If Hindu-Muslim unity is lost it will be loss for entire mankind: Maulana Azad

It is 4AM as I write these lines. February 22 Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s death anniversary. I write in his spirit; this was the hour when he began his day with the first sip of the best Chinese tea. He describes that precise moment in his letter dated 17 December 1943 written from Ahmednagar prison to his friend Nawab Habib ur Rahman Shervani of Aligarh. He writes, “You know my routine. I generally wake up between three and four in the morning. There is no one here who wakes up with sleep laden eyes and places the tea before me. So, I utilize my own eager hands. Instead of a bottle of old wine I open a tin of fresh Chinese tea. Then I sit on the chair and go into a trance. Please do not ask me about it. All I can say is that no one could have derived the extent of pleasure and intoxication from the one hundred years old cellars of old wine in Champagne and Bordeaux than I get from every sip of my morning tea.”

True to his tradition I brewed my cup at this hour not with Chinese but with Mizoram tea which has its own story.

My personal connection with Maulana Azad goes back much further than the time I began to read his writings and started writing about him. My father Khwaja Ghulamus Saiyidain, my aunt and uncle Saliha Abid Husain and Syed Abid Husain, my Chacha Khwaja Ahmed Abbas were his ardent followers. In 1947 when Congress formed the government Azad chose the Education portfolio above every other offer made to him because he knew that this was the need of the hour. He looked for the best minds to implement his vision of education; thereby he brought into his Ministry my father who with Dr Zakir Husain had been asked by Mahatma Gandhi to write the Wardha scheme of education. Father rose to become Education Secretary at the most challenging time when a newly independent nation was being born.

Azad was laying the foundation of Education in the country which he with Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had birthed. His stamp was everywhere. From the first IIT in Kanpur to Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, from the three Akademis, Sangeet, Sahitya and Lalit Kala to Indian Council for Cultural Relations to Public Libraries. His first love however remained Basic Education based on Gandhian principles of mother tongue and work-by-hands. He and his core team which consisting of my father and Prof Humayun Kabir and mentored by his friend and comrade Jawaharlal Nehru drove the most important agenda for the nation for a decade from 1947 to 1958. One week before his death he spoke at the Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu Conference at Red Fort. He was sharing the stage with Pandit Nehru, Pandit Sundarlal and Dr Tara Chand. He said that while the constitution has declared Hindi as the official language all 14 languages would be given requisite status; Urdu wallahs should not feel insecure. He went on to say that mother tongue should be the medium of instruction at primary level, and English should be retained because of its universal application.

Who was this man named Mohiuddin Ahmed, one who began to call himself Abul Kalam (father of the Word) and adopted the takhallus (poetic name) Azad at the age of fourteen? Azad was born in Mecca where his father Maulana Khairuddin had gone for higher learning. The family, settled in Calcutta, belonged to the Naqshbandia Sufi order; his father was a renowned Pir. His mother Aliya was the niece of the Sheikh Mohd Zahir Watri of the Harmain Shareef. No Indian language including Urdu was spoken in his house. He never attended any school; his father engaged the best tutors for him at home. He rose to the rank of an Alim, a Maulana at a very young age, many refer him as Imam ul Hind. Very early he withdrew himself from his family tradition of Piri Muridi and became deeply involved with the revolutionary movement ‘Anushilan’ and ‘Yugantar’ referred as the guerrilla movement of West Bengal. Azadi was his declared mission. His comrades were Shyam Sundar Chakravorty and Rash Behari Ghosh. For the same objective he was inspired by West Asian revolutionaries from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Names like Jamaluddin Afghani, Sheikh Mohd Abduh and Sheikh Rashid Raza are featured in his writings, especially his journal ‘Al Hilal’ which was launched in Calcutta in 1912.

Al Hilal’s appeal to the Muslims of Calcutta was instant. The combination of style and subject matter was electrifying. Erudition combined with clarity of thought and mastery of language made a formidable combination for an age that loved rhetoric. Frequent quotations from the Quran to establish the Islamic basis of the subject matter created a religious fervour in the reader. Defining the objectives of Al Hilal, he states that his prescription for the community has one single inalterable premise, “Believe me, we have the one and only light bestowed upon us by the siraj-e-munir (source of light). Remove it and we shall be struck blind.”

