Abdal Hakim Murad – Abdul Majid Daryabadi Paradigms of Leadership
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Assalamu alaykum.
And welcome to the I don't know how
many episodes we've had so far of these
paradigms of leadership sessions.
But in every case, I think we have
experienced the truth of the Alemaz dictum that
be
dhikrihim
tanzilurrahma.
By remembering the great ones of the Ummah,
mercy descends upon us.
We do not have the contemporary cult of
celebrity
in
the
Islamic context, which is all about ego.
But instead,
we respect
and find blessings in
those whose lives have been uplifted and transformed
and illuminated
by the following of the chosen one, sallallahu
alaihi wa sallam, who is the paradigm of
all of these paradigms. To the extent that
we are inspired by him and submit to
his way,
we become Islamic. There's no other way.
So these are all different facets of the
diamond
of the chosen one
All of these individuals who took themselves to
be
stepping humbly and at
varying degrees of distance
in his footsteps.
The footsteps in which
so many flowers grew.
And,
we began this series really by looking at
one of the transitional figures,
Imam Shamil,
the great Mujahid scholar
of
the Caucasus
of the Tavistain
Adar borders,
and considered ways in which the still entirely
traditional world of Islam
was being challenged in the mid 19th century
by being pitched
headlong against its will
into
European
modernity.
Unable to resist that encounter
because of the military
technological
prowess
of the European
peoples who had, as it were, sold their
religiosity
in order
to buy
mechanical physical mastery.
And so the ancient
process whereby
the older religions,
understood by the olema as abrogated
earlier versions
of the one true faith,
were naturally
receding,
started to be reversed in ways that the
olamat found it very difficult to understand,
often an extremely brutal process.
Islam came to Europe
at its greatest moments of its
high tide,
reached the Pyrenees
and beyond,
crossed the Saint Bernard's Pass, even the heights
of
Switzerland.
And then to the east, of course,
the Muslims of Russia,
Islam reaching Russia
before Christianity
reaches Russia.
And then in the Balkans,
cities like Budapest,
So much
has been touched and illuminated
by the spirit of Islam, not just for
the illumination
of
the Muslims who came,
but those who were protected
by Islam, particularly
the Jewish communities
and other minorities
in Islam's
very cosmopolitan vision
of
how a decent human society
is constituted
and then pushed back
with the most excruciating
cruelty and violence
in the west, the inquisition,
and in the east,
the destruction of the Muslims after the
defeat at Kazan. So in the west,
Pedro the Cruel,
in the east,
Ivan the Terrible.
And this process went on, the destruction of
Circassia, which we looked at briefly, and then
the the appalling Russian penetration of the Caucasus
and Imam Shamil defending his people
with his ancient musket
in that time of massive European triumphalism.
And this mid 19th century period is the
time of Iqam Adl Qadir Raja Zaire
in the Islamic West.
And it's the time of the Tomsimat,
the great reforms, the modernizing Europeanizing,
reforms whereby the Turkish empire becomes part of
the Concert of Europe,
part of the international system of nation states.
The sultan moves into a European style palace,
Dolmabahce. And the 1850s really are gigantically important
as a kind of symbol of the Islamic
world having to
play this Western game in order to hold
on to its remaining territories.
We looked a few sessions ago at one
of the figures further east who were engaged
in this process of dialogue and retrenchment.
That was more like a Hossein Ahmed Madani,
of,
one of the great scholars of of Dar
Olom
Deoband,
and, great great inspiration.
And I want to go back to India
today,
partly because,
it's one of the great hubs of Islamic
civilization.
One could even just about make the claim
if you visit
the museums,
the summit of Islamic civilization.
Maybe the arts and the literature of the
Mughal Empire were greater than the arts and
the literature of the, say, Ottoman Empire or
Safavid Empires. You could
make that claim
If you look at the just the cultural
productions,
the stonework of Fatehpur Sikri, the the textiles,
the
music,
the cuisine,
the Taj Mahal. It's one of the great
summits of human civilization, or I might even
say
the summit of human civilization. It's a subjective
judgment of course, but
but pretty unsurpassable.
And this
civilization of the sacred
with its olema and its munchis and its
Khwarajas
and its extraordinary
upliftment of the story of Hind
becomes colonised
by the archpragmatists
of Europe,
the traitor English.
They go there, not really for Christianity the
way that, you know, Jesuits had done and
the Portuguese had done.
They go there to cut a deal. East
India Company is a big multinational,
which is emphatically
profane,
materialistic
in its purposes.
And this is the nature of the modern
world. The modern world is about business. What
is Brexit about? It's about getting the deal.
It's not really about the symbolism of Western
civilization and unity or none of those philosophical
things. Still less spiritual things are mentioned or
even
on the minds of any of the negotiators.
It's about
fisheries and access to markets, and that's the
level the civilization seems to be operating on.
But the British are already there,
in India
to cut a deal after Clive, the Battle
of Plessis, the destruction of Tipu Sultan. And
then 1857,
right in the middle of this decade that
we're * as the watershed time for the
Ummah.
1857,
the First Indian War of Independence, the Uprising,
whatever you choose to call it, the last
gasp
of the old order
and the arrest,
the deportation
and scenes of considerable
misery
of the last moron
and his exile
and the catastrophic
end, symbolic end by this time, because his
reign really is just in the old city
of Delhi, but still he is walking the
house.
That means something.
And then the East India Company becomes the
British Raj,
and a different kind of discourse, which is
actually harder to accommodate,
comes about. Because the East India Company had
claimed to be about
textiles from Bengal
and opium
and whatever made, made
money.
The Raj claimed itself to be a more
civilizational exercise, the white man's burden,
and became in its time the operator of
a kind of soft apartheid separate
railway compartments for Europeans and natives. That that
thing
that the Raj did, which was not what
the East India Company had done, where intermarriage
and a lot of cultural curiosity was was
pretty normal.
And the old days when it was assumed
that if you were a collector or a
judge in the British influenced parts of India,
then you could deal
respectfully with the culture of the natives by
learning Persian in particular.
That became less common.
And a certain
cantonment
mentality developed. And this was a new scenario
for the olema. And
the adjustment was a painful one.
And in a sense,
was
more intense than that that, say, the Ottoman
olema found themselves confronting. Because until the end
of the First World War, there were no
Christian soldiers occupying Constantinople. But
in India,
it was
a daily
reality, the missionaries, the new churches,
the railways,
the
the white man's burden,
a painful experience.
So we can learn a lot, even though
we're now 2 centuries later,
from that first Muslim
impacting
of the full tradition
and the very pragmatic materialist Mercantile mentality of
the British Raj and
its
assumption
of its right to prevail civilizationally.
And the story will be familiar to many
of the reactions of the olema and the
Muslim elites, which were all over the place.
From a certain
retrenchment
of tradition
and,
an ideologizing
in certain ways
of aspects of subcontinental
Islam, the development of the deal band
and Braille v traditions,
the emergence of Ahlil Hadith type fundamentalisms,
the development of mashrabs and madhabs, and the
concretizing of certain strands that have been distinct
in Indian Islam for a long time, but,
which had been less sectarian
in the past.
The beginning of significant
a significant sense of Sunni, Shi
differentiation.
It was an age of sectarianism
against the backdrop of what should we do
with this new catastrophe.
And some
took the opposite view, if you can't beat
them join them.
Why are we defeated? It's because we didn't
get to these scientific truths first. We didn't
have Galileo, we didn't have Copernicus, we didn't
have Newton.
And therefore we weren't able to defend ourselves
with the technologies that come from those scientific
world views. And so a certain type of
scientific
apologia became quite common. Mulvee Chirag Ali, an
example of somebody who's even quite happy to
throw out
the the scriptural
baby with the bathwater of tradition.
So, Sayed Ahmad Khan, founder of the Aligarh
Movement, more considerable personality perhaps, but still somebody
who's an arch modernist,
and very keen to allegorize
and interpret away any thing in the tradition
that seemed not to fit his very
Victorian, science oriented
world
view.
So a world of real bifurcations. And of
course, on the ground, the ordinary Muslims are
still going to the piers and the the
mazaars.
And life for them, more or less, continues
unabated, unlike French colonialism,
which wanted to change everybody and evolve the
Muslims' degree. And mussouement
evolue, an evolved Muslim. In other words, a
Frenchified Muslim. There's no other model of evolution.
