Adventures in Aligarh, India
A visit to the Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine and Sciences
Recently a combination of intentional and fortuitous turn of events prompted me to visit Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine and Sciences for the first time in my life. The Academy is located in the historic city of Aligarh, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in northern India, home to the famous Aligarh Muslim University.
In many ways this visit was a better researched and more informed version of my earlier visit to the Jewish haven at Chabad Street in New Delhi. I had to make this trip for a task assigned to me at University, in order to access a particular document reportedly available only at this place.
After procrastinating over this visit for two days, I decided to finally make the trip. At first I did not know much aside from the fact that students go there to study and prepare for their upcoming competitive or academic examinations. When I reached Aligarh, it was almost closing time, but still I tried to reach out to the curator who was responsible for the section I needed to access.
A middle-aged, clean-shaven gentleman at the entrance asked me what my business was. I told him everything about myself (or at least as much as I was allowed to reveal at that point). He asked me to write down my name and the 'artefact' I wanted to access, and give it to him. He went inside the large house that was attached to the academy and came out 5 minutes later to tell me that I should come the next day at 11 AM.
So I waited for a day to visit again.
As soon as I arrived the clean-shaven gentleman asked me what my business was, in a fashion not unlike the one of previous day.
Taken aback, I mumbled that I had visited a day before too, around 2:30 in the evening. He looked puzzled, and said: "2:30 in the evening?!"
In this part of the world, and really much of anywhere, there is no such thing as an evening at 2:30, whether PM or AM.
I quickly said "Yes I meant I came at closing time," and explained how he had me write a note and asked me to visit again.
That caused him to recollect, and he went inside the house attached to the academy complex and came out 10 minutes later to tell me that "Sir" was calling me inside.
I promptly walked in, rehearsing all my lines: who I was, where I was from, why I was here.
I was reminded of the scene from James Joyce’s Ulysses, when the character Leopold Bloom, an Adman, nervously approaches Nanetti the editor in chief of the newspaper he is working for. There is an air of intimidation and anticlimax about this scene, like knowing that one is about to meet someone much greater in stature than themselves.
Meeting Professor Hakim Syed Zillur Rahman
He complained of the rot, the decay, the stagnation that has infected the collective consciousness of Muslims in India.
An aged man, of around seventy years old, sat looking at a sheaf of tattered papers in his hands. I resisted the urge to look around and scan the room and focused on the ancient human being in front of me. He gestured for me to sit, and I took the chair opposite him. For those of you who are not familiar with the luminaries of Aligarh Muslim University, this gentleman was none other than Professor Hakim Syed Zillur Rahman, a scholar of Perso-Arabic traditional medicine (also known as Yunani medicine) and founder of the Ibn Sina Academy.
I didn’t know in that instance that I was setting myself up for an unplanned and hasty interview with someone who most likely stays aloof from media and local journalists. I don’t know why he decided to give me so much time, given that is a very busy and very important personality.
Perhaps he wanted to open my philistine eyes to the richness that I had stumbled upon. Perhaps he wanted to show me the true worth of my heritage as an Indian Muslim.
Whatever the actual reason for this encounter be, I was enriched by our discussion, and the chronicle of this encounter I present before you to read and relish.
At first the usual expected questions began, him asking me where I was from, what I was studying, and why I was here. Everything except my name. I addressed each query truthfully.
After I finished speaking, the monologue began.
This institute, Professor Rahman informed me, was created for a purpose. The purpose is very specific: to collect, preserve, and bequeath our heritage to the next generation. He complained of the rot, the decay, the stagnation that has infected the collective consciousness of Muslims in India. This decay is owing to ignorance and indifference, of our neglect of our culture and values.
As he was speaking, one of the people working in his house yelled something loudly to another person, giving me a start. I thought I was being called. Professor Rahman stopped in the middle of his speech and called out to the man who was doing the yelling and gave him a piece of his mind. “Learn some manners,” he said gently.
Then he continued. He was talking about the rot and neglect within the Indian Muslim psyche before the interruption, and he expanded on it by saying that this is because of the indifference we have with regards to our mother tongue: Urdu.
