al-Nadi al-Adabi

He opens with a note saying what the piece is for: it was written for the students of al-Nadi al-Adabi, so that his brothers in the society “may have courage, and heart, and work with their whole soul, and make their own future”.

The memory it turns on is a year. In 1967 he was at Darul Uloom Chhapi in Gujarat, reading Hidāyah Awwalain, and heard from those who had been to Deoband that it was the Azhar al-Hind: that the teaching there was the best of all, that a graduate’s learning ran deep, and that above all he came out bold. What settled it was hearing that Deoband taught its students to speak, write and give speeches in Arabic, and that the students there wrote fine essays and spoke extempore. So instead of going home for the Ramadan holiday he went to Deoband.

There he found one thing on every student’s tongue: get into al-Nadi al-Adabi and you will master Arabic. He had two years left, Mishkāt and Dawra-e-Hadith, and he decided to stay three, and took admission in Ṣaff-e-Thānawī.

The rest of it is about his teacher. Mawlana Waheeduz Zaman Kairanwi he calls an angel-like man, who spoke clean Arabic and made his students practise speaking it clean; who stopped a sentence wherever there was a mistake in it, explained it, and taught the idiom “with great love”; and of whom he says he has never seen a teacher of such sympathy. The closing lines are unguarded in a way little else in this collection is:

I was a rustic villager. I knew neither Urdu well nor Arabic; I did not even know the manner of living, and I had no cleverness. I only kept staring at Hazrat’s face and tried to absorb his ways into my life. But it is that teacher’s perfection that in five years he gave such love and such affection that even today, when he is remembered, the heart melts and the eyes grow wet.

He signs the whole of his fluency over to him: today my fluency is my Hazrat’s.