Arif-uz-Zaman - Gem of a Man

M. Z. Iqbal

Arif sahib, an ex-teacher and a colleague at Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU), was the son of Prof Salimuzzaman Siddiqui sahib, a renowned chemist and the first Fellow of the Royal Society from Pakistan. The family hailed from Lukhnow (erstwhile Oudh, as pronounced by the colonial British or Awadh, as pronounced in Urdu), India. Arif sahib was the middle of three distinguished brothers amongst Rafe-uz-Zaman, the eldest, who played a leading role along with Aslam Azhar sahib in establishing the Pakistan Television (PTV) in 1960s and Asif-uz-Zaman, the youngest, a chemist at Aligarh Muslim University, India, who never migrated to Pakistan after Partition.

Arif sahib was a sufi-like person who cared little for the worldly gains and the rat-race that consumes most of us earthlings. He had his own peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, like most of us. These included wearing a jacket (dress coat) even in hot summer days, smoking and forgetting his matchbox wherever he was in the Physics Department at QAU or elsewhere, to name a few. He was adept at poetry in Urdu, Persian and even German, a trait he had inherited from his father with full proficiency and interest. He was full of stories, anecdotes and even tidbits in these linguistic domains. I vividly recall – from my student days at Islamabad University (1968-70) – being amused by his narration of a comic little skit about a cat getting frozen while jumping from one building to another and completing the jump on melting with the heat of the approaching summer. His jokes from the stories of Mullah Naseeruddin, a comic character (cited in some sufi parables also) from the stories of Iran, Turkey and Central Asia were abundant. Human history of different regions of the world was another passion of his. These traits were, not infrequently, misused by the students to divert him from his lecture material, whenever they wanted to have fun, instead of having to digest the challenging subjects in his physics lectures. All too often, they would divert him by asking how did a particular historical event, touched upon by him during some earlier lecture, turn out in the later stages. Once thus goaded into such themes, Arif sahib would easily forget his original lecture plan till the story was finished which, inevitably, would be well after the allocated time for the lecture! Regarding his knowledge of and interest in human history, legend has it that once while in his short stay at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP - now renamed after its founder, Prof Abdus Salam, the Pakistani Nobel Laureate in Physics, as AS-ICTP), in Trieste, Italy, where most of the Physics faculty of QAU were regular visitors during the University’s summer breaks, Arif sahib immersed himself into a thorough reading (or re-reading, who knows?) of Arnold Toynbee’s magnus opus on the world history (A Study of History)! So devoted he was to history of the human race.

But history was not his only favorite subject outside of Physics. Following his illustrious father, he was very fond of poetry, which encompassed not just Urdu poetry, but also Persian, English and German poetry. Rilke was one of his favorites among German poets. His treasure trove of Persian poetry encompassed poetry of the great masters, Hafiz, Sa’adi, Omar Khayyam and Baydil, among others. During the Zia-ul-Haq reign in Pakistan, badly depressed by what has now come to be known as the judicial murder of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the popular Prime Minister of Pakistan in 1979, after a military coup, Arif sahib would often be found reciting the poetic line:

مفتیِ دینِ مبین فَتوٰہ فَروش

The mufti of the clear religion is but a dealer of theological edicts

castigating the clergy who, by and large, supported the military dictator. Similarly after the Iranian ‘revolution’ of 1979, when the all powerful mullahs took to assassination of all the regime’s erstwhile dissenters, which included virtually all the liberal elements of Iran, Arif sahib would often be found reciting the line “cheh aashufta bazaar Bazaargani”

چِہ آشُفتہ بازار بازارگانی

What a mess in the trader’s market

Bazargan being Iran’s first prime minister during that fateful dark period. “Punch a hola in the Ayatollah”, was another of his favorite one liners during those days, which he had picked up from some western newspaper or magazine. The relish with which he would go about reciting these favorite lines of his (often preceded by 'ہاں بھائ ہاں' ‘ha.n bhai ha.n’, a favorite prologue of his), while moving through the corridors of the Physics Department of QAU was worth being a witness to those days. Ah, the one and only Arif sahib! These traits of his, without a doubt, brought the entertainer in him to the fore.

A scientific quirk of his! A perpetual smoker that he was, he was notorious at forgetting his matchbox wherever he went while smoking during the day, like my lab, among other places. During sunny days, therefore, he would often be found lighting up his cigarette using a glass of his spectacles to focus sunlight onto the cigarette until it started burning. Thus did he demonstrate that he was a real applied physicist too, among other things!

After his retirement from QAU as Associate Professor – with a little bit of serious effort he could have attained a full professorship, but such worldly things didn’t bother him one bit – having moved to Karachi to be with his broader family, he would come to visit QAU whenever his erstwhile colleagues would arrange for him to attend a scientific conference In Islamabad. He would often stay with his elder brother, Rafe-uz-Zaman, who lived not far from my home. Invariably, I was to pick him up for QAU on my way in the morning. On one such occasion, when his younger brother, Asif-uz-Zaman, was there from India, after my usual bell at the door of the house, I found Arif sahib coming out and looking for someone, who turned out to be Asif, already nearing sixty. After not being able to locate him outside for a while, Arif sahib, very innocently, said to me:

یار، یہ لڑکا پتا نہیں کہاں نکل گیا ہے

Friend, don’t know where has this lad disappeared!

I couldn’t hold my laughter at a man about 60 years of age being referred to as a lad! Such was Arif sahib’s love for his younger brother. It turned out that Asif sahib was a heart patient, thus warranting Arif sahib’s worry about his slightly prolonged walkabout before accompanying us to QAU.

Among other episodes of this interesting character, that I vividly recall, is his inseparable notebook always under his arm while coming to or leaving the University. The back of that notebook was full of randomly hand-written phone numbers, mostly without the names these numbers belonged too, and some verses (asha’ar) of varied poetry that he had picked up and/or recalled and liked. On a couple of his visits after his retirement, he used to have the same or similar notebook, accompanied by an early well-known published paper by Salam and Strathdee, wherein he would try to reproduce their - rather difficult, according to him – calculations, to no specific purpose other than to amuse himself. Mathematics, as per his oft repeated claim, was akin to poetry and he relished this poetry like, or more than, any other poetry.

At one stage, soon after he rented a house close to my home in Satellite Town, Rawalpindi, where we lived with our parents, he would visit our home every evening and chat with my father for an hour or two. These conversations moved around contemporary Pakistani politics, Urdu and Persian poetry and occasionally religious history. Any outsider, who witnessed their nightly conversation sessions, would hardly believe that it was not me, but my father, who knew Arif sahib since long and I was just an interested onlooker.

All in all Arif-uz-Zaman sahib was a wonderful, very knowledgeable and very entertaining member of the Physics faculty of QAU. He was one of the most interesting and entertaining characters around at the University, whose company continues to be sorely missed by his friends, colleagues and students and so it will for a long time to come. He, truly, was a gem of a man.