Abul Kalam Azad

He was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, into a family of Afghan origin, raised between Mecca and Medina, and lived for a time in Calcutta with his father, the scholar Maulana Khairuddin ¹². In 1890 the family moved to Calcutta; fluent in Arabic, he was trained in the madhhabs of Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i and Hanbali fiqh, in the Shadhiliyya and Naqshbandiyya orders, and in mathematics, philosophy and the sciences by tutors his family hired ¹. At fourteen he was running a monthly journal, by seventeen he was editing one, and at twenty he became editor of Amrit Bazar Patrika; the Arabic article calls him a child prodigy who spoke Arabic, Urdu, Persian and English ¹³.

In 1912 he founded the Urdu weekly Al-Hilal in Calcutta, which became an influential vehicle for Islamic revivalism and for anti-colonial, pro-unity views ¹. When the government suppressed it, he renamed it Al-Balagh in 1915, and the Urdu biography records that Al-Hilal's subscription reached some twenty-six thousand and that the journal woke the sleeping nation ². In 1916 he was confined to his home in Calcutta and then interned at Ranchi, in present-day Jharkhand, because of his views, remaining there until 1920 ¹.

He joined the Indian National Congress in 1920 and became its youngest president at the Delhi special session of 1923; he was president again from 1940 to 1946 and led the Congress delegation to the Shimla Conference in 1945 ¹. He opposed the partition of India, and in the negotiations of 1946 was a fierce opponent of Jinnah and the League's two-nation theory ¹. He was imprisoned repeatedly, including three years at Ahmednagar fort from 1942 to 1945 for the Quit India movement ¹.

Azad wrote as a Muslim scholar: his magnum opus was a translation and commentary of the Qur'an, and he founded Al-Hilal as a vehicle of Islamic revivalism ¹; the Arabic article's infobox gives his sect as Ahl al-Sunna wa'l-Jama'a ³, and Wikidata's religion values are Islam and Sunni Islam ⁴. No article text read names a legal school for him; the English article describes his training in all four schools of fiqh, as set out above ¹, and the Arabic article says he was raised in a Sufi upbringing ³. The museum's data record sets out exactly what each attestation is worth at the two-source bar.

Tarjuman-ul-Quran is his translation and exposition of the Qur'an; Tazkirah is his autobiography, written young; Ghubar-e-Khatir collects letters to his friend Maulana Abdur Razzaq Malihabadi written at Ahmednagar fort between 1942 and 1945; and India Wins Freedom is his account of the freedom struggle ¹.

As independent India's first and longest-serving Minister of Education, he steered the national education policy, founded the first Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur in 1951, set up the University Grants Commission in 1953, and laid foundations for the country's national academies of letters, music and arts ¹. His birthday, 11 November, is observed in India as National Education Day ¹. He died of a stroke in Delhi on 22 February 1958 — a date the Arabic article pairs as 3 Sha'ban 1377 AH ³ — and his resting place lies beside the Jama Masjid in Delhi; in 1992 he was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna ¹.

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