 She is a well-known social and women's rights activist. Actually, she has many parts. She is a very versatile and well-known woman. She has been an educationalist. She is a writer and she has also contributed towards making policy in the government as a member of the National Women's Commission and also as a member of the Planning Commission. She served as the Chancellor of the Valhalla Azad Urdu University in Hyderabad. For several decades now she has been researching and writing on Azad Saab, Sufism, women's rights and several other issues. She is a recipient of the Padmashti. Now this is a technical introduction of Saida. But I'd like to add that she is a remarkable woman. She is a woman not only of many parts but of extraordinary courage and valor. She has been with every struggle that the democratic movement has had. She's been a strong supporter especially of women's rights and women's movement. She's been in the forefront of civil rights issues no matter whether it is a question of fighting for equal rights it's a question of fighting for justice, fighting for a greater voice in policy and legislation. She has been along with me and many others. One of the fundamental principle struggles I would like to call her that for all these daily crises. It's a great pleasure to welcome her today and to ask her to speak on Malana Abdul Kalam Azad. She has done research on him. He's a remarkable figure likewise and he has been in my life a remarkable figure because he's been there when I was young. I've heard him. I've seen him. And it is for me not a part of history, it's a part of my living memory. And I welcome Saida Arani and I hand it over to her now to talk to you. Thank you Aruna. Coming from you, this introduction is very generous. And I'm sure that a part of it is your love for me which makes you say these things. But I'm equally beholden to you as the country is for what you are standing for. And what the School for Democracy is standing for. And the fact that the School for Democracy decided that they will have a session on Malana Abdul Kalam Azad in both languages. I think this is something which is the need of the hour because the whole world is convulsed in so many different ways but the biggest convulsion that has been going on since 9-11 has been Islam and terrorism. And if there is one answer, there is one solution, there is one compassionate understanding of what Islam is all about. It's in the works and the writings and the speeches of Malana Azad. So I will try in this next while that has been given to me. I will try to give my view of what I have studied and what I have understood. But let me begin as Aruna did on a very personal note. She is younger than me but she also recalls because seeing Malana passed away in 1957. And I recall visiting Malana Azad during Eid because my father was his education secretary. And in a sense he was also his Emanuensis. Malana was very conversant in Urdu, English, Farsi, Arabic and French. But he never never spoke or wrote in English. Maybe he thought he didn't have the perfect and he was a perfectionist. So that was why my father was his Emanuensis in Urdu and English and Humayun Kabir was his Emanuensis in English. So I used to visit him and even as a little girl I used to find him so impressive as he used to be reclining on the sofa with a cigarette. He was quite a chain smoker and a tea drinker and I have those images in my mind. And then of course then what happened many, many years later when I started working on Azad then I thought that how can I understand and even begin to fathom the depth of his scholarship and believe me there is so much. So I started reading through huge journals of his earliest publication Al-Hilal and it was all in Urdu and it was all in those big folio editions. And so I went on and on doing it and in 1988 because he was born in 1888 so in 1988 India celebrated his centenary year. Now it's up to school for democracy to celebrate these things because this India doesn't celebrate Malan Azad. So to commemorate that year I was asked to do four volumes on Malan Azad and there were two volumes in English and one in Hindi and one in Urdu. So those became kind of seminal work on Malan Azad. The only thing which was done earlier was by an Englishman by the name of Ian Henderson Douglas and then after that nothing and then these four volumes came on the scene and then those were more or less a selection of his writings which all I translated and then there was his own tributes and appraisals from everybody, all the scholars, politicians, everyone for centenary year and the same in Urdu and the same in Hindi. Then I wrote my book which I am just going to refer to it off and on. It was called Malan Azad Islam in the Indian National Movement. So this book was published by Oxford and this was my work on Malan Azad, my understanding of Malan Azad. So this by way of background I wanted to just share that with you. So let us now look at this, look at Malan Azad as a person and let us just go down this whole nice little pages and pages of history. Okay. He was born in Makkah. He was born in Makkah where his father Maulana Khairuddin who was originally from Calcutta and who was a big Sufi peel in Calcutta and his family was there too. He was sent to Makkah for further education and there he married Alia Begum who was the daughter of the Harman, that is the chief of that particular