He was a peculiar and very special representative in a high degree of that great composite culture which has gradually grown in India. I do not mean to say that everybody has to be like Maulana Azad to represent that composite culture. There are many representatives of it in various parts of India; but he, in his own venue, here in Delhi or in Bengal or Calcutta, where he spent the greater part of his life, represented this synthesis of various cultures which have come one after another to India, rivers that had flowed in and lost themselves in the ocean of Indian life, India’s humanity, affecting them, changing them, and being changed themselves by them….. " So spoke Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at the 1st Maulana Azad memorial lecture on 11th November, 1959. The Maulana was a great religious scholar, journalist, writer, poet, philosopher and above all, a great political leader whose services and sacrifices in the freedom struggle will be long remembered alongwith his matchless contribution as free India’s first Education Minister.

Feroz Bakht (fortunate), later to become famous as Maulana Azad, was born in Mecca on 11th November, 1888 - an year before Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. He mastered many subjects at a very young age. There were learned tutors to teach him Arabic, Persian, Urdu and religious subjects alongwith mathematics, the Unani system of medicine, calligraphy, and other subjects. Learning of English was, of course, not allowed to him as it was ‘the language of the hated Firangis (the Britishers)’. Fortunately, he met a gentleman who knew English and in no time he learnt the alphabet and the first reader from him. Very soon he started reading the Bible and the newspapers with the help of dictionaries.

He used to read late into the night in dim candle-light, early in the morning, and sometimes even missed his meals. He often spent his money on books. He mentioned : “People pass their childhood in playing but I, at the age of twelve or thirteen, used to pick up a book and slip into a remote corner trying to hide myself from people’s looks.” As for his writing, a great scholar wrote : “Like Somerset Maugham (an eminent English writer) Maulana Azad learnt writing as a fish learns swimming or a child learns breathing.” A unique quality about him was that he always remained much ahead of his age, in years, in many fields.

He was running a library, a reading room, a debating society before he was twelve! He was teaching a class of students, most of whom were twice his age, when he was merely fifteen. He edited a number of magazines between thirteen and eighteen years of age and himself brought out a magazine of high standard at the age of sixteen. The power of his writings shaped in no small measure, the pattern of thought and political values of the Indian youth of his day. Maulana’s Tarjuman-al-Quran is a classic in Muslim religious literature. According to one of his biographers, S.G. Haider, Urdu-speaking people once invited a ‘learned scholar’, whose writings they had read with admiration, to address a national-level conference in 1904.

But when a lean and thin, unbearded, fair-complexioned Maulana Azad, barely sixteen, alighted from the first compartment, thousands of his admirers at the Lahore railway station could not believe their eyes. Some were even disappointed. And when this ‘boy’ gave a memorable extempore speech, for more than two and a half hours, the President, Maulana Hali, well-known sixty-seven-year-old poet and scholar himself, hugged him lovingly, saying : “….. of course, my dear boy, I now believe my senses, but am not yet able to overcome my utter surprise.” Maulana felt that for some reasons, the Muslims had fallen behind their brothers, in many ways, after the freedom struggle of 1857. Many of them thought that India would always remain under the British rule and, therefore, there was no need to fight against it. But Maulana told them, through his writings, that to be free from the slavery of foreign rule was not merely a national cause, it was also their religious duty.

He once declared : “It is easier for the Muslims to make peace with scorpions and snakes, move into the mountains, caves and burrows and make peace with the beasts there, but it is not possible for them to beg for truce with the Britishers.” To spread this message he brought out his own famous weekly paper Al-Hilal in 1912. How soon this paper became famous in India and abroad seems like a marvel now. Within a few months Al-Hilal’s circulation reached 26,000! Groups of people used to read or listen to each and every printed word of it like a lesson in a classroom. Very soon the paper created a new wave of awakening not only among Muslims but among others too as there were many Urdu-readers then. At least the Government forfeited the securities of Rs. 2,000 and Rs. 10,000 of the Al-Hilal and finally turned Maulana Azad out of Bengal for his anti-government writings. Later, he was imprisoned in Ranchi, Bihar, for more than four years.

