PRESIDENT of the Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu Pakistan Wajid Jawad held a session on Wednesday evening at a local club with Prof Dr Andrew Stewart to introduce him and his work to a select number of members of academia in the city interested in preserving manuscripts.

Mr Jawad on the occasion said Dr Stewart is Executive Director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, Saint John’s University in Minnesota. (He was addressing him as Father Columba because Dr Stewart ‘professed vows as a Benedictine monk of Saint John’s Abbey, Collegeville in 1982, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1990’.)

Mr Jawad said a few years back the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library signed an MoU with the anjuman for digitising manuscripts which the Baba-i-Urdu Dr Abdul Haq had brought from India under difficult circumstances. “We have 2,500 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and some of them date back to 500 years. Dr Stewart has a knack for tracking manuscripts all over the world. I have great appreciation for his organisation and him as they’re doing a great service to the world by discovering and making it available online for free. He is here to see what the anjuman has been doing. He provided us with two labs for digitisation and we have already digitised 744 manuscripts.”

Dr Stewart said, “This is my first visit to Pakistan. We began the project in early Covid. I always wanted to come because you cannot work in the professional world without meeting people. I’ve been to India several times, mainly to Kerala, and more recently to Hyderabad (Deccan).

Manuscripts are voices of our ancestors; we have 2,500 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and some of them date back to 500 years, says host Wajid Jawad

“I now live in Minnesota in a Benedictine monastery. Our library was founded by Benedictine monks known for, among other things, copying and interpreting sacred texts. In the 1960s one of the monks of the monastery became very concerned about what was happening with manuscripts in places such as Austria. In the 1960s there was the Cold War, We thought there would be World War III, and the horrible destruction of World War I and World War II would become far worse if WW III were nuclear because everything would be vaporised. So that monk, who was a German, persuaded a monastery in Austria to allow us to microfilm their manuscripts, just in case. I got involved in the process 20 years ago.”

Dr Stewart told the audience that he’s from Texas. His family roots are from Louisiana, which means they’re deeply rooted in Catholic tradition with a deep love for culture. As a young man he wanted to be somewhere else, so he went to a college at Harvard, the oldest in the US, studying history and literature. Subsequently he joined the monastery in Minnesota. In 2003, the president of university called him up saying they’re letting the (then) director go. “That’s how I became the director [of the library].”

In response to a question Dr Stewart said his organisation had so far digitised 500,000 manuscripts. In reply to another query, he remarked “manuscripts are the voices of our ancestors”.

Published in Dawn, January 20th, 2023