Maulana Azad – A Life

Title: Maulana Azad – A Life

Author: S. Irfan Habib

Publisher: Aleph Book Co, 2023 (First)

ISBN: 9789393852182

Pages: 305

 

India was partitioned in 1947 on the demand of the Muslim League to create a separate homeland for the Muslims. Even though the League claimed sole representative status of Muslims to itself, a section of the traditional and conservative Muslims opposed the party and stood alongside the Congress and its leaders. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was the most prominent among them. He was a show boy of the Congress and was made union minister for education and culture in the Nehru cabinet. This was a little odd as Azad didn’t have any formal education and was a self-taught scholar. He was an expert in Islamic thought with minute knowledge of the Quran and other religious books of the Muslims. There are several biographies on Azad and the idea of this book is to understand both Azad’s Islam and his concept of India. It locates him in terms of the theological, political and philosophical ideas put forward by him. All the more importantly, it also tries to place the Maulana in the present context of Islam as well as nationalism. This book’s author, S. Irfan Habib, is not to be confused with the well-known Marxist historian of the same name belonging to Aligarh Muslim University, even though I had taken this book under this misunderstanding. This author is a historian of science and modern political history. He was the Maulana Azad Chair at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi.

 

Habib briefly illustrates Maulana’s early life. In fact, this is the only part of the book where reliance on the subject’s own words is minimal. In other areas, the author recedes to the background and lets Azad speak for himself. Azad’s ancestors came to India from central Asia in the Sultanate period as courtiers. His father was ‘a learned man whose life was governed by Islam and its moral code’ (p.4). He migrated to Arabia with family a few years before the 1857 rebellion. This was not unusual. Many Muslim families did the same anticipating the end of Mughal rule and the subsequent decline in patronage. Azad was born in Mecca to an Arab mother. The family returned to India and settled in Kolkata when he was seven years old. Ultra-orthodoxy ran in the family for a very long time. Sheikh Jamaluddin was his ancestor contemporary to Emperor Akbar. He refused outright to declare Akbar the Imam i-Adl (the Just Leader) in 1579 due to the emperor’s eclectic religious policy. He too migrated to Mecca claiming the government of the day was with infidels.

 

Azad’s father taught him by selecting teachers who followed his own strict version of religious upbringing. Azad himself remarked that his father was so rigid and that even the slightest departure was infidelity or hypocrisy in his view. This led to the young boy rebelling against his father psychologically, if not physically or by words. The author claims that Azad turned to rationalism, inspired by the writings of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. This is rather odd. Sir Syed Ahmed was an Islamist radical and his alleged connection to rationalism is a little too farfetched. Later in life, Azad dissociated from this school. Habib hints that Azad indulged in every malice when an opportunity presented itself during his foreign trip to West Asia and Europe when he was only 20 years old. The habits earned in this period include sexual, smoking and alcohol use. Azad has remarked that Europe ‘squeezed out all that could be got without leaving a drop of juice behind’. While leading a married life, he got into an affair with another lady in Mumbai. After this short phase of licentiousness, he embarked on serious journalism and edited the newspapers Al Hilal and Al Balagh. The authorities are reported to have stifled them and put Azad under house arrest for objectionable content. The author does not explain what the point of contention was. This is suspicious.

 

 Habib makes a survey of Azad’s religious belief which is full of contradictions and leaves much to be desired. The reader may also suspect that the ambiguity was let in by design in order to fabricate a façade presentable to the modern, secular world. Maulana Azad was an Islamic scholar with an uncompromising faith in the Quran. He preferred solitude and contemplation, but religion interspersed through all aspects of his life. He abjured the influence of the ulema and relied more on the Quran and Traditions. The author then remarks that his faith in them was close to the Wahhabi/Salafi understanding of Islam. There is a brief primer on Wahhabism here, but elsewhere he claims that Azad opposed it. Moreover, the author accuses Wahhabism of having deformed Islam, but finds justification for equating it to the Catholic Inquisition and witch hunts. Azad’s quest was to promote an Islam which has space for critical thinking and is not committed to taqlid (tradition). Here, he follows Jamaluddin Afghani as an intellectual disciple. But Afghani was convinced that Islam was the religion closest to science and knowledge among all religions. Hence there is no need to reinterpret it to make it compatible with modern science. This leads to the concept that critical thinking and rationality are central to Islam! This is the second contradiction in the author’s argument. Azad also believed that the evolution theory of Darwin agrees with the spirit of the Quran (p.82). The author does not elaborate how. But over the centuries, it lost this spirit and maulvis dominated with their utter ignorance. This book masquerades pan-Islamism as anti-imperialism forgetting that Ottoman imperialism was as evil as its European counterpart to its unfortunate victims. Azad was also influenced by Mohammed Abduh of Egypt who called for a progressive Islam, but considered the first community of Muslims – the prophet and his followers (salaf) – as the role model.

