Learning a new language is not just a matter of learning the semantics and linguistic structure of a new dialect, but it is also a discovery of the culture that surrounds that language. In some cases, it can even be a rediscovery of a culture. I grew up in Karachi, Pakistan and went to a school that taught Urdu as a second language. Our daily classes were primarily conducted in English. Urdu was often taught to us in a completely different way than English. Teachers relied heavily on verbal drills, memorization and uninspiring reading opportunities. I never mastered my own mother tongue in Pakistan because I found it boring and tiresome to study. Also, it was never encouraged as such. At home nearly all my school friends and I spoke English with our families. English was always considered superior on many levels. We were all very comfortable, in school, performing from English Plays such as “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Macbeth” but never did much in Urdu on that level. Ironically, it was not until I left Pakistan to study Linguistics in Madison, Wisconsin and met Professor Memon that I truly started to appreciate Urdu and discover the wealth of my culture and history.

Professor Memon is an Urdu scholar who had also studied both Persian and Arabic, two of the languages Urdu is primarily derived from. He could explain the root of any Urdu word, he could explain idiom and diction and most importantly, he could articulate to us how Urdu was a very oral language and didn’t always make “sense” in the way we would expect from more Western languages.

It was a life changing experience for me and the students studying with me. Many of my colleagues were Pakistani Americans who had lived in the United States all their lives and had never formally studied Urdu. We all learnt to appreciate the richness and diversity of the Urdu language with Professor Memon. And in so doing, we learnt a lot about our culture. We were shocked to discover how the literature was so liberal and expressive, tackling such topics as socialism, existentialism, feminism and even homosexuality, in a very thought provoking and, at times, very graphic way. We were especially surprised to see how many other students with no direct links to Pakistan found Urdu to be a fascinating language and often put us to shame by speaking it a lot more fluently than we ever could! It made us appreciate our roots and our heritage with a pride we had never felt before.

Professor Memon has spent the 38 years of his teaching career in Madison, Wisconsin greatly impacting the lives of his students with his passion and enthusiasm for Urdu. He has tirelessly worked with other Urdu scholars from around the world to create an academic blueprint for Urdu discussions and research through his brilliant journal, “Annual of Urdu Studies.” He has translated numerous Urdu fiction works into English, thereby opening up the world of Urdu by making its fiction accessible to a much wider audience. He has also taught many courses on Islam and Sufism that were just as enriching and instructive in their own right. Professor Memon is now retired from his teaching in Madison. He spends his retirement working on numerous translations and on his “Annual of Urdu Studies” journal. I was honored to sit with him, recently, and ask him some questions about his career and passions.

Q. Tell me a little about your background and how you came to where you are today.

A. The answer to the first part of your question is probably easier. If I knew “where I am today” I might find that easier to answer too. But where am I? I sometimes feel that I’m one of those people who’s always on the way but never arrives anywhere. Life is a work-in-progress. One doesn’t arrive but merely plods along through a continuum, its terminal points on either side forever obscured in the blue haze of the distance. It is both a weighty and an ambiguous question. Does a person really know where he has come, if he has come anywhere at all? Then again, arrival spells the end, death, at least figuratively.
If in your early days you knew precisely and necessarily what you wanted to do, looking back from a later vantage in life you might perhaps say whether you’ve accomplished what you set out to do, how much of it you’ve accomplished. My misfortune is that I never set myself any kind of goal and took things as they came. All I can tell you is that there have been times when a given choice has brought me immense unhappiness, and some have brought me satisfaction. As I say this I’m reminded of the central dilemma posed as “the idea of eternal return” in the opening pages of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. So I too have lived my life, whatever and however it was: whether “horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.” And that shouldn’t matter. Just to live is enough. Arrival is not important, continuous journeying is.
And now that I have deftly evaded the issue through this excursion into metaphysical-sounding mumbo-jumbo, let me turn to the first part of the question.

