Person · scholar & Congress president · India
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
An Islamic scholar and Urdu journalist who argued from within the tradition that Muslims belonged in a united India, edited Al-Hilal until the government suppressed it, was Congress president through the whole of the Second World War and the Quit India imprisonment, and opposed partition to the end.
- Date
- 1888–1958
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 22.573, 88.364
Worth knowing
As independent India's first education minister for eleven years he founded the IITs, the UGC, the Sahitya Akademi and the Sangeet Natak Akademi. India Wins Freedom, published with thirty sealed pages held back for thirty years, is the most uncomfortable memoir of the period.
About the place
Placed at Calcutta, where he grew up, edited Al-Hilal and began in politics. He was born in Mecca and died in Delhi, where he is buried beside the Jama Masjid.
Connections (3)
- Alternative toMuhammad Ali Jinnah
Both were Muslims who had spent decades in the national movement and they reached opposite conclusions about the same problem. Jinnah, a secular constitutionalist who barely observed the faith, concluded that a minority of a quarter could not be protected by guarantees alone and demanded a state. Azad, a trained alim who argued from within Islamic tradition, held that Muslims belonged in an undivided India and that partition would strand more of them than it saved — which, numerically, it did.
- CampaignGowalia Tank / August Kranti Maidan
Azad was Congress president through the whole of the war and the Quit India years, which means the resolution passed at Gowalia Tank on 8 August 1942 was moved under his presidency and he was arrested with the rest before dawn the next morning. He spent the following three years in Ahmednagar Fort with Nehru and the working committee, which is where Nehru wrote The Discovery of India.
- Teaching lineageFarangi Mahal, Lucknow
Azad was educated at home in the Farangi Mahal tradition of Arabic and Persian learning rather than at Aligarh or Deoband, and his early journalism in Al-Hilal argued from inside the classical Islamic sources that Muslims belonged in a united India and that the Congress was the proper vehicle for it. That is why his opposition to partition carried a weight no Congress Muslim of secular formation could have given it.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Maulana Azad”. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom (1959; unexpurgated 1988); his Al-Hilal essays.
Open Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in the repository →