The Rest is Silence

Taking off from the tragic murder in January 1999 of the Pakistani artist Zahoor ul Akhlaq, the book charts the story of this elusive artist and provides a glimpse into his prolific work. The more the author, Roger Connah, researched, the more versions of a truth emerged. Known within Pakistan as the painter's painter, Akhlaq appears to have lived a life so public that it became secret, to the extent, as the author explores, his life became a critical fiction.

Beginning with an interest in calligraphy, Akhlaq went on to search, explore and develop ahead of his times a vibrant cultural practice in contemporary Pakistan. A permanently picaresque figure, recalling Sufi scholars from the ninth and tenth century in Asia, he was an artist-wayfarer in and out of cities like Karachi, Delhi, Lahore, Toronto, London, Montreal, Bangkok, Kabul, Teheran, Tokyo, and Venice.

This book begins to recount a life in flux, a life on the move, a life exploring the traditions of Islam and the exiles and danced furies, that dancing order, within a Muslim mind. The necessity and urgency of negotiating the invasions and seductions of modernity produces unusual reversals in Akhlaq's art and within the contemporary narratives about Pakistani society and culture. This is a timely volume which reappraises this artist and the critical fictions made about him, offering an unusual enquiry on society and culture at a time when Pakistan has never been more important.