I was born at Aligarh in 1939 to the only Memon family in town. My father was professor of Arabic at the university there. Nothing in my childhood or boyhood is compelling enough to merit revisiting. It was an average life of an ordinary boy with ordinary classmates. Following my father’s retirement in 1954, we moved to Karachi, where I did my B.A. Honors and M.A. and taught first at Sachal Sarmast College and later at Sind University, both in Hyderabad. By then I had been writing short stories in Urdu and had had some modest success as a writer. In 1964 I received a Fulbright scholarship to study at Harvard University. I finished my M.A. there a year later and then proceeded to do a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies at UCLA, simultaneously teaching Urdu. I met my wife Nakako in Cambridge where she too had come on a Fulbright from Tokyo University to continue her studies in Chinese history.

In 1970 I joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison and retired last year after 38 years of service as professor of Urdu Literature and Islamic Studies. I also taught Arabic in the same university for two years but in a different department, and Persian for some years in what was then the Department of Indian Studies. At my retirement this department was in its third incarnation: the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia.

My wife and I have two boys, the older, Asim, became disenchanted with academia just before his Ph.D., quit, and started working for an investment company. The younger, Anis, did a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, but didn’t want to live and teach in the U.S. After many years in France and Italy, this fall he accepted a teaching position in French and Italian at the University of Vermont. End of story.

Q. What drew you to translating Urdu fiction into English?

A. By 1964 I was already known as an Urdu short story writer of the generation that emerged after 1947. There were four of us who had acquired something of a reputation as the modernists, whatever that term meant— perhaps a buzzword for anything that deviated from the traditional way of writing short stories with an emphasis on the chronological ordering of event and time and the portrayal of social reality, and that instead made use of events in spatial juxtaposition. In short, a form that veered toward abstraction. Although of the four—Surendar Parkash and Balraj Manra in India, Enver Sajjad and myself in Pakistan—I wrote very little in this form. I liked my friend Balraj’s stories quite a bit. He had crammed tons of Sartre and Camus and inclined heavily toward the philosophy of the “absurd.”

So I decided to translate a few of his stories, among them “The Match Box,” which was later reprinted in Short Story International (New York). And that was that. Later, a practical reason drove me to translate extensively from modern Urdu fiction. It was 1970, I was teaching at the University of Wisconsin and had introduced a course on Urdu fiction in translation. When I started to look for translated stories for the course, I found very little. This prompted me to translate myself.

Q. Have you been happy with the responses to your translations? Have the Urdu writers you’ve translated, at least those who are still alive, appreciated the increased exposure you’ve given them?

A. Actually, “happy” doesn’t come into the picture. Serious reviews are the only way to know how one’s efforts have been received. My anthologies or translations of individual authors have been reviewed in the U.S., but not extensively. A few reviews of one book, Naiyer Masud’s Essence of Camphor (The New Press, New York), did appear here. They were generally positive, especially the ones in the Boston Globe and Kirkus Reviews. For some reason, in the U.S. there seems to be a conspicuous lack of interest in world literature, especially non-Western literature. The situation is better in Europe. For instance, compared to the U.S., the percentage of translations from non-Western languages is much higher, say, in France and Italy. I was quite surprised when Essence of Camphor was translated into Finnish and French.
Most of the readership for my translations is in India, not Pakistan, even though the greater part of my translation work showcases work by Pakistani Urdu writers. Last August Penguin published Do You Suppose It’s The East Wind? Stories from Pakistan, which is a selection of Urdu stories I translated. Chandrahas Choudhury reviewed it in The Middle Stage and Satyanarayana in Tehelka. They are very positive reviews, but what struck me the most was the absence of any tentativeness or dismissal or hubris or superior air in the reviewer’s attitude, the kind one frequently sees in reviews and columns in Pakistani newspapers. Instead, there was a healthy curiosity and welcoming spirit in which the reviewer approached the body of fictional literature emanating from the other side of the border. So it can be said that my efforts have received a degree of appreciation.
Do Urdu writers I translate appreciate my work? I don’t know. They don’t tell me. A few have thanked me though. That said, I know that today Intizar Husain and Naiyer Masud are not totally obscure names among those in U.S. academia with an interest in South Asian Studies. Maybe this is due to my translations. One time an Australian professor, whose scholarly focus is mainly on South India, was in Lahore and saw my translation of Intizar Husain’s collection of stories An Unwritten Epic in some bookstore. These stories impressed him enough to write an excellent article on Intizar Husain and later publish it in a highly acclaimed professional journal.

