After Quaid-i-Azam’s demise, only a few men in Pakistan’s 62-year history have provided intellectual and moral enlightenment to young and old, as did the gaunt, but intellectually an invincible icon, Professor Khwaja Masud.

This noble teacher taught hundreds of his students to think original and aim high to become achievers; contemporaneously he motivated and synergised, the neglected and exploited working class to understand their stature in society as well as to stand up for their rights. His human endeavour went beyond mere academics because he had felt a compelling passion to apply his teachings and beliefs to better the cause of the toiling labourer and peasant. His superior intellect, dedication and sterling character won hearts and minds of intelligentsia, friends, students and the dehumanised working labour class.

Khwaja Masud was rewarded with awesome respect by every segment of society, except by midgets of the establishment, who witch-hunted this noble person and his even nobler educationist wife, during the dictatorial repressive and brutal reign of Zia-ul-Haq. But he did not relent and achieved what only a few others intrepid men in the profession of education and helping the poor workers could rightly claim. He earned his lofty stature as the indomitable principled principal of Gordon College Rawalpindi.

It was during those tumultuous times of his life, in Zia’s tyrannical theocratic perversion epoch when I first met him and his noble wife Salma Masud, another stellar educationist. Both were under the ire of the dictator. My second meeting with Khwaja Sahib was quite amusing. I had met him to protest that my son had received harsh punishment in his hands at the Grammar School where he taught maths. Upon hearing my complaint, the tough professor roared at me and virtually ordered me to take my son out of his class because he was useless, inattentive and distractive.

Destiny must have smiled at both him and me. Some 12 years later, Khwaja Sahib was somewhat circumspect when I proposed the hand of his favourite and brilliant granddaughter for my younger son. He warned my son to get his masters and PhD like his own sons to qualify for marrying his granddaughter. I became his disciple after we were joined through this wedlock. It was a short but most proud relationship I developed with the icon. I was like a student each time we met and I listened to him in rapt attention. There was so much ebullience in those hours with him, yet it was like an ascent to a fountain of knowledge, about philosophy of life and nature; Socrates, Plato, Braham, Beethoven, Iqbal, Quaid-i-Azam and Faiz were jelled in an evolutionary aloft and then masterfully he would descend to bring the tormented present in perspective. But he was always optimistic about Pakistan’s future as long as the youth of the nation understood the value of knowledge and its strength for an evolution to have tryst with destiny with Jinnah’s vision as the beacon. That was his style of prose as well. I saw him with indomitable strength, physical and moral, and saw him fade away in two short hours in front of my eyes last Saturday evening. He was in total control, an intrepid gentleman to his last breath and courageous to the core even when he descended in to oblivion as his soul left his mortal remains.

I will miss Khwaja Masud as will kith and kin and thousands in Pakistan and around the world. His spirit and legacy will remain alive eternally like the unfluttering flame of a candle in the darkness of our times. If we look up at heavens, there is a new shining star in the galaxy. May his soul rest in eternal peace in heavenly abode.

 On being advised to pray
At the spot
Where Hazrat Abu Zar Ghaffari
Used to meditate
Inside the Prophet’s mosque
I sould-searched my life
To judge if I deserved
Such an honour to desire.

Beyond some feeling for the underdog
And indulging in profitless bombast
In the name of the poor
I found little to commend myself
For undertaking this meritorious act
In memory of a savant who believed
History will only advance
If the right to dignity of every human being on earth
Is secured. Without it,
History will be
A tale of infamy
Replete with thunder
That will dissipate momentarily.

The revolution of the Quran
Is to enrich the whole world
By giving everyone
An equal chance
To grow full stature.
Tyranny left unchallenged
Will turn satanic
And perpetuate
The plight of the weak.

History teaches
How Abu Zars have shaken
The ribs of the unconscionable
And kept alive
The dream of dignity
In the eyes of the forgotten.

Heeding the venerable Khwaja’s advice
I mounted the raised platform
Facing the Prophet’s pulpit
With an astounding ease
Where the grand master
Used to pray
Envisioning the day
In which impoverishment
And inhumanity
Will cease to be.