 

We see contradictions in the author’s narrative in almost all he did. Azad’s translation of the Quran simultaneously invoked esoteric Sufi traditions as well as the literalist and canonical textuality of the fiqh tradition. He is categorical in placing the blame for the diversity of interpretations of the Quran on the diverse believers who he said introduced fanciful standards of their own making. Azad believed that the period of enquiry and research in Islamic learning came to an end after four centuries of Hijra – tenth or eleventh centuries CE. Thereafter, interpreters blindly followed the commentary of a learned scholar. Habib remarks that Azad’s antipathy towards British colonial occupation was ‘not confined to the fate of India alone’. This glib comment really means that he was more concerned with the countries in which the British had subdued Muslims rather than what happened to India. This was the spirit behind the Khilafat agitation which had nothing to do with India. And we can safely interpolate that the modern Indian Islamists’ obsession with the freedom of Palestine is a kind of reincarnation of the Khilafat idea. Maulana Azad wanted secularism in India where Muslims were in a minority but demanded Islamic law wherever they are in a majority. His double standard was clearly exposed in his claim that ‘Hindus can revive their self-awareness by national consciousness on the basis of secular nationalism, but it is not possible for Muslims who can seek inspiration for self-awareness only from God and Islam’ (p.123-4). But my greatest shock was reserved for his contempt of idol worship which he thought evil and was ‘a powerful obstacle in the way of a free search for God’ (p.110). With such a blatant disregard for the fundamental feature of Hinduism, how could he expect to coexist with them in a multicultural, secular society? And this man was the central minister for education and culture in free India.

 

 The question about Azad that naturally comes to mind is not that why he had joined the Congress party, but rather why he did not join the Muslim League. The book offers only a partial answer which also comes from Islamic history. The League was formed by educated Muslims who wanted a separate state as a temporary abode like Medina was for the prophet who had to flee Mecca and wanted a foothold in preparing for the re-conquest of his home town in a few years. Likewise, leaders like Jinnah and Iqbal wanted to have Pakistan at first and later to conquer India as a whole. However, radical and uneducated leaders were more concerned about the fate of Muslims who would be left behind in Hindu India after Pakistan is separated. Their idea was to remain in India and latch on to the demographic factor. Muslims had already reached a quarter of the population and in a democratic set up with indiscriminate universal franchise, a lobby of this size voting en masse is quite capable of controlling or even usurping power, particularly if the other side is divided. Leaders like Azad followed this line. Habib does not openly say so, but this is plain reading between the lines. The Maulana saw himself as a national leader from the 1920s and not just as a leader of Muslims only. Though he had absolutely no popular following, he utilized his close proximity to Gandhi and Nehru to reach the highest positions in the party and government. Azad proposed composite nationalism as the ideal for India where Hindus and Muslims should work in unity to fight the British. Early Islam was again projected as the role model. The prophet allied with the Jewish tribes of Medina and united them as one nation against the Quraysh of Mecca. Azad suggested a similar arrangement for India. The author also stops here, lauding the idea. This is nothing but heinous treachery, exploiting the Hindu masses’ ignorance of Islamic history. You can make an Internet search and see for yourself what was the fate of those three Jewish tribes who allied with the early Muslims after the Prophet’s conquest of Mecca. The Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir were expelled from Medina and the Banu Quraysa was slaughtered in cold blood! Azad was a great religious scholar who clearly knew what happened to the Jewish allies but still had the brazenness to suggest it as a model for India.  Azad even opposed the Shuddhi movement of Arya Samaj which was initiated to take back the forcibly converted people in communal riots back to Hinduism. He thought it was ‘not in the national interest’.

 

The book also makes a dedicated effort to paint Azad’s tenure in the Nehru cabinet in a very positive light. Habib claims that the core of Azad’s education policy mirrored the Quranic concept of striking a balance (p.213). He ‘democratized’ the education system with Quranic concepts. However, he did not have much to tinker with in the education policy as Nehru continued to play a key role in most of the policy formulations in educational and scientific matters. He strove for emphasis on primary universal education, but Nehru focused on covering lost ground and catch up with the world in industrial and scientific development by concentrating on higher education. The book includes Azad’s speeches made in meetings as a minister and marvels at the depth of his vision. But these were definitely prepared by secretaries in line with the current government policy. Azad also wanted to impart religious education in schools at public expense.

 

This book is an abject failure as a biography. Practically no personal information is provided. We come to know that Azad was a married man when the author informs us of his emotional distress on his wife’s death while he was lodged in the Ahmed Nagar Fort prison during Quit India Movement. Did he have any children? Again, the readers are in the dark. The author frequently shuttles between the Nehru era and the present to lament at the perceived damages to India caused by the Modi government. It even includes a criticism of the Central Vista Project! But it fails to address a common criticism often levelled against Azad by nationalists – that he invited the king of Afghanistan to invade India and liberate her. Habib does not mention anything about this point and looks very subdued while handling the Khilafat issue, leading one to doubt on the sincerity of the narrative. The Ghubar i-Khatir is the only source used by the author that directly comes from Azad. It was written around 1942 while in prison and includes a collection of letters and miscellaneous topics except politics.

 

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star