congregation. And so he and his siblings were all born in Makkah and he came to, then his father decided to return to India and return to Calcutta because Calcutta was, you know that was their home, their place. And so he returned to Calcutta and there he, his Piri Muridi tradition started. At that time Maulana Azad was about I would say 7 or 8 years old. So from then on began this phase of his phase in West Bengal and his whole identification with Bengal, his love for that soil and his rise to his stature on the soil of Calcutta. So that too many people don't associate Calcutta with him so I wanted to emphasize that. So when he reached there he did all his customary schooling and his finishing the Quran, his learning even more with greater rigor, his Arabic, his Farsi, but let me say two things. One that his father never sent him to any school. There is one myth that he went to Allahzar in Cairo, which is absolutely not right. His father did not believe that there was any school which could have given him the kind of rigorous training he could have given him. But that rigorous training meant that no Urdu, no English. Urdu also was a kind of a mixed language, so pure. His spoken language in their house was Arabic. So from there when you talk about his speeches and all, the story is that at night he used to quietly read Urdu texts because he was very interested in Sir Sayyed Ahmad Khan's Tezibe Akhlaq. Later on his philosophy would become very different from Sir Sayyed Ahmad Khan. So he started reading that and very early he began to, there were two things that happened to him. One was that he slowly did not like this Piri Muridi tradition that he was, he could have easily inherited the mantle of his father, he could have thousands of murids, but all of this obsequiousness he did not like. So he would also revolt from that. And the other thing was this reformist zeal in him. See he was well versed in the Quran. There was no question of that. He understood it, but he saw the kind of reform, the kind of degeneration that people, his people of the Muslims, the degeneration of the Muslim Qom. And from time to time reformists have risen and they have held a mirror up to the society. He decided very early in the game and I'm just quoting these few lines from my book and that will give you the sense. Yanga Azad disenchanted with many practices. This is my book Malan Azad Islam in the Indian National Movement. Yanga Azad disenchanted with many practices of Indian Muslims in the name of religion appeared on the political scene in 1903. So he was 12, 15, 13 years old as a social and religious reformer. His first articles were about religious reform and social advancement. He was attempting to create in his fellow Muslims a heightened sense of political awareness and a recognition of the unified struggle in the people of the, in the, in the struggle. The importance of the unified struggle in the struggle of the peoples of Islamic countries against imperialism. So very early he was, you know, this imperialism was something that he was going to fight against. Indian leaders had not yet taken up the cause of complete independence. Gandhi was still in South Africa and barring a few important leaders and stuff of Bengal. They were thinking only in terms of dominion status under the benign patronage of the British Koran. So that, at that age of 15, he took out his first journal, which was called Lisanu Siddh, which means an Arabic word, which means the voice of truth. And at that young age, he started lambasting the poem for their retrograde customs for dowry, for violence, for frowning upon widow remarriage. Islam is absolutely not nothing against widow remarriage and all of that. So he started and a useless expenditure on flamboyant things at that age he started. But the real, when he really broke into the first glimmerings of the freedom movement was when he launched his first journal, which was called Al Hilal. Now the word Hilal means the crescent. So this journal was Al Hilal. It was in Urdu and it hit the streets of Calcutta. He was at that, that was the year 1912. So he was all of 24. And this journal was the most vociferous voice of two things. One was, you know, the reform, the reformist streak continued. But in the light of the Quran, he was going to tell his com that there was no option, but it was the Islamic injunction for them to struggle against this, struggle against the British and gain independence. Azadi, Hurriyat. Hurriyat means simply Azadi. He was struggling for Hurriyat started at that time in 1912 with the launching of Al Hilal. And suddenly, you know, people in the streets of Calcutta, the Urdu knowing, they were astounded that this young man has, and Al Hilal sold huge numbers of copies. And the other issue, the other sort of the principle which he stuck with all his life was that it is the duty of Muslims to join hands with the Hindus and together struggle for freedom. This has to be a unified front. And this principle he did not deviate till the end. And let me just backtrack and say that a couple of years earlier he had joined in Bengal. There was an underground movement called Jogantar and Anushilan. So quietly he had joined this Jogantar and Anushilan. And the name that I remember now from my own research was Shyam Sundar Chakravarti. So joining hands with this was one aspect and the other aspect was, you know, propagating his