Argentinean poet and writer Jorge Luis Borges had almost lost his eyesight in the latter years of his life. Once he visited a friend whose house was still being furbished; construction material and pieces of furniture were strewn all over. After guiding Borges through a zigzag path through the entrance and the living room and settling him in a corner, his friend apologised for the inconvenience. He told Borges that the house was still unfinished. “You mean it is still a draft,” Borges replied.

In order to make sense of what we see and experience, and gauge the relative significance of different incidents taking place at the same time, we choose our own frames of reference based on our concerns and pick our own particular spectacles based on our familiarities. Hence, if one is more concerned with the profound challenges faced by our society and civilisation, then the most alarming event in the last week was the tearing down of a historic building in Sialkot. The brouhaha around the publishing of The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace and the 24/7 coverage of the mundane political negotiations on who would lead the interim government in Pakistan for eight weeks are matters far less significant.

Besides, many of us are still more interested in Allama Muhammad Iqbal and the impact of his poetry and writings on our aesthetics, idiom, outlook and sensibility, than we are in the authors of The Spy Chronicles — Lt. Gen. (Retired) Asad Durrani (former chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence), A.S. Dulat (former special director of India’s Intelligence Bureau and former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing) and Aditya Sinha (Indian author and journalist) — or the interim prime minister of Pakistan, retired Justice Nasirul Mulk.

The building in Sialkot which was vandalised and demolished by a violent mob in the presence of the local administration was the same place where, as a child, Iqbal was sent by his mother to learn to recite the Holy Quran. It was then called Masjid Hassamuddin.

If we were to be a civilised country, such a place — where someone not only considered the national poet, but also seen as a leading intellectual light in South Asia and beyond began his education — would have been a protected heritage site. Hakeem Mir Hassamuddin, after whom the neighbourhood and the mosque were named in the 19th century, was the father of Shamsul Ulema Maulvi Mir Hasan, the celebrated tutor and mentor of Iqbal whom the poet had always revered. At the time of its demolition, the part of the building which was now used as a worship place by Ahmadis was named Baitul Mubarak to abide by the law of the land. This law, promulgated in 1984, restrained the community from calling its worship places ‘mosques’. Since we have come to a point of cherishing our ignorance, most of us do not even remember that the Ahmadi movement was mostly unknown before the last decade of the 19th century and the building that housed the demolished worship place predates the religious movement itself.

We are not at peace with our present because we are not at peace with our past. Any crude attempts at erasing the complexity of the past from the memory of a people, or reinventing the past to fulfil the desire of creating a monolithic present, seldom succeed in changing history.

Shaikh Ata Muhammad, the brother elder to Iqbal by 18 years, was the mainstay of the family in the material sense. He is said to have paid for Iqbal’s education in Lahore and in Europe and helped purchase and renovate Iqbal Manzil — the family house in Sialkot. He is said to have been influenced by the Ahmadi movement, while his son Shaikh Ijaz Ahmed — one of Iqbal’s earliest biographers — had, in fact, converted. But this neither has any bearing on Iqbal and his work, nor does it change the fact that he had Ahmadis around him, who would be declared non-Muslim 36 years after his death.

Likewise, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah was born in a mixed Ismaili and Shia Ithna Ashari family. How can we rewrite that bit of history and convert him to the majority sect posthumously? And how would that improve our condition and our lot?

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 3rd, 2018