The British were content to allow
local
institutions,
sacred spaces,
urban fabrics to
continue
unimpeded
to a considerable extent.
Now we saw with with the sort of
the Erband
idea and with Hossein Ahmed Madani in particular,
what you might describe as
a continuation
rather than a break with the past, but
one that nonetheless was alert to a new
set of questions which were being asked of
and by the Muslim elite.
Whatever
happened, it was clear that one couldn't just
continue with the magnificent world of the peacock
throne and
the the courtiers that was
coming to an end. And even the little
replications of it in the courts of Hyderabad,
Bhopal, Ud and wherever were kind of
clearly their days were numbered as
the,
they went riding with the saabs and the
local collectors, and they joined the clubs, and
they went to public schools, went to rugby,
eaten and so forth. And that world
was also being
anglicised. That didn't seem to be a place
where the tradition could continue
uninterruptedly.
There was a sense of hiatus
and discontinuity, but we saw with Madani
the continuation certainly of a kind of Tassowoff,
the Hanavi Mathab,
the Maturidi Aqeda,
and the the Chishti Sabari line from *
Imdadullah Maki in particular, who we looked at
as as an example of a
sober, but nonetheless
charismatic,
figure from from the the Chishti line.
The sage who lived in the forest and
then came out to inspire
the the Olamath,
great commentator on the Masnavi, the significance of
Rumi in all of this. And this continues
way back in India
and goes on to inspire
Bertrand Iqbal and continues to be
exemplary.
Molina,
Rashid Ahmed Gangohi,
who dies right at the beginning of 20th
century, that world
is also
in response
to the new facts of
the raj.
But the individual I want to talk about
today is
indicative of the crisis in a different way.
And somebody who partook of the darkest aspects
of the crisis for a certain
significant period of his life.
This is Maulana, as it's generally called. Although
he didn't go to a Dar ul Olam.
Abdul Majid Daria Bedi,
who died in 1977,
so part of our modernity, really.
Died in in Lucknow.
And
what's interesting well, there's many things that are
interesting and kind of indicative symptomatic about his
life, which
as is normally the case with a with
a with an alim, is not kind of
the imam Shamil idea of jumping over the
heads of the astonished Russian soldiers to fight
another day. It's not that kind of,
heroism, but but still
a jihad with a qalam,
if not with a qadam,
with
pen, not with physically marching out.
And known
and this seems to be a particular feature
of the Indian tradition at the time, as
a Quranic scholar.
Well, there are so many others,
who are writing tafsirs,
who were reflecting on the Quran.
This is to some extent because of the
apologetic environment
that the missionaries,
the rationalists,
and the British are just looking at the
Muslim scripture, the Quran, and taking it apart,
rearranging it, figuring out
how to criticize it,
how to pull the rug from beneath the
epistemic unity of the Mohammedan population in order
to either make them go to Church of
England services in Simla or something, or just,
you know, to take away from their minds
any thought of
independence
and autonomy to make them,
subaltern
subject of the colonial state.
And,
this focus on the Quran, which really is
the kind of great love of,
Daria Bedi's life,
is, as I say, something that's very emblematically
Indian. So I want I want
to talk about,
Dariabadi in particular,
not just because his life is interesting and
indicative, but because of so many larger issues
about tradition and modernity.
And how these paradigms of leadership
adjust to the
historically unparalleled
challenges of,
of of modernity
and the unexpected
regrowth
of,
empowered
Ahl al Khitab opposition to the Tawhid of
Islam.
So,
Dariabad is this small town in UP,
Uttar Pradesh, then the United
Provinces,
which in many ways is the kind of
intellectual and spiritual heartland of Islam in Hindustan
generally.
Deoband,
of Lucknow, of Saharanpur,
Delhi. This is kind of it was the
core of the Mughal Empire, core of the
intellectual
life of of that world.
Now he's
from a kind of subcontinental
Islam is kind of divided into groups and
not quite castes, but family groups. You've got
the Chaudhris in the east. You've got the
Memans. You've got,
it's a big
deal in the subcontinent. He's from the kind
of Kwidway
caste or class, and you get Kridways to
this day in that region, particularly in Lucknow,
and also some in Karachi and elsewhere.
From the Arabic word Qudwa
Qudwatul Allahma or Qudwatul Qudat, because the
eponymous semi imaginary ancestor
of, these people was a was a certain
more, is the Deen,
who came to India, we're told, with one
of the the Afghan
waves of conquerors and settles in Ayodhya.
Famous Babri mosque in Ayodhya, now being rededicated
an
idol temple.
And,
the the Gidway family, which continues to produce
eminent scholars in the subcontinent
and populate the universities there,
have supplied the the basic bio data. So
most of this talk is going to be
based on this actually quite palatable, readable
book. Journey of Faith Molana Abdulmajid Daria Bedi.
Ibrahim Kidway is one of the
editors. There's a lot of biodata in there
as well. It's not just,
selected very useful translations into English of pieces
by him and about him. It's quite a
useful kind of work. It's quite recent. We
have it in the library here at CMC.
So I'm going to be following this story.
So there's this story of the Qiguays and
how they came to India.
Some modern olemmah have wondered about the wisdom
of the propensity of the Muslims in Hindustan,
unlike, say, the Muslims of the Balkans,
or of China,
or elsewhere
to proudly trace their ancestry
back to non Hindustani
places because, of course, this provides ammunition
for the Hindu nationalists who say, they're just
colonists.
You don't really belong.
But after so much so many a 1000
years of intermarriage and so forth, there is
ethnically
Indian as
anybody else. And the
just to open a parenthesis here, the
the richness of this tradition,
which even after the the pushing over of
the Mughals by the Marathas, and then finally
by the,
by the the English,
generated such extraordinary and unprecedented cultural richnesses in
India, the tourists.
They want to see the Taj Mahal. They
want to see the Red Fort. They want
to see, you know, the wonders of
Muslim India.
And they'll go and see Hindu temples and
so forth. But it's it's the Mughal achievements
that are the jewels in the crown of
India that
many thoughtful Indians,
Arundhati Roy, for instance, are saying
there is no better way of reducing the
world's respect for India than denying this Muslim
sort of summit,
this jewel in the crown, this extraordinary, you
know, wealth. And you visit the Victoria and
Albert Museum in London at the Nehru Gallery.
And there's Hindu stuff there, but the Muslim
stuff is where you get the crowds.
It's so amazing.
So Hindu nationalism
is not the same as Indian nationalism,
because India is not just a Hindu thing,
but is an accumulation as a cosmopolitan region
of other things as well that that represent
part of its greatness and,
it's anyway,
one of the reasons, I think, why you
get more and more converts to Islam from
Hinduism, and we see this
really quite strikingly, is because,
the Hindutva thing is
turning the Hindu identity into yet another kind
of nasty religious
nationalism. A lot of people are kind of
repelled from that and looking for alternatives.
So one of the silver linings of this
Modi type chauvinism
seems to be a migration of young,
thoughtful Indians in the direction of Islam and
sometimes other religions as well.
In any case, that that's another story, but
the point is these people really see themselves
as Indian,
as part of the Hindustan
development that was
the Vedas and then the Dravidian, the Aryan
invasions, and these accumulations of people who come
from outside to bring it up, to become
this sort of cultural
amazement,
that was that was India.
So
this idea that away from elsewhere is not
is a kind of a 2 edged sword.
But in any case,
if any of them has a DNA test,
you can see
99%
Indian.
The nationalist thing doesn't really work. But,
his great ancestor, who is a more historical
figure,
Khwaja Mahdoum
Abkesh.
Abkesh just means he brought water to a
desiccated place.
Settled in Dariabad,
which is a small town, still a small
town in UP. And the family are based
there.
His grandfather, Dari Bedi's
grandfather,
is certainly
a Maulana in the tradition of of Olamat,
of the Firangi Mahal Olamat of Lucknow, kind
of rationalising traditionalist
scholars, big on logic, kalam, that kind of
of of rationality.
This is Mufti Mozar Karim.
He supports,
of course, the Indian side
against the British
in 1857.
Hard
not to if you're an Alim.
And the British
don't shoot him out of a cannon
the way they do with some others, but
they exile him to the Andaman Islands,
which is their kind of India's Australia penal
colony,
where he stays for several years and
continues to translate and write books as an
indefatigable scholar. He manages to get
paper. He he writes on firq and tasawaf
and does a
medieval Arabic text on
on on geography. He's
not phased by this at all.
