Jihad or Ijtihad Page 11

  Though his early education was ‘deep-dyed in colours provided by racial and family influences’ yet the first prick was felt against this very conformity. He seems to be puzzled by this reaction and goes on to explain in these words:

  I don’t know why but the question repeatedly popped up that the basis of belief should be information and free thinking, why should it stand on imitation and inherited tradition! This was the beginning of a foundational shake up because the entire superstructure of inherited traditional beliefs stands on the foundations of conformity and imitation.6

  Here Azad gives some clue to his eclecticism, which had set in very early in his life and proved extremely useful in his profile as a nationalist leader. We later find that Azad’s educational perspective was fundamentally Islamic in inspiration, yet he happily synthesized anything of value anywhere. He was not ‘exclusively an "Islamic" mind or even an "oriental" mind, unacquainted with, or insensitive to, the rich streams of influence emanating from other sources’.7 He was deeply impressed by the advances made in the West in the realm of elementary education for children. He was firmly committed to what was scientific in the Western system, and the two factors that most inspired him were the idea of freedom as the technique of education, and the all-embracing importance of primary education.8 Azad was particularly impressed by the French philosopher Rousseau and was in agreement with him about the innate goodness of man.9 He wrote about this in his paper Al-Hilal, in a piece which reveals his view of Rousseau as one who revolutionized the entire intellectual and social life of his age.10 Azad agreed with Rousseau in his advocacy of the child’s necessity and ability to grasp the truth through his own insight.11 Contrasting the centrality extended to education in the West, Azad was bewildered at the apathy towards it in the East, where mediocrity was its hallmark. He strongly felt that we in India are oblivious of the fact that education is of paramount importance for the nation’s overall development. He considered planning for education on a national scale as more important than national planning in economic and industrial development. Addressing the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) meeting in 1952, he said:

  Economic and industrial development creates material goods. These can be used by people in different parts whatever be their source or origin. Education, on the other hand, trains the citizens, and if this training fails to inculcate the right attitudes and ideals or encourages fissiparous tendencies, the security and welfare of the community is at stake. Our reconstruction of national education must therefore aim at creating a unity of purpose among all our nationals and developing in them a common outlook which will transcend and harmonize in an attractive pattern the differences in history, background, language and culture that exist among various sections of the people.12

  I have briefly referred to some aspects of Azad’s early engagement with education and science and the significance of these matters in his plans for independent India. There is a sizable opinion among scholars that Azad did not really have much to do with education personally, and the task was handed over to him by Nehru, who continued to play a key role in most of the policy formulations in educational and scientific matters. It is a fact that Azad accepted the responsibility on the insistence of both— Nehru as well as Mahatma Gandhi. But it is also a fact that the choice fell to him because Azad was the best available person for the job. Both Nehru and Gandhi were aware of the fact that Azad was passionately committed to education, culture and scientific and technical progress. He surely had his limitations and Nehru always came forward to take care of them. On the death of Azad, Nehru called him ‘a man of luminous intelligence and a mighty intellect with an amazing capacity to pierce through a problem to its core’. His erudition and high intellect led Nehru to compare him in European history with ‘the great men of the Renaissance, or, in a later period, of the Encyclopaedists who preceded the French Revolution, men of intellect, men of action’. Azad was not a professional educationist, nor were so many others like Montessori, Tagore or Gandhi, yet their impact on education has been enormous. He was essentially a scholar, a man of thought, a litterateur, a divine, who found himself pitchforked into a life of intense political activity and who, amazingly enough, was able to combine the exacting and almost mutually exclusive demands of the life of the mind and his life of intense political activity—a rare quality which he shared with his life-long friend and colleague, Nehru. Retrospectively, Azad was the most eminently suited choice for the post of Minister of Education to bring India out of the morass it had become bogged in after Partition. There was a need for a person of great vision and character who would be able to assess the situation correctly and adopt sound educational policies which would help, in the long run, to restore mental sanity and balance to national life and instil the right values in it.13