Likewise Alok Bhalla once came to Madison to see me and told me that he had discovered Intizar Husain through my translations. He was so impressed by Husain’s work that he translated, with the help of a collaborator who knew Urdu, a series of Husain stories that are modeled after the stories of Mahatma Buddha’s rebirths (jatakas) but with a contemporary twist.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see Intizar Husain’s The Seventh Door and Other Stories (Lynne Rienner), which I translated and published with a very long introduction, as part of a syllabus for a course at Tübingen University (Germany).

Appreciation and notice apart, it is not necessary to know whether anyone appreciates or acknowledges your work. Which is not to say that I don’t take pleasure in their appreciation. I do. However, the motivating force has never been the desire to be thanked or acknowledged. I translate a piece because I feel it is good. Over the years I have come to realize that a person should not pay too much attention to these things. I have assimilated translation work into the act of living. It is a part of my life and has meaning for me. I undertake it to explore my own possibilities. You may call me self-oriented if you like. If others also find it meaningful, they may express that if they like, or leave it unsaid.

Q. When you have translated Urdu stories into English, you have obviously enabled English speakers to read such stories and be introduced to the world of Urdu fiction. But what was your ultimate goal in doing such translations? Did you want some of these people, then, to try to study Urdu and read stories in the original language or did you just want to show people what Urdu fiction is all about?

A. Yes, of course. I cannot rule out an ulterior motive and inherent purpose. I initially did the translations for my undergraduate courses, but somewhere at the back of it all lurked the desire that some students might find these stories provocative and intriguing enough to do their graduate work in Urdu literature. And some did. But few continued, not through lack of desire or waning interest but because of a very unfortunate situation. Before they could get to me they had to take the first-year of what was called Hindi-Urdu. There was hardly any Urdu in the course and the person who taught it didn’t even know the Urdu script. (Urdu has suffered much on American campuses because of this unwarranted and politically motivated hyphenation, although I must admit the situation is gradually changing now.) Because of their avowed interest in learning Urdu they sometimes felt picked on, so they often felt terribly discouraged and dropped the course.
In 2007, eight students, one from China, applied for admission to work with me on modern Urdu fiction for their M.A. and Ph.D. We admitted all of them, but none could come because they were unable to get any scholarships and were swept away by other universities. Even the three Title VI grants that were awarded to Urdu applicants went to students here in the departments of Anthropology and Political Science. But that’s not the point. The fact is that these students didn’t know me and decided to work with me after doing some legwork on the internet. There they saw The Annual of Urdu Studies (AUS) and my books and made their decision. Some even called me and made detailed inquiries. When they were convinced that Wisconsin was the right place for them they applied. So one could say that my translation work has generated some interest in modern Urdu literature as a viable field of scholarly enterprise.
It is also a source of satisfaction for me personally. Most early scholars of Urdu have focused mainly on premodern Urdu literature, especially ghazal poetry, and even there primarily on Ghalib. While this is laudable, it unfortunately creates the wrong impression, whether intended or not, that one is dealing with “a patient etherized upon a table,” a glory that is no more, as if all that Urdu had to give has been given already, so why go beyond the nineteenth century. This is detrimental to Urdu. By concentrating on the modern, I’ve always wanted to bring the necessary corrective to this kind of pervasive feeling. Here I might also mention that I find European Urdu scholars much more inclusive and open about this matter, those who do not hesitate to go “through certain half-deserted streets” and “the muttering retreats.” Drs. Christina Oesterheld (Germany) and Alain Désoulières (France) not only speak fluent Urdu but also have written engaging scholarly work on both classical and modern Urdu literature. Dr. Daniela Bredi in Italy and Ursula Rothen-Dubs in Switzerland are two other such scholars, and no surprise that the last two were students of Ralph Russell.
Aside from curricular needs, I also felt that Western readers should know about a very rich literary tradition, namely Urdu prose and poetry.