His son,
Mufti Mozar's son, Mavi Abdul Kadri, is also
a graduate of this Firangi Mahal.
Firangi Mahal is the district of the Europeans.
That's what Firangi Mahal means, which is kind
of if you're in Lucknow, it's the Chalk
meeting Victoria Road, and the place is still
known and pointed out. But this becomes a
great sort of center,
originally quite an informal way for,
Hanafi olamah of the strongly rationalizing Matoridi tradition
that comes originally through a genealogy going back
to Samarkand and the Maturidis
of of Samarkand,
very developed karam tradition.
So,
Dariya Bhatti's father is also from that from
that world.
But this is now the Raj,
and he in order to sustain himself, the
Mughals are gone. If you want a decent,
honorable
living, you somehow have to deal with the
fact of the British
structure.
So he becomes deputy collector
in several districts in UP, which is a
pretty,
decent kind of job. Moves around, knows English.
It's really important to understand that Daria Bedi,
even though his further ancestors,
Wunshi's, Malvies,
poets,
that they're already accommodating themselves to the new
British reality.
Speaking English,
getting on with British railway officials and so
forth.
But he's still the father was still devout.
A lover of the Quran, a lover of
Persian poetry, a lover of Urdu poetry,
and also known to have been respected by
the Hindus. And in the context of modern
Indian nationalism, it's important to remember that these
traditional people
had developed for years a close modus vivendi
with the Hindu
classes who all also are lovers of of
Persian poetry
and accommodated
to the same world. So,
that's his father, Rahmatullah.
His mother,
Nasirun Nisa.
The women are important in these stories, but
because they are master art,
their world is not the documented world of
the public space,
but the no less significant world of the
home, which
is particularly important in that this is where
the new generation is being
shaped and schooled. Women have a particularly
significant
role.
So when we look at her life, we
see the real conservatism
of these families at the time.
When she took the train,
they had to book a whole railway compartment
in case some strange man came.
She didn't wait on the platform,
but she came in a kind of palanquin
that was carried by bearers with curtains,
which was put into the train,
and she'd get out when she was in
the train. So nobody could see anything at
all. This was the real street.
Purda.
So she's from that world, but she's a
lover of the Quran. She says tahajjud every
night. She's really active in her world,
which is a world
of sadaqa,
looking after orphans, feeding the poor. And orphans
are one of the instruments of Islamisation
in India because there's famines and famines and
famines, and a lot of people died. The
country is full of orphans.
Muslim or Hindu orphans, they get taken in
by these big
traditional
Elizabethan Urdu speaking families
brought up,
as Muslims as part of the enormous
sprawling ethnic
extended family.
So this is his
family background. He was born in 18/92
in the town of Dariabad,
and he does the traditional thing. The age
of 4, the traditional Indian ceremony, the Bismillah.
He recites
the Arabic Urdu letters for the first time.
He recites his Faatiha,
everybody celebrates as a meal and he's off.
So his early education is done at home
in the traditional way with a Munshi who's
around all day long. And
Persian teachers, Quran teachers come to their house.
And he does the very Persian focused,
kind of ethical
syllabus because the Persian style of teaching is
kind of sweet and enjoyable for children, particularly
texts like Saudi,
the Gulistan, and the Bustan. It's nice stories,
some of it quite amusing,
but always with a moral and an Islamic
message
That Persian becomes an important instrument of
communication,
really, even for young children in in this
world.
So he does Saadis Bostan in particular.
He looks at,
he says that at an early age he
was at post it memor ghazali's
Kimyaisa Adet.
Quite a difficult text,
but something presumably sunk in.
Mollajami,
Yusuf Zuleikha,
which actually we had a lecture on Mollajami
a few months ago, and we did some
extracts from Yusuf Zuleikha.
Urdu poetry,
moral tales,
by the age of 7, his are half
his.
And he has because this is a kind
of Lucknow UP world of everybody is into
poetry
Before people have
phones to waste their lives on,
poetry is the thing.
The family members are saying, come to me
with this to this book shop. I've heard
that they've got a new poetry collection.
Have you heard that there's a new edition
of this?
And books are everybody's life, that's all there
is. There's not even wireless
at this stage.
It's just books. Everything is print media and
manuscripts.
So at the age of 8 he goes
to school for the first time, and he
proves exceptional.
Now his parents, because his father is a
district collector, are not putting him in a
madrassa or a darulonorm.
He doesn't engage with that world. Even though
he becomes
significant finally in the nadwatuloloma
in Lucknow.
But he goes to
a kind of European style school
in which he's one of the very few
Muslim pupils.
Almost everybody is Hindu.
And,
he has a good relationship with them. He
learns English for the first time from a
Hindu teacher. There's just 2 Muslim teachers in
the school who are both Shia.
Lucknow and region is a big, Twelver Shia
community.
Though his relations with Hindu is interesting. And
again from this this book, let me just
read a translation
of Dhariya Bade's own recollection
of,
what it was like to be a minority
pupil.
It was for the first time that I
came into direct contact with Hindus, who are
my equals.
Earlier I'd been in touch with only some
subordinate Hindus, as for example the stable boy,
office attendant, or private tutor.
The Hindu custom of greeting with the folding
hands, the excessive respect for Brahmins which bordered
on veneration,
the touching of the feet of teachers, their
practice of untouchability
even among themselves struck me.
They did not share food or drink among
themselves,
never mind eating or drinking with Muslims.
Students had the option to learn either Persian
or Sanskrit.
Most of the students who were of course
Hindus used to opt for Persian.
Even the majority of the teachers of Persian
were Hindus.
At the insistence of the Arabic teacher however,
I chose Arabic as the optional language.
This is a 100 years ago. India has
really changed.
It's hard to imagine that educated Hindus and
schoolboys
would prefer to do Persian where the literature
is entirely Islamic. There's no Hindu Persian literature
really that's in the canon.
And that that was just the language of
India. It was the language educated language of
India before English came to
displace
it
all. So I was weak in mathematics. My
Hindu headmaster was kind enough to ask a
class fellow to help me overcome my weakness.
He did this job almost as a religious
duty, and did not charge any fee.
Although he was a needy student, he declined
to accept the modest honorarium which I offered
him after the examination.
Later on he joined the education department as
a demonstrator.
In 1960 when he learned about the demise
of my elder brother, he visited me after
a gap of decades.
While offering condolences to me he said, today
not only your brother, my brother too has
passed away. I stand by you in your
grief. So he's
very
insistent later on when
commonless tensions become
the big issue in India,
to record the fact that in his day,
this is before the First World War,
relations are pretty good and the Islamic culture
is kind of the prestige culture.
And he also notices his observation
of these internal differentiation
between the the Hindus. That they wouldn't share
food amongst themselves,
because they were from different castes and different
sub castes and were simply not allowed
to do that. So it's a very interesting
reminder of of a different India,
the pre pre partition
India, before the British and others started to
stir up this communist divide and rule thing.
I think it's important for Muslims now to
remember that things were not always
bad.
So,
he then goes on to Lucknow, to something
called Canning College, which is a Europeanized
branch of the University of Allahabad.
It becomes
a university, Lucknow University, a bit later. By
this time, it's a kind of branch
of the other one.
The lecturers here are mostly Europeans.
Academics have come up from Europe, usually Germans
or English.
And here the subjects that he chooses are
Arabic and philosophy
and English.
Those three things put together become really important
in shaping his orientation and his technique in
his in his tafsir.
And the standard is pretty high as far
as one could tell because the Arabic set
texts include some of the hardest things. If
you know Arabic literature, you'll recognize the names
of the Diwan of Abu Tammam,
the Muhammat
of Al Hariri and Al Hamadani,
Ibn Khaldun. This is fairly advanced
stuff. But he's really
even though he never really gets top grades,
he comes out with a 21.
He's really just
an obsessively
voracious
reader.
He's in the library of this Canning College
place and he sets out to read everything
he can get his hands on.
So he hears weeks in advance with great
excitement excitement that the new edition of the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica is going to arrive in Lucknow.
Nowadays, young people might think, oh, the next
series of Game of Thrones,
that's where we are now, but back then,
cyclopedia Britannica is coming. It doesn't reach the
library yet, but he's impatient. So he has
a Hindu friend who's bought it, who's wealthy,
who agrees to lend it to him one
volume at a time.
