Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz?

1. Sialkot: a traditional education and a modern mind

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born on 13 February 1911 in Sialkot, in the Punjab, then part of British India. His father, Sultan Muhammad Khan, was a lawyer who had studied at Cambridge and who served as an adviser to the Amir of Afghanistan, and the family was prosperous and well connected. Faiz received a traditional education in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, studying the classical poets under the guidance of his father's friends, and he also attended the modern schools of the time, eventually earning a master's degree in English literature from Government College Lahore and a master's in Arabic from the University of the Punjab. The combination of a classical Islamic education and a modern English one shaped his poetry throughout his life.

As a young man, Faiz was drawn to the Progressive Writers' Movement, a group of writers who believed that literature should serve the cause of social justice and should speak for the poor and the oppressed. He was also drawn to Marxism, and he became a member of the Communist Party, a commitment that would shape his politics and his poetry for the rest of his life. His early poems were romantic, in the tradition of the Urdu ghazal, but they were already marked by a social conscience, and his most famous early poem, Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat Mere Mehboob Na Maang, written in the early 1940s, is a love poem that turns, in its second half, into a poem about the suffering of the world.

Faiz began his working life as a teacher, at M.A.O. College in Amritsar and then at Hailey College of Commerce in Lahore, and he also began to write for newspapers and journals. He was a gifted teacher, and his students remembered him as a man of great charm and erudition, who could quote the classical poets from memory and who treated his students as equals. The teaching years were also the years in which he began to publish his poetry, and his first collection, Naqsh-e-Faryadi, published in 1941, established him as one of the leading young poets of his generation.

2. War, journalism and the birth of Pakistan

During the Second World War, Faiz joined the British Indian Army, serving in the publicity department and rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He later said that he joined the army because he believed the war against fascism was a just war, and his service gave him an experience of the world beyond the Punjab that would inform his later writing. He left the army in 1947, the year of independence, and he became the editor of the Pakistan Times, a progressive English-language newspaper in Lahore, and of its Urdu sister paper, Imroze.

The birth of Pakistan in 1947 was a moment of hope and of tragedy for Faiz. He welcomed independence, but he was horrified by the violence of Partition, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed and millions were displaced, and his poem Subh-e-Azadi, written in August 1947, is one of the great poems of the period. It begins with the words Yeh daagh daagh ujaala, yeh shab gazida seher, this stained light, this night-bitten dawn, and it refuses to celebrate independence as a simple triumph. The poem is a reminder that Faiz was a poet who told the truth even when it was unwelcome, and that his loyalty was to the people, not to the state.

As editor of the Pakistan Times, Faiz was a prominent public figure, and he used the newspaper to argue for democracy, for social justice and for friendship between Pakistan and India. He was also a leading figure in the cultural life of Lahore, and his home became a meeting place for writers, artists and political activists. But his politics made him enemies, and in 1951 he was arrested on charges of involvement in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy, an alleged plot by military officers and civilians to overthrow the government of Liaquat Ali Khan.

3. Prison: four years behind bars

Faiz was imprisoned from 1951 to 1955, first in Hyderabad jail and then in other prisons in Pakistan, and the years in prison were among the most productive of his life as a poet. He wrote some of his finest poems in prison, including Zindan Nama, the prison memoir, and the poems that would appear in his collection Dast-e-Saba, published in 1952, and Zindan Nama, published in 1956. The prison poems are marked by a remarkable absence of bitterness: they are poems of hope, of love and of faith in the future, and they are written in a voice that is calm and musical even when it speaks of suffering.

The Rawalpindi Conspiracy case remains a contested episode in Pakistani history. The government of the time said that Faiz and his co-accused were plotting a military coup; Faiz and his supporters said that the case was a fabrication, designed to silence a critical voice and to intimidate the left. Historians have generally concluded that the evidence against Faiz was thin, and that the case was politically motivated, but the full truth of the conspiracy has never been established. What is certain is that the imprisonment made Faiz a symbol of resistance, and that his poems from prison are among the most loved in Urdu literature.

Faiz was released in 1955, after the conspiracy case collapsed, and he returned to journalism, becoming the editor of the Pakistan Times again and later the editor of the magazine Lail-o-Nahar. He also became a prominent figure in the international peace movement, and in 1962 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union, a recognition of his work for peace and for the rights of the oppressed. The prize was controversial in Pakistan, where the government was aligned with the West, but it confirmed Faiz's standing as a poet of international importance.

4. The poetry: the ghazal remade

Faiz's great achievement as a poet was to take the classical Urdu ghazal, a form that had been used for centuries to write about love and wine, and to remake it as a vehicle for political and social expression, without losing its music or its beauty. His ghazals are romantic, but they are also political: the beloved is often a metaphor for the revolution, or for the people, or for freedom itself, and the pain of love becomes the pain of the world. The poem Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat is the classic example: it begins as a love poem, and it ends with the recognition that the world has changed, that the beloved can no longer be loved as before, because the suffering of others has intervened.

His language is a blend of the classical and the modern. He uses the traditional imagery of the ghazal, the nightingale, the rose, the wine, the beloved's face, but he also uses the language of the modern world, of prisons, of exile, of the working class, and he does so without ever breaking the music of the verse. His poems are written in a diction that is accessible to ordinary readers, and they are meant to be recited aloud, and they have been set to music by singers from Noor Jehan to Iqbal Bano, whose rendition of Hum Dekhenge, sung in Lahore in 1985 in defiance of the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq, is one of the great moments in the history of South Asian music.