ideas through his Al Hilal. In that there is a very, very famous article which is called Al Jihad Fee Sabeel Al Hurriyat, which means jihad for the sake of hurriyat, freedom. And the word jihad is so badly understood and so convoluted, it simply means a struggle. And the biggest jihad is one struggle against oneself. So anyway, so he in this, in Al Hilal, he said something which I think is very important. And that is that indeed through the Quran, Muhammad had revealed, the Quran had revealed that Muhammad, peace be upon him, was the last of his messengers and there would be none after him. Therefore, the right of a Muslim to interpret for himself is also reinforced in all messengers of Quran. So Quran, he said, he did a way with all the middle men and all the interpreters and all the gatekeepers and said that since the Quran says that Allah is closer to you than your jugular vein, then you have to interpret and understand it on yourself. And there he spoke about, you know, the importance of the whole hurriyat idea and freedom. And so he began to like, you know, in Hindi, we say, he started, now the British started watching him with a lot of suspicion and they realized that this young man was really, you know, creating all kinds of unwanted revolutions. He was a sedition, all the words that we use today, all of that was used for him. And so they pounced on him and they confiscated the press and they tore up everything, they destroyed everything. And within very short while, he launched al-Hilal in another, he called it al-Balaq. And al-Balaq means the articulate. So al-Balaq was launched in another format, but the British would not, I mean, that was not, they would not be fooled by any such, you know, manner of his trying to push his message. And so therefore they decided that it's very dangerous for him to stay in Calcutta. He is corrupting, he is revolutionizing. So they decided to send him as a prisoner in a home confinement to Ranchi. He went away to Ranchi and there he stayed for four years. And what he did in Ranchi was something which is spectacular. And that is there he completed his translation and his commentary on Quran. And I can say that as a very modest and humble scholar of the Quran. This is the world's most important commentary on the Quran because it shows Islam as a religion which encompasses and embraces the entire religions of the world. God is not the God of Muslims, but he's the Rabbul Alameen. And Azad very categorically says that he is the Rabb of the Alam, which means he's the Rabbul Alameen, not the Rabbul Muslim. So that explication and understanding of the Quran was something which the world at that time, people understood and people appreciated, but it shook the orthodox. It completely, their hegemony on Islam that was all rocked by this Tajaman of Quran. But let me tell you another thing which would be of interest to you, that two things. One is dedication of Tajaman of Quran. So people dedicate such an important document and I saw this actually, I actually saw this in his own handwriting because my research was done at Indian Council for Cultural Relations Azad Library, where Azad had donated 8000 of his most precious books. And now that library does not exist, those manuscripts did not do not exist. That is where existed the manuscripts of Mahabharat and Ramayana, which Azad is an education minister commissioned for translation into Arabic and Persian. So that was the extent of his commitment and those manuscripts were also there. His own handwritten Tajaman of Quran was also there and none of it exists now. It's all gone. So I saw that myself and the dedication of this was, and I just tell you one little anecdote and then go on ahead. So he wrote in the dedication that I was once going back to my confinement in Raji when someone was walking behind me. I looked back and it was a man, an old man who looked like a Pathan. So I said, why, what brings you here? He says, I have heard that you are the most learned and the most profound scholar of the Quran. And I came here all the way from Kabul. I walked, I took my caravans and people who were riding. I completed the journey with them and with great difficulty I've reached. So as Azad said, I sat him down and we had few sessions and one morning I got up and the man was gone. And I, he was a very poor man and I think he quietly left because he thought if he stayed on, I would try to give him some money for his journey. And he said, I don't know his name. I don't know where he came from. I don't know his address. But had I, if I would have known it or not known it, I dedicate my Tajaman of Quran to him. So this is typically Azad and I find that this needs to be shared with people who have this passion and understanding. So after that he was of course, the next phase is very important. Why is it so important? Because of the kind of the conditions in which we are living. And that is when he was sent back to Calcutta. Once again, he was, once again he was imprisoned again because he did not stop his revolutionary activities. And he was sent, he was going to be sent to the Alipur jail. Now this is where he made a statement and the statement was called Qaul-e Faisal. Qaul-e Faisal means the last statement, the last judgment. And in that Qaul-e Faisal, he, and that, you know, in a sense reminds me of the Qaul-e Faisal that we have been talking about for the last month, one