So he reads the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica,
38 volumes,
and acquires
as a result a
pretty encyclopedic
amount of knowledge. Even though
when you read his tafsir it doesn't become
particularly
burdensome.
It's not full of obscure references.
He actually limits himself to a fairly small
number of European sources when he's dealing, for
instance, with biblical place names that relate to
or annex stories.
He doesn't,
wear his learning on his sleeve, but clearly,
erudition and also very strong memory
to
necessary
preconditions
for scholarship.
So
his reading in the library and the library
is full particularly of English philosophers,
Locke,
Hume, well he's Scottish,
John Stuart Mill,
Henry James,
author of this
religiously quite subversive book, Varieties of Religious Experience.
Lapna, of course, is also one of the
great centres of Urdu
learning,
and he associates with people like Abul Kalam
Azad,
who later, of
course, becomes another
Qur'anic focused person. He's great Tarjumaan al Quran,
bits of which are in English,
And becomes the 1st minister of education in
Independent India, Abu Kalam Azad, an opponent of
partitioner,
significant scholar, Mollana.
In 1912, he graduates,
and he wants to do a masters. It's
already pretty unusual
for an Indian to have a BA in
those days. Even in England at the time
it was unusual.
Where to go for a masters in India?
There's basically just two places. There's Benares Hindu
University,
and there's this place that Sirsayed Ahmed Khan
has created in 18/75,
the Anglo Mohammedan
College
in Aligarh.
Now this
still exists, of course. Aligarh is one of
the main universities of India. Aligarh Muslim University,
it's called now. And it has sub campuses
in Bengal and Kerala and places, and is
mainly science oriented now. But it has a
faculty of theology with
a Shi'i section and a Sunni section. That's
how things are nowadays.
But back then it was the only place
where you could get a western style
university education. And it was founded
by Sirsair Ahmad Khan after his visit to
Oxford and Cambridge. He wanted there to be
an Indian Mohammedan
version of this. So it has kind of
Oxford type quadrangles
and
libraries, debating societies, chess clubs. It's that sort
of Victorian
institution
and did a lot for the Muslims of
the subcontinent. It was focused on the broader
Aligar movement that included for instance a movement
to reform the Urdu language. So that
it became a little bit less
complex,
and rococo, and became a little bit simpler,
so that more people could simply understand
text.
So
he studies there where he encounters not just
English empiricist philosophers, but also German idealists,
Kant and Hegel in particular.
He doesn't really thrive there. He moves on
to St Stephen's College in Delhi, which again
is
is still there.
I'm in touch with
1 or 2 members of staff there. It's
an Anglican institution.
He continues his MA, but in 1912,
his father dies.
His
father, before he dies, he dies on Hajj,
he's buried in Mu'ala.
His father,
puts aside
some
income for him, that's not accessible. But, an
important philanthropist called the Raja of Mahbodabad,
donates some money for the support of him
specifically because he's a rising
star. Raja of Mahmoudabad
is an interesting figure in the development of
British Islam.
You still hear his name
amongst old timers.
Now, but this in 1912 is the old
rajah of Mahmoodabad,
Muhammad Ali Muhammad Khan,
who died shortly afterwards and the later raja
of Mahamudabad.
The Shi'i family,
So he had a house in Karbala, which
was then donated to the government of Pakistan,
and that's what became of it,
and is buried in Mashhad.
But this rajah of Muhammad Ahmad
Amir, I think,
who Muhammad Ahmad,
small city,
mainly Muslim or maybe 5050
Hindu Muslim with a big Muslim qaila castle
in the middle, a traditional
sort of Nawab scene.
He's really a kind of Sufi, Shi'i,
kind of ecstatic type, And it's he who
creates the Islamic Cultural Centre in London,
which is Regent's Lodge,
which then becomes the Islamic Cultural Center, which
is the Regent's Park mosque.
He's the one who
agitates for that,
and,
collects money and and makes that
happen, and becomes its first director. A very
even Arabi oriented,
quite
ecstatic
lover of God, particular
very aristocratic mother. I've I've met people who,
remember him and were quite,
he was particularly support supportive of the convert
community at the time. That was before the
Arab embassies really got got involved.
His Marcia, his great poem in Urdu
on the death of Imam Hussain,
published in London just
a couple of years ago, I think. So
still his literary presence is there. But the
Raja of Mahmood are bad, significant figure. So
his father puts money in an account to
support Daria Bedi, who's this promising student.
His father
dies, never comes back from Hajj,
and then the bank
breaks,
and the money's gone.
So he can't continue his MA,
and the family, relatives, they're not really able
to support him with this. So he never
really finishes his academic career, which he said
later on might have been a blessing. He
might have ended up as a philosophy teacher
in some minor university and kind of spent
his time
teaching Hegel to Indians. And fine, but not
not transformative.
But during this time,
something is going on within him
which is far from good.
This is a time of
spiritual crisis.
The traditional olamaz discourse and the highfaluting
Urdu and Persian poetry and the ancient talk
of nightingales and rose gardens and Leila and
Majdun,
is colliding
with the pragmatism of John Stuart Mill and
the religious skepticism of Henry James, and there
doesn't seem to be a way in which
you can inhabit both worlds.
Remember what we said about this 18 fifties
watershed, the difficulty that so many Muslims had
in adjusting themselves mentally to this completely new
cognitive frame.
Now all of this reading that he's doing
late at night reading this philosophy in the
the library at Canning
College
is starting to get to him.
He doesn't have a language which enables him
to process this new
science based,
very secular
philosophy. Huxley was called Darwin's bulldog. These are
really anti religious figures.
And because he is inhabiting 2 worlds,
the kind of traditional Munshi world of the
extended family at home,
Every second
sentence is a line of poetry. And then
he's reading this this Victorian,
sort of, secular positivism.
That because he's inhabiting these 2 worlds, he
kind of falls into a spiritual crisis.
And that maybe is the most dramatic sort
of Ghazalian moment in his life, that effectively
he loses his faith.
He doesn't go out carousing, drinking, womanising, and
so forth. He's not like that.
He's still a very high minded person,
but he's not
praying any longer.
And even when he puts his religious identity
down when applying for this
MA,
under religion,
he doesn't put Muslim, he puts rationalist.
That's quite extreme to be that
out and open about it.
And it seems that he becomes pretty confident
and arrogant that Olamat can't help him. They
don't know these modern debates. They can't deal
with John Stuart Mill and so forth.
His brilliant world
with all of its articulateness
doesn't have anything to say to him. It's
dumb.
So he's in this kind of desert,
and
during this time starts to publish, he's still
in his early twenties,
very smart.
Unwin publishes in London,
bring out
a book,
Psychology of Leadership,
quite appropriate for these lectures, which is in
English. He writes it in nice English.
And it's pretty hostile to the idea of
prophecy, to the idea of belief in God.
It's about progress,
science,
positivism,
reason, all of these sort of 19th century
Victorian
ideals that were then going to come
under severe pressure in the 20th century
following
rationalist ideologies of communism, Marxism,
and then,
the collapse of the Newtonian
idea of cause and effect at the hands
of Darwin,
at the hands of,
Einstein.
Relativity,
when theology started to become much more intellectually
interesting again. But this time,
it is hard.
So he starts to write anonymous
articles defending secularity
and atheism
in Urdu journals. But word gets out.
So
Ahmed Raza Khan,
who is never hesitant
to hurl an anathema at anybody, calls him
kafir.
Becomes a big big deal.
But then slowly
his views start to moderate. He's a kind
of zealous convert to the
to nothingness.
But
it's very important to recognize how this happens,
because even today there are Muslims who have
a crisis. They go to a degree in
medicine, and they think Darwin can't be reconciled.
It becomes
the more these are, but the mosque can't
really help, and so there's a crisis.
And in this generation, this is really the
first time when this is happening to the
Ummah,
across the Ummah. But in his case, you
know, particularly
scandalous given his background and his ancestry and
his his Ahafis.
So it's important to spend some time thinking
about how it was during these 10 years
that he starts to soften and comes back.
This is like Salman Rushdie, but a 100
years earlier.
The Salman Rushdie crisis is book burning and
hyperventilating
and Khomeini's fatwa, and that if anything pushes
Rushdie further away.
It's certainly not the kind
of panic, knee jerk reaction that's going to
melt his heart and think, well, maybe I
should start taking Islam more seriously.
