KARACHI: During one of my last conversations with my father, the topic turned to his politics, upon which he quoted Julius Caesar, “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.”

These words for me exemplify my father’s relationship with Pakistan. His concern for individuals, parties and the finer details paled in comparison to the bigger picture: his love for his country.

Many of his friends, students and colleagues have written extensively on his political career with a more informed perspective than I could have. Rather than attempt to replicate this, I will try to shed some light on his motivations and the kind of man I knew him to be.

His political career was bookended by the two periods he spent in jail: once in the 1980s due to his resistance to the Zia dictatorship and the military’s attempts to police his university activities, and a second time in 2016 for his presence at a recorded speech by Altaf Hussain.

While most men might wither in the confines of a prison, my father thrived. I was struck most of all by his optimism and how he actually seemed to enjoy his time there. He wrote, he held study circles with many of his fellow prisoners and learned about the plight of others.

When I asked him whether he ever feared for his life living in Pakistan, he laughed and said that no one could ever touch him. He would have laughed again at the picture being painted of him in the media today: brutalised and murdered — a victim. This was not a man who lived a single day of his life in fear, and his incarceration was no different.

Indeed, what he saw in jail inspired him to fight for the rights of those illegally detained, mistreated or denied their rights. He helped the families of prisoners to file petitions and bail pleas, representing them and educating them on a system they knew little about — assistance we could have used while he himself was in jail.

It is a testament to the kind of man I remember him being — unquestionably generous and unmaterialistic. He would aid students from low-income backgrounds in taking admission to his university, often convincing the parents of female students to allow them to pursue their education. He never cared for titles, status or wealth, in his private life or in his political undertakings.

He had spent his life fighting for the downtrodden, challenging injustice in the system, and the last year of his life followed in this vein. This, I feel, was his true motivation, and any actions he took were in order to seek a platform from which to pursue this goal. Few might have understood his choices — I certainly struggled to — but that was another thing about him: he never cared what people thought about him.

There are those who call my father a martyr. Though it was the long history of heart failure that ultimately killed him, it cannot be denied that six months in jail (beyond his control) and the lengths to which he pushed himself despite his age and health (a choice he happily made) played a part as well. In some ways, then, perhaps he did die for his country, or because of it.

Dr Zafar-Arif’s life was so much more than his political affiliations, which for him were incidental rather than driven, and his achievements should not and must not be overshadowed by the largely contrived spectacle surrounding his death. His legacy is the sum total of all his choices, his actions, his brilliance when it came to philosophy and his fearlessness when it came to politics, and it remains for those of us who loved and admired him to carry it forward.

He was a philosopher, a teacher, a politician, an activist — and a father. To borrow once again from Shakespeare, “He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.”

Published in Dawn, February 10th, 2018