Date of Birth : February 13th, 1911
Place : Sialkot ( Punjab ), Pakistan

Faiz's mother was Sultan Fatima. Faiz's father died in Sialkot in 1913. Faiz's father was a learned man and enjoyed the company of well-known literary persons. Wrote the biography of Amir Abdur Rehman. Faiz was therefore, born in a respectable and literary environment and was a very promising student with a religious background.

Primary Education: Started memorizing the Holy Quran at the age of four and in 1916 started his formal education in the famous school of Moulvi Ibrahim Sialkoti , and learnt Urdu, Persian and Arabic. Was admitted to the Scotch Mission High School in 1921 in Class IV. Passed his Matriculation Examination in the 1st Division from Murray College , Sialkot and during this period learnt Persian and Arabic from Allama Iqbal's teacher, Shamsul Ullama Moulvi Syed Meer Hasan.

College Education: Passed his B.A. (Honours) in Arabic from the Government College , Lahore and then M.A. in English from the same College in 1932. Passed his M.A. in Arabic in the 1st Division, from Oriental College , Lahore .

Employment: Lecturer in English at M. A. O. College , Amritsar in 1935 and then at Hailey College of Commerce, Lahore . Joined the Army as Captain in 1942 and worked in the department of Public Relations in Delhi . Was promoted to the rank of Major in 1943, and Lieut. Colonel in 1944. Resigned from The Army in 1947 and returned to Lahore , where, in 1959 appointed as Secretary, Pakistan Arts Council and worked in that capacity till 1962. Returning from London in 1964 he settled down in Karachi and was appointed as Principal, Abdullah Haroon College , Karachi . Editorship of the monthly magazine Adabe-Latif from 1947 to 1958. Worked as Editor under the Progressive Papers Ltd, of the Pakistan Times, the Urdu newspaper Imroze and the weekly Lailo-Nihar. In the 1965 war between India & Pakistan he worked in an honorary capacity in the Department of Information. Acted as Editor of the magazine Lotus in Moscow , London and Beirut .

Marriage & Children: Faiz married with a british lady Ayls George in 1941. She later was known as Ayls Faiz. She gave birth to Salima in 1942 whereas Muneeza was born in 1945. Salima (known as Chheeni) married Shoaib Hashmi. Muneeza (known as Meezu) married Shoaib's younger brother Humair Hashmi. Both these brothers taught at Government College Lahore, now known as Government College University Lahore. Salima retired as Principal National College of Arts, Lahore. Muneeza works for Pakistan Television.

Imprisonment: In March 9th, arrested under Safety Act and charged in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case, and having borne the hardships of imprisonment for four years and one month in the jails of Sargodha , Montgomery (now Sahiwal) Hyderabad and Karachi , was released on April 2nd, 1955 .

Awards

The real award for a poet is the love and appreciation of his fans. Faiz stands among those who enjoy both at one and the same time. Besides he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963, as the first Asian poet. Before his death in 1984 he was also a nominee for the award of Nobel Prize , but his association in later life, with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Movement, and the Editorship of Lotus, deprived him of the award because the Zionist element in the controlling body of the Nobel Prize is strong.

Legacy

Faiz was acknowledged long ago as the greatest Urdu poet after Iqbal. Even those who were critical of his progressive social and political beliefs could not deny him that position, although they always qualified their praise of him by regretting that such a good man should have fallen among the Communists.

He was a keen student of various traditions of classical poetry in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, and English among others and had realized at an early age that it was the content and not the form which was basic in the art of poetry, that originality had little to do with formal experimentation and was primarily a matter of a profound understanding of human existence in its totality and wholeness.

His Critical essays, written mostly during his formative years, are a testimony to the fact that he had arrived at, and formulated clearly the essential elements of the poetics necessary for our age, the age of the masses.

Iqbal had sung poems of glory to the fact of revolution and given out a clarion call to the people to rise up against the master-classes and tyrants. Faiz, having joined the people in their rebellion, and having adopted the collective cause as a poet of the revolution, made the transformation of the individual human being and his passage through the infinite variety of situations and moods in this process, the subject of his poetry. He is concerned, above all, with the experience of the individual human soul in the long and arduous journey of revolutionary struggle.

And yet love is the leit motif of his poetry. Faiz is one of the great lyricists who seems, from one point of view, to have sung of nothing with greater passion than love.

Faiz takes Ghalib's plea for a deeply philosophical coordination of the poetic profession as his premise to refute the arguments of the aesthetes of his time for whom poetry was merely peripheral activity. But he goes further and comments that Ghalib's definition of creative vision is incomplete, because the poet is not only required to see the ocean in the drop, but also has to show it to others.

That is why, apart from being a great revolutionary poet, he was a great love poet, and there was no distinction between the two, love and revolution had become identical in him.

Publications

. Naqshe Faryadi, 1941
. Daste Saba, 1953
. Zindan Nama, 1956
. Daste-Tahe-Sang, 1965
. Sare-Wadiye Seena, 1971
. Shame-Shehr Yaran, 1979
. Merey Dil Merey Musafar, 1981

. Mizan, a collection of literary articles,1956
. Saleebain Meray Dareechay Main (Khatoot), 1962
. Mata-e-Loh O Qalam, 1973
. Hamari Qaumi Saqafat, 1976
. Mah-O-Saal-e- Aashnayee, 1980
. Safarnama Cuba
. Urdu Shaiyree Ka intekhaab
. Pakistani Culture, Urdu & English
. Iqbal Ki Shairi