100 years ago,
the Muslim olema and population of India were
more subtle and more confident,
and thought instead of pressing the panic button,
let's work with him.
Let's pray for him.
It said his father went on Hajj specifically
to pray for his son.
But never heard the news that it'd come
back to Islam. It was a real source
of
grief for
him.
Scholars who are already in his circle are
trying to reason with this passionate
dogmatic young man. One is Muhammad Ali Johar,
who becomes one of the key figures in
the congress party, and a key
quite often imprisoned
activist
and agitator against,
against
the the Raj.
In fact, he becomes the president of the
National Congress party for for a while. He's
another
Aligar
graduate, but also studies
in Oxford. So he's a very interesting example
of this transitional generation,
Regarded as a bit too kind of dogmatically
religious by some of the more kind of
secularizing
Jina type,
people in India at the time,
but a really triumphant defender of the Quran.
Really good in English, writes articles in The
Times and The Guardian.
Somebody worth finding out about, Muhammad Ali Johar
from this transitional,
generation. So he goes to him and tries
to kind of listen to him, to deal
gently with him, to hear his arguments, to
try and find
some common ground.
In the background,
and the extent of this,
has not really been fully acknowledged by a
lot of modern Indian writers who are still
in the shadow of the Aligarh movement's determination
to demonstrate against the,
idea of so many
British writers
that Indian religion is a kind
of folklore or primitivism.
But there is in the family,
another influence.
The influence of somebody called Waris Ali Shah.
Now Waris Ali Shah died in 1905,
so this is before
the crisis.
But his disciples, Dervish's acolytes, are still around.
And,
he is from a place called Dehwa. Now
it is Dehwa Sharif, which is only kind
of
a day's walk, if you like, from for
Lucknow. This is the big spiritual happening
of the region in the late 19th century.
And,
this movement is a kind of
really medieval movement in many ways. This has
nothing to do with any kind of
formalised,
fastidious,
deobandi precision,
nor has it anything to do
with Gerard Ali or Sayed Ahmed Khan,
Yusuf
Ali, reformism or rationalism. This is traditional Indian
Sufism.
And
the walasis
continue to exist.
He is this ecstatic.
So
the story, and it's worth being aware that
behind the scenes of these kind of Anglicised
elites, traditional
India is still what most people are following.
5 generations
before
Walrus Ali Shah
burst onto the scene as this kind of
geyser of ecstatic,
wheelayer,
A wandering dervish had come 5 generations to
to his ancestor,
saying my greetings to you and to him
who will be born in your family. Allah
has illuminated your brow. I offer you my
congratulations.
His qualities will spill over the boundaries of
2 worlds.
His conduct and kindness will resemble the light
of Mustapha.
It will be popular from east to west
in young people. Even among Christians, they will
acknowledge him as their leader. He will be
the guide of every religion.
He will fulfill the aspirations and hopes of
everyone.
So kind of a legendary account,
But an indication of the idea that
Islam then,
through the optic of the Sufis,
was something
too enormous to fit into one particular
vessel, but overflowed because of the immensity of
the wallaya
of these people who lived in poverty and
when they inherited
gave it away.
So,
this is the founder of the walrusi order.
They're big in karachi nowadays, but they still
have, for instance, the warasi brothers, great kawali
singers in Hyderabad and so forth.
Keeping that tradition alive, this kind of ecstatic
folk, Wali centered
Islam.
And as this prophecy indicated,
the disciples of this tariqa would include many
Hindus.
To be a formal mureed initiated bay'a, you
had to be Mohammedan.
But you could certainly come and participate and
get the sheikh's guidance, your dream interpreted if
you were Hindu. So this is the traditional
way Islam is spread in the subcontinent. And
one of the things Muslims in the subcontinent
have lost in the 20th century is this
idea of bringing in
everybody from the principle of the holy man,
which is really interesting to
everybody in India. So this name Wararsi is
a sort of surname or patronymic,
which can be carried by Hindus as well
as by Muslims.
Muslim contact, for instance we have Baroness Warrzey
in this country of course in some complex
way
comes from
that world. So this Waris Alisham,
completely traditional person, ecstatic
outpour of
amazing
poetry and a wonder worker.
And people in his presence went into a
kind
of hal or ecstasy.
This is certainly
the traditional form
of Sufism in India.
He goes to England and meets Queen Victoria,
who is amazed by him.
He meets
Otto von Bismarck
in Germany.
He wants to spread this message of
love, ecstasy,
kindness to everybody,
to everybody. So goes to in goes to
Europe and because his famous
fakir
or dervish,
is received by people and
immensely
respected.
So that is in the background. The family
is aware of that as well. There as
well as this kind of rationalist Virangi Mahal
thing. There is ecstasy, halal wedged.
Which,
of course, the the the problem with that
is that it can become decadent
quite easily,
because of the focus on the personality of
the sheikh and the shrine of the sheikh.
Those places often
nowadays, if you visit them, can be quite
depressing.
The aroma of hashish in the air, people
not really bothering with the prayers, and not
properly segregating
the genders,
and people selling talismans and
exorcists, and it's that kind
of folk religion which is often
explicitly
decadent.
So quite often that sort of Sufism
kind of collapses quite quickly into that. The
white hot transformative
power of the sheikh during his lifetime.
Charisma is routinised in ways that can be
not always, but can be quite quite negative.
But that is there in the background and
those people are around. His experience
of holy people
is part of his make up.
Somebody who is kind of on that side
of things but is a poet is Akbar
Allahabadi,
who is a noted Urdu stylist but also
a judge. So he's part of the British
scheme. But pro independence,
a lot of his Urdu poetry is satire
mocking British civilization and the pomposity of
the British.
And Akbar Allah Habari seems to have been
quite
instrumental in his reconversion to Islam.
His friends with him, they can talk about
literature together. They have things in common. He's
very gentle. He doesn't shout at him. He
doesn't say, careful shout. It's not like
the modern Saudi olamat
who say that
atheism
is terrorism
and
bore everybody with
sort of stupid emotional
reactions. He's he's
genuinely concerned
to help and,
advises him
to
work particularly on the Masnavi. The Masnavi of
Rumi is part of the Persian world that
everybody knows, and they both work together through
the Masnavi.
Another contact is an interesting person.
It's not clear if they met in person,
but there's some kind of they're in the
same circle. Althija Faizi,
who is interesting as quite a westernized,
but still Muslim
lady, who is the first Muslim woman to
have studied at the University of Cambridge.
These connections are
still present. She was in
communication with Shibley Noamani, who is a well
known polyglot
and
and alim,
author of a number of books, some of
which have gone into
into English.
Should be a mani not so westernized
or familiar with western things. Perhaps he's studied
with traditional scholars and Sufis in
in Mecca and,
and becomes the principle for a while of
the the Dar ul ul Olom in Lucknow,
The Nadwat ul Alama in Lucknow.
He writes a seerah book, which is influential
because
the writing of seerah at this time, like
writing about the Quran,
is against the background of western orientalist
missionary
scientific attacks. So the style of sira that's
developing in India at the time and finds
its way into Dari Bedi's own writing
is an attempt to explain to Muslims,
the perfection of the holy prophet, not in
traditional pietistic, eulogistic terms, but explaining
morally,
metaphysically, historically,
the excellence
of the chosen one, alayhis salat Rasalam.
Daria Bedi actually attacks Shibley quite violently in
some Urdu articles,
and Shibley no mani responds very kind of
gently
and even gives him a job, sort of
writing a few articles in his in his
journal. So this principle of idfa b'latiye
ahsindor, anic instruction of
push back
against an offense with something more beautiful.
And this mujerdala
bildatihiyasan,
discussing with others
in the most excellent way. This is the
Quranic instruction on how you deal with people
who are in a state of falsehood was
still understood by the olema in India at
that time.
So
because they are,
he he can't really make headway, he can't
get an emotional reaction from them that is
equivalent to his own emotional turmoil.
He starts to calm down, sees the quality
of these people, and they say, look at
what is of universal interest in Rumi. Look
at the life of the holy prophet. Look
at the Quran.
You can at least improve
your Arabic through studying the Quran.
But then also, he's continuing his study of
Western philosophy.
And he realises that there are dimensions in
western philosophy that are respectful
of forms of religious belief. And his trajectory
here is a very, kind of, curious, perhaps
surprising one, at least to a lot of
modern Muslims. His interest in Schopenhauer. We think
of I think no interest in religion at
all,
the predecessor of Nietzsche.