Q. As a follow up to the above question, what do you think has been surprising to Western readers who have read your translations? Do you feel you have broken down any barriers or changed people’s perceptions of life in India and/or Pakistan?
A. I have no access to the reactions of Western readers to my translations so I don’t know whether any stereotypes or barriers have been broken. Now and then when I’ve encouraged some of my colleagues to read my translations of, for instance, Naiyer Masud, they have been simply dazed by his superior art. One of them, a professor in the German Department here in my university, found Masud’s stories so intriguing that he even wrote an article on him which I published in The Annual of Urdu Studies.
Likewise, last June in New York I met the editor of Words Without Borders, a web magazine of world literature, and gave him Naiyer Masud’s Essence of Camphor and Snake Catcher to read. He still hasn’t quite come out of the author’s spell. I guess it was these stories that prompted him to ask me to do a whole section of his magazine on Urdu fiction and poetry. A student at Yale University read the Essence collection in one of Sara Suleri’s courses and was so mesmerized by the work that he ended up writing an exhaustive paper on the author. I published that in the AUS too. And Jane Shum, who is the Assistant Editor of the AUS, as well as my former student Robert Phillips, wrote their Master’s theses on Naiyer Masud. If I remember correctly, your own M.A. thesis critically examined the short stories of Khalida Husain.
Here I must mention Anna Oldfield Senarslan. She now teaches at Hamilton College—which your friend the novelist Kamila Shamsie attended—but Anna did her Ph.D. at Wisconsin in Turkish literature. As a student she took my course on “Literatures of Muslim Societies” and also, after her doctorate, audited my course on modern Urdu fiction. She was impressed by what she read of Urdu literature in translation and reviewed Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s translation of Dastan-e Amir Hamza and the first volume of Tilism-e Hoshruba for the AUS. According to Farooqi, of the 100 or so reviews on these works, he feels hers are the best. Anna frequently consults me on Urdu materials. This semester she had her students read Altaf Fatima’s “Do You Suppose It’s the East Wind?” and Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire.
I consider such interest a by-product of reading Urdu translations. So, yes, there has been some notice. But a wider recognition of Urdu literature, such that would bring it into focus worldwide and make a difference in the readers understanding of Urdu humanities, that, I’m afraid, is a far cry.

Q. What do you think about the future of the Urdu language? Some say it is a dying language. Do you agree? If so, what, in your opinion, needs to be done to make it a more dynamic language?