Mahatma Gandhi, who knew about Maulana’s powerful writings, wanted to meet him when Maulana was in Ranchi prison. The Government did not allow him to. Soon after his release, in January 1920 - Maulana met Gandhiji at Hakim Ajmal Khan’s residence, in Delhi. Recalling this meeting Maulana wrote later : “…..To this day ….. as if we have lived under the same roof…… We had differences also …… but we never went different ways…….with every passing day my faith in him became stronger and stronger.” On the other hand, Gandhiji said : “I have the pleasure of working with Maulana since 1920…..His love for the country is as strong as his faith in Islam. He is one of the greatest leaders of the Indian National Congress. One should never forget it…..” Maulana believed from the very beginning that Indians can make a strong nation only when they have unity among themselves. Like Mahatma Gandhi, there was nothing dearer to his heart than the unity of the people.

Like his ‘Guru’, who ultimately sacrificed his life for this cause, Maulana was prepared to sacrifice everything for the unity of the nation. In his first presidential address to the Indian National Congress (1923), he declared in his peculiarly beautiful style in Urdu : “Today, if an angel descends from the sky and declared from the heights of Delhi’s Qutub Minar that India can get Swaraj in twenty-four hours provided she gives up the idea of Hindu-Muslim unity, I will forego the Swaraj rather than the Hindu-Muslim unity, because if Swaraj is delayed it will be a loss of India alone but if this unity is lost it will be a loss of the entire humanity of the world.” Late in the night of August 8, 1942, the historic meeting of the AICC, under the presidentship of the Maulana, gave the ‘Quit India’ call to the British Government. Early next morning all the great leaders were seen in the compartment of a special train. The train stopped at Poona and Gandhiji and Sarojini Naidu, escorted by a number of police officers, alighted. In the afternoon, Maulana, along with his colleagues was taken to the historic fort at Ahmednagar.

He wrote to his friend from there : “Only nine months earlier……the gate of Naini Central Jail was opened before me (to let me out) and yesterday, the 9th August 1942, the new gate of the old Ahmednagar fort was closed behind me.” The next day he wrote : “This is the sixth experience…..the total period of the last five terms….will-total to ……seven years and eight months…..this…..comes to a seventh part of the fifty-three years I have so far lived.” At the end of this term (July 1945), the total period of his imprisonment became ten years and five months. Maulana Azad always remained consistent to the beliefs with which he began his life : uncompromising faith in the Quran and total commitment to the principle of Hindu-Muslim unity.

He became the President of the Congress three times. Besides becoming the youngest President in 1923, he led the Congress for more than six years in his last term from 1940 to 1946. This was not only the longest period of Presidentship in the pre-Independence days, it was also the most crucial time in the history of the Congress when, under his presidentship the Congress passed the historic ‘Quit India’ resolution which was moved by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and seconded by Sardar Patel. India achieved its freedom on 15th August, 1947. The country was divided. The Maulana was dejected as his dream of united India was shattered. However, when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru offered him the education portfolio in his cabinet Maulana Azad readily accepted the offer and despite his poor health spared no effort in sharing the burden of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru towards building modern India. Raising the level of literacy was given the highest priority. Thousands of new schools, colleges and universities were started throughout the length and breadth of the country.

The Maulana also established many great institutions like the Sahitya Akademi, the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Lalit Kala Akademi, and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, to give a new life to India’s great culture. Maulana Azad died on Feb. 22, 1958. It was a loss deeply and widely felt in the country. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru paying glowing tributes to the Maulana in Parliament said : “We have had great men and we will have great men, but the peculiar and special kind of greatness that Maulana Azad represented is not likely to be reproduced in India or anywhere else.”

- Praveen Davar