Raza Kazim (Urdu: رضا کاظِم, born 13 January 1930^[1]) is a lawyer, philosopher, inventor and former politician in Pakistan.

Family

He invented a musical instrument, the Sagar Veena,^[2] of which his daughter Noor Zehra is the only player in Pakistan, and through her is the grandfather of the famous pop-rock band Noori duo, Ali Noor and Ali Hamza,^[3] while another daughter, Baela Raza Jamil, is one of Pakistan's leading educators, with major contributions in the field of education reform.^[4] He is also the uncle of actress and model Juggan Kazim.

Politics

He began his political career with a protest in his school during the Quit India Movement, in 1942 in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh, India),^[2] and joined the Communist Party of Pakistan in 1948 for some time before quitting it for ideological reasons in 1951, while he became a lawyer in 1953, and as an activist has been jailed under Ayyub Khan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto as well as Zia-ul-Haq, the first two for refusing to become a minister, and the third for supposedly attempting a coup d'état. He later on abandoned leftist politics and Marxism altogether, after having studied it for some two decades but ultimately writing a "50-page article on gaps in facts and reasoning in dialectical and historical materialism", and now describes himself as a "post-Marxist."^[5]

Later activities

He currently devotes his time to the Sanjan Nagar Institute of Philosophy & Arts, a non-profit organization consisting of a team of fifty (now growing) full-time members working in the fields of Philosophy, Music and Photography. The Institute is currently based in Lahore.

Books and booklets

• Notes on theoretical aspects of revolution, 1972.
• Socialist revolution : the alternative to disaster, 1974.
• Dictatorship of the urban left : Pakistan's road to socialism, 1974.
• Pākistānī inqilāb aur Islām, 1976.
• Raz̤ā Kāẓim : mushāhidāt, 1986.

References