One Problem, Two Solutions: Syed Jamal Uddin Afghani or Sir Syed Ahmed Khan
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg , CA
“Mentors impact eternity because there is no telling where their influence will stop” - John Maxwell
Jim Collins, in his wonderful book, “Good to Great”, says that it is wrong to assume that people are always your most important asset in a company, or (country). The right people, of course, are. Even when in matters as ordinary as choosing to board a bus, he says, one should make sure who would be in the driving seat, and who would one be riding with. A slight trouble on the way can turn the whole journey into a disaster. The bad driver and the chaotic passengers in such an eventuality just act as catalysts to worsen the situation.
Success of a company or a country depends largely on the quality of its leadership. Often people talking about leadership, greatly emphasize the presence of vision in it. Collin says it is a wrong perception. Leadership is not about perceptions, or about spending time and energy on how to ‘motivate’ people. Right people, (leadership team), are always self-motivated. Great leadership works on how to save people from not getting de-motivated when brutal facts become known to them. Closing eyes to harsh realities is a tried recipe behind every form of de-motivation that takes place in people.
Simply having a vision is not enough. Visions often get miscarried. When mishandled or falsely propagated, they often turn into a great liability. Leaders, therefore, according to Jim Collins, can be of two types: either they are like a fox or like a hedgehog. A Greek saying is, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. A fox is sleek, fast, sharp, crafty, light-footed, multi-directional and centrifugal, and is capable of adapting to many a complex strategy. It is less focused, and less fixated as it is prone to be everywhere. A fox-like leader is like a modern stock-broker; always gambling, always insisting on diversifying the options. Rolling stones, as we know, often get rubbed, and never gather any tangible moss.
On the contrary, a hedgehog is a simple creature. It is slow, simple and straight. It is fixated because it just remains restricted to minding its own business. It is not stupid or naïve either. In its simplicity is hidden a streak of acute foresight. In fact, as says Princeton Professor Marvin Bressler, “You want to know what separates those who make the biggest impact from all the others who are just as smart? They’re hedgehogs”. It knows one solid and sterling solution to the most complex problems because it is clear-headed. When the clever and crafty fox way-lays a hedgehog after many an hour of waiting and planning, and finally leaps out at it in a lightning fashion; the slow and confident and little hedgehog ‘sensing the danger, knows clearly what to do. It looks up and thinks, ‘Here we go again. Will he ever learn?” It rolls up itself into a perfect little ball; spreads its sharp spikes in all directions, forcing the clever and crafty fox to call off. It gets what it had come out to get, and withdraws to its hole. No anxieties; no heart-aches, because a hedgehog knows the certainty of its strength, and hence of its success.
“Those who built the good-to-great companies (countries) were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs…,” says Jim Collins. “Freud and the unconscious; Darwin and natural selection; Marx and class struggle; Einstein and relativity; Adam Smith and division of labor - they all were hedgehogs. George Washington and independence from Britain; Abraham Lincoln and the unity of the States; Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and the up-lift of Muslims through education; Nehru and the relentless pursuit of the independence of Hindu-majority India; Quaid-i-Azam and the logic of figures and a homeland for Muslims; they all were more like a hedgehog than like a fox. They took a complex world and simplified it. They left the biggest footprints” on human history, as would say Bressler. They understood the essence of the problems clearly. They had the ability to come up with down-to-earth workable solutions when the situations appeared almost impossible. What could be more simple than Einstein’s e=mc2?. They all were Einsteins of their times in the field of politics. ‘They were not scattered, diffused and inconsistent’, or Utopian like Plato, Shakespeare; Goethe or Balzac, Jamal Uddin Afghani, or even Gandhi and Iqbal, and I may include Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, too. The hedgehog type leaders knew when to curl up and when to make a rolling ball of sharp spikes of themselves for the problems they confronted.
Astonishingly in the 18 th Century, all the leaders of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe were more like a hedgehog than a fox.
The Sir Syedian Solution (Cooperation and Change from within)
The above discussion can facilitate us easily to sort out who belongs to which category in the Islamic world; who saw opportunity in the adversity better; who offered workable solutions; who delivered and who just talked about vision, ideologies and past glory.
