June 8, 2003

Throwing light on the reading habits of Ghalib in his trail-blazing biography, titled Yadgar-i-Ghalib, Maulana Altaf Hussain Hali writes: “Just as Mirza [Asadullah Khan Ghalib] never bought a house all his life, he never purchased books for reading in spite of the fact that throughout his life writing remained his principal occupation. A man used to get his clients books on loan from a bookseller’s shop. Mirza used to borrow books through this man. He would return the books after reading them.”

Those were good, easy-going days. Even so, meticulous research was not Ghalib’s forte. (Hali recalls with the unease of a devoted disciple how his mentor Ghalib incurred the opprobrium of his censorious contemporaries for writing Qate Burhan). But in this competitive age a conscientious researcher can hardly do without essential books; and since he must pore over them again and again with a fine-tooth comb, he should, if possible, keep them close at hand at all times.

That Moinuddin Aqeel, a PhD and DLitt in Urdu, has read more than 30,000 books on his fields of specialization is not surprising. After all, he is acknowledged to be an outstanding researcher who has written and edited as many as 35 books. That he owns more than 30,000 books and has kept them at home in a most methodical manner at great expense is worthy of praise, to say the least.

Mr Aqeel’s love affair with books began in his childhood. Looking back nostalgically on his school-days, he recalls that he started to scrimp and save to buy “frothy novels and stories at first”. He then turned to serious stuff, devouring with great delight age-old classics as well as the works of progressive writers. “I have not pursued anything as single-mindedly as I have purchased books over the years. I do not have any other interests. I used to buy a lot of books even when my salary was a meagre Rs500 per month,” he says.

Now that he is a professor in the department of Urdu and director of the bureau of composition, compilation and translation at the University of Karachi, a major chunk of his salary still goes towards books. In 1975, his research paper on the role of the Urdu language in the freedom movement in the subcontinent earned him a PhD from the University of Karachi. Spread over four rooms on the ground floor of his house, Mr Aqeel’s collection of books is most systematically arranged. A bibliophile to his fingertips, he even took a course in library science to ensure that books pertaining to his areas of interest — which include literature and the history of the subcontinent — are maintained properly.

One room contains history books, particularly those dealing with the Muslim and British rule in the subcontinent in addition to some rare and very old books on the Muslim struggle for freedom and the Muslim culture in South Asia. The second room is full of books on literature, further classified into Urdu literature, Persian literature and Arabic literature.

Monographs and books on leading literary figures occupy a small corner in the room. Books on religion, philosophy, psychology, journalism and magazines sit on shelves in the third room. The fourth room serves as a reference section containing dictionaries, encyclopaedias, biographical dictionaries, gazettes, library catalogues, bibliographies, etc. But the most prized volumes in the reference section are Tazkerah of poets, authors, Sufis, Ulema and statesmen of different regions of South Asia and the Muslim world.

In pursuit of old books and invaluable manuscripts, Mr Aqeel has frequented old bookshops where quite often he has struck gold. “I have spent a fortune purchasing rare, hard-to-come-by volumes in Arabic and Persian. But sometimes I have also bought books at unbelievably low prices. At an antiquarian bookshop, I acquired a copy of Masnawi Sahar-ul-Bayan for Re1. Written in immaculate khat-i-shikasta, the manuscript came out in 1842.”

A glass-fronted bookcase in the reference section contains the 300 manuscripts that Mr Aqeel possesses. With utmost care, he takes out a hand-written Persian translation of Mahabharata which dates back to the late eighteenth century. Another moth-eaten book is Diwan-i-Wali written in the same period. Yet another yellowed volume contains the poetry of Zahoori written in the reign of the seventeenth-century Mughal ruler Aurangzeb Alamgir.

Closer to the present times but equally important is a Bayaz (a notebook in which a poet writes his verses) kept by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. “Few poets do not make changes to their poetry after putting it to paper for the first time. Faiz was no exception. His Bayaz, which contains his published and unpublished poems, shows how he dissected his poems before publishing them.”

In an attempt to lay his hands on out-of-print books and microfilms, Mr Aqeel has made many pilgrimages to famous libraries all over the world, from London, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Edinburgh, Princeton, Washington and Boston to Paris, Berlin, Kuala Lumpur, Canberra and Tokyo. “When a book is more than 50 years old, they do not let anyone get it photocopied. When they do not have a microfilm of the manuscript you want to have, they make you pay the cost incurred in preparing the microfilm of the whole volume. Naturally, this makes one microfilm even dearer. All the same, I have managed to procure some 50 microfilms of very rare and important manuscripts from different libraries in the world,” he explains.

But one microfilm turned out to be very elusive. “I learnt that the John Rylands University library of Manchester has the book which not only contains the poetry of the eighteenth-century Persian poet named Ishq but also an account of the mushairas at which he had read out his verses. Theirs is the only copy available in the world. Since the book comprises more than 2,000 pages, the microfilm cost me a packet. Overjoyed, I returned home with the microfilm only to discover that some pages were missing. I flew back to Manchester, and after much ado got the missing pages microfilmed,” he recalls.

Mr Aqeel may have gone to great lengths to purchase costly books and microfilms, but he is not overly possessive about them. He has made arrangements for students working on their doctoral theses and scholars to come and consult his books. Nevertheless, he says he is not willing to donate his precious collection to a public library where books are kept in a slipshod manner. In view of the poor condition of public libraries in Pakistan, one cannot argue against his contention.

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