It is one of the more intriguing paradoxes of Indian nationalism that the man who led the Congress Party for most of the crucial years before Independence — at a time when the struggle was increasingly seen as being not just between Indians and British but between advocates of a united India and followers of Muslim separatism — was himself a Muslim.

Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed — Maulana “Azad” (free) as he had baptised himself in his 20s, and whose birthday falls today — was President of the Indian National Congress from 1940-45, leader of the Quit India movement and head of Congress delegations in crucial meetings during this period. As a Muslim divine, steeped in the erudition of his faith, and as a committed nationalist unalterably opposed to the proposed partition of his country, Azad symbolised the all-inclusive aspirations of the nationalist movement.

Silence

The Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah disparaged him as a “Congress Showboy”, a token elected by the Congress to advertise its secular credentials. The Maulana was too dignified a figure to respond to the League’s insults. But at the All-India Congress Committee session in July 1947 which debated the Partition plan, Azad stayed silent throughout, and finally abstained from voting on the resolution. He could not vote against it because he knew that the League’s appeal had now captured most of the Muslim masses, and he had learned through bitter experience how intractable the League’s leaders were and how illusory the prospects of co-operation with them in a national government. So Partition, the very idea of which he found abhorrent, had become inevitable, and Maulana Azad was too intelligent a man not to acknowledge reality. His silence was the silence of a man who had nothing left to say; no words could have been adequate in the face of this transcendent political failure.

The irony was that he was 10 times the Muslim that the secular, bacon-and-sausage-eating, English-educated and Westernised Jinnah was. Born in Mecca and raised in Calcutta, Maulana Azad was a brilliant Islamic scholar, completing his religious studies at the astonishingly young age of 16, some nine years younger than the norm. He was a linguist, mastering Persian and Arabic in addition to Urdu and Hindi; an internationalist, who travelled extensively in the Arab and Muslim worlds and acquired a deep understanding of the main currents in those societies; a scholar, who read widely and retained a profound, even encyclopaedic, knowledge of political and social issues; an educationist, who founded the Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi; a journalist and writer, who started, edited and wrote India’s first nationalist newspapers in Urdu; and a man of action, who led the Khilafat movement and the Dharasana agitation, and who remains the youngest-ever President of the Indian National Congress, having been first elected to that position in 1923 at the age of barely 35.

Humane thinker

And in the midst of all this he was a deeply humane and reflective Islamic thinker. Where Jinnah’s was an Islam of identity, Azad’s was an Islam of faith and conviction, the source of his intellectual worldview. As a follower of the Ahl-i-Hadith school of Islamic theology, he took a broad and all-encompassing view of his faith, reflected in several treatises liberally reinterpreting the holy texts and principles of Islam. Within the grand debate in Islamic jurisprudence between votaries of Taqlid, or strict adherence to conformity, and Tajdid, or constructive reinterpretation of doctrine in the light of contemporary social needs, the Maulana stood uncompromisingly for innovation. Muslim scholars counted him amongst the most gifted exponents of Wahdat-i-deen, the Islamic equivalent of “Sarva Deva Samabhavaha” or the essential oneness of all religions, and his unfinished “Tarjuman-al-Quran” is a remarkable exposition of the Koran as a vehicle for pluralism, inter-communal harmony and co-existence. (There could be no better time for a new edition of his work than today, in our era of a putative “clash of civilisations”.)

After Partition, Azad understood his historic role as the country’s most important Muslim leader; in his person he symbolised the new democracy’s guarantee that his co-religionists could remain in their homeland in security and dignity. In the wake of Partition he travelled extensively in the regions rent by communal carnage, directing the organisation of relief

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