It is true Muslims once left deep footprints on history and they continued to do so for more than 650 years, starting from 800 to 1450 . Things however changed for the worse for them, and especially bad in India after the 1857 debacle. In 1979 when Dr. Abdus Salam was awarded the Nobel Prize, he was asked one simple question by a reporter, “What happened to your Islamic Science?”. Dr Salam was curt and to the point, and said, “Nothing. The siblings that we planted in Asfahan and Cordoba, have now grown full-length, and are bearing fruition at MIT, CalTech, and at the Imperial College of London”. Lloyd Graham in his book, “Deceptions and Myths of Bible” rightly records, that knowledge was everywhere except in the Catholic Europe then.
When even a European King could not read or write, a Moorish King retained more than half a million books in his personal library. That was the time when an Arab meant a doctor. But, that was then. What happened after 1450?. Muslims became introvert; self-righteous; intolerant; nostalgic; self-indulgent, and above all, discriminatory. They began playing God on each other, and began labeling people as well as knowledge as good or bad. Love of materialism did not abate in them; they only invented ways to just hide it under the veneer of mysticism, but often under a façade of false sense of piety and hypocrisy; they abandoned the spirit of religion and became fervent in the performance of its rituals.
The Renaissance of the 15 th Century came and passed without touching them; Reformation of the 16 th century appeared in Europe and went away; the Age of Enlightenment and Reason in the 18 th Century also came, but passed like a stranger in the Islamic world; the age of Industry and Science likewise also remained alien to them.
Two events in human history impacted the people of the East and West just so differently. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Turks; and the defeat of Muslims in 1857 in India. The first one awakened the West from its slumber of centuries and made them aware of the power of knowledge, and of the importance of man in this world for the first time. The Movement of Renaissance started, first in Italy and then in Germany, France and England. Knowledge liberated the Europeans from the clutches of priests who till then had monopolized it. The debacle of the Movement of Independence in India in 1857, on the contrary, drove Muslims to seek refuse and shelter under the cloak of the clergy.
Once the people of a tribe in New Guinea climbed a mountain for the first time. On reaching the top, they saw on the other side a huge herd of elephants grazing . They took them as ants because they had not seen anything else except ants. Somewhat similar happened to Muslim as well. Resignation and withdrawal became the hallmark of their mindset.
Both Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Syed Jamaluddin Afghani appeared on the scene during this period in India and both agreed on one point. The main cause of the Muslims’ humiliation and fall was their lack of modern knowledge. Both diagnosed the disease that Muslims were victims of blind faith; had become narrow-minded; were bitter, and hence were either totally defiant, or were nostalgic.
Already in India, specifically at that time, two other people, namely the Hindus and Sikhs, had made their U-turns. The Sikhs after their debacle in the second Sikh war in 1848, had joined hands with the British colonial power in India and became the first ones to be inducted in the British army as a regiment. The Hindus had been even wiser. They fore-read on the horizon, the appearance of a dawn of whole new opportunities. In herds they religiously dedicated themselves to the learning of English and Sciences. As says Mr. Hunt, their enthusiasm knew no bounds. Muslims just watched their erstwhile buddies from the sideline, engaged in such “sinful activities”. Their priests whispered day and night in their ears how blasphemous the modern knowledge was, especially the learning of English.
As reported by historian Raj Gopal in 1880-81 while the Muslim youth reaped the curses of the Ulema if they ventured to have access to English and other sciences, the Hindus youth immersed themselves in the learning of English. They numbered 36,686 as compared to 363 Muslims. By 1878 there were 3155 under-graduate and post-graduate Hindus young men, ready to take up assignments, in comparison to Muslims who at that level of education numbered just 57. No one in those days talked of the independence of India.
Business had already been a Hindu domain. Now journalism, medicine, engineering and advocacy also came under their purview. The Muslims, in contrast, stood nowhere. Their economic and social condition had been pathetic. False pride in the lost glory put further constraints on them. Not to read the writing on the wall; not to face the brutal realities; not to learn from other communities with whom they had lived since centuries became a Muslim mark of identity. They never saw any wisdom in compromise; in alliance. Dejection either led them to total defiance, or to a state of total seclusion.
