Mani Shankar Aiyar 
In these times of spreading hate, it is balm for the soul to hear the voice of reason, for Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s voice was the voice of reason infused with compassion. Moreover, as it was a voice that spoke only in Urdu, Arabic and Persian, S. Irfan Habib’s work in translating the evolution of thoughts in English to the lay reader (as against academics) stands as an outstanding contribution to national integration.
The voice had a most unlikely origin. Azad’s family had migrated from India to the Hejaz in the mid-1800s as they foresaw that the India of the Mughals, where they had flourished, had run out of its time. Theocratic and conservative, the family moved to Makkah (Mecca). Moinuddin Ahmed, the future Maulana Azad, was born there in 1888 and grew up there till the age of 17 when the family moved again to Calcutta (Kolkata).
‘Maulana Azad: A Life’ by S. Irfan Habib (Aleph, February 2023)
His education was traditional and imbued with religious dogma, initially under his father, a renowned scholar of divinity, and then at the hands of maulanas and maulvis after the family returned to India. He was to write later in Ghubar-i-khatir (The Dust of Memories), a collection of letters and essays, “All my childhood was spent in the midst of people who were tradition-bound (qadamatparast), where there was not even the slightest opening for any outside influence” (pp.185-186).
“Disgusted”, says the author, by the blind adoration given to his father by his Sufi murids (followers), the young Mohiuddin turned to the more progressive, scientific rationalism of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, which, however, remained Islam-oriented and Muslim-centric and led to his drifting away from the Aligarh path which he later excoriated. To this was added a fervent anti-colonial passion engendered by Azad’s wide travels as a young man in West Asia, then steeped in Wahhabism but shaken by the radical thinking of Jamaluddin Afghani, Rashid Rida, Mohammad Abduh and other reformers.
His instinctive reaction was to explore the path to “unbelief”. He then thought “that what was always believed to be religion was merely a picture of our superstitions and misapprehensions, not religion” (p.77). When, after much cogitation, he returned to Islam he concluded that “the practice of love, regardless of the distinction of caste, creed or nationality” constitute “the basic teachings of the Quran”.
(Tarjuman al-Quran, the first volume of a trilogy of religious commentary, initially written in 1915, destroyed by the colonial authority, rewritten several times over, polished and revised, and eventually published only some 15 years later. An updated version came after his release from Ahmednagar Fort in 1945).
This exploration of different interpretations of basic Islamic texts in the light of rationalism (ijtihad) became gradually but definitively the drumbeat of Azad’s thinking. His impassioned anti-colonialism led to his starting and editing two periodic journals, Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh, that sounded the call to break the fetters of British colonialism and, because of their widespread resonance, particularly in the Muslim community, led to their being forcibly closed and the editor being sent into exile to a small tribal village near Ranchi. It was the first of a series of imprisonments that totalled nearly eight years.
His earliest works, Tazkirah (Reminiscences) and Kahani (Story), contained reflections on his family and his upbringing and were complemented by stray epistolatory references in his Ghubar-i-Khatir. Referring to these and others’ memoirs, Azad remarks that much autobiographical writing is “egotistical”. He appears to think, according to the author , that “most of our self-effacing behaviour is actually a manifestation of our egoism.” The world, writes Azad, “does not get time to measure their ego and is overwhelmed by its frank and informal appearance.” (p.187) As the writer of my recent memoirs that have been described as unusually “frank” and “honest”, I stand humbled!
Also read: Maulana Azad Always Stressed on Humanity. It’s a Lesson We Need Now More Than Ever.
Habib, therefore, focusses on Azad’s intellectual evolution, ranging from Islamic civilisation to Islamic learning, and covering different schools of Islamic thought, Islamic mysticism and Islamic science, climaxing in Islamic nationalism. He was bewitched by the Mu’tazila school of philosophy that “sought a reconciliation of faith with reason. This synthesis of Muslim theology with Greek logic gave birth to a theological science called ilm-i-Kalam”.(p.74)
Azad also echoed the radical Jamaluddin Afghani, who, on a visit to India, declared “the Muslims in India have applied the desire to defend religion, or religious zeal, in a very bad way…They believe they must, out of religious zeal, hate and abominate what was connected with opponent’s faith, even though these things were sciences and arts”. (pp. 84-85). Afghani further argued that there was no need to reinterpret Islam, as Sir Syed had done, “to make it (Islam) compatible with the requirements of modern science”.
Afghani’s “mission was to awaken Muslims from obscurantism and encourage them to embrace Western science and rationalism, which he considered inherent in the Quran” (p.80, italics added). So too, Azad “found it fallacious to say that Islam and modern science are contradictory” and blamed the ulema, declaring them “a hopeless lot…We have no alternative but to ignore rigid thinking altogether, focusing on the creation of a new mind” (p. 81)
In contradistinction to those of his fellow Indian Muslims who were concerned over the prospect of the Muslims becoming an oppressed minority in the very land they had once ruled, Azad held, “Hindus and Muslims must unite in a manner that they form one “Qaum’ and one nation…the Prophet said that he extended the hands of friendship to all those who lived in the vicinity of Medina and declared that we should be ‘Umma Vahidah’, one people.” (p.166 and 136). He returned to the theme again and again, indeed it became the leitmotif of his thought process. Drawing attention to India’s “composite culture”, that, he said, “Hindus and Muslims (have) been shaping for the last one thousand years and more”, he stressed that the Muslims have been “proud and active partners” in forging a “syncretic culture which occupies a distinctly distinguished place”. (p.166) This, he concluded, had given rise to the two communities sharing “a common nationality” (p.160).
He said that while “as a Muslim, I have a special identity…I am equally proud of the fact that I am an Indian, an essential part of the indivisible unity of Indian nationhood” (p.160). He also punctured (p. 156) the argument for Muslim separatism, holding incontrovertibly that as “Muslims number between eight and nine crores”, (how) “can such a vast mass of humanity have any legitimate reason for apprehension that in a free and independent India it may not be possible to protect its rights and interests?”
Also read: Interview: Irfan Habib Debunks RSS’s Nationalism and Their Attempts to Rewrite History
This implied that if the community divided into three, as it has done in the Partition of India in 1947 and the Partition of Pakistan in 1971, Muslim vulnerability in the subcontinent would only increase. Hence his clarion call: “The need of the hour is a single and united nationhood”. Jinnah fiercely disagreed, which is why Pakistani nationhood not only fragmented but remained fractured, and in today’s India the future of the community is fragile.
Azad mourned. From the steps of the Jama Masjid, he spoke to his community in October 1947, within weeks of Partition (p.266):
Today, when I see your ashen faces and desolation in your hearts, my mind goes back to the past. …I had warned you how the forces of poison unleashed by sinister designs would lead to the tragedy of Partition, but you refused to listen to me. You relied on your ignorance and today you feel as though you are threatened by new dangers”.
As indeed they are in Modi’s India.