Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan, former foreign minister of Pakistan, was the guest speaker at Aga Khan University (AKU) on Monday, July 23, 2001, where he spoke on an abstract topic that touched the whole spectrum of knowledge. Invited as part of the University's Special Lecture Series (SLS), Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan spoke on 'Imagination', a topic that had kept the audience speculating about the contents till the eloquent speech was delivered. Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of AKU since the University's inception.
Welcoming the guests that included faculty, staff and students in a fully-packed auditorium, Dr. Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, President of AKU, said: "We have the good fortune of listening to a true intellectual; a person who has seen the creation of Pakistan and who actually took part in Pakistan's birth. He is a man of many talents, and skills. We have heard him speak on such complex subjects as philosophy on the one hand and genetics on the other."
Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan began his talk with a short story in an attempt to convey to the audience the meaning of imagination. A child is offered untold gifts; these are narrowed down to gifts of handling people, ideas or material things. The child chooses imagination which encompasses all three abilities. Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan clarified that "imagination is to be distinguished from intelligence and reason, although it uses both in the combinations that it brings about. It fills the pool of rationality because liberated from the rigours of reason and logic, it has a free floating capacity like objects or alien beings that are in space."
During the talk, Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan said: "no productive act is possible without some degree of imagination." The speaker brought in to focus imagination from different perspectives, referring to the shadows in the caverns of Plato's Republic on the one hand, and the mystical approaches of the Sufis on the other. He said, "an act of imagination liberates a person", as was the case with people in Plato's cavern: "it was imagination through which they turned their faces towards the light (away from ignorance)."
Switching to Arabic, the speaker, who is fluent in seven languages, spoke about the heights imagination achieved in Ibn-e-Arabi's famous masterpiece Fatoohat-e-Mecca. Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan's exposition of the Sufis' use of imagination held the audience spellbound . In fact, Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan in the limited time allotted to him, covered mankind's progress from Socrates, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, to the new millennium and beyond, with frequent references to Khizr, Moses and Sufis who sought God through 'Tassawuf'- the total use of imagination.
At the end, the speaker was given a standing ovation followed by a question-answer session.