Your mind at eighty-five
Must be Einsteinian in strength
And Shakespearean in suppleness
Shaped equally
By quadratics and poetry
Combining mathematical abstractions
With life’s efflorescence.

The papers carried
Your birthday reflections
That moved me to think
You belong to the east
Nor to the west
But to a point
Around which the circumference
Is forever bending
Seeking self-recognition
As in a looking glass.

Begin at the beginning, you said
Bad primaries will not sustain
Good tertiaries
In the field of knowledge
Without a broad foundation
A pyramid will simply
Topple over itself.

Venture parabolic
Into the future, you said
To budding youth.

Do not incline obtusely
To the past
Or abstrusely to the ground
Surrounding your feet.

Be fearless like Iqbal
And open your wings
To history that is past-cognisant
But unfailingly forward-bound.

Learn to create
The big bang
That enlarges the universe
Of the small.

The compassionate of our age
Seek wisdom of the tender
And strength from the poor.

Pursued passionately
The golden goddess
Turns truant
Leaving one disconsolate.

True lovers contemplate
Fulfillment of their dreams
Not satiation of desires.

You remain
The consummate teacher
The potter who turns
Inchoate clay into protean forms.

You are the saki
Who fills
Empty amphorae
With Cherished wine.

With your touch
Knowledge is metamorphosed
Into Love.

While the Gordon College, Rawalpindi*
Which was once among
The proud pinnacled pioneers of education
In South Asia
Has waxed and waned
In its long history of over a hundred years
You, Prof. Khwaja Masud
Have remained a steady stream of role mode principled
Life, light and learning
Not just for your generations of students
For nearly ninety years of a blessed life-span
But also for
Your ever-expansive fraternity of extended family of friends
All over Pakistan
And indeed, the rest of the world!
As an ever-living legend
You will continue to inspire
Your fraternal progeny
Henceforth
Who will strive for the fruition of your dream
In the renaissance of the Gordon College
As a leading University of Pakistan!

May your noble soul
Rest in perpetual Peace!

Reference: * Ikram Azam. “Nazriya-e-Pakistan”: The Vision of Pakistan: Islam, 2010. See Gordon College; p. 324

Sir!
We, the successive generations
Of your students
Salam and Salute you from the core of our beings
For making our lives
With your moral role model example
Thus you are a living legend
In your own blessed life-span
Identical to the legend of
Our shared alma mater
The Gordon College, Rawalpindi
The motivating motto of which proclaimed:
“Seek and ye shall find!”
And so you taught us
To seek courageously and fearlessly
The truth, knowledge and wisdom
Justice, equity and equality
In the sovereignty of fraternal freedom
Life, light, learning and liberty!
May you live longer to serve
The cause dearest to you:
Service to society and humanity
In perpetual peace
Through Education and Enlightenment!
May your ever-living legend and legacy
Survive you eternally, infinitely
So that this beloved Pakistan, our country
May progress and prosper in peace
For ever
Alongwith the Islami and human fraternity!

Intellectuals, academics, scholars and students are celebrating the 85th birth anniversary of Prof Khwaja Masud, a teacher par excellence, today.Khawaja sahib joined Gordon College, Rawalpindi, in 1944 as lecturer of mathematics and has not looked back since. Following great mathematicians, he did not confine himself to the field of mathematics but liked to wander in the vast horizon of philosophy and social sciences.

Khwaja Masud was born at Campbellpur (Attock) in 1922. His grandfather Allama Alifdin Nafees was a renowned scholar and a friend of Allama Iqbal. His father Khawaja Mahmood was a legal practitioner. The whole family was involved in the Freedom Movement and played active role in All India Kashmir Conference. Following Sir Syed and Iqbal they were trying to redefine character of the Muslim youth for coming challenges of independence.

He got his early education from Scotch Mission School Daska and graduated from Murray College Sialkot. Finally he got his masters degree in mathematics from government college Lahore in 1944 and joined Gordon College Rawalpindi as a lecturer in the same year.

