then Rashed would either have to be declared a non-rational man or the comment would have to be modified to include Rashed, for he does not seem, either in his life or poetry, to be the kind of individual who did not need God. He never showed the necessary indifference to God to qualify for being a godless person. To worry about God as much as he did in his poetry or in his life is to manifest a deep concern and, perhaps, a latent need for Him, My purpose in this essay is to examine Rashed's views about God, particularly those which have been expressed in his verse. In doing so. I may also touch upon related subjects such as Islam and the mullas, the spokesmen of institutionalized religion and self-proclaimed intermediaries between God and man. Rashed had very little to say about the Prophet Muhammad: in fact, the Prophet's name appears only once in his work, and in a poem which he did not include in his published verse. The poem, "Becarg7" ("Helplessness"), contains a reproach to the false prophet, Ghulam Ahmad. The speaker of the poem observes this pretender among the inmates of hell and is struck by his helplessness, his impotence, and by the absence of the warmth and glow of revelation in his frozen eyes. The speaker is able to find some redeeming qualities in the other inmates of hell such as Marx, Lenin and Stalin, but none in the false prophet. God is referred to in the poem as "My God, the God of my Muhammad!" This line is the fullest statement of the speaker's faith in Islam, God and Muhammad, and I suspect that it was the closeness of the speaker's faith to the poet's own. and the embarrassing confessional nature of the line which prevented the poem's inclusion in Rashed's published verse. Rashed was normally averse to talking openly about his intimate feelings, and his religious faith, in his view, was personal and intimate.5 In wrestling with Rashed's concept of God, I shall look more closely at the poems in GumaN Ka Mumkin. his last collection of poems, than at his earlier verse. I am working with the assumption that a writer comes closest to summing up his views or to articulating his final position on issues in his latest work Early on in his poetic career Rashed had established his reputation as a rebel and an iconoclast,6 In choosing to write in blank verse, he, like Meeraji and Faiz, had rebelled against the traditional concept of poetic form in Urdu literature. But he went a step ahead of his contemporaries in his iconoclasm. In an early poem "Ittifaqat" ("Coincidences"), the speaker chastises his beloved for her constant worry about God; he doubts the relevance of God's existence to human life: "What does it matter to you whether there is a God? , .The sky may be far, but the earth is near . . .On dewy grass let two frozen bodies meet And if there is God. let him feel embarrassed," In another poem "PahiT KIran" ("The First Ray of Sun"), in a stanza which seems a rephrasing of Nietzsche's famous dictum 'God is Dead', the speaker says; "Look out of the window See the angels carrying God's dead body [the dead body] of the same clueless conjurer who was the Lord of the West but not of the East"/ It is true, as Alam Khundmin in his excellent article r) In cin interview with somo students? from Americ'an universities when one of the students asked Ra^ncn to c'xpliin the extent to which lovo politics and rpiiginn were the main concerns of h's poetry he spent considerable 'jrno oxolaininq to thorn the siqnificancp of 'OVP rind politics to nis poetry nut inout relnjion lie simply stated that it was imoossiole to impress publicly Any indppondont viewpoint on religion See L5«/nsan (Lahore AI-Misal, 1969), o 24 Saqi Faroo(|i believes that Rasned s desiro for cremation was consistent with nis rcoplhous nature Ordina'y u inal wcis tho last rejiyious idol he was to break Op cit ''o" o ?9 The publication of [he poern "PahfT Kiran" has an interesting history Since the poem was Mitlpn after the ouohcation of the first edition of Mawara (July, 1941) it (ould not have oeen included in any edition of Mawar'a ypt it /.'as oublibhed in the Marttaba-o Urdu (Lahore) edition Chronologically^ it should have belonqed inTran MeN AfnabJ, tnc second volume of Rasnod s vorse, yet thn Gobha-e Adab (Lahore*) edition of 1'ran MeN AfnabT (1957) did riot include iho ^oem in 1969 when Muneur Niazi Annual of Urdu Studies. #5 n^