Here is the thing about this poem that almost nobody says plainly. Zia-ul-Haq was running Pakistan in the name of Islam. Faiz was a man of the left, and the obvious move would have been to argue against religion. He does the exact opposite. Every single image in the poem is taken from the tradition the dictatorship claimed to own: the Day of Judgement, the Kaaba, the clearing of the idols, the throne, the name of God. Even the poem's real title is Arabic and comes from the Quran, wa yabqa wajhu rabbik, and there shall remain the face of your Lord. He is not attacking their scripture. He is telling them it was never theirs.
The idols are the clearest case. Sab but uthvaaye jaenge, all the idols will be lifted out, quotes the Prophet clearing the Kaaba on the day Mecca was taken, and everybody hearing it knows exactly what is being quoted. But Faiz writes arz-e-khuda ke kaabe, the Kaaba of God's earth, which turns the entire world into the sanctuary. In a country then run by one man who had placed himself above everyone else, nobody hearing those words thought about statues. And in the very next breath the people thrown out of the sanctuary are the ones seated on the throne. The outcast raised up is a promise these traditions make, and Faiz aims it straight at the regime.
Then comes the moment everything has been climbing toward. Anal-haq, I am the Truth, is the sentence that got Mansur al-Hallaj killed in Baghdad in 922. One man said it and died for it. Faiz says it again and hands it to everyone listening: which is me, and is you as well. A claim that cost a mystic his life gets turned into a shared sentence. And in the next line the ones who will rule are God's own creation, meaning everybody, followed by the same six words again. The Truth and the people who will govern turn out to be one and the same, and that is us. A mystic's execution and a demand for democracy, finished inside one sentence.
On 13 February 1986, at the Alhamra Arts Council in Lahore, Iqbal Bano performed it while Faiz's poetry was banned. The audience would not let her leave without singing it again, a technician taped the encore in secret, and that tape is the reason the performance exists at all. The authorities raided the organisers' homes the same night looking for recordings, and a copy got out anyway. The story is usually told with the detail that she sang in a black sari, black for mourning, and the sari was a garment the regime discouraged. Faiz had died two years earlier. The poem has been sung at protests in countries and decades he never saw.