Those were turbulent times. The Muslim youth of the subcontinent were keenly observing various freedom and revolutionary movements of the world. People in the early 20th century gasped to see Czarist Russia changing into USSR and a point of reference for the workers of all countries to unite against colonialism and imperialism. Under the impact, youth was dazed.

It was their romance, love and physical involvement. People left their homes, love ones, traditional comforts for unknown destinations never to return. Some of them were lost for ever after suffering from torments. At that time they were tasting ruthlessness of revolution and romanticism of the movement.

Prof Masud attracted by Marxist thought started reading Marxist literature along with Russian classics of Chekhov Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky. During this period he also joined study circles and inspired young students like artist Ali Imam and Abid Hassan Manto. During this period Democratic Student Federation was also launched and Progressive Writers Association was formed in Rawalpidni.

He was also associated with the group of the Marxists, working with military officers for toppling the government of Liaquat Ali Khan. The incident is labelled as “Pindi Conspiracy Case” in the files of the government. He saw the group integrating and disintegrating and later on men like Gen Akbar, Maj Ishaq, Capt Zafarullah Poshni, Air Commodore Janjua, Col Latif Afghan, Sajjad Zaheer, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mohammad Hussain Ata, Sibte Hassan and many others were languishing in various jails of Pakistan.

During this period he was a great help for the promotion of trade unionist movement at Progressive Writers Association in Rawalpindi.

Prof Sahib became principal of Gordon College in 1972 and retired in 1982. During period of Ziaul Haq he was transferred to Bahawalpur as punishment, but he never went to join there. As principal of the college he was strict disciplinarian. But in one of his earlier interviews to Ayesha Shoukat he said: “I never took any disciplinary action against any one teacher and student. I just disciplined myself. I had earned the right to be severe after teaching for 30 years and having taught their fathers”.

Apart from the present vulgarised connotation of the word enlightenment, Khawaja Sahib is the man of enlightenment in its true sense. He tries to approach readers through reason. All his articles in different journals and newspapers are testimony to this approach. Nothing is left from his scathing eyes but his criticism is positive and reflects character of a gentle teacher. In his articles he discusses everything from Heraclitus theory of change to postmodernist bias against metanarratives. He is founder member of Islamabad Culture Forum and Islamabad Philosophical Society. The former has been working for the last 15 years.

Today his mind is a mixture of Marxian-cum-Gramician thoughts, Iqbal’s view of Islam and Sufism. He tries to justify one another with Marxist and Wahdatul Woojudi approach, which seems to be little bit confusing sometime for the common reader. But all these approaches are against orthodoxy, fundamentalism and obscurantism. He always served the cause of free inquiry and skepticism and who can learn without taking refuge in them.

Prof. Khwaja Masud was a living legend. He did not inherit a famous surname, nor did he occupy a position of authority or privilege, but he commanded respect and admiration of a crowd of loyalists who called him his Guru.

All his life he taught mathematics in Gordon College Rawalpindi – from 1944 onwards for more than half a century until be became the principal of the college after its nationalisation and a few years later when Zia-ul-Haq proclaimed himself as the custodian of Islam and the ideology of Pakistan, Khwaja Sahib was transferred to a Gujar Khan college.

Khwaja Sahib belonged to a Kashmiri family from Duska but after his father’s transfer to Pindi he studied at Gordon College Rawalpindi, opting to study mathematics which was a rare thing to do for a Muslim in pre-partition days. He was an extra-ordinary student who did his Master’s from Punjab University with flying colours and was immediately recruited as a teacher by the mission college. He was known by all and sundry as an excellent teacher of manner that nobody ever missed his class. But his mass popularity among the students of the college was much larger than his students of mathematics as he did many more things to attract and influence scores of students, since there was hardly a college activity, barring sports, he did not participate in.

