THE late Aziz Ahmad is mainly known as a distinguished Urdu novelist and short story writer. In fact, he was far more than that. Precisely speaking, Ahmad is neatly divided into two: Ahmad, the distinguished fiction writer in Urdu and Ahmad, the eminent Islamic scholar with a number of scholarly works written in English.

When he arrived in Pakistan after leaving his home in Hyderabad, India, in 1949, he already had to his credit a few novels. But the best of his fictional works, the novel Aisi Bulandi Aisi Pasti and the short story ‘Jab Ankhen Ahen Posh Hueen’ were written and published during his stay in Pakistan. Add to them a few translations from English in to Urdu and a few critical studies.

In 1957 Ahmad left for England and joined the School of Oriental and African Studies as a lecturer. Then, in 1962, he proceeded to Canada and joined the University of Toronto as a professor of Islamic Studies.

His journey may also be seen as a migration from literature to scholarly studies and from Urdu to English. Soon he earned the reputation of an Islamic scholar. We in Pakistan know very little about his second janam. Of course, Lahore’s Idara-e-Saqafat-e-Islamia has brought out two of his books, translated into Urdu by Jameel Jalibi.

Now scholar Ikram Chaghatai has taken it upon himself to trace out all that Ahmad has written in English and compile them in a series of volumes. The first volume is titled Prof Aziz Ahmad, an Eminent Muslim Scholar.

Here Ahmad is seen tracing the arrival of Muslims in India bringing with them Islamic thought in different forms. “In India, Islam came face to face with one of the oldest religions and civilisations of the world, the Hindus … And finally India was one of the places where Islam first felt the political, intellectual, and institutional impact of the West”.

“Islam in the Indian subcontinent,” says Ahmad, “has had two external challenges, which could threaten its identity, the Hindu and the Western”. He adds, “Hindu civilisation, notwithstanding its caste structure, is more assimilative than any other civilisation. Islam alone, rigidly monotheistic, communally insular, resisted Hinduism’s assimilative pull. But the contact and conflict between two religions, and the two civilisations, led to the rise of microscopic communities on the fringe, such as the Hussaini Brahmins, influenced by the two principal Ismaili groups in India: the Bohras and the Khojas; and within India this led to the rise of the syncretic mystical Bhakti movement in the 19th century, and to the formation of the Sikh religion, which later became bitterly anti-Muslim.”

Tracing the origin and development of the Hindu-Islamic culture, he says that with the occupation of Punjab by the Ghaznavids, Lahore became the centre for the Muslim-Indian culture, and gave the Persian contours it had largely preserved throughout the centuries; continually accepting and modifying certain additional Indian features. “The period,” he says, “also marks the phase of incubation, if not of the actual growth of Urdu”.

And, according to him, the elite of the court, at first purely Turkish, opened their ramps under various pressures to the Afghan and later to the indigenously converted elements. The writings of Amir Khusro, he says, reflect how Islamic culture borrowed from the Hindu ways of living, popular vocabulary and music. In the later period, a programme — initiated by Akbar (and earlier by Sultan Zain al-Abidin) — of translations of Hindu religions and literary classics marked the beginning of a more liberal understanding of Hinduism. “The 11th-17th centuries mark the culmination of the growth of syncretic sects, some of them rooted in Hinduism but borrowing liberally from Islam such as Kabir Panthis, Vairagis, Hussaini Brahmans etc.”

But we should not forget our Ulema-e-Deen who had to play their own role in the contradiction of this process of acculturation. Ahmad talks about the Shah Waliullah Movement, and coming to present times, he talks about Maulana Maududi and his ‘orthodox fundamentalism’. Sir Syed’s Aligarh Movement and Allama Iqbal’s speculative Neomodernism have also been discussed.

So the book appears to be an exhaustive survey of the Indo-Muslim situation from its inception to recent times. And Chaghatai tells us that the remaining English writings (excluding Ahmad’s German and French studies) will be available in the next volume.