Sir Syed understood the complexity of the Muslim dilemma very well. His objective in the first place was to awaken them, and to unfetter them from their ‘sickening, absurd, incongruous and outmoded traditional credo”, as says Syed Mahmood Shuja. He wanted to pull Muslims out from the, “narrow medieval grooves and vile fantasies and fanaticism”. To sum up, he offered two solutions, loud and clear ,like a hedgehog to them:
- The British colonialism has become a reality, and they appear to be in no haste to leave India soon. The earlier we reconcile ourselves to this bitter reality, the better it would be. His famous saying is, “Unless we become flexible to aliens, we can never iron out our problems”. Alliance, not defiance, is a better course for them, under the circumstances. The Hindus had already done that. The point to be remembered is that the Indian National Congress had not come into being as yet.
- The only workable and plausible way to pay the English in the same coin and to regain respectability is to get well-versed in the field of art, literature and modern sciences. This would help them have a better view of the world. Once he famously said, “Though we may have a grudge against the fascist rulers, but modern education is a thing which willy nilly will force them to agree with the adequate demand of ours”. Sir Syed accurately presented what we term these days a process of globalization. They sought power through knowledge. Afghani, on the contrary, emphasized the same, but he wanted Muslims to have political power first, because without power, no ideas and ideologies could be implemented.
Just as a father playing the role of Polonius, tells his son/daughter when dropping him for the first time at a University campus, “Never lose sight of the purpose for which you are here, which being the completion of your education. On the way you will encounter many distractions. But remember, our social and economic conditions. You do not have very many options”. Or a doctor, telling his patient which medicine to take first and which later, Sir Syed also clearly and cleverly tried to tell Muslims what they must do first and what later.
Much is made of his advice to Muslims that they should not join the Congress; or that he did not approve Muslims’ participation in the local representative elections. These are the developments that suited Hindus only because they had gone through the first phase. Now they could afford politics and agitations.
We are talking here of a phase prior to the existence of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Even after its inception for many years, INC did not do much except to meet once a year and pass a resolution in an advisory role, appreciating what was good and suggesting what needed improvement. It remained a spineless organization, till again the Muslims jumped into it and galvanized it into a revolutionary organization during the Khilafat Movement. But that happened in the early part of the 20 th century, 1915. Gandhijee came to India in 1915. Remember the advice a father gives to his son on his joining the college. Sir Syed wanted Muslims to first equip themselves with modern knowledges as the Hindus had done. This they could do only by staying away from politics and by re-casting and re-interpreting their religion in the modern context.
To call Sir Syed a stooge of the British is to misunderstand him. He was ahead of his times. He believed that freedom of thought was essential. “So long as freedom of thought is not developed there can be no civilized life”. Muslims must get rid of stupid religious convictions which had no genuine relevance and sanctions. He told them to embrace what was of value in the life and culture of the British, and reject what was bad.
It is true that in the interpretation of some of the religious tenets, Sir Syed went overboard, especially in his stance on the miracles of Prophets, on the concept of Heaven and Hell, on the physical presence of Jesus in Jannat, on the essence of making a dua, etc. And this did not fit well with the orthodox Ulema. So they started a parallel system of religious education in which worldly sciences remained a forbidden fruit, even till today. He tried to tell Muslims how to see the Divine injunctions in the light of science.
But Sir Syed was not a religious scholar. He was a sage, a savior, a reformer, a re-constructionist. He genuinely tried to restore in Muslims a sense of confidence. In 1867, he refused to appear in the Agra Darbar in which he was to be awarded a medal, because the layout of the chairs deflected that Muslims were inferior in status to the British. His son, Syed Mahmood in 1872 on becoming a Judge of the Allahabad High Court, made it clear on the fellow judges through a memorandum that except by his name and his parents, he was every inch their equal. Allama Iqbal, in a hinted manner and Akbar Allahabadi, openly criticized him. But later, Allama Iqbal did admit that the Muslim Umma actually had failed to grasp the real spirit behind the far-sighted message of Sir Syed. His brain child, a Muslim Cambridge, the Aligarh University produced some of the best minds. They all carried a stamp of their alma-mater. The word “liar” was a banned word at Aligarh. I served for more than 21 years at Sir Syed College and had been one of its original members. This college is one of the best institutions of the country. Sir Syed’s spirit always permeated its corridors. (To be continued)
