Dr Zainul Abedin and the Story of the Journal, Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
Huma Abedin, a distinguished public servant, was Senior Advisor to Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Over the years, her closeness to the centers of power in Washington DC has attracted the attention of her detractors. In the Islamophobic narrative, so carefully cultivated since 9/11, Huma Abedin singularly stands out as an exception. This is clearly unacceptable to the Islamophobes and they have attempted over the years to insinuate that she was at one time or the other associated with Islamic causes. One such insinuation is that she worked with the Journal, Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, a scholarly journal published from King Abdel Aziz University, Saudi Arabia.
No, I have never met Huma Abedin. But I knew her father Dr Zainul Abedin as a friend and colleague for two decades. I am personally familiar with the Journal Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs from its very inception and have contributed several articles to it.
I met Zainul Abedin in 1969 in Chicago. The occasion was the first meeting of the Consultative Committee of Indian Muslims organized by Dr Assad Hussain, a dynamic social activist with family roots in Lucknow. The context was the rising tide of communal riots in India. It was a charged convention with a large attendance from young scholars who made an impact on the American Muslim community in later years. The Government of India had sent Dr Humayun Kabir, biographer of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s historical autobiography, India Wins Freedom.
Humayun Kabir was a cultivated man, a scholar par excellence. I made it a point to sit across the table with him at lunch. It was a free-floating conversation revolving around Shakespeare, Rumi and al Gazzali. I was young, in my late twenties and rather naïve. When I offered the opinion that Muslim youth should know their own heritage and learn Rumi and al Gazzali before they read Shakespeare, Professor Kabir explained why it was important to know Shakespeare as well as Rumi as they were both universal figures.
The discussion was soon joined by others including Zainul Abedin. He was a distinguished figure in his early forties, sporting a good-sized beard and walked with a slight hunchback. It was obvious from his comments that he was a man of erudition and judgment. It was in that discussion that the idea of a journal dedicated to the issues facing Muslim minorities, including Indian Muslims was first mooted.
My memory is now fuzzy as to whether the idea came from Dr Zainul Abedin, Dr Humayun Kabir, Muhammed Munim, Azmatulla Qadri, Dr Wiqar Ahmed Hussaini or someone else around the table. The idea was discussed at the convention. Lacking resources for a full-blown journal, the proposal was whittled down to start a newsletter. Dr Zainul Abedin recommended that I become the editor of the newsletter. I had just completed an advanced course in journalism at the New School of Social Research in New York. That was my first introduction to journalism.
Our intellectual pursuits overlapped and Zainul Abedin and I struck a friendship that lasted until his death twenty years later. After I retired as editor of the CCIM newsletter in 1970, Zainul Abedin took over and continued his distinguished services to the community for several years. The 1971 Bangladesh war intervened and Zainul Abedin came under heavy criticism from Indian and Pakistan sources alike for some of the articles he wrote. I did advise him at the time on how to handle the barrage of heavy criticism.
Dr Abedin continued with his dream of establishing a journal of Muslim minority affairs when he moved to Saudi Arabia as a professor at King Abdel Aziz University in the 1970s. The first to embrace the idea was another of my old friends Dr Mohammed Abdo Yamani, then Minister of Information, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (not to be confused with Shaikh Zaki Yamani, the Oil Minister). Abdo Yamani and I were fellow graduate students at Cornell University in 1965. Indeed, Dr Yamani performed our Nikah in IIhaca, New York in 1967. By 1977 I had temporarily moved to India and had become a Member of Legislative Assembly in Bangalore and Dr Yamani sought my input on the proposal for the Journal. Shaikh Hassan Abdullah Al-Shaikh, the Minister for Higher Education was the next to embrace the idea and the Journal took off in 1978 with Zainul Abedin as its Managing Editor.
Writing in the introduction to the journal, Dr Zainul Abedin wrote: “We pray to Almighty Allah to guide us on the path of righteousness, to make our efforts acceptable unto Him, to promote through this Journal an accurate understanding of the condition of the life of Muslims living in non-Muslim States, and to strengthen the bonds of brotherhood among all Muslims”.
Dr Abdo Yamani wrote in the preface: “Muslims wherever they live share a spiritual affinity which imposes on them certain mutual obligations. During the past few years majority Muslim communities have been preoccupied with their own developmental problems. The time has now come to devote adequate attention to our brothers in faith elsewhere. Muslim minority communities are a trust in the hands of the ummah. We shall be answerable to Allah on how we fulfill this trust.
“The believers”, says the Qur’an, “men and women, are protectors one of the other”. However, before we devise ways and means of fulfilling this trust, it is of the utmost importance that we arrive at an accurate understanding of the nature of the task we have before us. Unfortunately, reliable information about the social, economic, educational and other needs of these widely scattered communities is still lacking. I hope this Journal will help to fill this gap”.
Shaikh Al-Shaikh wrote: “The Journal, I understand, aims among other things, at focusing on issues relating to present day Muslim minority communities and at shedding light on their actual living conditions for the information and intimation of the world community as a whole and our Muslim brethren in the Islamic world in particular. The Journal proposes fully to substantiate its studies of these Muslim communities with documented research and scientific analysis with a view to advancing knowledge, and securing the legitimate rights of these communities and reinforcing the bonds of human fellowship”.
The purpose of the Journal, from the outset, was to enhance knowledge and further understanding between religious groups around the globe. It was indeed a grand idea. I contributed an article to its first issue published in the spring of 1979, titled “Framework for an Islamic Life in India”. There were other articles as well by well-known scholars, Ismail al Faruqi, Theodore P. Wright, Jr, Smail Balic, Muhammed Anwar and others. Over the years, the Journal served as a major forum for dissemination of information about far flung Islamic communities in places as remote as Turkistan and as accessible as Bosnia. It was a major scholarly resource for information about Muslim minorities, providing a foundation for analysis and evaluation of sound alternatives for their welfare.
I unexpectedly ran into Zainul Abedin circa 1985, of all places in Disneyland. He looked pale and exhausted from what he said was kidney trouble but still exuded the zeal that made his literary presence felt around the world. It is in this scholarly context that one must evaluate the contributions of Huma Abedin to the Journal.
The Abedin family has rendered a distinguished and enduring service to the advancement of knowledge. The late Dr Zainul Abedin and his family are to be commended and lauded for their contributions to the furtherance of human understanding and human fellowship, not vilified and maligned as the Islamaphobes are wont to do.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
