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00:00In a time when silence was law and dissenter crime,
00:26In the history of poetry and protest, no name shines brighter than Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
00:41Born of fire and ink, Faiz was more than a poet, he was a witness, a voice against silence.
00:56Lahore, city of culture and intellect.
01:06It was here in the 1920s that a young Faiz arrived to continue his education.
01:13It all began with a poetry competition, judged by none other than a Lama Iqbal.
01:23A teenage Faiz recited verses that revealed a potential Iqbal instantly recognized.
01:35Iqbal urged Faiz's father, his friend from Cambridge, to send the boy to Government College Lahore.
01:42He studied Arabic and English at Government College.
01:51His passion for learning naturally led him into teaching and writing.
01:58Then came a brief chapter in the British Indian Army.
02:02Disciplined, fleeting, before he traded the uniform for the pen.
02:11Becoming editor at the Pakistan Times.
02:14But Faiz was no ordinary writer.
02:24A committed Marxist in a fragile new nation, he was arrested, accused of conspiring to overthrow the government.
02:36They took away his freedom, but they couldn't silence his voice.
02:39Behind bars, where hope flickers like a candle in the wind, Faiz wrote some of his most powerful verses.
02:53Four long years in prison.
02:56Four years of ink and iron.
03:03Upon release, he stepped into another arena.
03:06This time alongside Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a socialist leader with whom Faiz shared a vision of justice.
03:20He continued to write for magazines, for people, for truth.
03:25His words crossed borders, translated into Russian, earning him the Lenin Peace Prize.
03:41But peace is always fleeting in the eye of the storm.
03:48Bhutto's government fell.
03:49And then came the general.
03:54With a steely gaze and an iron fist, Zia-ul-Haq seized Pakistan's soul, scripting a saga of faith, fear, and ferocity.
04:09For a man like Faiz, a Marxist, a humanist, a lover of freedom, there was no room left.
04:21Deemed an atheist, watched by unseen eyes, he fled.
04:31Beirut became his refuge.
04:33Exile, his new companion.
04:42But even there, Faiz fought, with verses instead of weapons.
04:50He penned poems that pierced through Zia's theocratic veil.
04:53Invoking the words of Mansour al-Hallaj, the Persian Sufi mystic executed for declaring,
05:03Anna al-Haq, I am the truth.
05:09In the mystical tradition of Sufism, these words carry profound meaning.
05:14A declaration of the annihilation of the self, where the ego dissolves and only the divine remains.
05:21To Halaj, it was union with God.
05:27To tyrants, it was a threat cloaked in heresy.
05:33Faiz, ever the craftsman of metaphor and defiance, wove these words into a poem.
05:39A quiet act of spiritual rebellion against the regime.
05:43But when the poem reached the hands of his publisher, fear took hold.
05:51In the volatile climate of Zia's rule, such words could not see the light.
05:58The verses were removed, suppressed, erased.
06:02They never appeared in any local edition.
06:11Only in a rare 1983 publication in London does the full poem survive.
06:16A verse silenced by fear, buried in ink, waiting to be remembered.
06:29A verse silenced by fear, buried in ink, sit at the silence of hollow, was believing that the assault on the ground is a boundary.
06:47A verse silenced by bit, pray for me a
06:58GULO MEI RUNG BHARE, BAD NAHU BHAR Ú†LE,
07:02CHLE BHI AOU, KEI GULSHAN KAI KARAUBAAR CHLE