and a half month. For obviously, for the most important reasons in our, in our own, in our own life and our own, the textures in which we have, we are existing. So this Qaul-e Faisal is a long statement he made in front of the magistrate before he was sentenced for imprisonment at the Alipur jail. And what did he say? He said, I was only 18 years old when I start, first started speaking and writing on the theme of freedom. I have consigned my entire existence to it, and I have sacrificed the best years of my life that is whole of my youth to my love for this ideal. For four years I've suffered in internment, but even during internment, I've never resisted from pursuing my goal and inviting people to adopt this national ideal. And then he goes on and says, I have been charged with sedition, but let me understand the meaning of sedition. Can sedition be defined in terms of that struggle for freedom which has not been successful? If so, I plead guilty. But at the same time, let me state this very thing, this very thing when successful is called patriotism. The insurgent leaders of Ireland were regarded as rebels till yesterday, but what title would Great Britain suggest for de Valera and Griffith today? And then he concludes, Mr. Magistrate, I will not take any more time of the court now. It is an interesting and instructive chapter of this history, which both of us are engaged in writing. The doc has fallen to our lot and to yours, the Magisterial Chair. I admit that this chair is as necessary for this work as this doc. Come, let us finish our role in this memorable drama. The historian is eagerly waiting, and the future is looking forward to us. Allow us to occupy this doc repeatedly and continuously, and you may also go on writing the judgment again and again. For some more time, this work will continue until the gates of another quarter of Langopan. That will be the court of the law of God, and time will act as its judge and pass the judgment, and that verdict will be final in all respects. There is so much in Qaul-e-Faisal that one resonates with what we are passing through in our life these days. We can talk more about it, but let me just go on. All of this is happening just before he gets onto the national scene. Already his fame and his words are going across the country. People are hearing him. In 1923, he becomes the youngest president of the Congress. That is where he delivers a couple of Congress addresses that I would like to quote a few lines from. But there are so many that I will have to leave out. This is 1923 Congress, the youngest Congress president. He is about 33 years old and it is in Delhi. This one is held in Delhi. The famous lines from here, which I have now quoted out of context in context, which I think the school for democracy needs to hear this because they may already imbibe it in their hearts. But here is someone who sang it in 1923, a man by the name of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He is a Maulana. He is an Azad. He is Abul Kalam means father of the word. So he is master of the word. He is a Maulana and he is Azad. So he is saying it. And what is he saying? Today if an angel were to descend from the heaven and declare from the top of the Kutub Minar, that India will get Swaraj within 24 hours, provided she relinquished Hindu-Muslim unity. I will relinquish Swaraj rather than give up Hindu-Muslim unity. Delay in the attainment of Swaraj will be a loss to India. But if our unity is lost, it will be a loss for the entire mankind. But if our unity is lost, it will be a loss for the entire mankind. And this unity, he never loses sight of this unity. And it is for this reason that when I will quote you something at the end of this session, when he says the partition was a disaster and he spells it out very clearly. Remember that Jinnah called him a showboy of the Indian National Congress. And he considered himself a Qaeda, or really Qaeda simply means leader. Qaeda of India, like leader of all Indians. He never considered himself to be a leader of Muslims. It's we who have placed him in that niche. And that is why we have, you know, in all of these posters and all that are made during his birth anniversary and so on. He is presented as a caricature. So I want to now speak about his Congress address 1940, in which he talks about Muslims and a united, again, school for democracy. Muslims and a united nationalism. He says, I am a Muslim and this is 1940 Ramgarh Congress. There is a conflict between pro-changers and no-changers. And Azad is the ultimate arbiter. He's asked to reconcile. And the famous couplet that he quotes is now very well known. These two, there are two boring factions in Congress. So that's the story of their life. So they are, he's there and he says, while they are fighting, he says, So he is thinking what he should do to these warring factions. And ultimately, if there was a great reconciliation, it was Azad. So anyway, in this 1940 Ramgarh Congress, he said, I'm a Muslim and profoundly conscious of the fact that I have inherited Islam's glorious traditions of the last 1300 years. I'm not prepared to lose even a small part of that legacy. I have another equally deep realization born out of my life's experience, which is strengthened and not hindered by the spirit of Islam. I'm equally proud of the fact that I'm an Indian and essential part of that indivisible unity of Indian