Khwaja sahib was often carried on shoulders by dancing students and he would nod his approval by waving his head. However, the art of public speaking was his speciality and he tutored countless students in that, apart from the formal forums available in the college. One such activity was the creation of informal debaters club in which the students were trained in extempore speaking. Khwaja sahib himself would lead the discussion. As scores of his students entered public life, became civil servants, joined the army or entered politics, Khwaja Masud’s fame spread to all parts of the country. There was not a single Gordonians who would not identify himself with Khwaja Masud. Small wonder, a former Azad Kashmir Prime Minister Sardar Sikandar Hayat who himself was a student of Khwaja Masud, therefore, fans arranged a special meeting of Gordonians to play host to Khwaja Masud. Among the audience where Khwaja Masud was the guest of honour were scores of formal federal and serving secretaries, generals and politicians. Among them was ex-prime minister Shaukat Aziz.

After his retirement Khwaja Masud started writing a weekly column in a leading newspaper. His choice of subject was rare as he mostly addressed philosophical issues which nobody else in Pakistan has ever done. But this was indeed Khwaja sahib ’ s real self. Khwaja Masud was basically a visionary and intellectual par excellence. There was hardly another person in Pakistan of Khwaja Masud ’ s calibre who could talk about history and the process of social change. Perhaps no one was as well read in history and philosophy as Khwaja Masud, which gave him the facility to write with ease on such issues.

Incidentally, the veteran communist leader Joti Basu died the same day as Khwaja Masud, with whom Khwaja Masud had shared many ideas and values in life. Khwaja Masud was prudent enough not to reveal his political affiliation, especially when he was serving in a missionary college. But it was through words of mouth that all and sundry came to know that Khwaja Masud was a committed socialist. Some radical leftists have accused Khwaja Masud of hiding behind the façade of liberalism to avoid being dubbed as a socialist. They have also charged him with collaboration with the missionary college and later the government. They insist that Khwaja Masud could have called a spade a spade and followed in the foot steps of Faiz, Sajjad Zaheer and Sibtein Hassan. But the fact remains that Khwaja Masud was not a political activist but his role model was that of a guide philosopher. Khwaja Masud ’ s singular contribution to the cause of socialism was that he converted scores of his students to the ideal of social justice for the have-nots. He was indeed a moderator who did not believe in confrontation with his adversaries.

Among the long list of writers whom Khwaja Masud read and admired, and used to recommend by books to friends was Liu-Shao-Chee who disagreed with Mao and was branded as a “capitalist roader ”. But it was not until last year that Khwaja Masud has had the opportunity to go to China, when he was invited by the Chinese government to visit that country as a state guest. During his stay in China he discussed with the Chinese party leaders issues of mutual interests, especially how to go about accomplishing the task of transition from capitalism to socialism.

Khwaja Masud died at the age of 88. Till his last breath he was physically fit and mentally alert. Khwaja sahib was a well dressed person, who always used to wear a suit with a matching necktie. Even after his retirement when he had nowhere to go he would get up in the morning, and dress up properly before he would talk to anyone.

Time, that he had in good measure and which he made rich with never being idle, was what he said our people as a nation had wasted with reckless abandon. And don’t think we will go unpunished for that, he assured me. He was in quite a rage sizzling in the intense stare he focused at me. You see, he said, you catch the corrupt who steal your money but you spare the leaders who have robbed the nation of its time. You can get back the stolen money, but not the hours and years you have been robbed of.

We sat side by side at a function that was organised a few weeks back by the Pakistan Academy of Letters to confer a posthumous award on Benazir Bhutto and another on a Swedish poet. The appointed hour had passed and the scheduled proceedings were still nowhere near starting. Khwaja Masud as usual was among the first who had arrived at the given time. His frustration was justified. In the eighty-eighth year of your life you don’t have many hours to waste.

I remember the diminutive professor entering the college gate on a bicycle that seemed a bit too high for him but he managed it well and got off with a flourish of his leg making an arch to avoid the back wheel. Bakhshi, the peon who watched over the bicycles, would take the two-wheeler from him and Khwaja Sahib would walk to the office and soon emerge with the register under his arm and station himself between the table and the black board to take the roll call. One by one the students would enter and take their seats.

He would consult his watch and pick the chalk. “We have forty minutes to do this exercise. If we finish early and have a few minutes we will talk about Spain and the resistance,” he would say and start off scribbling mathematical symbols that he said were sacred as they represented universal truths. “The priest also deals with truth but he lacks exactitude because he does not know the numbers,” he would conclude a lesson with some such words.