But Schopenhauer
is respectful to Indian religion and Buddhism in
particular.
Theria Bedi thinks,
why should he be interested in
Buddhism? So he starts to study Buddhism and
recognizes
that Buddhism is not just idolatrous fairy tales,
but is
an integral
spiritual
principle.
You also read some Hindu thinkers.
So he's prompted
to do this not by his Hindu friends,
but by these German philosophers who are interested
in Indian religion.
He reads Sri Aurobindo.
And then he reads the Gita, the Bhagavad
Gita, the great
Hindu spiritual classic.
He reads it in
English.
He's in contact with Gandhi, who he really
respects.
And of course, since independence is the big
issue for everybody in India at the time,
the fact that Gandhi is also an active
practitioner of a religion and not some kind
of science worshiping
atheist
has an impact. They they don't actually meet
until much later,
in the 19 twenties. They meet at, actually,
the Ors of Khwaja
Mohanad Din Trishti in Ajmer,
where they finally meet.
But he's starting to realize that even these
philosophers in the west are interested
in
spiritual ideas and in Indian so he's moving
now towards the study of
the Hindu tradition and Buddhism,
and particularly
those who are kind of on the
interface. And this is a time when since
the time of somebody called Ram Mohan
Roy,
there has been an interest in Hindu figures
in seeing how Hindu religion can be articulated
in terms intelligible to the West.
And just as Goethe falls in love with
Saadi and Hafiz and becomes a kind of
Muslim, So also there are Europeans who are
really interested in the Hindu tradition.
And the theosophists,
this might seem very improbable.
The Theosophical
Society,
Annie Besant, Madame Blavatsky,
produce people like Bhavan Das,
who he meets and finds to be a
very holy person.
So he's amazed by the presence of this
religious charisma in this Hindu figure.
And Levascara is in 18/95,
so she's already gone. And then there's the
famous split
in
the Theosophical movement.
And there's the Adyar faction which is still
there in India.
And then the European
theosophists
formed their own kind of Europeanized
version of some sort of
perennial wisdom with
Vedic bits in it. And Rudolf Steiner, with
his
anthroposophy
comes out of that about the time of
the 1st World War. And of course,
the Steiner Schools are around the world now.
A lot of Muslims like to send their
kids to the Steiner School.
So, Theosophy as such is is profoundly
problematic and not regarded as particularly serious by
most
Brahmanical Hindus. But it's a kind of place
where you can see
Westerners
interested in Eastern wisdom
and a sort of syncretism and cross fertilization
taking place.
So this
breaks Derrybelli's
conviction that it's black and
white, east and west, completely opposed to each
other. There can't be a conversation. There can't
be an overlap
zone.
So
rather curious
circumstance,
this
reignites
his interest in Sufism and the Persian classic,
which as I said, are kind of really
beloved to the Hindu elite at the time.
Rumi's Mastervi, he never stops reading. He's really
interested in,
Sirhindi's Maktobat,
which are one of the great Nakshbandi achievements
of
early Mughal
India.
And then one of the key moments,
again curiously,
and of course we're dealing when you deal
with faith, which is a gift anyway, you're
dealing with obscure tides in the heart. It's
like falling in love. Who knows really what's
going on?
Why people believe? Why they're inclined to certain
it's very hard for us to see at
this distance exactly what's
what's going on in his spiritual
return.
But it seems that reading English translations of
the Quran does it for him.
Well, the Quran is an Arabic text, and
the translations are not really translations. They're just
kind of
paraphrases
in another very different language.
But he looks at certain,
at that time, pretty early
English translations of the Quran.
And somehow, he seems to see the book
in a different linguistic world. Seeing it in
the vocabulary of English
indicates that there are ways of inhabiting
the English linguistic space that are also
Islamic.
And it may well be, oddly, that it
is these early English translations of the Quran
that make him respect Islam again and see
it
in
a different light. So slowly, thanks to the
patience and the compassion of his scholarly friends,
and because of the power of Allah's book,
even in English garb,
and because of the
his sort of journey.
He's sort of personally interested in the Hindu
thing,
but he's impressed by these people,
and sees that the west doesn't have a
monopoly on truth and westerners are interested in
spiritual things.
That one day in the house of this
Urdu poet, Akbar Allahabadi,
he
takes his shahada again, and this is how
he describes it later. One day when I
had taken my shahada again and was a
guest of Akbar Allahabadhi,
I joined him for the first time in
Zuhr prayer.
He became happy, prayed to Allah for me
and told me that my late father would
be rejoiced by the angels
with the news of my prayer.
By 1918,
back in Islam,
and lives really the remainder of his life
as a great Mujahid,
a great struggler for the truth of Islam
with his pen.
So,
this is the great drama, the kind of
Ghazalian crisis and repentance of his life. And
it's it's complex, the way in which he
found his way back. But it's important to
study this because
how do we replicate this for confused young
Muslims at Bristol University? How can we help
them back? And how can we actually
make their experience of the darkness
something that helps them to appreciate the light
a bit more, so they become reinforced
by their journey when they found the light
at the end of the tunnel. We need
to study
things like this rather than shy away from
them. It may well be that the experience
of the catastrophe of the First World War
and the disillusionment that many were feeling with
the triumphant march of Western civilization,
also had an impact on him. But in
any case,
he becomes
stronger than ever
and becomes,
particularly a devotee of the Quran. He has
a spiritual teacher at this time and even
though there's this ecstatic thing around,
he, chooses to make beya,
to Molana Ashraf Ali Tanvi,
who we encountered in previous lectures.
Who is this, Darul Orlom Daoban
supremo, who he'd once despised
not really
being sufficiently anti British and being very conservative
and narrow and just stuck in traditional
texts. But then somebody gives him his speeches
and his chhupas and that changes his mind.
The guy is really
brilliant.
The lucidity of it
appeals
to him. So he takes his Bea from
him. This is in the Trishti Sabari line.
Also interestingly he takes the Bea later on
it seems with Mawlana Hossein Ahmad Madani, who
we had our paradigms lecture about earlier. So
certainly in middle age,
Tanafi becomes the great,
influence upon him.
And Taanavi, also a great lover of the
Quran, and has this kind of tafsir work,
Bayan al Quran,
which becomes a kind of important foundation
for Daria Bade's own tafsirs.
And in his book, Tarbiyat al Solok, advocates
certainly Sufism as the basis of what you
might call religious Islam,
as very sober,
disciplined.
And the discipline
particularly of this tariqa,
is a support
for, many of the scholars of this age,
where they absolutely
meticulously
map out every hour of the day.
And
when he
kind of semi retires
and devotes himself just to reading and writing,
goes back to Dariabad.
The account of how he ran his household,
even though it was extremely loving and prayerful
and hospitable, and guests and cousins and so
forth.
It's like a tariqa,
because he wanted every member of his household,
daughter, cousin, whoever,
to write a report
every day
on what that person had done during the
day. So every daughter had to write 'daddy
today I did this and I read that
and I learned this and can you '
Every day.
So this is a kind of Sufi principle
of Muhasaba,
calling oneself to account reckoning,
but in family life.
And he imposed it upon himself, and he
was amazingly prolific in terms of the number
of things that he
could achieve. And
his letters,
people would write to him. He would always
write back whatever the question might be. So
after he died, they collected his letters and
published them in 7 volumes of letters.
And he achieved this simply through real discipline
and time management, which is one of the
gifts of tariqa.
Every moment, every nafas is a breath,
a secret of God.
Seize it, don't throw it away, make use
of it, because it won't come back.
So the Sufi time management thing helps productivity
and helps with his
family life. So
Tanavi is his inspiration. He goes back to
Dariabad. At the time it's a small town,
no electricity.
It's really quite basic.
And he lives with his books and his
family.
How does he support himself? Well, the Nizam
of Hyderabad is giving him a small
amount of money on condition that he publishes
a book
every year.
He gets a little bit of income from
writing in Urdu journals
and, from
his
royalties on his books, which is not very
much. But one of the things about him
that is interesting
is that
he doesn't belong to any organisation
or any tendency, really. Even though he has
this particular connection with
with
Aligarh and then particularly with with Nadwa.
He's not a Deobandi. He's not a Brailvi.
He's not explicit about his tariqa affiliation, he's
not Ahl al Hadith.
