Pervez A. Hoodbhoy
Looking back at my elders in the QAU physics department, there is none I remember so fondly and vividly as Arif sahib. The decades have flown by since the time I became his junior colleague in October 1973. Yet, some memories remain undimmed. As a young man with a long unkempt beard and no moustache, it had taken him a while to grasp that my appearance was not what most people were taking it for – in fact it was just a fad from the rebellious student generation in America from where I had freshly returned. Once he understood what my beard represented, he would beckon me to the side and suggest that I be rid of it. It’s ugly, he said, and mullahism has no place in physics.
Though diffident and gentle, Arif sahib was a die-hard PPP supporter with a tendency to fly off the handle at the slightest criticism of Bhutto. There were many intense eruptions because Faheem, Nayyar, and I were left-wingers who strongly opposed Bhutto’s repression of workers and trade unions as well the rampant corruption he had introduced into QAU through his hand-picked vice-chancellor, Kaneez Yousuf. Fortunately Arif sahib’s outbursts would fade fast, leaving not the slightest trace of unpleasantness. After Bhutto’s execution in 1979, he was a broken man. We tried not to criticize Bhutto in front of him.
There was something truly enigmatic about this man. He was not cut out to be a physicist; his physics papers were as few as they were unimpressive. Nor was he an engaging teacher. With his back to the class, he would write on the board from a thick sheaf of papers mumbling something that was barely audible¹. It is said that on more than one occasion, he would eventually turn to look back at the class and find that all students had slipped out. Knowing his limitations, he never applied for promotion and retired as associate professor – exactly the position to which he had been appointed initially some two decades earlier. Did he ever feel left behind? After all, those totally illiterate in physics had made it up to the rank of full professorship and retired with fat pensions. In terms of his understanding of physics, he was head and shoulders above them. But never did I see from him any hint of having been wronged.
And yet…there was something unique to him. There has never been any professor or student at QAU in its entire 50-60 years of history who I would dare to call a genius. But Arif sahib comes closest to being one. The only other person I have ever known and seen at close quarters having similar recall – and possessing such encyclopedic knowledge of the world – is the world-famous linguist and philosopher, Noam Chomsky. Once Arif sahib was somehow put into the right mood (a little to drink would work well) he could launch into any ongoing conversation and mesmerize a gathering quoting entire paragraphs from books. Or, it could be poetry in Urdu, Persian, English, and even German. Goethe was his favorite. Ask him about the etymology of a word and you get hit with a thesaurus. Ask him about a man of science, philosophy, or music and he would tell you his life history. Ask him about an event in history and he would tell you all that came before that and after. He was Google long before Google.
Could this man have become the Toynbee of Pakistan? Or perhaps have been an Indian historian as famous as his cousin, Professor Irfan Habib? Had he not “wasted” his time doing physics, I am sure he could have made the grade. Some 30 years ago he gave me a set of his typed notes, about 50-60 pages in all, interspersed with Urdu poetry written in his own hand. They dealt with the fall of the Mughal Empire, the reluctance of Muslims to move towards modern education, and birth of Muslim zealotry. No one but Asif bhai – his younger brother in Aligarh – had seen them. I know I had these notes until 2-3 years ago and will look around to see if I can find them. They surely should be published somewhere.
Resolutely pessimistic but disarmingly diffident in his pessimism, Arif sahib would sometimes summon me to the side just outside the tea-room or walk into my office. First looking left and then right, he would drop his voice and whisper in a conspiratorial tone:
میاں، ادھر سے بھاگ جاوْ، بھاگ جاوْ۔ اس ملک کا کچھ نہیں بنے گا
Mister: run from here, run away! This country has no future.
I would laugh him off. He was, of course, right – and wrong. Whichever way you look at it, I learned so much from him. What a privilege it was to have known him. I know that Faheem – now dead for thirteen years – and Nayyar would say the same.
1. Pervez Hoodbhoy confirms these observations relate to a period near the end of Arif sahib’s career.