The first female executive in Pakistani banking and a consultant for the World Bank, Zeenut Ziad’s passion for South Asian history resulted in a series of lectures on the Mughal Empire at the Smithsonian Institution and the publication of The Magnificent Mughals. Dawn caught up with Ms Ziad to talk about her work in this regard.

Q: Where does your interest in history come from?

A: My ancestors experienced diverse influences and were very open to adapting to change, yet proudly retained their own identity grounded in the Islamic ethics and universalism of the Sufis. My father’s family were the Nawabs of Kunjpura, a Pathan princely state of Punjab. My grandfather, Sahibzada Aftab Ahmad Khan, among the first Muslims to attend Cambridge University, in 1891, was invited to Aligarh by Sir Syed, and became the first vice chancellor of the university. My father, General Sahibzada Anis Ahmad Khan, was the second Muslim at Sandhurst.

He was the most remarkable man: gender-blind, class-blind, faith-blind, race-blind. I believe these are the true Islamic principles.

I was brought up exactly like my brothers, and educated to take ‘the best from the East and the West’. I was inculcated with tremendous pride in our code of adab, our poetry, music, arts, history and tassawuf. Hence the past becomes a spur to action and achievement in the future.

My wish has always been to share, particularly with our deprived younger generation, the joy and pride in our heritage that I was so fortunate and blessed to receive.

Q: You’ve come back after 30 years, what do you find changed?

A: Diversity is God’s blessing but we have restricted our vision. We were a tolerant country with all our regions and peoples contributing their distinctive traditions. Had we appreciated our diversity, we could have progressed, developing the best from each.

That is why I keep going back to the Mughals – they became so powerful because they celebrated and drew strength from diversity, pluralism. Now it is all about aping others and the tragedy is the loss of our spiritual and intellectual heritage, transmitted through our languages.

We lose our identity and we will be a lost nation and lost souls as time goes on. Still, there is so much creativity amongst our youth, a source of great delight for me. There was much more conformity when I was in my 20s, so I am excited to see barriers being broken now.

Q: What are you working on currently?

A: I am translating a text on Sufi ethics, The Radiant Dawn. This was a series of lectures on adab and akhlaq by my great-grandfather, prime minister of Gwalior.

Writing in the 1870s, at one place he points out that if people used the money squandered on weddings for good causes the nation would be showered with blessings – and many years later, we have gone from bad to worse!

That was a difficult period for Muslims because the British had so thoroughly destroyed the foundations of Muslim life. Pre-colonial education had been holistic, imbued with the values, the ethics of Islam. You see the importance of that holistic education today, as humans, heedlessly, proceed to destroy the planet.

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2018