In this context he asked the Muslims to strive for Mukammal Azadi. He urged them to join Hindus in the Crusade for Independence which he calls Al Jehad fi Sabil Al Hurriyat. Freedom he said was enjoined upon them by Islam. With the Hindus already in the struggle, Muslims should no longer watch from a distance. This message was hammered into the minds of readers by using several voices, from mild rebuke to paternal admonition to Swiftian rage. At the time of writing this Gandhi was still in South Africa and the political demands of the Congress and Muslim League had not gone beyond dominion status for India. Azad preceded fathers of the independence struggle by almost a decade.

Once he had hammered out this path for himself, he never deviated from it. In 1923 he became the youngest President of the Congress Party. Addressing a mammoth convention in Delhi that year, he spoke words that are unparalleled in India’s political history. “Today if an angel were to descend from heaven and declare from the top of Qutab Minar that India will get Swaraj within 24 hours provided she relinquishes Hindu Muslim Unity I will relinquish Swaraj. Delay in the attainment of Swaraj will be a loss for India but if our unity is lost it will be a loss for the entire mankind.”

Azad’s decision to translate and explicate the Quran in Urdu was an extremely courageous one. For us Muslims the Quran is the undisputed word of Allah. The conservatives have held that the interpretation of Quran is the preserve of scholars and experts who have been educated and trained at acknowledged schools of Islamic studies. They are quick to point out that it is not for ordinary mortals to claim that they understand the meanings and messages in Quran which the universally recognized religious scholars and interpreters had not been able to fathom in almost fifteen centuries. Azad on the contrary when he completed his work invited a twelve-year-old child and an adult learner to explain what they had read. Only when he was satisfied that they understood what he was conveying, did he put down his pen.

As an Islamic scholar his commentary on the Quran is a modernist project. He rejected the received wisdom and adopted rational interpretive approach. In his preface he wrote, “There is no conviction of my heart which has not been stung by all the barbs of doubt. There is no belief in my soul which has not passed through all the stages of negativism. I have gulped poison from all the cups and sipped its antidote from all the healers. When I was thirsty my lip’s dryness was not like the others, when I was satiated the fountain of my satisfaction was not located on the public highway.”

His wisdom is reflected in his attempt to use the Islamic tradition and the authority of Quran to formulate a political theory for Indian Muslims to join with Hindus and resist the oppressive colonial regime. The struggle for freedom he said was anchored on concepts that lay at the heart of Islam; establishment of justice, equality, fraternity, and humanity.

It was two months after August 1947 when the worst communal killings had taken place that he addressed the Delhi Muslims from the steps of Jama Masjid. These killings would rip apart the very essence of amalgamating existing diversities into a union. A nation that had liberated itself from the colonial clutches was confronted with communalism that had seeped into its gullies and mohallahs. Azad as prophet and witness explained, once again, his ideals and philosophy to the dispirited and disillusioned Delhi Muslims.

“It was not long ago when I warned you that the two-nation theory was dead knell. ‘Leave it’ I said. These foundations which you trusted are breaking up very fast. To all my remonstrations you turned a deaf ear. Times sped by fast and now you have discovered that the so-called anchors of your fate have set you adrift.” Then he said, almost plaintively, with the pain of a father whose progeny had gone wrong, “The partition of India was a fundamental mistake. The manner in which religious differences were incited, inevitably, led to the devastation that we have seen with our own eyes.”

Today on his 64th death anniversary India is experiencing deadly convulsions within the currents of politics of hate that are swirling around. Azad’s words spoken at the 1940 Congress Convention about the ‘joint wealth of Hindu Muslim ittehad' are confronted today by calls for Muslim genocide at Dharam Sansads and cartoons of 38 Muslims hung by judicial order. The story is too long for a single article so let me end it with a couplet of the poet Sauda which he quotes in a letter about the death of his wife while he was incarcerated in Alipur Jail.

Sauda Khuda ke wastey kar qissa mukhtasar/Apni to neend ud gayi tere fasane se. (For Godsake shorten your tale O Sauda/Your tale has blown away my sleep).