nation to a vital factor in its total makeup, without which this noble edifice will remain incomplete. I can never give up this sincere claim. And then he says one more thing that has to, he says about this composite culture and these common heritage, which we are trying to make into a unique culture and a homogenized existence. These common riches are the heritage of our common nationality, and we do not want to leave them and go back to the times when this adventure of joint life had not begun. If there are any Hindus among us who desire to bring back the Hindu life of a thousand years and more, they're just dreaming and such dreams cannot become real. Likewise, if there are any Muslims who wish to revive their past civilization and culture, which they brought a thousand years ago from Central Asia, they do dream and the sooner they wake up from this dream, the better. So you know, like he was not much appreciated by the Muslim Ulema or of course, I mean, he was on both sides. It was a kind of a double jeopardy for him. So then came 1947 and the blood bath. And then he has this wonderful little radio speech that he made all India radio on 2nd of October, Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. And what did he say? He says, in Punjab, five rivers of water have been flowing for thousands of years. Now a sixth river of warm blood has also started flowing. On the rivers of water we constructed bridges of brick stone and steel. The bridge over the sixth river is being constructed with human corpses. Six hundred years ago when the Tatars attacked Multan, Amir Khusro lamented, in Multan, along with five rivers of water, five rivers of blood have started flowing. At that time, this account may have been an exaggeration, but today it is an irreversible fact. There is so much more to Azad that I can speak about and we can benefit from, but I will simply now talk about his last very important speech, which is when he addressed the Muslims on the steps of the Jama Masjid. It was called Address to Delhi Muslims. It was made on the 23rd of October 1947. This again is from my book and he talks to them about the Muslims were terrified at that time. They wanted to somehow find a way to get out because there was a huge blood bath and he was saying, why are you leaving? What are you leaving for? Do you know what kind of a life you're going to? So he had spoken and the steps of the Jama Masjid and he said and he spoke that I had warned you. I had warned you but when I hailed you, you cut off my tongue. When I picked up my pen, you severed my hand. I wanted to move forward. You broke my legs. I tried to turn you over. You injured my back. And when the bitter political games of the last seven years were at their peak, I tried to wake you up at every dangerous signal. You not only ignored my call but revived all the past traditions of neglect and denial. So only somebody who cares about you can lambaste you. And that is why the Muslims were now listening to him with their bated breath because he was like a father who was deeply hurt, deeply injured. And then his entire being was, in a sense, encapsulated in these words. And then he says, the partition of India was a fundamental mistake. The manner in which the religious differences were incited inevitably led to the devastation that you have seen with your own eyes. And then he tells them to stop, stop this exodus. And the same, when the people I live in an area called Jamia, and people from this area, which has always been a predominantly Muslim area, were so desperate at that time. And they were all thinking, how the hell can they get out? That was the time when Dr. Zakir Hussein bare feet ran out of his house. And I remember this being told to me by people, by my elders who had seen it, and said, stop it. Don't go and wrote this wonderful article called Karar Ya Farar. So that was like, you know, have your patients don't run away. So in the same way, Azad also was earlier saying, you are making a mistake, you will always be a stranger in that land. And ultimately what did they become? They became Mahajars in that land. So he said, why are you going, raise your eyes? The Minerates of Jama must want to ask you a question. Where have you lost the glorious pages from your chronicles? Was it only yesterday on the banks of the Jamina that your revans performed their vizu? That means they performed their ablations. Today, you're afraid of living here. Remember, Delhi has been nurtured with your blood. Create a basic change in yourselves. Today, your future is as misplaced as your jubilation was yesterday. So, you know, there is so much more to Azad. He was a, he was a, he wrote the best epistolary collection in the Urdu language, which is a collection of 17 letters that he wrote from his prison, when he was in, when he was in Ahmednagar prison, along with Nehru and Sayyed Mahmood and all the leaders, Raj Kumari, Amrit, God, all of them. And he wrote these 17 classic letters, which were never mailed. They were written to his friend Habibur Rahman Sherwani in Aligarh, but the letters were never mailed and he would probably have just, you know, destroyed them, except his secretary, Ajmal Khan decided that, no, no, the world can't, you know, there's too much of a treasure. So, they were all published, thank God, and it's called, the soul unburdened, in which he reveals his inner self. He wrote the skira, which