Dream on
IRAN is in our sociocultural and civilisational abiogenesis. Urdu, our national language, an amalgam of many Indo-European languages, draws most of its sweetness from Persian. One can count on one hand those who can name a couple of great, or even popular, poets of competing great languages and civilisations, such as Arabic, Turkic and Sanskrit. However, thousands among us know the Persian greats such as the Shirazi duo, Hafez and Saadi. Ferdowsi and Khayyam might as well be household names. Saib, Naziri, Urfi — the list is endless. The national anthem draws mostly on Farsi, with a fair bit of Arabic, and only one everyday Urdu link — the word ‘ka’, meaning belong/of.
Dreams and reality also entwine when it comes to our two countries. While Pakistan is often called a poet’s dream, given Allama Iqbal’s role in the politics of the day, Ferdowsi’s grand epic, the Shahnameh, is also believed to have been the result of a dream. According to lore, Daqiqi Tusi, a 10th-century Samanid-era court poet, appeared in Ferdowsi’s dream one night and urged him to complete what Daqiqi could not — the history of the Persian civilisation. Thus the legend of Rostam and Sohrab was born. It should actually be called ‘Rudaba-o-Rostam-o-Sohrab’.
We not only share a land border with Iran but also had it as our earliest donor and the first country to accord official recognition to the new state of Pakistan after independence. Some 15 per cent of our population is Shia, making it the second largest concentration of Shias in the world after Iran. They naturally look to Iran, the stronghold of the Shiite school of Islam, for religious, education and spiritual reasons.
The recent unprovoked attacks on Iran by the US-Israel combine naturally caused outrage among Pakistanis, irrespective of religion or creed. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz compounded Pakistanis’ principled indignation with economic pain. Much has already been written about the central role Pakistan continues to play in ending this most unjust aggression whose flames threaten to engulf the entire world. The MoU for cessation of hostilities was recently signed in Switzerland.
Are Iranians supposed to be grateful for the ceasefire?
Interim and stopgap as it may be, the cessation of large-scale hostilities in the region is a source of immense relief and should be appreciated. However, the collective global conscience must ask: even if the MoU leads to a full-fledged peace agreement, are the Iranians supposed to forget the miseries inflicted on them by the US and Israel? In keeping with the track record of the US-Nato attacks on Iraq — to ‘save’ the world from its stockpiles of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ — Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, the US again attacked Iran, this time on Israel’s prodding and with support from its Gulf allies, killing thousands of its citizens, including more than 100 students in a missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls Elementary School in Minab.
While bleeding American hearts go out to Afghan women forced to wear a burqa and to girls denied education, they have no compunction about the killing of Iranian girls who were simply going to school. Supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei was murdered along with his daughter, daughter-in-law, son-in-law and granddaughter in the earliest attacks. A significant cadre of front-line political and military leadership was also killed. The Iranians are supposed to forget that, be grateful for the ceasefire, and carry on with their lives, right? Wrong!
There is the warning of our own poet, Ahmed Faraz: “Bara muntaqim hai mera lahu, yeh meray nasab ki sarisht hai” (vengeance runs in the bloodstream of my forebears). Being human, the Iranians will pursue the forbidden fruit. Having tasted it, they will resist all efforts made to banish them from heaven, making life hell for everyone who tormented them. A nightmare not scripted by the Iranians.
Enough of the macabre; let us return to dreams. The first reference to what we now know as a cesarean section, or C-section, appears in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, where its hero, Rostam, the son of Zal and his queen Rudaba, was delivered by it; hence, ‘rostamzad’ became a synonym for C-section.
A poet’s dream led to the creation of Pakistan. It is unfortunate that the partition of the subcontinent was accompanied by bloodshed, likening the birth of the nation-state to a cesarean, performed not with a surgeon’s scalpel but a butcher’s knife in Radcliffe’s hand; a delivery that some consider premature, others overdue, and yet others still.
The C-section baby has the tree bearing forbidden fruit; many want it. Ironically, the tree of death appears to many as a tree of eternal life and a guarantor of independence. Dreams don’t grow on trees, but dreamers can dream on.
The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.
Published in Dawn, July 4th, 2026