  THE LANGUAGE QUESTION

  Addressing one of his first press conferences, on the eve of Independence, Azad said categorically, ‘A truly liberal and humanitarian education may transform the outlook of the people and set it on the path of progress and prosperity, while an ill-conceived or unscientific system might destroy all the hopes which have been cherished by generations of pioneers in the cause of national struggle.’ Azad was conscious of the fact that the colonial education system, particularly the post-Macaulayan phase, had done tremendous harm to Indian education, most importantly the medium of instruction. He did agree with Macaulay’s contention that Sanskrit and Persian were unsuited as mediums of instruction, ‘but English could serve the purpose no better’. When the East India Company decided to introduce English as the medium of instruction, we made a beginning in an un-Indian way. The Indians had to shape their minds in artificial and not in natural moulds. He believed that If the Indian languages had been made the medium of instruction a hundred and fifty years ago they would have come in line with the progressive languages of the world.’14 Here let me recall an attempt made in Delhi itself long before Azad arrived on the scene, when Master Ramchandra and Munshi Zakaullah at Delhi College tried to teach modern science through the medium of Urdu. Zakaullah very poignantly expressed his faith in the local language, echoing Azad’s views, almost 150 years before him, when he said:

  the constant use of English even from our childhood, so that we begin to express our thoughts in it instead of in our mother tongue, will go far to denationalize us. If we wish to remain an Eastern people, we must not neglect the language which we learnt at our mother’s knee … To forget it, or to despise it, is to lose one of the strongest factors in the building up of national character.15

  Azad seems close to Zakaullah’s understanding when he said about English as the medium of instruction that ‘now it became necessary for every child to shape an artificial mind and to tackle every aspect of learning from an unnatural angle of vision. He could not enter the sacred precincts of learning with a natural mind.’16 However, Azad being a freedom fighter, apart from being an intellectual, could go beyond Zakaullah and articulate the reasons for this inadequacy (in particular the loss of sovereignty) to decide about such policy issues. He compared colonized India with Turkey, China and Japan which had the freedom of choice to go ahead and impart modern education through their respective languages.

  Supposing this educational revolution had been brought about by our own hands, we should have certainly done what other countries of Asia and the East did in the nineteenth century. Egypt, Syria, Turkey, China and Japan all felt the need for western education. They established schools and colleges for modern learning, but none of them had the experience of undergoing the artificiality of giving up their own languages and receiving education through the medium of a foreign language.

  India lost this freedom very early, with the victory of the Anglicists in 1835, and since then it had to cope with a foreign language where learning was never a pleasure.

  Azad firmly believed that provincial languages need to be developed to serve the purpose of medium of instruction. He pointed out that ‘the experiment of imparting instru
ction in the mother tongue up to the matriculation standard has already been tried with success and the time has come when the process must be extended further and all education in the land made accessible to the people in their own language’. His faith in the provincial languages, however, could not be properly incorporated in our education system, ultimately leading to the growth of a disparate generation of Indians, alien even to each other. We are still grappling with the issue and have no clear solution to the problem.

  EDUCATION BEYOND CASTE AND CLASS

  Soon after Independence, Azad was confronted with the issue of the democratization of education, particularly when India had emerged out of 200 years of colonialism, going through varied forms of discrimination and deprivation. Being primarily an Islamic scholar, he saw Islam as a democratic and modernist movement, in striking contrast to what is being done in the name of Islam today all over the world, and sought to draw lessons for the new nation from it. He observed Islam as ‘a perfect system of freedom and democracy whose function consists in bringing back to mankind the freedom snatched away from it’.17 At another place he defined Islam as ‘the message of democracy and human equality to the world suffering from chronic types of class discriminations’.18 Azad expanded Islamic values on a national scale, going beyond the narrow confines of the faith, to explain and understand the problems of the newly independent nation, particularly the access to education on a universal scale.