A lot of his friends are Shia.
He doesn't because he doesn't belong to any
of the factions of Indian Islam as they're
already forming,
he doesn't really have a big national infrastructure
that can support his publications.
They can immediately say, there's your tafsir, we'll
publish it. Here is your new collection of
poems, we'll publish that. And he always struggled
to get his works out even though he
was so
respected.
So his Urdu tafsir, which is a major
tafsir,
he could only publish at first by serialising
it in little bits in his journal.
He published a weekly journal,
Cedric, which is one of the big Urdu
literary
journals, which continued really throughout his life, and
that was one of his major,
major calls on his time.
One of the things about his journal is
that it doesn't talk too much about
political infighting,
and is not really polemical.
It's literally, it tries to include everybody. It's
a platform for everybody in the North Indian
culture
of the day. It's consistently hostile to western
policies in the Muslim world, but the focus
is more Quranic and poetry rather than
political polemic.
Now, but his great work and that which
he really dedicated
the golden years of his life to was
the service of the Quran,
which can be seen in a sense I
mean, partly
because he was a lover of the Quran
and,
had been brought back to Islam
in a strange way by English translations of
the Quran,
seems to have been
precipitated by suggestion by Mawlana and Husayn Ahmed
Madani, although there are other explanations as well.
But he has 2 major tafsirs, one of
which is in Urdu,
and the other is in
English.
Now what can we say about
this tafsir? We have it in the CMC
library, and here it is. Two
significant volumes. This is the edition from Darul
Ishat,
Karachi in Pakistan. And actually publishing that has
improved. It's a perfectly nice
piece of work.
You can see why it was a bit
of a job for publishers because you have
to get the Arabic text. Absolutely right. If
there's one mistake in it, you have to
pop the whole edition.
And so it's
it's quite a brave thing for publishers to
take on, but
it is now finally available. And there's a
version that you can get through the Islamic
foundation
in Leicester, who've done a lot actually to
promote
his legacy and this this tradition.
You could say, looking at it,
that well, it is a tafsir, because
it's not a criterion
of tafsir
that it should be in Arabic.
So Maybod
is Persian
commentary on the Quran,
which is the first one of the first
Persian
Islamic texts really, which is in 10 volumes,
which is a Hanbali
Sufi
tafsir, is a tafsir even though it's in
Persian. So it's perfectly legitimate to write a
tafsir in the English language.
And this is what he gives us
in this tafsir of Quran translation and commentary
of the holy Quran. He doesn't really give
it more of a name than that. Sometimes
it's called tafsir and majidi,
after his
name.
He
is in a sense, just as Imam al
Ghazali
is in his later life arguing with the
things that had caused him doubts in his
earlier life.
He is also dealing implicitly, though not polemically,
with certain of the carpings and the polemics
that have been directed against the Quran by
European orientalist missionaries,
and ill wishes of various
kinds.
So you could say it has an apologetic
dimension.
But that actually makes it really useful because
a lot of people nowadays look at things
in the Quran to say, well what really
does that verse mean?
Is that translation really correct? I saw this
YouTube clip that said that this was from
some syriacs or what what so it is
useful to have that
contemporary dimension. And of course as somebody who's
not just Hafiz,
but read the whole encyclopedia Britannica,
he does
have a breadth of knowledge.
So
he's good at accessing biblical scholarship.
He's good at dealing with the Arabic
difficulties
of the text. He understands it really well.
He knows that you have to understand contemporary
archaeology.
So it is
a good deal,
in fact, infinitely better
than the sort of tafsir, which a lot
of English speaking Muslims are more familiar with,
which is Abdallah Yusuf Ali's
Quran,
which may well be the most frequently printed
translation of the Quran
into English,
maybe into any Western language.
And which even though it's kind of flowery
and inoffensive
is really quite a problematic text.
Because he is very much
in the, say, Ahmed Khan apologetic
mode. He doesn't really
but even jinn, he's not really sure about
angels.
Anything that looks supernatural
is rationalistically
explained away.
Heaven and * are not really about reward
and punishment, but are some kind of intellectual.
It's,
quite alarming really, even though in the seventies
eighties,
various Muslims tried to
smooth over
these
irregularities.
But,
it's now falling out of favor, I think.
So,
that came out whenever it was 1935.
This is about 10 years later.
But it's a real tafsir,
based on real knowledge
and a determination to be authentic in the
sort of traditional Islam sense, but not a
sectarian sense.
Now
there's so much that's sort
of a bit puzzling about it. I'm certainly
not saying that it's perfect and there's misprints,
and
it's written for early 20th century Indians.
So,
specifically for their work. But,
the it's interesting. Even though he spent 7
years or so working on this and actually
suspended publication of his weekly journal,
Sintra, for 2 years just so that he
could get down to this.
The introduction is less than 4 pages, and
he even calls it just a preface.
Why is that? But actually, if you look
at it, it really does
talk about,
you know, the
problems of translation.
It's not an introduction to the Quran. It's
a problem it's an introduction to the problems
of translation.
In really nice English,
Of all great works, this is how he
starts, the holy Quran is perhaps the least
translatable.
Arabic is not at all easy to translate
into a language so widely and radically differing
from it in structure and genius as English,
unless it be with the aid of loose
periphrasis
and lax paraphrase.
Even so the fire of the original is
quenched. Its vivacious perspicuity
is lost.
The so called literal translation looks rugged and
dreary.
That the language of the Arabs abounds in
nuances and both the noun and the verb
are extremely flexible
is a fact well known to every student
of that tongue.
That difficulty is increased a hundredfold,
when one has to render into English with
any degree of accuracy and precision, a work
so rich in meaning, so pithy in expression,
so vigorous in style and so subtle in
implications
as the holy Quran.
Now, so it's it's short, but the way
he expresses it is really spot on and
expressed with
with real concision. So
he describes the Quran as a work so
rich in meaning,
pithy in expression,
vigorous in style, subtle in implications.
That's a really
brilliant definition of
you know, why we find the Quran is
kind of like the Tardis. There's more inside
than outside, and you read it and it
kind of grows.
Each time you give a hot spot and
you look something up, you find a new
extraordinary
thing. And the delight of Islam really is
that the Quran is this banquet that continues
to feed you. It kind of
it's
the flowers keep keep growing.
And he's really really nailed it here I
would say. But anyway he has 6
impediments.
The impediments confronting an honest translator may be
summed up under 6 main heads and various
subheadings. So I'll do this just briefly.
1. In the first place comes the comparative
poverty of the English language in several respects.
For instance, there's a large number of Arabic
verbs untranslatable
into English as verbs.
Arabic is based on roots that are verbal,
and the nouns flow
from the roots. So it has this kind
of dynamic,
because a verb is something that is about
movement, about action.
A noun is about something that is static.
English uses a lot of
verbs in a kind of auxiliary sense. So
it's Arabic. It's verbs, verbs, verbs. It gives
tremendous energy, and he's he's he's seen this.
One has perforce to render each of these
words not by single word, but by a
combination of words.
So he gives some examples of that.
Next repetition of synonyms. Chiefly for the sake
of emphasis is a frequent incurrence in Arabic.
In the English language, there's no sanction for
it.
Thus, many such expressions as
literally, verily, we we we quicken the dead,
have to remain only partly translated.
So that's the second difficulty.
3, another serious difficulty is caused by the
case in which ellipses occur in the best
and finest Arabic style,
and both words and phrases have to be
supplied by the reader to make the sense
complete.
Yeah.
In other words there's something, there's things that
you understand when you read the Arabic, but
which aren't actually stated.
And the text has such dynamism that actually
the energy of it, the momentum carries you
over those apparent gaps. And it's more energised
and more kind of vertiginous as a result.
But doing that in English is difficult.
The obvious duty of the translator on all
such occasions is to supply the emission.
Although his attempts in many cases must be
hazardous, and he does this as Sayl does
by italicizing the bits that he's had to
to supply.
4, yet another perplexity has caused the translator
by the abrupt grammatical transition
in one of the same sentence frequent in
Arabic
of person as from the first and second
person to the third or vice versa. This
is what they call Iltifaat, which is in
the Fatiha,
which begins with he Allahu Rabbal Alameen and
then switches halfway through to the second person.
That's a strange thing in English. 5. A
further complication is caused by what is known
as intisaritomair.
