Professor Ataullah Siddiqui Of Kalimpong Demonstrated That A Devout Muslim Was Not An Enemy Of Other Faiths
By Samantak Das
20.11.20
Twelve days
ago, a sixty-six-year-old man died in Birmingham, the United Kingdom. He had
been raised in the picturesque hill town of Kalimpong, where, when still a
student at the Scottish Universities Mission Institution (typically abbreviated
to SUMI), he had had the temerity to approach one of the giants of Indian Nepali
literature, Parasmani Pradhan (1898-1986), with a rather strange request. Would
the great man consider translating a scholarly Urdu book on the fundamentals of
Islam into Nepali for the benefit of those who wanted to know about the faith
but lacked Urdu?
Not
surprisingly, the busy scholar did not take the uniformed schoolboy seriously,
and sent him away. But the lad was not to be discouraged so easily. He kept
coming back day after day until Dr Pradhan finally gave in, agreed to read an
English translation of the text, and then took on the task of translating it
into Nepali; which he did with a little help from the boy’s father, the imam of
the only mosque in town, Maulana Muhammad Sibghatullah Siddiqui. The book was
published in 1974, in Nepali, as Islam
Darshan, and Dr Pradhan would later confess that it wasn’t until he had
undertaken the project of translating it that he discovered just how many words
of Urdu, Farsi and Arabic origin had entered the everyday vocabulary of Nepali
speakers.
Ataullah Siddiqui as a young
man, in Kalimpong.
Fom his family's collection,
courtesy of Rafat Ali
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This
incident — narrated to me by his nephew, Professor Rafat Ali, a friend and
colleague — sums up the qualities that went into the making of Professor Ataullah
Siddiqui, a remarkable man who passed away in his prime, with his life’s
mission of bringing about inter-faith understanding and harmony still
incomplete. These qualities, recognized by students, colleagues and friends
across several continents, included doggedness, strength of conviction, an
ability to bring others around to his way of looking at the world, creating
bonds through accepting diversity and difference; and an unflinching faith in
the essential goodness of human beings.
From the
time he left for the UK in the early 1980s as a Research Fellow in the Islamic
Foundation, till his death, when he was Professor of Christian-Muslim Relations
and Inter-Faith Understanding at the Markfield Institute of Higher Education in
Leicestershire, having picked up numerous awards and accolades along the way
(including an honorary doctorate from the University of Gloucestershire),
Professor Siddiqui remained both a devout Muslim as well as a person who
believed in logic, reason, compassion and understanding to build a world where
all faiths could exist in harmony.
His 2007
report to the British Parliament, Islam
at Universities in England: Meeting the Needs and Investing in the Future,
better known as the Siddiqui Report,
begins by invoking “the changed dynamics of relations between Muslims and
policymakers in Western countries” post 9/11 and 7/7 (the July 2005 bombings in
London), then bluntly stating that “it is now equally important that different
experiences and expressions of Islam are explored outside the needs of
diplomacy and the exigencies of the situation in the Middle East”, before going
on to make a set of ten policy recommendations which have unfortunately, as far
as I am aware, still not been implemented in full within the British higher
education system. But that did not deter Professor Siddiqui from his task of
trying to bring about dialogue among individuals from different faiths (or of
no faith).
Dr Ataullah Siddiqui is a
Professor of Christian-Muslim Relations and Inter-Faith Understanding at the
Markfield Institute of Higher Education where he was also the Director of the
Institute from 2001 to 2008. He was a founder President and Vice Chair of the
‘Christian Muslim Forum’ in England, and a founder member of the Leicester
Council of Faiths.
-----
In a 2019
talk at the conference on “Leadership, Authority and Representation in British
Muslim Communities” at Cardiff University, Professor Siddiqui had asserted that
since it was enjoined that a mufti (an Islamic jurist) needed to know the urf
and adat, that is the customs and practices of the people, this meant knowing
about the Enlightenment, European history, as well as the religious beliefs and
practices of Judeo-Christian traditions “as part of Islamic Studies” in Europe.
Translated into the Indian context, this would require students of Islam to
know about Indian history, Hinduism, Christianity and other local traditions to
become true alims (scholars) — a point echoed by the imam of Calcutta’s Nakhoda
Masjid, Maulana Shafique Qasmi, at a memorial meeting held for Professor
Siddiqui a few days ago, where he asserted that only people who have not read
their scriptures properly fight over religion and that, in his opinion, the
Gita and the Bible, along with the Quran, ought to be read by madrasa students
as part of their curriculum. Such has been Professor Ataullah Siddiqui’s
influence.
Yet I was
unable to find mention of the man and his work in any major newspaper of the
state where he had been raised and educated. Which is a pity for through his
life and work — and I do not have the space to write about his many books and
articles here — Ataullah Siddiqui had demonstrated that a devout Muslim was not
only not an enemy of other faiths, but rather that it is part of a true
Muslim’s calling to understand, respect, and cooperate with members of the
nation/region/community/locality who hold beliefs that differ from her/his own.
As we seem
to sink ever deeper into bubbles inhabited exclusively by those who think and
act and react like us — a process accelerated by the ongoing pandemic — it is
perhaps even more vital to remember the likes of Ataullah Siddiqui; or, for
that matter, his fellow travellers in faith like Swami Agnivesh and the
shamefully still-imprisoned 83-year-old Father Stan Swamy: three individuals
whose deeply-held religious beliefs encouraged them to fight — in very
different ways — on behalf of precisely those individuals whose beliefs did not
match their own. Their journeys tell us that one can be a true believer without
necessarily demonizing others who are not; that one can pray to a particular
god or gods and still respect those who pray to others or none; that all of us
are, beneath our superficial differences, human beings after all. In so doing,
they encourage us to hold on to that fast-depleting commodity, without which it
is difficult to imagine a civilization worth the name — hope.
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Samantak Das is professor of Comparative
Literature, Jadavpur University, and has been working as a volunteer for a
rural development NGO for the last 30 years
Original Headline: Faith matters
Source: The Telegraph India