His class wasn’t a drab tutorial. He would break the monotony with comments on some current or past theme of interest that would shock or amuse us. This would keep us alert and on our toes because he could dart a question at us without notice. There was no indiscipline in his class; the naughty boys reserved their pranks for other classes because there was no time for nonsense in Khwaja Sahib’s class. He enjoyed a special position in the eyes of young students who knew him to be a political person, someone hunted by the government of the day. But he was clever and could always get around the law. Not only that. Even the American missionary college could not lay a finger on him in those days of MCarthyism. His detractors who were many sniggered and made snide remarks about his real loyalties. Khwaja Masud, very much in Faiz’s style, made no fuss about his critics.

A staunch Communist who swore by the book he didn’t give you the impression of being the typical revolutionary – unkempt, disheveled and forlorn. On the other hand, he was always properly dressed as a western gentleman, his hair parted neatly on the left, as if by mother sending her boy to school. The same system showed in his thought. Rational to the core he made his point logically proceeding dispassionately step by step in the Socratic manner.

The Soviet collapse had many convinced leftists disorientated. I think there was a period of quiet adjustment that he underwent trying to find causes and explaining consequences.

Then in the wake of Zia’s rule we saw him stumbling towards Iqbal in whose strong position on the dynamics of change and constant striving he found another offensive against the decadent system. He seemed to lean on mystic Islam. In his retirement years when he took to writing in the newspapers and spoke at literary and intellectual functions, one could not help admire his Sisyphusian doggedness.

Professor Khwaja Masud is no more but his lesson of tireless work for human progress and enlightenment will continue to inspire his many hundreds of students, friends, colleagues and comrades.

The dodgy lift that saves me from climbing up and down the stairs in the block of flats I live in right now somehow defines my unbreakable bond with Pakistan. The lift has a soul. It is cranky, shakes the passengers enough to scare the fainthearted and sometimes just stops at its will without a reason, technical or otherwise. Unlike other lifts in the building, it continuously exhales the smell of rusted metal chains, pulleys and clasps, daubed with grease and some strong lubricating oil. But for me it remains the closest, least occupied, available and the cosiest lift. I step out of the flat, turn right and push the call button. The only reason for using some other lift or taking the stairs would be when this one is not functional. I am attached to it and keep asking the maintenance people to service it properly and get its worn-out parts changed.

Pakistan with all its ills is my country. I as a citizen will keep asking those who are responsible for its service and maintenance to do their job well. But as a political worker and commentator, it is clear to me that worn-out parts of Pakistan have to be replaced by new ones and those responsible for doing it have become worn-out themselves. Therefore, the struggle at all levels of society and the state, ideational, institutional and social, has to be continued with a renewed vigour. When bleak apathy sums up the lifestyle of the biggest part of the educated and affluent middle class and the elite is out there to plunder what is left in this country, to lose people like Professor Khwaja Masud compounds the tragedy.

He and some others like him taught us to claim Pakistan for its citizens and continue to wage the struggle in favour of the powerless, marginalised and the wretched of the earth. According to them, it is the only choice left for those who refuse to cut their umbilical cord from Pakistan. During his illustrious career as a teacher, Professor Masud taught with equal passion within and outside his classroom. His writings were not only educative but infused a new hope in the future of humanity. I remember reading him regularly when he started writing a column for The News. It was titled ‘Fueilleton’, perhaps meaning pamphlet in English.

My father spent considerable time in Rawalpindi and Islamabad while making different documentary films from the 1960s to 1980s. On my moving to Islamabad much later, he told me that for him, the city is about three people – Sadiq Hussain, Dr Aftab Ahmed and Professor Khwaja Masud. The late Sadiq Hussain was an old friend of his who was an eminent short-story writer. It was imperative to pay him a visit until he was alive. I also met Aftab Sahib a few times and thoroughly enjoyed his incomparable insight into art and literature, particularly Ghalib.

