MUMTAZ Mufti, Urdu’s renowned short story writer, novelist and sketch writer, caused many controversies through his writings as well as his life choices. His life had as diverse and contradicting phases as there are possible to be. From being an angry young man and possessing religious scepticism bordering on blasphemy to becoming a born-again Muslim and a Sufi perfectly at peace with himself and the world around him, Mumaz Mufti lived it all.

The meanderings of this treacherous mental journey took Mufti along the path of psychology and philosophy but it turned out to be a pilgrimage culminating with Sufism — notwithstanding the recesses along the way in more worldly territories such as love and sex. Though his life may not read like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, it does read a lot like a romance, complete with a married woman who elopes with him (taking along her six children) and later sues him, and heartbroken, dies of tuberculosis. A restless soul, Mufti quit jobs on impulse and took up new ones. Teacher, script-writer (for All India Radio, Bombay’s film industry and later Azad Kashmir Radio), psychoanalyst and information officer, were some of the posts he took up and left.

Born Mumtaz Husain on September 11, 1905, in Batala, Mufti spent a life full of agonies and ecstasies but never really recovered from the devastating effects of his father’s personality who, according to Mufti’s own statements, was more interested in women than anything else in the world. But at the same time, his father’s impressive personality lured him. Some aspects of his love-hate relationship with his father and stepmother, his torrid love affair with a married woman (the wife of a friend), and traces of the Oedipus complex can be read between the lines of his autobiographical novel, Alipur ka Aili (1961).

In addition to the parental influence, his deep study of writers such as Freud, Havelock Ellis, Adler, Jung and Dostoevsky played a role in deciding what he would write about later in life, which was largely along erotic and psychological themes. But that was before he came into contact with Sufis and mystics who slowly but surely began to mould his attitude towards life and afterlife.

One such influence was Qudrat Ullah Shahab, but among the Sufis who changed the course of Mufti’s life were Sain Allah Bakhsh, Khwaja Jaan Muhammad Butt and Ahmed Rafiq Akhtar. Though some critics have termed Mufti’s leanings towards spiritualism as “travel from psychology to parapsychology”, especially in Alakh Nagri (1992), a volume on Sufism in which his overtures to parapsychology turned out to be a deciding factor in his total metamorphosis. The writings in his last years, such as Talaash (posthumously published in 1996), for example, portray a personality completely different from the one we find in his early works.

Aside from Islamic mysticism, another topic that enticed Mufti a lot in the latter half of his life (that is marked with a shift towards spirituality), is Pakistan, its ideology and its future as a leader of the Islamic world.

Perhaps I cannot capture the true spirit of Mufti’s journey and his ideological shifts the way Dr Najeeba Arif has done. In her new book, Mumtaz Mufti ka Fikri Irtiqa, she has beautifully and seamlessly gathered together the colourful pieces that create an alluring montage. The book, in fact her PhD dissertation, discusses at length Mufti’s life and works, taking into account every minute detail, published or not, and analysing Mufti Sahib’s art and ideology with special reference to psychology, the Quran and Sufism.

Arif teaches Urdu at Islamabad’s International Islamic University and some of her recent research work has earned her kudos from different quarters. Recently Dr Anwar Sadeed, a renowned research scholar and critic, paid her glowing tributes and said that she was perhaps the best woman critic Urdu has had since Mumtaz Shirin. In fact, her PhD thesis compares favourably with most of the doctoral theses published in recent years, as mentioned in the blurb by Professor Muhammad Umar Memon, Professor Emeritus of Urdu and Islamic Studies, University of Wisconsin: “From my experience of the tenor of a goodly number of Urdu theses submitted to Pakistani universities, Ms Arif’s stands in a class by itself and may be considered among the finest”.

Similarly, Professor Dr Christina Oesterheld of Heidelberg University says: “His [Mumtaz Mufti’s] writings were instrumental for the formulation of the ideology of Pakistaniyat or Pakistani Patriotism which views Pakistan as the centre for a renaissance of Islam. Thus the subject of the thesis is highly relevant to the literary and ideological landscape of present-day Pakistan.”

Mumtaz Mufti ka Fikri Irtiqa is a must for anyone who intends to understand Mufti’s writings and the impact of the Freudian school on Urdu fiction.

Mufti died in Islamabad on October 27, 1995, content and at peace. To some, becoming a mystic may sound as controversial as being an unbeliever may sound to others, yet Mufti had touched both ends of the scale and that’s the way Mufti Sahib was: unconventional, mercurial, extreme, yet articulate and unbelievably lovable.

Mumtaz Mufti ka Fikri Irtiqa (LITERARY RESEARCH/CRITICISM) By Dr Najeeba Arif Al-Faisal Nashiraan, Lahore ISBN 969-503-819-0 592pp. Rs600