mohammad Khan, was a poor shepherd boy, the son of a landless peasant in Kala Kader, Sialkot, who taught himself Persian as well as Urdu and English and, by a fortuitous combination of hard work, intelligence and luck, eventually rose to become the then Afghan king’s personal interpreter and senior minister.
He later moved to England, where he acquired a law degree at Cambridge and became friends with Iqbal. He finally retired back to Sialkot as a practising lawyer and a gentleman of leisure. Sultan Mohammad Khan had acquired several wives during his travels, including some daughters of Afghan nobles. However, upon his return to Sialkot, he married Faiz’s mother, his last and youngest wife. Shortly thereafter Faiz was born, and received his early education under the tutelage of the renowned scholar Sayyid Mir Hasan, known as Shamsul Ulema at the Scotch Mission High School in 1921. Mir Saheb was the finest scholar in Sialkot.
Allama Iqbal had completed his studies from same school in 1893 but a few of his teachers were still working there, including Mir Hasan, whom the British government at the insistence of Iqbal had given the title of Shamsul Ulema. By Iqbal’s own account, Mir Hasan had influenced him immensely, and Faiz was to become one of his favourite students just as Iqbal once was. Faiz showed a natural affinity for languages and excelled in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English as subjects. He graduated from the Scotch Mission in 1927 with honours and remained in touch with Mir Hasan, continuing to learn Sunnah and literature. Faiz described how in school he was accepted as a leader by his peers in spite of his own perceived lack of any such qualities in himself. Of his well known and soft-tempered personality, he offered another explanation from his childhood. He described himself as growing up in a ‘horde of women’, aunts, cousins and other relatives; how his two brothers, Inayat and Tufail, were interested in outdoor pursuits and how he (Faiz) was the one whom ‘the women nabbed’. He described affectionately how they ‘forced’ him to become civilised and how this resulted in him becoming ever so soft-spoken and never wishing to utter a harsh word to anyone.
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