is about his origins, but it's also about the Sufis who had actually the same struggle for speaking the truth, whether it was Sarma, whether it was Mansur Hallaj, people who gave up their lives because they were, they were not going to compromise on the truth. So this man, who today we think of as a Muslim leader, today we put him in a, in a kind of a caricature and image in our posters, this man, you know, really had the two major principles of his life. One was that the Quran teaches you Hurriyat, freedom, the Quran teaches you sisterhood and brotherhood, the Quran teaches you that you join with the Hindus and get into that heart of the freedom movement. You cannot, you cannot build, Sayyed Sayyed Ahmad Khan had told Muslims that, you know, education, Abitoh, forget about freedom now, you should just educate yourself. And later on, Azad used to be a great admirer of Sayyed Ahmad Khan, but he also wrote at the end of the day, he also wrote that when the Muslims were, we were struggling for freedom, Sayyed Ahmad Khan was holding the dead body of education in his lap. So the first thing was the struggle for freedom. So different ideas, different principles, not to undermine, but I think at the end of it, I want to say that, you know, to regard Azad as a leader of Muslims and the Muslim bomb is a real disservice to him. He understood the depths of the Quran. He used the Quran to tell the Muslims that this is your Quranic injunction. This is your duty to struggle for the freedom of your country along with the Hindus of this country. You cannot do it alone. This culture, this composite culture, something has been built over centuries. You cannot, you cannot and not start, you know, building your separate entities and trying to so called further your cause in factionalism. So that's those are some of the ideas and I hope that, you know, it will give more impetus and reason for you to think for the students of the School for Democracy to maybe delve deeper into Azad. Thank you. It's been an absolutely wonderful 40 minutes. I grew up with the most extraordinarily complimented views on Maulana. I grew up with the feeling that like Gandhi was a single believer in Hinduism, but fought for secularism. Maulana was a believer in Islam who fought for secularism and for the nation and for its independence. For me, it's wonderful music to hear your words, to hear the details which I might have missed in my memory and in my reading about Maulana. But I want to say that for the people who are listening to this talk today from you, it's a revelation. And I cannot for the life of me imagine if one talks about Muslims and Hindus, between the two of us, who is who and what is what. You're my friend, you're my sister. And what does it matter what religion you need to face or what religion I do or don't do it? What does it matter? Because humanity is much larger than religion. And it's one lesson that people who fought for the independence clearly established and they've lost it maybe. Your commitment and your work, my commitment and my work brought us together and we're bonded in a manner which nothing can sever. It's a bond which is ideological, which is a bond which is born of affection and love. It's a bond which is born of intellectual compatibility. It's a bond which is born out of a desire for truth. And these are bonds that cut across everything else. Maulana's life was such an example. He was a wonderful human being and I grew up with my parents extolling his great virtues, talking about him as it's here, as a political leader, as a national leader. So for me, it's been wonderful. But for this nurse, we're going to listen to you much more than the school for democracy. It's going to be like this broadcast to a much larger audience. I really think that we should not listen to contemporary rhetoric ever. We should learn how to read and listen to people. But what really hurt me today was the mention you made that his documents are no longer available. And for me, it's a huge loss. It's a loss as great as the temple or a mosque being destroyed. When people's intellectual heritage is destroyed, what is left of a country's history is a blank. I'm really very sorry to hear those wonderful words of Maulana have been lost in negligence of this deliberation. I do not know whether they have been lost. It's a tragedy for the country. When the library in Alexandria was burned by Julius Caesar, and so many volumes were lost. It was a tragedy for the entire world. And repeatedly when books and manuscripts are burnt, it's a loss not for just a few people, it's a loss for mankind. So I'm really disturbed by that. And I think we should really start looking at it again, perhaps in another arena and another care. But I can't thank you enough for pointing out that Maulana was part of the national movement in an intrinsic manner. And that it's possible to be both religious and secular, which is something we are now losing in our present discussion about the Constitution. That you can be part of secular India and be as religious as you please, you must be. That these are not contradictory positions. I have been exhilarated. I have been educated. And it's been a wonderful time listening to you, Caesar. Thank you very much from my side, from the side of School for Democracy. And all the listeners will be listening to you talking. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.