Abul Kalam Azad

Abul Kalam Azad argued from inside Islamic scholarship that Indian Muslims belonged in a united India, and lost that argument in 1947 while remaining India's first education minister. He was born in Mecca to an Indian father and an Arab mother, was educated at home in the traditional syllabus, and was a published religious commentator in his teens. Al-Hilal, the Urdu weekly he founded in 1912, argued for Hindu-Muslim unity against British rule and was suppressed. He was interned for nearly four years during the First World War. At thirty-five he was the youngest president the Congress had had, and he was president again from 1940 to 1946, the years of the Quit India movement and the negotiations over partition, which he opposed absolutely and thought would settle nothing. His Tarjuman al-Quran is a serious work of commentary. As education minister he founded the university grants system, the IITs and the national academies of letters, art and music. India Wins Freedom, his account of the years to 1947, was published in 1958 with thirty pages withheld at his instruction and opened only in 1988; they were sharply critical of Nehru and Patel over partition. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1992. His birthday, 11 November, is observed in India as National Education Day. He refused to leave Delhi during the killings of 1947 and spoke at the Jama Masjid telling Muslims not to go. The Sahitya Akademi, Lalit Kala Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademi were all founded under him.

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