DAWN The Review, November 6-12, 1997

8 DAYS A WEEK

Ishq Beparwa Bhi Hai

By Yadullah Ijtehadi

If you await one book this year, make it Ishq Beparwa Bhi Hai.

Khurram Shafique’s Ishq Beparwa Bhi Hai (to be published by Dia Publications, Islamabad) will be the first of his ‘quintology’on the life and times of Allama Iqbal. The book will be out within the next six weeks, and ‘hopes’ to defy the accepted definition of an autobiography [sic. biography]. Khurram has chronicled every possible detail of the poet’s life, the significant as well as the insignificant one, and therefore his book will have an advantage over all the scholarly works done by researchers of Iqbal. The writer here has aimed to integrate Iqbal the man with Iqbal the artiste, to give a more holistic view of the poet.

But why did he choose Iqbal? The writer has been fascinated with the poet’s “human magnanimity” and considers him to be the most interesting Muslim figure in the subcontinent in the last two hundred years. With this book, Khurram hopes to attract the scholars as well as the average individual with more (or less) than a pedantic interest in the life of the nation’s poet. This first of the five books covers the period upto 1904, before Iqbal left for Europe. And when does it begin? 1,500 B.C.! You can figure out that one when you read the book.