Meeting Khwaja Sahib was easier. He would come to many public functions in the city and captivate the audience, sometimes with his fiery speeches and sometimes cold historic logic. Once he honoured me by chairing the launch of my English poetry collection. Knowing my association with his old comrade, Professor Amin Mughal, who now lives in the UK, he would tell me many interesting things from their shared past. His being hard of hearing in the later age wouldn’t restrain him from being attentive and involved.

You will be missed dearly Khwaja Sahib.

Prof Khwaja Masud, who died on January 16, 2010, was among the last Punjabi progressive thinkers of his era.

Educationalist, ideologue, columnist, intellectual and teacher Prof Khwaja Masud died on January 16, 2010. He was among the last Punjabi progressive thinkers of his era. Rawalpindi division consists of those districts of Punjab that produced a variety of progressive and left-leaning people. Dada Amir Haider headed this galaxy of progressives. Mirza Ibrahim, Mirza Abdul Aziz, BD Chopra, Ali Imam, Ram Nath, Khalid Manto (elder brother of Abid Hassan Manto), late Sufi Sharief, Baldev Raj Iudhar, Gurbaksh Singh, Balraj Sahni, Aslam Sheikh, Jamil Malik, Ahmad Zafar, Afzal Pervaiz, Hassan Tahir, Bashir Javed, Iqbal Bali Dhillon, Khurshid Hasan Mir and Khwaja Masud were among the many who represented progressive ideas in this region.
Khwaja Masud was born in Campbellpur — now known as Attock — on August 11, 1923 to the family of Alif Din, a respected name of the area. He got his early education in Sialkot, Murree and Quetta.

From 1938 to 1942, he studied in Gordon College Rawalpindi and got first position every year. He spent two years (1942-44) in Government College Lahore where Baldev Raj Iudhar baptised Khwaja and he became a serious reader of Marxism. He not only admired Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, but also loved Allama Iqbal and Faiz Ahmad Faiz in his own unique style. In mid 1947, he was among those who stood against communal violence and saved the lives of Sikhs and Hindus.
Khwaja Masud and his companions established the first Pakistani progressive student organisation, Democratic Student Federation (DSF), at Rawalpindi in 1948, which later spread to Lahore and Karachi. Among his comrades, he had a great regard for Eric Cyprian who was a pioneer in establishing College Teachers Association at Lahore in the 1950s. Like late Ahmad Bashir, he acknowledged high scholarship of Eric Cyprian and Safdar Mir regarding Marxism. He had a big heart to accept extremist, orthodox views and follies of early day Pakistani communists. Unlike his comrades, he believed that Marxism is a science and like a science it is an evolutionary process. “Theories have to be changed every ten to fifteen years, but orthodox communists, like mullahs, stick to theories of the 19th and 20th centuries which is unfortunate,” he said.

His commitment to professionalism indeed raised his stature up to the extent that even his ideological opponents respected him as a teacher par excellence. His famous quotation “if I was not a good teacher and administrator then I could not be a good communist” reflected his vision.

In South Asia, people usually fail to establish a creative relationship between their profession and political thoughts. One is either a progressive or an Islamist; but one often indulges in a contradiction between profession and ideology. Pakistan’s last 40 years are witness to such behaviour among nationalists, Islamists, rightists and communists. Khwaja Sahib, like Socrates, always believed in dialogue. In his last interview, he advised young progressives to identify past mistakes first and then find new lines. “From 1947 till today, we could not make a progressive party in Pakistan. Without revisiting our common progressive past, uniting the left will remain a dream,” Khwaja once said.
Khwaja Sahib told me, “If you are an artist, you should be the best and if you are a journalist, then you should be professionally sound. If you have progressive thoughts, these ideas will automatically spread with your talent. There is no room for non-professional people, at least, in the leadership of a progressive party.”

He always admired the role of his wife, Salma Masud, in supporting his activities. His sons, Sarmad and Khwaja Yaldaram, did their PhDs in economics and physics. Khwaja Sahib’s people-centric approach was alarming when he said “If a communist leader is not popular among masses, it’s his fault, not of the masses.”