ENIGMATIC PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILES AND LACK OF QUESTIONS ABOUT ICONIC LEGACY
THERE WERE NO FINANCIAL PACKAGES OR GREED IN THE LEGACY OF ISLAMIC ICONS

I was sitting in the drawing room of the Prime Ministers House in Rawalpindi in 1976, and having a candid talk with Mrs Nusrat Bhutto, wife of the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was in the adjacent room watching us. Mrs Bhutto was kind enough to show me the bedroom of the Prime Minister and three paintings of M.A. Rahman Chughtai hung on top of the bed. They had been acquired from the artist himself, by the then Governor of Punjab, Ghulam Mustafa Khar. Mrs Nusrat Bhutto had a huge file in her hand and I enquired what was it that she was reading from the pages. She looked startled but was candid too. She said it was a file they had made on me. I asked “Who made it?” She said, Dr Muhammed Ajmal, the Head of the Psychology Department, of the Government College, Lahore. I innocently asked if I could look at it. She smiled and said NO. I always wondered about it, till it was read by General Zia ul Haque himself. The Presidents House remained in touch with me.

I was sitting with an American family in Bethesda, and the Head of the house, asked me a question. No actually sought compliance to his query. STOP LOOKING AT THE LEGACY OF YOUR FATHER, MAKE SOMETHING OF YOURSELF ON YOUR OWN. HE WAS A GREAT ARTIST BUT HE IS NOW DEAD. FORGET HIM! I could not believe the statement. I, who patted my father’s back numerous times during his illness, being asked to forgo my legacy. I retorted in a rather brazen way for a very young person. I said perhaps father-in-laws in Pakistan could say things to their prospective son-in-laws, but in the United States, a land of freedom, this retort sounded not only unfair but against the very Ideology of Pakistan.

In last 42 years so many psychological profilers have come to profile me and while they are profiling me, I am profiling them, with their silly habits in trying to be too clever. I have been on this road for a very long time. Petty investigators cannot understand the dynamism of an intellectual mind. Working on set number of questions, devised by foreign lobbies, how can they relate it to our Ideological frontiers? A few days back a funny man was asking me bizarre questions. WHEN I WILL COME FACE TO FACE WITH ALLAH, WHAT WILL I ASK ALLAH? Making dossiers with predictive values is falsehood. The creative genius of humankind is very complex. It will react to stimuli in a number of ways, but conditioned by Islamic legacy, the choice between FIGHT and FLIGHT will be easy to make.

M.A. Rahman Chughtai did not know greed in any way. He suffered all his life but his dignity was intact till the end. He never carried money in his pocket. He hesitated to count money. He would not bear with the idea of our counting the money. His icons started from Hazrat Umar himself, and he could weep by telling us stories about him. There was no greed in Islamic icons. Salah-ud-din Ayubi is reputed by Arab historians to have four coins (Others say forty silver coins and one gold) in his possession and not enough money to pay for even his funeral. The Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb Alamgeer was on the verge of bankruptcy too. One of the reasons it fell was lack of finances. The hoarding of wealth is forbidden by Islam and large deposits left behind, crush the spirit of Islam and reflects capitalism at its worst. Corruption and ruthless fixation with amassing wealth is crushing the spirit of Pakistan. Instead of profiling people, start studying the legacy of Islamic civilization. It may have gone into hiding, but with a blaze of glory it is ready to emerge out any time in our history. The best is yet to be. Pakistan is on towards renaissance. Perhaps it will be a bloody one! Instead of big things, even a small incident can ignite the inferno. Allah forbid such a situation!