Work
Naseem Hijazi bases most of his work in Islamic history. In dealing with this history, he shows both the rise and fall of the Islamic Empire. His novels Muhammad Bin Qasim, Aakhri Ma'raka, Qaisar-o Kisra and Qafla-i Hijaz describe the era of Islam's rise to political, militaristic, economic, and educational power. While Yusuf Bin Tashfain, Shaheen, Kaleesa aur Aag, and Andheri Raat ke Musafir describe the period of Spanish Reconquista. In one of these novels (Kaleesa Aur Aag) he has painfully, yet truthfully, depicted the infamous Spanish Inquisition that began by targeting the Spanish Jews and ended also with the conversion or expulsion of the Moriscos or crypto-Muslims outwardly converted to Christianity.
In Akhri Chataan, he describes the Central Asian conquests of Genghis Khan and his destruction of the Khwarizm Sultanate. The novel shows the brutal conquests of the Mongols, the military geniuses of Genghis Khan, the undying will power of Sultan Jalal ud-Din Khwarizm Shah, and the unworthy condition of the Abbassid Caliphate of Baghdad.
He wrote two sequential novels on British conquest of India, and described the shortcomings of Indian nations after the collapse of Mughal Empire. The story, Mu'azzam Ali, starts a little before the Battle of Plassey. The lead character, Muazzam Ali joins the fight against the British with the army of Siraj-ud-Daula. The story goes around as the character moves from one place in India to another in search of the lost glory and freedom. He takes part in the third battle of Panipat and finally settles in Srirangapattana that was growing in power under the towering personality of Haider Ali. The book ends almost around the death of Haider Ali. The second book, Aur Talwar Toot Gayee (And the Sword is Broken) is more about Haider's son Sultan Tipu where the same character is finding his dreams being fulfilled in Tipu's valiant endeavors against the British East India Company. The book culminates in the sad and untimely martyrdom of Sultan Tipu.
He also wrote a novel on the Independence of Pakistan named Khaak aur Khoon. Many believed that the novel was his own story.
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“You haf slafed your life away in de bosses’ mills and your fadhers before you and your kids after you yet. Vat is a man to do with seventeen-fifty a week? His wife must work nights to make another ten, must vork nights and cook and wash in day an’ vatfor? So that the bosses can get rich an’ the stockholders and bondholders. It is too much... ve stood it before because ve vere not organized. Now we have union... We must all stand together for union.”
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“We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost.”
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—Editorial, The New York Times (September 6, 1983)