its advocacy of working class rights, etc., as manifestations of an attempt at the demolition of our traditional spiritualistic culture and its replacement with an alien, materialistic, one. The irony of the matter is that some of the foremost anti-modernist critics of progressivism, like Mr. Salim Ahmad, have recently been giving expression to thoughts closely resembling the above-listed sinful aberrations of their adversaries, going so far as the adoption in toto of the Historical Materialist method of social analysis initiated by Karl Marx.
However, the latest target of the anti-modernist movement, as we discover it in Mr. Askari's book, happens to be, strangely enough, psychoanalysis, - his old ally against the progressives. For many years in the forties and the fifties, there was a tendency among the literary opponents of the progressives to use Freudian psychology for demolishing the foundational social theses of their adversaries. When Freud's authority was challenged and overthrown by Jung and his analytical psychology, it was the new concept of the Collective Unconscious which came in handy for beating the progressives on the head. The advantage of Jung and Jungian ideas lay in their religious and mystical dimension. The anti-progressives supported their^mildly religious propensities with the props of Jungian psychology, and used them to carry on their Jehad against the materialistic enemies. And now even Jung's ideas have been described by Askari as a form of materialism and irreligion.
In all these twists and turns of literary fashions, Mr. Askari played a very important role. He was the doyen of the anti-progressive movement among Pakistani writers. For his vast and exact knowledge of Eastern and Western literatures, for his incisive intellect, as well as for his caustic style, he wielded great authority in the modernist literary circles. He wrote in a biting, bantering, casual-seeming but really earnestly serious style, with a lot of loose ends, startling assertions, unashamed names-dropping, and tortuous though flimsy argumentation, which has been picked up and made into a fashionable and convenient mode by his younger followers, without, of course, their mentor's vast learning to back it. And it is much more than a style they picked up from him. They have been parading all his prejudices and aversions as their very own. One cannot but wonder what they are going to do now, when he has denounced practically every one of his old enthusiasms as the work of the devil.
He had always been an enigmatic and tantalizing preceptor who caused a lot of frustration among his followers. His literary enthusiasms and philosophical preferences changed so often and so suddenly that, as Intizar Husain has pointed out, it was difficult for his followers to keep pace with him. Indeed from James Joyce to Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi it was a strange journey, but it does not imply what some of his followers have tried to suggest, i.e., a lack of deep and firmly held convictions, or any convictions at all. Nor is the journey lacking in a consistency of approach to literature and life. Intizar Husain's stricture that Askari was never seriously committed to anything is unjust, because he was very deeply and totally committed, and this is revealed in his latest book. He was committed to a concept of Muslim culture and civilization which in time superseded all other interests, including his creative activity. He was trying
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