A personal relative pronoun having different antecedents in
one of the same sentence.
In other words there may be a personal
pronoun
that seems to refer to a number of
things previously and therefore the ambiguity
adds to the richness of the text. But
when you translate it,
you can't maintain that ambiguity, except
a really good translator can sometimes do that.
6th, finally there's no real equivalence in the
import of many of the Arabic and English
words generally held to be synonyms.
Yeah. So how do you translate if the
Arabic doesn't have
a really
exact English equivalent
ever
really.
The Arabic word zena, for instance, there's no
equivalent in English. Both adultery and fornication being
of much narrower import.
Adultery is zina outside marriage. Fornication is zina
before marriage. So how do you translate zina
and so forth. Anyway, and then he goes,
on and then talks about his own,
his meager knowledge of English
and his passing acquaintance with Arabic. Well,
you know, some of the world's great novelists
nowadays come from India. I mentioned Arundhati Roy,
but there's plenty of others. So,
and in many ways, in India, today,
because they retain a kind of traditional Victorian
curriculum,
and little kids
learn a lot of Dickens,
they are better in English despite the accent,
than we are in England now. Because we
don't teach Dickens to
primary school kids any longer. We give them
basic things because there isn't a discipline that
can carry them through Nicholas Nickleby. So
generally
the Indian subcontinental
standard
of English in the better schools is better
than what it is in this country. So
That's why they're producing all of these great
writers. Anyway, so,
I found that really a kind of perfect,
but very brief statement of
he's not saying untranslatable.
Who's translated it? It is a translator. But
he's saying
yes but no. It's a translation, it's not
a translation. Anyway,
but he also uses classical
texts. I mentioned that he uses the Hanavi's,
Bayan al Quran,
but he also uses the classical commentaries quite
extensively. So he uses Baydawi. He uses Razi.
He uses Ibn Kathir. He uses
Ibn Abbas.
So he's really covered them. And also the
Ruach Anani of Alusi,
mid 19th century Iraqi commentator, which could be
seen as kind of the beginning of,
a new school of
commentary. Anyway, so he produces this work
and very complex publication history.
And this is one of the tragedies of
the Ummah. We don't have proper university presses.
In the Arab world, they certainly don't. The
only exception really is
Turkey, where the divinity faculties do have their
own journals and do have their
publication houses.
But not generally elsewhere in the Islamic world.
So he gives it to a Pakistani publisher
who mangles it.
Abolhyse and Nedwi
rescues it and works on it. And finally,
it's published in Lucknow in 4 volumes.
The first proper edition doesn't come out until
about 1985,
so it has to wait
40 years or so before it comes out.
He has other books on the Quran,
which are interesting. Arut Al Quran, which is
on the toponymics, the place names in the
Quran.
He has a book on, the famous
the the the proper names in the Quran.
So who is the firaun?
Who are these individual prophets and so forth.
This is aalam in the Quran.
Other books. He has a book on Tassawaf,
Tassawaf islamin,
published in Lucknow in 8 in 1929,
I think.
Which is an interesting kind of book, in
that it's a kind of summary of some
of the early Tassaroff manuals
from Sarraj,
4th century of the Hijra,
Kitab al luma,
Down to
again Mulla Abdulrahman Jami,
and
8th 9th century, and his lower ehar, which
we looked at briefly when we talked about
Jami. So a very interesting
way of introducing Sufism just by these
literary figures. And it's written to some extent,
in order to alert people who might be
seduced by the kind of Ahlul Hadith
attempt to shrink Islam,
that this is part of the fullness of
scriptural
Islam.
Here's a short seerah, which is interesting again,
unusual based very much on the seerah events
as these are recounted in the Quran.
And biographical works. So this Akbar Allah Habadi,
the satirical poet who helped to,
catalyze his his conversion or his reconversion. He
has a whole book about him. Very useful
biography, I'm told.
So he's
really in a state of some poverty in
Dariabad,
turning out these books and this journal. He's
able to do this partly because he's not
part of an organization, and he tries
to pull together,
you know, all of the Muslim tendencies in
India.
That's certainly been for CMC an important principle
that we don't have any confessional
requirements for studying here. Even if you're a
a Christian, you could take the BA at
CMC, and we're kind of inclusive in that
sense.
And I mentioned his
good relations with with these
Hindus. It is very important I think to
remember that this strict Islamic authenticity,
the guy whose mother won't stand on a
railway platform,
is also from that same world that was
friendly with Hindus and they were reading Persian.
That can't be stressed enough really,
in our polarizing
BJP
times.
So
he maintains this
extraordinary
sort of diligent
life as an independent scholar,
which is another mode that you find
some olemmat trying to follow nowadays. Even though
in the Islamic world, majority of Muslim countries,
there's so much state supervision of olemmat
and insistence that if you're going to work
on religion you have to do so in
the context of university or even a Darroch
law that is subject to some kind of
state scrutiny
because of the securitising
of religion.
It's really a privilege
to be outside that world and to be
able to research and to do
new and constructive things, rather than be part
of an apparatus
which is ultimately,
curated
in order to ensure the survivability of some
regime or other. That's a harsh judgement, but
a lot of our institutions have become like
that. They're ancillaries to
regime survival. This is a subversion that we
really have to,
at least, be alert to. But, you know,
in the west, rather like in the
republic in India,
you're not subject to those kind of strictures.
And as long as you're not outrageously
extreme,
you can do new things
the way he did in order
to serve
the
religion. So we should close.
He dies, as I say, at the beginning
of 1977.
He dies in Lucknow,
and the Jannazzar prayer, the first Jannazzar prayer
is held at Nedretul Olomar.
And according to his own wishes,
Maulana,
Abloh Hassan Ali Nedwi leads the Jahnazzar prayer.
He's buried in Dariabad,
kind of returning home, buried in the Dargah,
the little
Sufi cemetery
of his ancestor,
Sheikh Mahdoum
Ab Keshe, the one who brought water to
the village. Whatever it is
that he did.
And,
on his grave is inscribed, of course, a
Quranic inscription, which indicates his humility.
So in Surah Al Zumr, we have a
particular connection with Surat Zomer
at CMC. It's
the treasures keep keep coming.
I've never seen that Ayah
on
a gravestone
before.
The translation is, say, oh my servants who
have been extravagant
against themselves,
do not despair of Allah's mercy. Allah forgives
all sins.
He is the forgiving the merciful.
That's a very contrite
verse to choose.
And he was a very humble
person, despite these, you know, very significant,
accomplishments.
And
this has something to do, I suspect, with
his wandering in the darkness for 10 years.
It's sort of agnostic or atheistic period.
Don't despair of Allah's mercy.
That could be said of the whole Ummah
as we wander in this darkness of craziness
that's going on now. And
so few Muslim countries
to whose structures one can really give heartfelt
ascent nowadays. Things are really decadent, in some
cases,
outrageous.
There's a lot of darkness around, but look
at this. He went through the ultimate darkness,
came back again, shone light to so many.
So we're proud to have his tafsir in
the CMC library.
Insha'Allah it'll be in the library helping people
in a 100 years time. Do not despair
of Allah's mercy.
That's a good ayah to remember in this
time when we really seem to be in
a tunnel.
So,
yeah,
Abdul Majid,
Daria Bedi,
Interesting life, traumatized life, in a difficult time
of
shifting between a fully medieval
God oriented life to the pragmatism
of test tubes, railway trains, British Raj, institutional
racism. A difficult time he lived through. Caught
between 2 worlds
and showing
that because Islam is light and can't be
confined in any world,
that you can use Islam
in the context of the English language,
and the Quran's
light continues to shine
even in the language
of the imperialist.
So Islam
prevails.
It has the upper
hand.
What remains of the Raj
now?
Well, some messed up mines
and a few railway stations,
but Islam is still going.
Churches of the raj, largely empty.
Mosques are still full. Despite all of pessimism,
the mosques everywhere are still
full.
Do not despair of Allah's mercy.
So insha'Allah,
it's
a dramatic story, but one from which we
can learn practical lessons because it's a story
of our time and our age. May Allah
grant him,
paradise
and insha'allah
add to
the blessings that he has given to this
Ummah through his tafsir and his other works
inshallah, and support the Muslims of India in
these difficult times insha'Allah. They've been through difficult
times before insha'Allah.
Allah's word is uppermost.
Cambridge Muslim College,
training the next generation of Muslim thinkers.