ALI PUBLIC SCHOOL

Maulana Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi

Ali Public School true inspiration Maulana Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi

visionary of modern islamic education

During the twentieth century, Muslim India has produced great Islamic theologians, interpreters of the Quran, scholars of Hadith, Islamic jurists, historians, propagators of the faith, social reformers and educationists, but one cannot name another Islamic scholar whose concerns covered the entire spectrum of the collective existence of the Muslim Indians as a living community in the national and international context, who, for decades, enjoyed universal respect, and who was accepted by the non-Muslims, at the highest level, as the legitimate spokesman for the concerns and aspirations of the entire community. Maulana Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi was indisputably one of the greatest exponents of Islam in the second half of the twentieth century and because of his comm. And over Arabic, through his writings and speeches, he had a wide area of influence extending far beyond the Sub-continent, particularly in the Arab World. His exposition of Islam was marked by moderation. He was not a fanatic in any sense of the term but he believed in Islam as a blessing for mankind and as a positive and creative factor in human history. In a sense Islam was perceived by him as a civilization force which retained its relevance in the modern age as a viable counterpoint to the Western civilization with all its excesses. The Maulana’s forte was his extraordinary grasp of Islamic history. It is this historic sense of the rise and fall of Islam in different ages and regions, which prompted him ever to take a long-term rather than a short-term, a broad rather than a narrow, view of the problems the contemporary community faced. The Maulana was the very anti-thesis of the media image of the fire-eating, narrow-minded Mullah. Orthodox as he was, he was far from being conservative in his approach. Umma-conscious as he was, his love for the motherland knew no bounds. He never preached ‘Jihad’ to restore Muslim dominance; He stood for mutual respect, for peaceful coexistence, for human values, for establishing a social ambience based on tolerance and harmony in India and in the world at large. The Maulana understood the spirit of the age. He appreciated the role of Democracy and Nationalism. With his deep insight into the Quran and his understanding of the personality of the Holy Prophet, he understood the implications of a multi-religious world, a global village divided into multi-religious States. Scion of an illustrious family which has produced scholars and spiritual preceptors like Shah Alamullah Naqshbandi and Syed Ahmad Shaheed, the Maulana’s father, Hakim Syed Abul Hai, was an eminent scholar of his time, immortalized by his encyclopedic work, Nuzhatul Khawatir, (in eight volumes) containing about 5,000 biographical notes on Muslim scholars, theologians, jurists, etc. of India, apart from other notable works.