http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-forgotten-inheritance-of-azad/article5714121.ece
The forgotten inheritance of Azad
By S. IRFAN HABIB
The Hindu
February 22, 2014
It was on this day in 1958 that Maulana Abul Kalam Azad passed away.
It was not merely the death of an extraordinary human being but also the death
of an idea that sparkled for a few decades — the idea of an undivided India
where Muslims could live happily with the Hindu majority. Muslims made India
their home centuries ago, and according to Azad, they had a huge stake in the
idea of India. However, Azad’s idea received a jolt in 1947 as the violence of
partition ravaged India. Azad went on to live for another ten years, helping in
healing and rebuilding the scarred and bruised new India.
Azad lived many lives. Some of them are well known, yet some have remained
mysteriously unknown. Not much is known or written about them in public. There
was a decade in his early days when he was disenchanted with the inherited faith
and had to brazen out some difficult and uncomfortable questions about
Islam.
Even before arriving at this situation, he was a rebel as a child who
disagreed with his father’s faith, got enamoured of Sir Syed’s modernism that
his father Maulvi Khairuddin hated, and decided to learn sitar on the quiet
though his father did not approve of music. His dissent against the inherited
belief went even further — he became an atheist (dehri) and reposed faith only
in materialism and rationalism. Religion was reduced merely to a superstition.
From the age of 14 to the mid-20s, he just put up a facade of belief in public
but inwardly remained completely without faith.
A different Islam
This short phase in his life was ephemeral as he soon got back to Islam,
yet his Islam remained qualitatively different. And it is on this count that
Azad stands distinctly apart from everyone else. He was himself conscious of the
fact that not many people went along with him when he said: “In religion, in
literature, in politics, on the paths of philosophy, wherever I went, I went
alone. The caravans of the times did not support me on any of my
journeys.”
Azad emphasised all his life on the original spirit of engagement with the
Quranic text, which was available to all believers of Islam. He refused to
accept the canonised Islam; instead he called for independent reasoning or
ijtihad to interpret the faith. He also warned against reading more than what
was intended to be conveyed in the Quran. This sounds so prophetic in the
contemporary context where Islam is invoked by many to speak what they want the
Book to speak.
Ghubar-i-Khatir is a collection of letters written in the Ahmednagar Fort
prison during three years of incarceration between 1942-45, where Maulana Azad
opens his mind to some very unconventional and mundane issues. For example, one
of the letters deals with his lifelong passion for tea. He began his day, he
writes, with a freshly brewed cup of white Chinese jasmine tea that he consumed
mostly alone as no one else could appreciate its taste. Most others were
addicted to a concoction mixed with milk and sugar which the British had told
them was tea. Only Jawaharlal Nehru, he wrote, used to have black tea, but not
the real Chinese tea. In another letter he writes about happiness. He cites a
Chinese person saying: “Who is the wisest man? The answer is: He who is the
happiest.” Interestingly, he derides those who believe that men of religion and
philosophy need to look serious and morose. This, he says, cannot be a
pre-condition for respectability and learning.
Reforms in education
Azad also comments upon the education system and syllabi in the context of
his own education in late 19th Century India, particularly the Islamic madrasas.
He wrote: “It was an outdated system of education which had become barren from
every point of view — teaching methods defective, worthless subjects of study,
deficient in the selection of books, defective way of reading and calligraphy.”
If this is what Azad felt about the Islamic madrasas more than hundred years
ago, we can well imagine the urgency and necessity of radical reform in the
contemporary system of education.
He is critical of even Al-Azhar University and calls its syllabus poor.
Expressing a sense of relief at the fact that he did not have to depend on these
madrasas for his early education, he writes: “Just imagine if I had stopped
there and had not gone in search of new knowledge with a new curiosity, what
would be my plight! Obviously my early education would not have given me
anything except a stagnant mind, a total stranger to reality.”
The present day Islamic enthusiasts need to learn a lesson or two from the
insights of a scholar like Azad — both from his writings against conformism and
conservatism and his questioning of his own family’s intellectual and religious
inheritance. He writes further in another letter: “Nothing is greater hindrance
to the growth of a mind than its conservative beliefs. No other power binds it
as do the shackles of conformity…At times so strong is the grip of inherited
beliefs that education and environment also cannot loosen it. Education would
give it a new paint but never enter the inner belief structure where the
influence of race, family and centuries old traditions continue to
operate.”
We need to reflect upon and recall
Maulana Azad’s precious and mostly forgotten inheritance, which was based on
free thinking and pluralism. In particular, Azad’s Islam was much more
accommodative than the contemporary rigid and combative Islam.
That is why, at times like these, when religious fault lines threaten the
very idea of India, we must pay heed to Azad’s inheritance.
(S. Irfan Habib holds the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad chair at Delhi’s National
University of Educational Planning and Administration.)
