KARACHI: Institute of Business Administration (IBA) Karachi, organized a distinguished lecture series by Dr Noman ul Haq, Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts, IBA on ‘Iqbal as History, Iqbal as Commodity’ at the IBA City Campus. The welcome note was delivered by Malahat Awan, Head of Alumni Relations IBA.
Eighty years after the death of Allama Iqbal, the lecture aimed at assessing the literary, philosophical, and political status of Dr Allama Iqbal. Dr Haq’s assessments were based essentially on primary sources, particularly Iqbal’s Urdu and Persian poetry as well as his private letters. He commented on how the irony lies in the fact that despite their ideological rejection of Iqbal’s ‘philosophy’, Pakistan’s leftist groups still appeared to be utterly charmed by Iqbal’s verse in their private moments.
Before delving into Iqbal’s poetry, Dr Haq expressed how Urdu as a national language is undergoing a process of getting lost. This language vacuum, he argued, appears regardless of numerous Urdu electronic media channels, Urdu print media publications, and emerging Pakistani film industry, which uses Urdu as its underlying carrier. And this happens primarily due to the lack of proper cultivation of language in schools and colleges that fail to teach how to articulate speech.
Dr Haq linked this apparent language blackout with blocked access to Iqbal’s poetry. He stressed that Iqbal’s poetry is not aimed for ‘declamation in a performance assembly to display the poet’s virtuosity’. Instead, it is poetry for reading.
“The loss of languages, together with the retrograde motion of what was rising as a reading culture of Urdu poetry beyond sheer hearing — these two historical accidents go a long way in explaining why Iqbal-the-poet is receding into darkness from the skies of contemporary cultural vogue”, remarked Dr. Haq. However, he also added that there exists another agency that fuels this culture: the tendency to talk about Iqbal’s message and philosophy to an extent that conveniently excludes his poetic expression.
The session concluded with Dean & Director Dr Farrukh Iqbal presenting Dr Noman ul Haq with a shield and giving a note of thanks. The lecture was attended and appreciated by luminaries from all walks of life, academics, alumni, faculty and students of the IBA.—PR
