Sibte Hasan’s contribution, though acknowledged, has never really been readily made available. Many of his books and articles that have often been referred to are not that easy to access, but now this has been rectified to some extent by two publications edited by Syed Jaffar Ahmed.
In the early years of his life, though inclined towards academic work, Sibte Hasan was fully involved in active politics that gave him little time or peace of mind to concentrate on his work. The years too were marked by repressive measures of the authorities towards those aligned to causes generally associated with the left. It was a cat and mouse game of state repression, incarceration and trials in courts. Whatever time or energy was left was meant for active politics under the dark shadow of arrest and imprisonment.
Despite these circumstances, Sibte Hasan continued to work on the academic and theoretical side of politics. In the last couple of decades, that is of the 1960s and 70s, he was able to devote himself fully to research and academic endeavour. Thus, he was able to produce a corpus of work most useful for the study and understanding of culture and its relationship with politics here.
Though much of Sibte Hasan’s time was spent in jail and in escaping in avoiding the authorities, his association in active politics has been of great use to him and to his intellectual pursuits. His output is thus not of a purely academic nature falling under the armchair variety but is deeply rooted in praxis. It was his involvement in politics that must have made him realise the significance of culture and heritage in positing the relevant questions and adopting the right political posture.
For him, unlike many others, the theoretical framework of Marxism did not exist in a vacuum, applicable in all conditions; its scientific understanding was only possible by a deeper study of each society and of making the necessary dialectical adjustments to its framework. It was thus not only the current state of society that had to be analysed, as there were marked variations in the level of various societies, but of its past as it was integrally linked to the complexion and hue of historical forces.
Some of the writings in the two books could be divided -- one consisted of the articles that others have written on the life and contribution of Sibte Hasan but more important the collection of his own articles on various subjects that do not relate to politics directly but to various cultural aspects. According to him, these went in the making of a political culture. And no wonder he started from the dawn of civilization and discussed the significance of Moenjo Daro civilization and its continuously long shadow on our attitudes and mindset.
Like a true historian, he developed a dispassionate approach and studied the history of civilizations beginning from the very earliest and then counting the various achievements that he attributed to them. He did not bring in artificial barriers based on nationality or religion but saw it all as a cumulative process that drew its strength from what had preceded it. He looked at civilization in general but then narrowed it down to the historical developments of each society.
He also tackled the most contentious issues from our history like secularism, the nature of the Muslim state and the critical understanding of the divine message. It had been a problem within the Islamic scholarship -- to divide the secular from the sacred, the revealed from the rational, and the hagiographical from the critical. Sibte Hasan like some others in history has attempted to understand it all against the backdrop of a rational approach and choosing a Marxist framework as forced by the compulsion of production relations.
His essay on the evolution and development of Urdu too has been the consequence of looking at language as a product of human endeavour. He considered language to one of the finest creations of mankind, and saw it as carrying and containing ideas. Concepts had to be enunciated in language and its development had to be seen within the context of all the ideas that made language and, then in turn, as language made ideas. Similarly, his understanding of the form of marsia too had been seen in the context of the various cultural and human demands that were considered to be serving the objective requirements of the age or era.
So many of his contemporaries wrote about him and that has been collected in a volume. Scholars like Mubarak Ali, Abdullad Malik, Hamza Alvi, Sehar Ansari, Muhammed Ali Siddiqui, Salahuddin Haider and Jaffar Ahmed were motivated to write about him. Similarly men of letters like Kaifi Azmi, Hameed Akhter, Farigh Bukhari, Shaukat Sidddiqi, Intizar Husain, Ahmed Hamdani, Munno Bhai, Zahida Hina, Noor Zaheer, Saeeda Gazdar and Riffat Sarosh wrote on his contribution and also about him as a person. Sibte Hasan was like a malang, a qalander, and this he also admired in others as was evident from the piece he wrote on Hasrat Mohani.
Sibte Hasan’s association with journalism served him well because the language he used was not of an expert or a specialist. He wrote in a style that was easily understood and, it seemed, he kept the lay reader forever in mind. He expressed even the most difficult or complicated problems in everyday language, without losing its complexity. The simplicity of language or style did not mean that it was an exercise in reduction but the communication of it was made easy. This is also a very important aspect of his writings for he was understandable and could be easily related to.