  He strongly felt that the country’s goals could not be realized unless we get out of narrow-mindedness, which has been our greatest hindrance. In this new era of freedom, we should keep ourselves free from this disease as there is no other disease as dangerous for the healthy growth of national life. Elaborating upon this, he said:

  Like an actor it masquerades in disguise. In the domain of religion it appears in the form of blind faith and wants to deceive us in the name of orthodoxy. In politics it wants to overpower us in the guise of nationalism. In learning and culture it makes an appeal to us in the name of our nation and country. It behoves us not to be taken in by these fictitious names. We must remember that the root cause of all this is nothing but narrow-mindedness.

  Azad was inspired by the values of the freedom struggle and he was convinced that those values should come in handy for nation building, where education should be seen as a right for all the citizens of this newly independent nation. In the context of age-old discrimination and deprivation, Azad also emphasized women’s education, most of which had been marginal. He felt that the education of women is doubly purposeful: first, they need to be educated as citizens of free India, and, second, their education facilitates the task of educating the younger generation. In 1949, he raised this issue in the Constituent Assembly, asking for the multiplication of educational opportunities for women.

  Emphasizing the significance of education for all, Azad referred to Disraeli, who believed that ‘a democracy has no future unless it educates its masters’. In independent and democratic India, with universal franchise as the key principle, the voter was truly the master of democracy, and this was whom Azad wanted to be educated and aware. He was conscious of the sad inheritance of an 85 per cent population of illiterates on the eve of Independence. Several class and caste discriminations and disabilities were in place, which required urgent removal. He was convinced that the state needed to play a key role in combating such afflictions and providing the means of ‘the acquisition of knowledge and self-betterment; however, the most disconcerting factor was the lack of necessary funds to carry out the state’s responsibilities. Azad conceded with a sense of guilt as minister of education that the central government had only 1 per cent allocation for education and he thus pleaded in the Constituent Assembly to raise the expenditure to 10 per cent. He pursued the issue with passion and was able to raise the allocation from twenty million rupees to around 350 million during his tenure as minister of education. His commitment to the democratization of education is also reflected in his strident position in the Constituent Assembly where he talked of equalizing opportunities in the context of old caste, class and sex prejudices. He thus spoke in 1948: If they have been left behind in the sphere of progress, it is not their fault. The society is to be blamed for this. It is all the more necessary, therefore, that the society, which has not until now placed them on an equal footing, should help in their advancement.’19 This is all the more important today when we are in the midst of implementing the Right to Education Act; it is a tribute to Maulana Azad, for it was he who took up this arduous task almost sixty years ago.

  COMMITMENT TO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

  Maulana Azad’s commitment to modern scientific and technical education is important to recall today, particularly in the context of Islam, where a debate is on as to whether modern science is Islamic enough for the believers or whether they need their own brand of Islamic science. A sizable section of Islamic intellectuals in Euro-American universities, as well as in Turkey, Malaysia and even India, have been aggressively proposing that modern science is Christian in spirit and inspiration and thus is against the basic Islamic values and fundamentals. The stridency of global political Islam and its reductionism can be seen in intellectual debates and writings, where all sources of knowledge, including that of science, are reduced to the Quran and hadis. Maulana Azad had categorically pointed out at several places in his writings, particularly in the Tarjuman al Quran, his Urdu translation and commentary on Quran completed in 1930, that we cannot expect the facts of history and science in the Quran. Azad also avoided finding confirmation of the latest scientific theories in the Quran. The aim of the Quran, he said, is to invite the attention of man to His power and wisdom and not to make an exposition of the creation of the universe.’20 Given that the Quran did not anticipate or cannot legitimate many modern discoveries, it becomes necessary to disaffirm those discoveries, and to divide science itself along cultural lines; that is, to fabricate an Islamic science consistent with the Quran in opposition to a ‘Western’ science unsuitable for Islamic societies because its epistemology is basically in conflict with the Islamic view.21 Azad found it fallacious to say that Islam and modern science are contradictory or that the pursuit of science leads to atheism.22 While delivering the convocation address at the Aligarh Muslim University, Azad touched upon this issue once again. He recalled the serious obstacles faced by the reformers in the nineteenth century when they began to advocate the cause of modern scientific education:

