SMI: The Light in Our Lives

Syed Badrul Ahsan

There was the quality of spring in him. In his eyes, in the smile he exuded everywhere, in the statements he made on different occasions at various points in time, it was spring, an abundance of hope, which underpinned his personality.

Professor Syed Manzoorul Islam was spring for those of us who knew him as a teacher, as a mentor, as a commentator on the myriad issues the nation was confronted with. Little was autumnal about him; and winter, in that metaphorical way of speaking, was never part of him. But spring as he personified it came to a sudden end when the life went out of him at a time when no one expected him to fall silent.

The knowledge that this emblem of spring fell to the laws of mortality, for we did not believe he would not return to us, into our midst, once he was in the grave is yet the shock we bear. SMI, for that is how his students mention him in deep respect, simply walked away from our mortal world. He passed into the Great Beyond too soon, in that particular period of time when there was much more which the nation expected of him. He had become the nation’s conscience keeper, for he articulated the emotions which bubbled in riotous hues in the depths of our souls.

Ah, yes. He was a teacher of English literature. And literature was the arena to which his life was anchored. The university was all. Poetry was what he excelled in talking of, to his students in the classroom. Fiction, all the way from Chaucer and Shakespeare and on to Hardy and Orwell, was the landscape he moved in, indeed expanded even as he interacted with his students. A young, vibrant intellectual was SMI that very first day when he walked into the classroom at Dhaka University, there where we, in first year honours, waited expectantly, eagerly for a roadmap to our understanding of literature. And from him flowed ideas, those that we would be mesmerised by in the months and the seasons that would follow.

Professor Islam was to move off, away from the country, to pursue doctoral studies in distant Canada. We missed him, unsure of whether the links between him and our class could be restored anytime soon. Or could it be that we would finish our education in English literature before he would return to the country, indeed to the university? Of course, he did come back home. It was a time when we had finished our masters and gone off in the various directions life was to take each one of us. And yet we reconnected with SMI. We reconnected with an academic in whom we spotted the makings of an intellectual of profound depth, a voice of reason willing and ready to play a role beyond the classroom.

Professor Islam’s emphasis was consistently on the development of independent thinking on the part of his pupils. Nothing of the armchair kind was there about him. His accessibility defined his relations with the young, the boys and girls who were to transform themselves as men and women in their association with him. Proximity mattered to him; nothing of the aloof or the forbidding was part of his being. That he embodied the very best of creativity soon made itself manifest as his career, indeed his view of life, expanded through the written word. Literary criticism, fiction, analyses of poetry and, yes, his reflections on the state of the nation in terms of politics turned him into a much sought-after commentator at the media and other fora.

That was the brilliance in him. He launched us on long, enriching journeys to authors and poets of old in the classroom; and then he branched out into a region where he stamped his own mark on the world he was part of, a world born of ideas, his ideas. Do not forget that SMI was an intellectual who was never drawn to a need to flaunt his achievements before the world. He worked in silence, away from the noisy world around him. It was in silences that his powerful words came forth, ideas which, having taken birth, truly and purposefully spoke to us of the philosophy which defined his worldview. Humility was the underpinning that made his works, his creativity, shine. In him breathed a scholar who explained the troubled times we were living through.

SMI’s was an upright personality. His views on life, on politics, on literature were no sitting-on-the-fence tales. Frankness was part of his vocabulary, and it often came touched in admirable bluntness. Never willing to tolerate ignorance or arrogance or pretension, he was always willing to put the pompous in their places. On a flight out of the country to attend a conference abroad, he was accosted by a fellow passenger, a government official, who was keen to know how a university teacher could afford to be on that flight to an overseas destination. SMI silenced him: ‘You are on this flight through your privilege as a government servant with a free ticket on a trip that will likely not bear any fruitful result; I am on this flight at the invitation of an organisation which expects me to enlighten it with my views of life and literature in my country.’ Needless to say, the pompous civil servant got the message.

That was Syed Manzoorul Islam. Fastidiousness was part of his interaction with others. He consistently demonstrated a no-nonsense approach to circumstances and individuals. When he received invitations from people or organisations requiring his presence at seminars and conferences, he checked the way his name was spelt on the envelope or on the invitation card. If Manzoor was spelt as Manzur, he lost little time, when the prospective host called to remind him of the invite, in upbraiding him. One who was careless about other people’s names, he once told me, was, first, to be rebuked for one’s unpardonable carelessness and, second, to be properly ignored.

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My links with SMI are today a memory I treasure, in all the sadness I can muster, in light of the education he imparted to me both inside and beyond the classroom. Every time I went to see him at his office in the Department of English at Dhaka University, it turned out to be a fresh learning experience for me. In the first place, all that treasure of books in the room conveyed the impression, a very real one, that here was space, here was an academic who was an embodiment of learning. In the second, there are teachers who rekindle in you the air, the atmosphere, the ambience of intellect being a necessary part of existence. In SMI’s room, surveying all those books and listening to him reflect on the many dimensions of literature, my world came by newer and richer substance. I was once again the student enlightened by his guru.

SMI was always ready to offer good advice on writing. Whenever he came to know that I was engaged in research or in writing on history and politics, he came forth with suggestions on the publishing houses I ought to connect with. But there was a caveat too in his proffering of advice. He named particular publishing firms and their owners who he thought I ought to stay away from. He had his reasons behind the advice and he let me in on the details. And I followed the advice. He carefully read my columns in the newspapers, making it a point to let me know that he shared my views on the themes I happened to be focusing on.

Years ago he visited London, where I served as minister press at the Bangladesh High Commission. He wanted us to meet in a nearby pub in the early afternoon. We spent a long time, over beer and snacks, reflecting on the state of the country and on the nature of my job as media spokesman at our mission. At one point, we decided to go for a fresh round of drinks. I went up to the young woman at the counter, ordered the drinks and then quietly told her that my teacher at the table nearby might wish to pay for the drinks and the snacks but she should decline his offer. After all, I was his student and he was my guest-cum-teacher.

Moments later, when we finished the drinks, SMI quickly went up to the counter before I could stop him. In despair I saw him make the payment. He came back to our table, his face wreathed in a huge smile. Curious, I waited for him to explain. And the explanation came: ‘You know what that young woman was telling me, Badrul? She simply told me that you had pretended to be my student and that I was your teacher and that you had asked her not to accept any payment from me.’ SMI and I broke into laughter. The young woman, perhaps considering the streaks of grey in my hair, obviously thought I was the teacher and Professor Syed Manzoorul Islam was my student.

His patriotism was beyond question. An aircraft carrying him to a destination where he would take part in a conference landed at Karachi airport in Pakistan before it would take to the sky again. All passengers were instructed by the airline staff to disembark since the aircraft would be there for a couple of hours. As SMI related the story to me, he refused to leave the aircraft in spite of the pleas of the captain and his crew. He firmly told them that he would not be setting foot in a country which had killed millions of his fellow Bengalis in 1971. The crew understood. SMI sat in the aircraft, spending those couple of hours reading.

He has passed on. As I walk through descending twilights in the land of Shakespeare and Dickens and Coleridge and Keats, it is the image of my teacher, the scholar Syed Manzoorul Islam which wells up in the imagination. I hear his laughter; I see him pass on his thoughts, in all the politeness yet firmness of his being, to all those individuals who in turn have had their perspectives on life reshaped and redefined by SMI. And as I walk on, I inform myself that someday I will stand at his grave, offer a silent prayer, and whisper to him, ‘Thank you, Sir, for being the light in our lives. Thank you for being the springtime you were and always will be.’