Urdu, he said, is the single thing that opponents of Indian Muslims have a grudge and fight against. They do not have a problem if Muslims own land, or follow their religion, or pray to a single God. It is the ‘language’ in fact that threatens the oppressor.
Having taken a course on Language and Identity in the university, I could see where he was coming from. Language shapes a large part of our thinking, and owning our language means owning our unique culture and the associatiosn that our identity has with that culture.
African postcolonial writer Ngugi Wa Thiongo talks about this radical linguistic counter-imperialism in his seminal book Decolonising the Mind (1986). Others, such as writer Nigerian Chinua Achebe and Indian-American writer Raja Rao, take a more moderate approach and make room for writing in English, in the recognition that it has already irreversibly seeped into our consciousness.
Professor Rahman gave me a brief background of what this academy was all about. Without getting too technical, he focused on aspects a layperson like myself would be able to grasp. He said that people donate artefacts to the musuem for three reasons.
First, he said, they want to gain repute or long-lasting fame, as anyone visiting the museum would see the donator’s name associated with the artefact.
Second, they want to contribute to academic research by encouraging research on newly unearthed artefacts and pieces of antiquity.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, they want to help someone in the future trace their origins through a piece of cloth, or a device donated several decades ago to a museum, where it will be preserved for generations to come.
South Asia’s two partitions
When cultural preservation comes to the fore, people hold an attitude of apathy and indifference.
Professor Rahman also told me about the academy’s rich library, which is home to many tomes of literature in Urdu, Farsi, Arabic, and even English. He added, with somewhat thinly garbed disdain, that not a single volume of Hindi text can be discovered in these shelves. Professor Rahman illustrated the power of language through two examples.
First was the example of South Asia’s two partitions, in 1947, when Pakistan was formed, and 1971, when Bangladesh split from Pakistan. Had people really prioritised religion over linguistic identity, Bangladesh would have remained a part of Pakistan. Religion can transcend borders, but a common brotherhood within the hands of a universal life code may be susceptible to collapse. We have seen Muslims persecute Muslims solely on linguistic difference in recent history and news. For example, the Darfuri genocide in Sudan, and the systematic excesses against Kurdish Muslims in Turkey and Iraq.
The second example was the antithesis of the failure of the partition. He reminded me that the Jews of the world didn’t have a common land for over a thousand years, since their expulsion from Arabia. But they kept their language alive through spoken and clerical discourse, and when finally they re-formed into a nation, they became a formidable force in the world. Hebrew is now a language used openly in the press, in arts, and in secular academia. This is the power of language and unity through a common tongue.
Finally addressing me as a “youth” (نوجوان) or a young face, he asked me to convince my friends and family to engage with the Urdu language as much as possible, to not let it die out, and to buy and support Urdu newspapers and magazines.
He complained that today if a man starts a donation service for building a Mosque or a Madrasa (an Islamic school), he would garner unanimous support. But when cultural preservation comes to the fore, people hold an attitude of apathy and indifference. This is because they realize the importance of Mosques and Madrasas, but they don’t associate a similar value with museums and repositories.
I agree with Professor Rahman here. Islam may not rely on the number of followers or devotees to stand the test of time, in fact it doesn’t need anyone, rather it is a need for human beings. But Urdu, being a language, does need us as much as we need it.
He finally asked me the omitted question — what was my name? I told him. He told me to write it down, and I wrote it in Urdu: عفان. He reminded me that the third Caliph Uthman’s father bore that name. I nodded, indeed he was right.
After the discussion ended, I was given a tour of the museum and the library’s various sections, and I was in awe of what I saw. I urge all my friends to visit this place at least once in their lives.
The academy’s services to Indian Muslims cannot be understated, and the philosophy behind this effort, which I am now exposed to, had much value in our present.
The herculean task that Professor Zillur Rahman has taken upon his shoulders requires support from the rest of the Muslim community in India. We must recognise that aside from the immutable way of life that Islam presents through its universal code for humanity, as Indian Muslims, we hold a claim to a distinctive culture and tradition which binds us through the sweet language, the لسان شیری (sweet tongue) that Urdu is.
I cannot wait to unearth more such gems in my city.
