IN the last quarter of the 19th century, two South Asian Muslims were born in the holy city of Makkah. Not many knew that they would later be playing prominent parts in South Asia’s politics.
Haji Muhammad Musa Khan (1872-1944) and Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958) were both born in Makkah. Azad, by his own account, was born in quite a religious family, which he wasn’t particularly fond of. “I felt that I must find the truth for myself,” he was later to claim in his autobiography. Subsequent to this feeling, “a stage came when all the old bonds imposed on my mind were completely shattered; I felt free. It was about this time that I decided to adopt the pen name ‘Azad’ to indicate that I was no longer tied to my inherited beliefs.”
Azad’s assertion, however, betrays his actions. In the first place, he does not indicate clearly at what stage in his life the change took place in him. The fact is that he started as a journalist and worked for Al-Nadva, an organ of Nadvatul Ulema, and Vakeel of Amritsar, which was a religious journal. Even when he started his own Al-Hilal in 1912, he appeared to be Pan-Islamist. He was a member of the All India Muslim League until 1925 and in 1920 was elected president to its Ahmedabad sessions, a position which he declined to accept.
In 1913, Azad took part in the agitation organized against the demolition of a mosque in Kanpur and was arrested. He remained in confinement for some time.
As a Pan-Islamist, Azad was a Khilafatist and wrote in support of Turkey and its Sultan. Indications are that it was during this time that Azad began to look away from the purely Islamic to Indian issues due to M.K. Gandhi’s influence on him. The latter had joined the Khilafat Movement to “save the holy cow” from the slaughter by Muslims. Like Gandhi, Azad too appeared ambitious to gain prominence in the country’s politics, which led the two men to join each other. Moreover, Gandhi, or for that matter the Hindu dominated Indian Congress, badly needed someone from the Muslims to prove that theirs was a “national” struggle against the British rule in India. From the ‘20s, thus Azad went over to the Congress and during 1939-45, when out of necessity he remained president of the Congress, Azad could achieve no prominence as a political leader.
Unlike Azad who started as a Pan-Islamist and ended as a leader of the Indian Congress, a rival to the All India Muslim League, Haji Musa Khan, like many prominent Muslims, began as a sympathizer to the Indian Congress. But soon he realized that the objective of the Congress was to serve Hindu interests and when the time came to establish the Hindu rule over India. In 1908 he confided in Syed Hasan Bilgrami: “For long I remained aloof and only used to hear from afar which made me a supporter of the Indian (National) Congress. But when I entered into it and began to take practical part in country’s politics then the reality (of Congress) dawned upon me.”
Early on, particularly after 1898 when Hindu antagonists of Urdu started a movement in favour of Hindi to replace the former, Musa Khan began to advocate the Muslim cause. He wrote in Makhzan, a leading Urdu journal of Lahore about the Muslims’ requirements. He became an ardent supporter of the idea of a separate Muslim political organization, which should be agitating for the protection of purely Muslim interests in India. Actually in 1901 he was one of those few Muslims who impressed upon the intense necessity of establishing a Muslim political organization, following the Congress’s pattern. In 1906 he became one of the founding members of the All India Muslim League at Dhaka. He also became the longest serving joint secretary of the organization from 1908 to 1919. In that year when the Khilafat Movement was introduced in support of Turkey, he lent his full support to it. As a matter of fact, he turned Pan-Islamist in that particular year.
It is indeed interesting to note for the sake of comparison that how divergent in views were these two Makkah born Indian Muslims. Azad, belonging to a religious family and starting as an Islamist and Pan-Islamist, turned to the Congress and became one of its leaders. Musa Khan, starting off as a sympathizer to the Congress turned to exclusive Muslim politics and finally joined the Khilafat Movement, which, however, was only a temporary phase because the movement withered away by 1922.