  The cry of religion supplied the opponents of progress with one of their most potent weapons. The path of religion is not in fact opposed to that of reason and knowledge but unfortunately has often been represented as being so. The usual cry was that Western education was opposed to the teachings of religion and those who held religion dear must therefore adhere to the old tradition.23

  Azad explained this phenomenon through history and felt that human thought has had to face this conflict at different times in different countries. Europe went through this struggle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while the Eastern countries faced this conflict in the nineteenth century. He was disgusted with the ulema of the time who were quick to block all progress and reform. He declared to Muhiuddin Kasuri:

  the ulema are a hopeless lot. To believe that a traditional mind can still give way to regeneration is to believe against the laws of nature. We have no alternative but to ignore the rigid thinking altogether, focusing on the creation of a new mind which requires a radically different variety of literature and apprenticeship.24

  He firmly believed that ‘the courses of study had been narrowed down to the point of no return, not to speak of allowing the introduction of modern arts and sciences’.25 He was not only critical of the prevalent madarsa system of education that stayed away from modern scientific education; he equally castigated the Aligarh College ‘for its intellectual sterility’. Reminded of the great centres of learning, like Cordova, Granada and Baghdad, in the history of Islam, he observed the utter impotence
and futility of Aligarh in advancing the cause of modern science and philosophy in the Indian Muslim community.26 Let me quote this passage from Azad’s article in Al-Hilal, where we see him at his sarcastic best. We need to keep in mind that Azad was also critical of the politics of the Aligarh group, so his acerbic and derisive tenor may be placed in that context as well.

  If people recall the name of the Aligarh College, they get an onslaught of asthma. The sentiment that compels its ignorant partisans to hide its defects makes its critics shed tears of blood. For God’s sake tell me about the arrangements made for the dissemination of modern sciences and philosophy at this Islamic centre, at this dome of the Muslim community, at this modern Cordova, at this present day Granada, at this pale imitation of Cambridge and Oxford? What literary and scientific societies have been organized? How many scholars, in the real sense of the term, are produced? And how many of its ex-students have translated works on modern philosophy and sciences or made original contributions to these subjects?27

  Maulana expected the Aligarh College to pursue modern sciences and philosophy and expressed regret at its failure to do so. He also hoped that the college would adhere to the Islamic spirit; the pursuit of modern science was not perceived by him as an un-Islamic vocation. For him both the tasks could be carried out without compromising the faith or undermining Islam. As a young man, as pointed out earlier, Azad was infatuated with Sir Syed’s vision of Westernization; however, he later found comfort in the company of Sulaiman Nadwi, who himself began with Sir Syed but later distanced himself due to disenchantment with the education system and the generation of students that came out of Aligarh, instead founding al-Nadwa in Lucknow. This does not mean that Azad had given up on modern science; he was rather critical of the Aligarh group which emphasized modern education aimed at mere employment and not education per se. The Al-Hilal phase of Azad reflects this ambivalence in his treatment of issues related to modern scientific education. For example, commenting on a review article by Sulaiman Nadwi in which he had said that Azad ‘declared the present ruin of the Muslims to be due to their mental slavery to the philosophy of ancient Greece and modern Europe’, Professor Muhammad Habib said this only showed how even the most progressive of the ulema failed to understand Azad. According to Habib, Azad ‘objected to the interpretation of the Quran in terms of Greek thought, but to Greek philosophy, science, art, music, culture … he had no objection whatsoever. Also [Azad] at no stage of his career objected to the complete acceptance of European science in every field.’28 It is a fact that Azad always had Aligarh and its students in mind when he wrote about modern scientific education in the context of Islam. He found them lacking in true love for knowledge. Agnosticism used to be considered the result of the spread of learning. But what shall we say of agnosticism which is now linked to sheer ignorance?’ It was this lack of knowledge that prompted Azad to introduce columns on ‘scientific matters’ in Al-Hilal29