A. I don’t dabble in clairvoyance. Who can say anything about the future? Still I don’t think that Urdu will die in Pakistan. But let us first deal with its current situation in India.
You must have often heard that Urdu is a Muslim language. This is a mistaken and largely politically motivated notion. There is absolutely no inextricable link between language and religion. A person would do well to disabuse themselves of this notion. It is an Indian language and did not carry a Muslim identity tag until the British somehow foisted a Muslim identity on it to create discord between the Hindus and Muslims, all in an effort to perpetuate their stranglehold on India. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has cogently and forcefully argued for its Indian origins in his highly acclaimed work Early Urdu Literary Culture and History (Oxford). Until 1947, when the Indian subcontinent was partitioned, India never suffered from a dearth of Hindu and Sikh writers of Urdu. In the first half of the twentieth-century, among the three most celebrated fiction writers in Urdu, one was a Kashmiri Hindu (Krishan Chander), one a Sikh (Rajindar Singh Bedi), and one a Muslim (Saadat Hasan Manto). Earlier, Munshi Premchand wrote in an Urdu few Pakistanis could match today. Among the poets I can cite several, but Chakbast and Firaq Gorakhpuri should suffice.
Well, the British succeeded. Both Hindus and Muslims bought into their fiction. Now a single language came in two different packages, one for Hindus (Hindi) and another for Muslims (Urdu). So, from a purely nationalistic point of view, Urdu has no place in India. It is recognized in the Indian Constitution but is slowly atrophying due to politics and neglect—neglect largely on the part of the Indian Muslim community. You may blame the Indian government for the sorry state of Urdu in India all you want, but really the Muslim community is largely responsible for shirking its responsibility. If you claim to own it, you must preserve it. It is as simple as that. Why always ask the government to do everything? Why not do what little you can? Very little evidence is forthcoming of any organized effort to keep Urdu alive and develop it further. By this I do not mean any government-sponsored activity, but any initiative coming from the Urdu community itself. On the contrary, Indian Muslims would rather have their children taught English and Hindi because of the greater opportunities for economic betterment that such learning promises. In the U.S. I personally know two Indian Muslims coming from highly cultured Urdu families who can write Urdu only in roman or Hindi script.
I know I’m painting a very bleak picture, but that picture is generally valid. Anita Desai has lamented Urdu’s pitiable condition in India in her In Custody. But in fairness, it must be said that Urdu has not died in India. There are quite a few writers, some even Hindus, who write prose and poetry in Urdu. But it is difficult to predict the future of Urdu in India on the basis of a handful of contemporary writers.
As far as Pakistan is concerned, although Urdu is the mother-tongue of a minority, it enjoys an historically unique, though by no means enviable, position, which has more to do with practicality than any inherent national effort to make it a truly vibrant language. The practicality lies in Pakistan being a multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic society. It needs a common language for communication among its linguistically diverse population. No other regional language seems to fit the bill. Urdu does, in some strange mixture, enable its different linguistic groups to communicate with each other. So, yes, as long as this need is there, Urdu will live, as a language of communication. No harm there. But it is difficult to imagine what kind of literary expression will result from this kind of Urdu. The educated classes are inclining increasingly towards English.
The economic imperative is operative here too. English opens the door, why teach your children Urdu and its culture? If you know anything about the people—the so-called élite—who live in the swank neighborhoods in the Clifton area of Karachi, you will know that most of them speak English at home. One of them, a writer, speaks only English. She went to a boarding school in the U.K. as a young woman, easily half a century ago. Ever since her return she is living in Pakistan. She told me without a trace of embarrassment that she couldn’t speak in Urdu.
There is no dearth of full-throated pronouncements in support of Urdu while precious little is being done to take well-thought-out and well-coordinated steps to translate those shrill pronouncements into living reality. Yes, there is this “Authority” and that “Academy.” What have they achieved? And Majlis-e Taraqqi-e Adab, which was really doing some good work toward the preservation of Urdu classics, suffered a drastic cutback of its grant. The whole country suffers from the worst kind of cronyism. The same people keep circulating from one institution to another, regardless of whether they are qualified for the job. Yesterday director of the Pakistan Academy of Letters, today director of the National Language Authority. Qualifications for the job? Well, a medium-weight poet, but endowed with a unique quality few can rival: no matter what government, they will always come out smelling like a rose. Not a penny’s worth of scholarship has emerged from these places. They bide their time and collect their salaries, and jealously guard their privilege. Of course I’m exaggerating, but not by that much.

