he 115th birth anniversary of Faiz Ahmad Faiz has arrived at a moment when words have lost their moral weight. We live in an age of slogans, hashtags and instant outrage. Meanings appear exhausted. Faiz therefore returns, not as nostalgia, but as necessity.

Faiz was never a poet of reaction; he was a poet of endurance. His resistance was not episodic—it was ethical. He did not merely oppose injustice; he re-imagined the moral universe in which injustice could no longer justify itself. This is what distinguishes Faiz from much contemporary protest literature: he refused to abandon beauty while confronting brutality.

At the core of Faiz’s poetry lies a radical act—the redefining of passion (ishq). Where classical Urdu poetry had confined love to metaphysical longing or private sorrow, Faiz transformed it into a collective ethic. Love in Faiz is not withdrawal from the world; it is an insistence on redeeming it. His beloved is never merely an individual—it is justice delayed, freedom denied, humanity wounded yet undefeated.

This fusion of intimacy and history explains why Faiz’s poetry does not age. Political contexts change; moral truths do not. Faiz understood that tyranny thrived not merely on violence, but also on the erosion of imagination. His answer was to protect imagination itself—to ensure that even in prison, exile and censorship, the human spirit retained its capacity to dream.

Faiz Ahmad Faiz, poet, teacher, editor, critic, human rights activist, trade unionist, thinker and revolutionary—was part of a 20th-Century pantheon including the likes of Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet and Mahmoud Darwish. All of them worked under the banner of Afro-Asian Writers’ Association—a progressive organisation raising the voice of the downtrodden in post-colonial era. Faiz was editor of its prestigious magazine, Lotus. Since Faiz, Nazim, Mahmoud and Neruda were very close ideologically, their work has astounding resemblances, disseminating a universal message of quest for peace and justice for humanity at large.

In the 1930s, Faiz had joined the famous Progressive Writers’ Movement under the leadership of Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1973). During World War II, Faiz served in the Indian Army. In 1944, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Following independence in 1947, Faiz resigned from the army. Alys Faiz (d. 2003), whom he had married in 1941, later published a book of memoirs, Over My Shoulder. Faiz became editor of the daily, The Pakistan Times. He also worked as managing editor of the Urdu daily Imroz and helped organise trade unions.

In 1951, Faiz and several army officers were implicated in the so-called Rawalpindi Conspiracy case and arrested under Safety Act. The government alleged that they were planning a coup d’état. He spent four years in prison and was released in 1955.

In today’s Pakistan—where discourse is shrill, history is selectively remembered and dissent is increasingly transactional — Faiz matters not because he offers comprehensive answers, but because he restores questions.

Faiz later became the secretary of the National Council of the Arts. In 1962, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. The military takeover in 1977 forced him into exile. After working in war-torn Lebanon from 1979 to 1982, Faiz returned to Pakistan and died in Lahore on November 20, 1984.

His prison poems demonstrate his resolve. Darkness is neither denied nor exaggerated. It is mapped. Having acknowledged despair, Faiz gesture toward dawn. This sequence—truth before hope—lends his poetry credibility.

One of Faiz’s most profound literary innovations was his refusal to abandon hope—even when history offered little justification for it. His famous line, “mere dost aaj ka gham na ker,” is often misread as optimism. It is ethical insistence. Hope, for Faiz, is an obligation, not a prediction.

Faiz’s prison poetry, especially Zindan-nama, exemplifies this moral discipline. Confinement does not reduce his voice to complaint. Instead, chains glitter, walls breathe and darkness yields metaphors of light. Tyranny is acknowledged, but never granted sovereignty over meaning. This is resistance without hatred, defiance without cruelty.

Perhaps Faiz’s most enduring contribution is his refusal to dehumanise his oppressors. He indicts systems, not souls. Anger, in his poetry, is purified by compassion. This is why his verse never curdles into vengeance. In a world increasingly polarised by absolutes, Faiz offers a grammar of resistance that preserves humanity on both sides of power.

Faiz’s global stature—his kinship with Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet and Mahmoud Darwish—confirms that his message was never parochial. All wrote against different tyrannies, yet spoke a shared language: dignity before power, hope before despair.

In today’s Pakistan—where discourse is often shrill, history is selectively remembered and dissent is increasingly transactional—Faiz matters not because he offers comprehensive answers, but because he restores questions. He asks what kind of society we wish to be, and what moral cost we are willing to pay for silence. Faiz’s poetry reminds us that resistance is not an event; it is a way of being. On his 115th birthday, his true legacy is not celebration, but conscience.

Dr Ikramul Haq is an advocate of the Supreme Court and an adjunct teacher at Lahore University of Management Sciences. He is also a member of the Advisory Board and a visiting senior fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.