Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in Sialkot in the Punjab, then a part of India under British rule. His family were well-to-do landowners. Faiz’s father was a prominent lawyer, who was interested in literature, and whose friends included several prominent literary figures, including Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1873-1938), the national poet of Pakistan. Faiz received his education at mission schools in Sialkot in the English language, but he also learned Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. His first poems Faiz wrote already at school. He studied English and Arabic literatures at Government College, Lahore, receiving in 1932 his M.A. in English, and in Arabic from Oriental College, Lahore. Besides formal studies, very important for Faiz’s development was participating in the activities of literary circles, which gathered at homes of established writers. After graduating he worked as a teacher from the mid-1930s in Amritsar and Lahore.
In the 1930s Faiz came under the influence of the leftist Progressive Movement. Under the leadership of Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1973), authors were expected to follow the dictates of the Socialist Realism, but by the 1950s the movement had ceased to be an effective literary force. During World War II, Faiz served in the Indian army in Delhi, and in 1944 he was promoted to the rank of Lieut. Colonel. After the Islamic republic of Pakistan was established in 1947 the country experienced an era of chronic political instability, heightened by tensions between Hindus and Muslims. With the division of the subcontinent, Faiz resigned from the army and moved to Pakistan with his family. Alys Faiz, whom he had married in 1941, later published a book of memoirs, Over My Shoulder (1993), about her life as a British expatriate living in Pakistan. Alys died in 2003. Faiz became editor of the leftist English-langauge daily, the Pakistan Times. He also worked as managing editor of the Urdu daily Imroz, and was actively involved in organizing trade unions.
In 1951 Faiz and a number of army officers were implicated in the so-called Rawalpindi Conspiracy case and arrested under Safety Act. The goverment authorities alleged that Faiz and others were planning a coup d’etat. He spent four years in prison under a sentence of death and was released in 1955. During this perod Alys Faiz worked for the Pakistan Times to support his family. Faiz became the secretary of the National Coucil of the Arts, and in 1962 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. During his years in exile he was editor of the magazine Lotus in Moscow, London and Beirut. In Pakistan his poems, which renewed the traditional romantic imagery of Urdu poetry, gained a huge popularity. Faiz also supported to the use of regional languages of Pakistan in education, the media, and literary expression. After a period of exile in war-torn Lebanon from 1979 to 1982, Faiz returned to his home country.
Faiz’s first collections of poetry, Naqsh-e faryadi (1943), Dast-e saba (1952), and Zindan Namah (1956), were politically motivated, and include some of his most famous poems based on his prison experiences.
In spite of his Marxist beliefs, Faiz did not burden his poems with ideological rhetoric. He fused classic traditional forms of poetry with new symbols derived from Western political ideas. However, in an interview Faiz has criticised the view that a poet “should always present some kind of philosophical, political or some other sort of thesis…” Like Muhammad Iqbal, he reinterpreted the most important theme in the Urdu ghazal, the theme of love. The word ghazal comes from Arabic and has been translated as “to talk with women” or “to talk of women.” Faiz often addressed his poem to his “beloved”, who can be interpreted as his muse, his country, or his concept of beauty or social change. He died in Lahore on November 20, 1984.