Q. What advice would you give other budding Urdu authors or translators? Any lessons learnt that you would share?

A. Frankly, I’m past giving anyone advice. But I will tell those who want to write fiction, read Mario Vargas Llosa’s little book Letters to a Young Novelist. After reading it, if you still insist on being a writer, then unlearn everything Llosa has taught you. Nobody taught him anything. He read tons of fiction and began to see what makes it tick. He tells you something about the strategies accomplished writers have devised to create dazzling worlds of fiction. But he also tells you, and let me quote the concluding lines of the book:
That is why no one can teach anyone else to create; at most, we may be taught to read and write. The rest we must teach ourselves, stumbling, falling, and picking ourselves up over and over again. My dear friend: what I am trying to say is that you should forget everything you’ve read in my letters about the structure of the novel, and just sit down and write.
It might sound as if all any Tom, Dick, or Harry needs to do is just sit down and write and voilà! a writer is born. No. Llosa is telling you just the opposite: once you know what good writing involves, you will inevitably know whether you have it in you to become a writer. Chances are, a good 90 percent will pack up and leave for some other more lucrative business. My disenchantment with about 90 percent of the trash currently being churned out by Urdu fiction writers is precisely due to their inability to know what good writing takes and whether they’re up to delivering it, never mind “stumbling, falling, and picking ourselves up over and over again.” They just keep “budding” but never “blossom.”
The same goes for prospective translators. Translation isn’t easy. A worst case example is the Urdu translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex by a venerable name in Urdu letters. Compare it with the English translation of this work and you’ll know what I mean. For such people translation is a walk in the park or a piece of cake. But if you want to do a good, honest job, and I mean a really good, honest job, it will drain you completely. I’ve sometimes spent days translating a single sentence in an effort to capture all its semantic resonances and rhythms, all its vibrations below the surface and beyond the words themselves, to somehow reproduce it in its emotional intensity and charge, and have often failed to achieve it and settled on something less, which makes me infinitely unhappy.
The problem is compounded by the absence of a good and user-friendly Urdu dictionary. I work simultaneously with four or five of them, two or more of Urdu and one each of Persian and Arabic at a minimum. While we have been writing fiction in Urdu for well over a century now, we’ve paid scant attention to devising a vocabulary suited to express newer experience in the most telling way. If only you knew how much work the Arabs and Iranians have done for their languages.
I was recently translating the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswani’s ’Imarat Ya’qubyan and almost gave up in exasperation. It has also been translated into English as The Yacoubian Building. A comparison of the original and the translation made it abundantly clear that in the majority of cases there was perfect semantic equivalence between the two vocabularies. Yet the Arabic words are those that have been added to the language in modern times. A comparison with the late nineteenth-century Egyptian writer Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti’s stories will demonstrate the difference in language and modes of expression. During the translation of Toshihiko Izutsu’s little book Creation and The Timeless Order of Things: Essays in Islamic Mystical Philosophy, I was surprised to see that its Persian translation freely uses a goodly number of Persianized English words that didn’t exist in Persian—words that are now standard items in any contemporary Persian dictionary.
I might sound too critical. I know that some of my problems may be the result of my own dwindling hold on the Urdu idiom. Having lived in the U.S. for close to a half-century now, more or less in isolation from the Urdu community, speaking only in English, my Urdu has deteriorated considerably and I’m fast losing my Urdu vocabulary. So I don’t rule out the possibility that my failure may be due in part to my own limitations.
A problem specific to translation activity in Urdu is the lack of a phonetically standardized transcription of Western personal and geographical names. Take, for instance, the common personal name Andrew in English. It is pronounced and spelled differently in French, Hungarian, Italian and many other European languages according to the phonetic structure of those languages. The Czech “Tomas” (pronounced “Toomaash”) is really your English “Thomas.” In Urdu, on the other hand, translators resort to a totally arbitrary spelling. Arabs and Iranians have already paid attention to this need for standardization. Arabs have even invented a new letter—a vaa’o with three dots above it—to denote a very troublesome Russian sound. Take “Italy.” Some write it “iTlii” (with the specific Indian Hindi-Urdu retroflex letter “Te,”) others “aTaaliya” (with the Arabic “To’e”). Why can’t we decide on one or the other? And what is the logic of transcribing a European word with the Arabic letter, when it hasn’t come to Urdu through Arabic? These may sound like simple matters, but the laissez-faire attitude bespeaks the worst kind of apathy and indifference, which is detrimental to the development of Urdu as a dynamic language, susceptible to newer developments coming in the wake of and necessitated by newer experiences in the modern world.
I do realize that strictly speaking this is not an inherently Urdu problem, but only if all we ever did was write for ourselves and within our four walls. But in this age of globalization (not in the economic sense, though), if we consider ourselves part of the world community, we cannot be indifferent to these matters.

Q. You used to teach courses on Islam and Sufism at the University of Wisconsin. Did you feel your teaching changed as Western perceptions of Islam changed? Were more students attracted to your classes?

