Literary Notes: Khursheed Rizvi and his history of Arabic literature
“ARABIC literature is the enduring monument of a civilisation, not of a people. Its contributors were men of the most varied ethnic origins,” wrote H. A. R. Gibb in his Arabic Literature: An Introduction. While quoting these words in the preface to his Urdu book in two volumes Arabi Adab Qabl Az Islam (Arabic literature before Islam), Dr Khursheed Rizvi says Gibb’s words not only point to the extraordinary extent of the Arabic literature, but also to the reason for its enormousness.
During a long expanse of time, the geographical immensity of Arabic literature continued to increase and people from different nations and races kept on contributing to Arabic literature. As a result, the breadth and length as well as depth of Arabic literature continued to grow and, says Dr Rizvi, that is why there is not a single history of Arabic literature written in any language of the world, not even in Arabic, that can truly be called ‘complete’.
Dr Rizvi is considered one of the authorities on Arabic language and literature in Pakistan today. A scholar, critic, poet, prose writer, translator and a teacher par excellence, Rizvi is still teaching Arabic and Persian at Lahore’s Government College University (GCU). He was born, as mentioned by him in one of his pieces, in Amroha, UP, on May 19, 1942, and his date of birth, recorded as Dec 8, 1940, is incorrect. According to Dr Zahid Muneer Aamir, Khursheed Rizvi’s real name is Muhammad Khursheedul Hasan. In 1948, his family migrated to Pakistan and settled in Montgomery (now Sahiwal), Punjab, where Rizvi’s maternal uncle was employed in Pakistan Railways.
Khursheed Rizvi opted to study Arabic and, as he puts it, his teacher and mentor Dr Muhammad Sufi Ziaul Haq was the major influence in his achieving excellence, though Rizvi sahib would never use the word excellence for himself as his humble and self-effacing ways profess distaste for self-praise. He took admission to Lahore’s Punjab University Oriental College in 1961 and passed his MA (Arabic) with flying colours. He was hardly 20 at that time and joined a government college at Bahawalpur as lecturer. Much to their amazement, students of the college saw a very young teacher delivering lecture and gathered outside the classroom as most of them were older than him.
In 1963, Khursheed Rizvi joined Government College, Sargodha, and taught there for about 22 years. He obtained a doctoral degree in Arabic from Punjab University and went to Islamabad in 1981 to join Idara-i-Tehqeeqaat-i-Islami (Islamic research Institute). But teaching was his first love, so he came back to Lahore and joined the famous Government College (now a university, named GCU). He took premature retirement, but the GCU insisted on continuity of his services albeit part-time and Rizvi Sahib, who will turn 82 this month, is still teaching.
Coming back to Khursheed Rizvi’s history of Arabic literature, he writes in the preface that when he was doing BA (Honours) in Arabic, the books on history of Arabic literature were hard to come by and Nicholson’s A Literary History of the Arabs was the only book available. His teacher Sufi Ziaul Haq used to lament that Nicholson kind of disposed of Arabic literature’s history in just one volume while he should have written it in at least four volumes, as did Brown who penned the history of Persian literature. This, says Rizvi, struck a chord with me and I decided to write a history of Arabic literature in 10 volumes. Here Rizvi gives a brief account of books written in Urdu on the history of Arabic literature, beginning from Moulvi Kareemuddin’s Tareekh-i-Sh’uara-i-Arab (1847) and ending it with Muhammad Kazim’s one-volume Arabi Adab Ki Tareekh (2004).
But as he began work on writing history in 10 volumes in 1968, Rizvi soon realised that even 10 volumes would not be enough to cover the vastness of Arabic literature. After burning the proverbial midnight oil for about six years, there were heaps of jottings and it could hardly cover the literature of what is known as Jahili or Jahiliyya era of Arabic literature, which refers to the pre-Islamic period. But other scholarly engagements took most of author’s time and when he returned to his notes and drafts about a decade later, he realised that much time had elapsed and in the meanwhile some other works on history of Arabic literature, written in Urdu, had appeared. While he was pondering over whether to get it published or not, someone informed Saleemur Rahman and Riaz Ahmed, the editors of Savera, of the unfinished manuscript. On their insistence, Rizvi Sahib began to serialise it in Savera, though quite unsure of its usefulness. But the overwhelming response from the readers forced him to publish it in book form.
Published by Idara-i-Islamiat in two volumes, the first edition flew off the shelves and two more updated and revised editions had to be published.
Published in Dawn, May 13th, 2024