Hum Dekhenge, written in 1979 and published in his collection Mere Dil Mere Musafir in 1981, is Faiz's most famous poem, and it is a prophecy of a day when the oppressors will be overthrown and the people will be free. Its imagery is drawn from Islamic tradition, from the Day of Judgement and from the Kaaba, and it has been claimed by many different groups, from secular progressives to religious movements, a fact that has led to argument about its meaning. In 2019, the poem became the centre of a controversy in India, when a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur complained that some of its lines were anti-Hindu. Supporters of the poem replied that it was a poem against oppression in general, and that its imagery was drawn from a shared cultural tradition. The controversy showed, once again, that Faiz's poetry is alive, and that it is still capable of provoking argument more than three decades after his death.

5. Exile in Beirut and the later years

In 1978, Faiz left Pakistan for Beirut, where he became the editor of Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers' Association, and he lived in Lebanon until 1982, during the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasion of 1982. The years in Beirut were difficult, but they were also productive, and they gave him a perspective on the struggles of the Arab world that informed his later poetry. He returned to Pakistan in 1982, and he spent his final years in Lahore, writing, receiving visitors, and remaining, despite his failing health, a public figure of great moral authority.

Faiz died in Lahore on 20 November 1984, at the age of seventy-three, after a long illness. His funeral was attended by thousands of people, and his death was mourned across South Asia, in Pakistan, in India and in Bangladesh. The government of Pakistan awarded him the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, the country's highest civilian honour, in 1990, six years after his death, a recognition that came late but that confirmed his standing as the greatest Urdu poet of the twentieth century after Muhammad Iqbal.

The later years of his life were also the years in which his reputation spread beyond South Asia. His poems were translated into English, most notably by the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose translations, published as The Rebel's Silhouette in 1991, introduced Faiz to English-speaking readers around the world. His work has also been translated into many other languages, and he is now read as a world poet, a writer whose concerns, love, justice, freedom and the dignity of the human person, are universal.

6. The translator's poet: Faiz in English

Faiz's reputation in English rests largely on translation, and the quality of the translations matters. Agha Shahid Ali's versions are the most admired, and they capture the music and the compression of the originals, but they are also, inevitably, interpretations, and readers who know Urdu often argue that no translation can do justice to Faiz's language. The most famous lines of Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat, in Ali's translation, run: Do not ask of me, my love, the love I once had for you, a rendering that captures the poem's turn from love to the world, but that cannot reproduce the sound of the Urdu. This is a general problem with translated poetry, and it is worth remembering when reading Faiz in English: the translations are guides, not substitutes.

The fact that Faiz is read in translation at all is a measure of his importance. Few Urdu poets have been translated as widely, and fewer still have been adopted by readers who do not share his language or his culture. His poems are read by activists, by students, by lovers and by exiles, and they are read because they speak to experiences that are common to all of them: the experience of loving someone in a world that is unjust, of hoping for a better future, and of refusing to accept the world as it is.

His influence on later poets has been enormous. In Pakistan, he is the model for every progressive Urdu poet who has followed him, and in India, his poems are recited at protests, at literary festivals and at weddings, a sign of the breadth of his appeal. He is also, for many readers, the poet who made it possible to be both a romantic and a revolutionary, to write about love and about politics in the same poem, and to do so without sacrificing the beauty of the verse. That achievement is his lasting contribution to Urdu literature, and it is why his poems are still read, recited and sung today.

7. Legacy: the conscience of a nation

Faiz Ahmed Faiz is remembered in Pakistan as the conscience of the nation, a poet who spoke for the poor, the imprisoned and the exiled, and who never compromised his principles, even when it cost him his freedom. His birthday, 13 February, is celebrated by literary organisations in Pakistan and in India, and his centenary in 2011 was marked by conferences, concerts and publications around the world. His home in Lahore, in Model Town, has become a place of pilgrimage for readers, and his poems are taught in schools and universities in Pakistan and in India.

His legacy is also a political one. He was a committed socialist and a member of the Communist Party, and his politics were central to his poetry, but his appeal has always been broader than his politics. Readers who do not share his political views have loved his poems for their beauty, their music and their humanity, and his work has been claimed by people of many different persuasions, from secular liberals to religious reformers. That breadth of appeal is a sign of his greatness, and it is also a source of argument, as the controversy over Hum Dekhenge showed. But the argument is itself a tribute: Faiz's poems are still alive, and they are still capable of provoking debate, because they speak to questions that have not been settled.

The most fitting tribute to Faiz may be the simplest: his poems are still recited, still sung, and still loved, forty years after his death, by people who were not born when he died. They are recited at protests and at weddings, in classrooms and in living rooms, and they are recited because they say something that people need to hear: that love and justice are not separate, that the world can be changed, and that the dawn will come, even if it is stained and night-bitten. That is the message of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and it is why he remains, for millions of readers, the greatest Urdu poet of the modern age.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Faiz Ahmad Faiz
• Wikipedia — Faiz Ahmad Faiz
• Rekhta — Faiz Ahmad Faiz

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• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.