A. Yes, but not in my courses on Sufism, only in the course “Islam: Religion and Culture.” Sufism, by its nature, deals with things beyond our mundane world. Its mainstay is metaphysics, so no one in the West felt threatened by a Sufi. On the contrary, this is the only aspect of Islam that seems to have grabbed their imagination in a positive way. Still they wonder about how such spirituality could ever be part of a religion with which they have come to associate many negative things lately. Anyway, according to one estimate, Rumi is by far the top-selling poet in the U.S. My course on Sufism usually had a small number of students. This was also true for my introductory course on Islam (between 25 and 45 students) until Osama Bin Laden decided to blow up New York’s Twin Towers, condemning the entire billion-and-a-half strong community of Muslims across the world to eternal damnation. Immediately the following year enrollment shot up to 225, settling down at around 180 or so, and stayed more or less in that neighborhood in the following years. So yes, it was definitely a case of “bad-naam hu’e hain to kyaa naam na hogaa!” (ill-repute brings notoriety anyway). It is difficult to say what drove such large numbers to learn about Islam: curiosity, fear, a genuine desire to know about the faith of the other, or what? But regardless of the topic, discussion always veered toward questions generated by the heinous act of September 11.
My purpose in teaching that course had always been to talk about Islam as a religion and as a culture. I didn’t like to talk about this event because it wasn’t easy to talk about it in isolation from the history of the interaction and the nature of the relationship between Muslims and the West during the last 300 years, not so much to provide a moral justification for the act, but to situate it in its proper historical context. So I tried to answer such questions as briefly as possible and move on to my central concerns in the course.
My teaching style is somewhat unconventional and was not affected by this appalling event. I have taken a lot of flak for my style because most students want carefully planned outlines of the items to be discussed in each lecture. The slightest deviation and they seem to feel lost. To me, this sort of airtight organization of material, although it has its advantages, is counterproductive. I like to deal with a question exhaustively, pulling in information from everywhere and anywhere (novels, personal anecdotes, fine arts, the jokes of standup comedians, popular TV shows, you name it) to illustrate a point, and I aim for a vigorous back-and-forth between me and my students. (In class I used to call myself the Johnny Carson of Islamic Studies.)
The disadvantage is that very little gets covered. In course evaluations from my students, I invariably received a low grade on organization, but what sustained me in my “bad” habit were the sincere comments about how I had managed to make some difference in their way of thinking and change their perceptions of Islam and Muslim society. Their exams amply demonstrated that they didn’t go for stereotypes about Islam. It is amazing that now and then an e-mail or a picture postcard drops in from some student who took the course perhaps 20 years ago thanking me for the insights gained in my class that helped them in some recent situation. I find this very comforting. I feel I haven’t wasted my time. Perhaps I’ve done some good, however small.

Q. You retired almost a year ago from a long teaching career. Do you miss teaching? If so, what do you miss the most about it?

A. I do miss teaching. Indeed I miss it a lot. Actually, teaching had never meant just acquitting myself of a professional duty. That was there, of course. And the teaching wasn’t only for my students’ benefit. It was equally for my own benefit. Briefly, it made it possible for me to know myself better, my limits and possibilities. Temperamentally I have a pathological distrust of specialization. And I’ve paid a heavy price for my dilettantism. I can’t help it. What I discovered quite early in my teaching career was that during lectures all my exploits into different realms of intellectual activity and all my observations would unexpectedly pour out of my mouth fully coalesced into a neat and cogent argument and surprise me. I found this very refreshing. So lecturing has meant self-discovery for me.
I miss this interaction with students. I would never have retired if my professional job required only teaching. Teaching is not a one-way affair; students give you a lot too, often in very unsuspecting ways. This opportunity is now lost. Teaching also kept me on my toes. I used to read a lot, and my lectures were never the same two years in a row, except of course for the basic information. The elaboration always changed, incorporating everything new I had read, regardless of the source, and everything I had seen and experienced during the previous year. Then there were also those truly hilarious moments. I vividly recall a single sentence some student had written to a question on Muhammad: “Muhammad—he was a good dude.” Although he flunked, I had a good laugh.

