In the smoke-filled tea houses of Nazimabad and Federal B Area, before the guns and the graffiti, Karachi's revolution was written in verses. Not manifestos. Marsiyas. Not megaphones.
It's easy now to remember MQM as a militant street force — as the party of extortion, of Altaf Hussain's remote-control speeches, of the endless cycle of protest and crackdown.
But few remember the quiet before the noise.
The grief before the grief.
Because long before it became a political machine, the idea of MQM had a Shia soul .
And that part of the story has been almost completely erased.
Marsiya as Manifesto
It starts with the poems.
Raise Imrohvi , one of the greatest Urdu marsiya writers of the 20th century, didn't just mourn Karbala — he mourned Partition.
His lament was layered: for Hussain, for lost India, for a Pakistan that didn't keep its promises.
His contemporary, Master Ali Haider , a revered teacher and Shia organizer, helped shape a moral vocabulary of resistance — not with arms, but with arguments.
And Akhtar Rizvi , the thinker and pamphleteer, translated this grief into political awareness. Not sectarian Shia identity — but an Urdu-speaking, urban, Muhajir consciousness , steeped in a Shia understanding of sacrifice, betrayal, and martyrdom.
These men weren't radicals. They were readers.
They believed in the dignity of migration and the pain of exclusion.
They saw the Muhajir as Pakistan's orphan — dignified, displaced, and ultimately disposable.
A Theology of Resistance
You ever notice how MQM's slogans echo Shia political theology?
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“Zulm sehna bhi gunaah hai” (To endure oppression is itself a sin)
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“Mazloom ka saath do” (Stand with the oppressed)
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“Shaheedon ka khoon rang layega” (The blood of martyrs will not go in vain)
This is not just political rhetoric .
This is Karbala rhetoric — lifted, often directly, from Shia majalis and Marsiyas.
The idea of standing against the state , even in the face of death, is not new.
But MQM channeled it in a way that was deeply Muhajir and deeply Shia in spirit — even when its members were secular.
Martyrdom walls. Funeral processions. Iconography of blood and betrayal.
This was a Shia aesthetic , adopted wholesale by a movement that never officially called itself religious.
Neither Sunni Nor Secular — Just Erased
Ironically, MQM's early intellectuals weren't militant, and they weren't promoting sectarianism.
They were trying to build a space for Muhajirs — Urdu-speaking migrants who, in the 70s and 80s, found themselves mocked, marginalized, and misrepresented in both provincial and federal politics.
But the sectarian turn in Pakistani politics eventually buried their legacy.
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When MQM was demonized, their ideas were thrown out with the violence.
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When Karachi's conflict was simplified into “ethnic turf wars,” the layered intellectual roots were lost.
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When the state cracked down, it erased not just the gunmen, but the thinkers too.
Raise Imrohvi died mostly forgotten.
Master Ali Haider disappeared from mainstream narratives.
Akhtar Rizvi's papers lie unpublished, unread.
No documentaries. No archives. No commemorations.
Their names were not convenient.
What They Wanted — And What They Got
They wanted dignity for migrants.
Not dominance — just dignity.
They wanted space for Urdu in a city that had become violently multilingual.
They wanted class justice, not just ethnic quotas.
They wanted a Karachi where the children of Aligarh and Agra could walk freely — not with ID cards in one pocket and fear in the other.
Instead, the movement they helped shape was taken over by militancy, crushed by state power, and left in ruins by its own contradictions.
The Shia moral grammar of MQM — based on resistance, not revenge — got drowned in the bloodshed that followed.
But the Spirit Remains
Go to old bookstores in Federal B Area.
You'll still find Raise Imrohvi's verses.
Talk to an elder at Imambargah Wali ul-Asr — they'll tell you about Master Ali Haider.
Dig deep enough, and you'll see the ghost of a political philosophy that never got its due.
Karachi's Shia spine is still there — cracked, but not broken.
And maybe, one day, the city will remember the revolution that began with elegies, not egos.
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