Books & writings

Mohlat

Novel in Urdu · Tarteeb Publishers, Pakistan, 1993

Mohlat — the Urdu word for a reprieve, a breathing space — is the novel at the heart of Tahir Gora’s Pakistan years. Published in 1993 by Tarteeb Publishers, it appeared in the same season as his poetry collection Yeh Udassi Ki Baat Nahein, marking 1993 as the year the young Lahore editor emerged as a novelist and poet in his own right.

The novel belongs to the body of Urdu fiction he wrote before his forced exile in 1999 — work produced alongside running Gora Publishers and editing the weekly Hafta and the literary journal Rujhanaat. His novels from this period later travelled: three of them were translated and published in Hindi, Russian and Uzbek editions.

AlBakistan

Novel in Hindi and Urdu · Kautilya Books, New Delhi · Launched at the Press Club of India, New Delhi, 17 February 2023 · Urdu edition: 118 pages · ISBN 978-93-90885-46-6

AlBakistan was published in both Hindi and Urdu editions — a novel addressed to readers on both sides of the border, in the two languages Tahir Gora has written in throughout his career.

At its New Delhi launch, Gora described the novel as portraying the identity crisis of Pakistan and Pakistanis amid the country’s ongoing political, economic and social turmoil — weaving in the 1999 Air India hijacking, the coup, and the army’s role in politics. The title is his coinage from the widespread Pakistani perception of Arab rather than Indian ancestry.

Rang Mahal

Novel in Urdu · Hindi edition: CreateSpace, 2017 · 240 pages · ISBN 9781974288892

Setu magazine serialised the opening of an English rendition by Eli Raza and Tahir Gora — “Rang Mahal: A Palace of Colours” — whose protagonist Shahzad, a Pakistani immigrant in America, sits in the rain outside a café wondering why beautiful America still does not feel like home, and finds he can no longer even remember Lahore’s smells and streets.

A diaspora novel about belonging and the fading of the homeland — and one of the works behind his Setu bio’s note that his fiction has been translated into Hindi, Russian and Uzbek.

Covid Ke Dinoun ka Multiculturalism

Novel in Hindi and Urdu

His pandemic-era novel takes its title — and its subject — from the defining idea of his Canadian life: multiculturalism, in the days of Covid.

Few writers were better placed to write it: a novelist who fled intolerance in Lahore and rebuilt his life in Mississauga, and who received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for his services to multicultural Canadian society.

Tehzeebi Ranjishein

Novel in Urdu and Hindi · English edition: Garuda Prakashan, 2022 · ISBN 9798885750615

His earlier novel — when ANI reported the Delhi launch of AlBakistan in February 2023, it introduced this as his “previous novel” and noted that it “got a good reception from fellow writers”.

The English edition, published by Garuda Prakashan in November 2022, carried it to a wider readership. Its title — roughly, “civilisational grievances” — names the clash of civilisations that runs through his fiction and non-fiction alike.

Safar Akher Safar Hey

Short stories in Urdu · Maktaba Tamseel, Lahore · 128 pages · mid-1980s (catalogue records differ: 1985, 1986, 1987)

His first book. Published in Lahore in the mid-1980s by Maktaba Tamseel, when its author was barely in his twenties, this Urdu short-story collection opened a literary career that would span novels, poetry, publishing houses, journals — and eventually a television channel.

The title — “the journey is, after all, a journey” — reads in hindsight like a motto for the life that followed: Lahore to exile, exile to Canada, and a writer’s desk to a broadcast studio.

Khushk Samandar ki Thakan

Short stories in Urdu · Pakistan Books and Literary Sounds, Lahore, 1989 · 136 pages

His second book of short stories — “The Weariness of a Dry Sea” — published in Lahore in 1989 (Library of Congress catalogue record), from the same Pakistan years as Safar Akher Safar Hey.

Catalogues preserve its facts, if not its reviews: an Urdu collection of afsane from a young writer already running a publishing house of his own.

Yeh Udassi Ki Baat Nahein

Poems in Urdu · Tarteeb Publishers, Pakistan, 1993 (also catalogued: Gora Publishers, Lahore, 1996)

His 1993 Urdu poetry collection, published by Tarteeb Publishers in the same year as his novel Mohlat. Its title insists that “this is not a matter of sorrow” — a refusal of despair that runs through his verse.

His poetry later reached English readers in the translated volume This is not a Matter of Sorrow (1997), carrying the title of this collection across languages.

Manzer Ankhoun Mein Thehrey Rehte Hein

Poems in Urdu and Hindi · Urdu edition: Fun Publications, Islamabad, 2005 · Hindi translation by Tasneef Haider: Kautilya Books, New Delhi, 2023 · ISBN 978-93-90885-89-3

A collection of his poems in Hindi and Urdu — scenes, as the title has it, that stay lingering in the eyes. It is the collection from which the literary magazine Setu drew the poems it published in English translation (“Which Lands to Survive?” and “A Day of Happiness in the City”), poems of exile, cities and belonging.

Poetry has remained his private register alongside the public voice of the broadcaster — the same sensibility, turned inward.

This is not a Matter of Sorrow

His poetry in English translation · Tarteeb Publishers, 1997

The English face of his Urdu poetry: a translated selection published in 1997, two years before his exile, introducing his verse to readers beyond the Urdu-Hindi world.

Translation has since become one of his life’s through-lines — his own poems travelling into English, Hindi, Russian and Uzbek, and his Urdu translations carrying other writers’ arguments to South Asian readers.

Trevogi Nadegi

His novel in Russian translation · Asian Publishers, Uzbekistan, 1997

In 1997, while he was still in Pakistan, one of his novels crossed into Russian in this edition published by Asian Publishers in Uzbekistan — an early sign of how far his fiction would travel from Lahore.

It stands in his bibliography alongside the Hindi and Uzbek translations of his novels noted in his author bio — a South Asian writer read across Central Asia.

Submission: The Danger of Political Islam to Canada

With a Warning to America · Co-authored with Tom Quiggin, Jonathon Cotler, Rick Gill and Saied Shoaaib · Foreword by Raheel Raza · CCSE, Canada, 2017 · 284 pages · ISBN 9780995223530

His major work of non-fiction: a co-authored examination of how the ideology of political Islam threatens Canada — and, as its subtitle warns, America. Written with security analyst Tom Quiggin and co-authors Jonathon Cotler, Rick Gill and Saied Shoaaib, with a foreword by Raheel Raza, the book argues that governments must distinguish between a faith and a political ideology.

It is the book-length statement of the cause he has argued for decades — in print, in his broadcasts, and in testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security as Director General of the Canadian Thinkers Forum.

The Trouble with Islam Today — Irshad Manji (Urdu translation)

Urdu translation by Tahir Gora, 2005

Tahir Gora translated Irshad Manji’s bestselling challenge to literalist Islam into Urdu in 2005, bringing one of the most debated books of the decade to the readers who stood at the centre of its argument.

The work grew out of his own reform commitments in Canada, where he was an ally of Manji’s Moral Courage Project and a founding voice of the Muslim reform movement.

Writings of Daniel Pipes (Urdu translation)

Urdu translation by Tahir Gora

As an English-to-Urdu translator, Tahir Gora has rendered the writings of Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes into Urdu — part of his long project of carrying arguments across the language divide between the West and South Asia.

Writings of Samia Labidi (Urdu translation)

Urdu translation by Tahir Gora

His Urdu translations also include the writings of Samia Labidi — continuing the two-way traffic of ideas that defines his career as publisher, translator and broadcaster.