Q. You are the editor of a very impressive journal, The Annual of Urdu Studies. How did you get involved in this work? Do you have a large readership for this publication? 

A. C.M. Naim of the Chicago University started it in 1980. Over the next 10 years he produced 7 issues and then gave up. I waited 3 years for someone else to take it over. When no one did, I jumped in. We needed a journal of this sort, the only one of its kind anywhere in the world. I could have started a new one, but it made more sense to revive what had once existed. Our basic problem is funding. We were lucky to get some support from the South Asia Center in the initial period and later from the University. When the University’s fiscal problems forced it to withdraw its support, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) luckily rescued us. Now it too has had to withdraw its full support. After June 2010 we are on our own, which means that we cease publication.
Our immediate problem is to raise some $7000 to pay the three-month half-time salary of the assistant editor so we can get the next issue, our 25th, out around September 2010. After that I don’t know. So far the Urdu community in the U.S. has helped us very little. Maybe they don’t know we exist. Perhaps you could put a notice in your online publication to let them know that we desperately need money, that keeping alive the only journal that deals with Urdu humanities is an imperative and the common responsibility of those in the Urdu community who are well placed in life to spare a little. Beyond 2010, we need close to $23,000 a year to retain a half-time assistant editor. The rest of the expenses we can cover from the small grant of $4000 the AIPS has offered to give us, and from the sales of the journal, and $1000 which I’m willing to contribute from my own pocket.
Do we have a large readership? I should think so, but not a large number of paid subscribers. Very few individuals and institutions buy it. Part of the reason for this deplorable condition is that in 2001 I put the journal online for free. Several thousand people a month use it there. So they don’t feel the need to buy it, or perhaps in many parts of the world they don’t have the resources to buy it even if they might like to. Shamefully, some university libraries in the U.S. and Europe have now also canceled their subscriptions because it is available online for free. Do they not realize this will snuff out the journal’s life? I had originally put it online for the sake of our South Asian readers who cannot afford to buy it.
If we cease publishing the print edition, the web edition will also cease to exist. Our editorial expenses are the same, whether it is print or web or both.
Coming up with $23,000 a year is a big hurdle for any one individual, but if you think of all those hundreds of prosperous doctors and businessmen in our community it isn’t an astronomical sum. If each gave only a small portion of it, we could easily reach our goal. So please do anything you can on behalf of the Annual.

Q. What can we expect to see from you in the next few years, as far as publications go?

A. I have a lot on my plate at the moment. The first priority is to edit the material we’ve accepted for the next issue of the Annual. Editing takes a lot of time. Often we have to contact the writer several times for clarifications and references that are either missing or incomplete. Our readers probably don’t know how much time we have to spend in the library and online to verify reference information to make sure that a quoted portion, for instance, is correctly transcribed and indeed appears on the cited page. Not very creative work but time-consuming and pretty drab.
I have also been invited to guest edit a special section on “Urdu Writing from India” for Words Without Borders. I need to wrap it up in the next six months. I’m doing the major portion of the translations for this section myself.
Then I must finally get back to a number of unfinished translations from English. They include half a dozen novels, Izutsu’s book which I mentioned elsewhere and Llosa’s book from which I quoted the passage about writing, and numerous other articles on the transmission of knowledge to the West—a knowledge produced during the heyday of Islamic culture, and on Sufi metaphysics. Some of these are already translated and only need revision, touch up and polishing.
Last of all I would like to revise the short story “Jaati Chizen,” which I wrote in 1990 or 1991. I haven’t published it. I’ve become aware of some deficiencies in the story and since I like it too much I don’t want to publish it unless I’m satisfied. I’ve often thought of returning to it but each time I’ve hesitated. It would seem that we have become very intimate, the story and I. It is this intimacy that comes in the way, as if it doesn’t want to be put on display. I know what it is—I tell myself—so why rush, why indeed even publish it.

And thank you very much for this opportunity to speak my mind.