When the University of the Punjab was established in 1882, it emerged at a moment when colonial modernity was rapidly reorganising knowledge into disciplines governed by utility, administration, and power. Yet from its earliest decades, the university carried within it a quiet counter-impulse: the conviction that Oriental learning — Arabic, Persian, Islamic philosophy, philology, and literature — was not a vestige of the past but a living intellectual reservoir capable of shaping ethical subjects. This conviction found its most sustained institutional expression in the Oriental College, Lahore, where classical learning was neither romanticised nor marginalised, but theorised as a mode of intellectual formation.

The commencement of the classical tradition at Oriental College coincided with a civilisational rupture. Indigenous systems of transmission were under strain, the humanities were being displaced by instrumental reason, and identities were increasingly being hardened along lines of religion, race, and empire. In this context, Oriental College functioned as what might be called a site of epistemic mediation: a space where tradition encountered modernity not as an adversary but as an interlocutor. Classical disciplines were taught not in opposition to the modern university, but as its ethical grammar — training attention, interpretive patience, and moral imagination.

Few figures embody this ethos more fully than Faiz-ul-Hasan Saharanpuri (1816–1887), whose long tenure as Professor of Arabic at Oriental College established the template for classical learning in the institution. Trained across Delhi, Rampur, Lucknow, and under masters such as Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi and Mirza Ghalib, Saharanpuri represented the integrated Indo-Islamic curriculum in its most mature form: logic (mantiq) as disciplined reasoning, philosophy as metaphysical inquiry, Arabic adab as ethical cultivation, Persian poetry as refinement of sensibility, and Islamic sciences as a living tradition of interpretation. His editorship of Shifa al-Sudur further extended this pedagogy beyond the classroom, situating scholarship within a public intellectual sphere.

What distinguished Saharanpuri’s teaching was not encyclopaedism alone, but a theory of knowledge grounded in formation rather than information. Language, in his classroom, was not merely communicative but constitutive; grammar trained the mind in relational thinking, rhetoric cultivated ethical judgment, and literature became a mode of moral self-fashioning. That he declined the colonial title of Shams al-Ulama offered by the Punjab University underscores a deeper intellectual posture: authority, for him, resided in fidelity to knowledge rather than recognition by power.

The constellation of his students — Shibli Nomani, Altaf Hussain Hali, Syed Ahmad Khan, Hamiduddin Farahi, among others — signals the far-reaching consequences of this pedagogy for South Asian intellectual history. Equally significant are figures often mentioned only in passing, such as Abdullah Tonkvi and Moulvi Abdul Hakim Kalanauri, whose association with Saharanpuri points to the broader scholarly networks linking Lahore with Tonk, Kalanaur, and other regional centres of learning. These scholars remembered in Oriental College recollections represent this submerged geography of knowledge, where provincial madrasas, princely courts, and the modern university remained in continuous conversation.

This tradition did not fossilise with the nineteenth century. It renewed itself across generations, most notably through scholars such as Maulana Asghar Ali Ruhi (1871–1954), whose intellectual legacy — carefully written about by Dr Khurshid-ul-Hassan Rizvi — formed a crucial bridge between classical scholarship and twentieth-century academic life. Ruhi’s commitment to Arabic and Islamic studies, his pedagogical seriousness, and his ethical conception of scholarship profoundly shaped his son, Prof Dr Sufi Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, one of the most influential teachers at Oriental College. In this lineage, classical learning was not inherited as a set of texts but as a moral discipline — what Dr Rizvi has repeatedly emphasised as adab-based scholarship, where character and knowledge are inseparable.

Sufi Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s long association with Oriental College, his mentorship of Dr Rizvi himself, and the eventual donation of vast personal libraries and manuscripts to Punjab University exemplify a conception of knowledge as waqf — a public trust rather than private capital. The same theoretical orientation is evident in the career of Professor Abdul Aziz Memon (Al-Memoni), whose mastery of classical Arabic earned him recognition as Imam-ul-Lugha in the Arab world. His authority unsettles modern assumptions about linguistic ownership, demonstrating how classical learning, when pursued rigorously, dissolves ethnic and geographic boundaries.

In Urdu and Persian studies, Hafiz Mahmood Shirani extended the intellectual horizon of Oriental College in a manner that was at once philological, historical, and deeply theoretical. His celebrated thesis Punjab Mein Urdu was not merely a linguistic intervention but a sustained critique of cultural essentialism, challenging the idea of languages as sealed, monolithic entities with singular points of origin. By locating Urdu within long histories of migration, conquest, coexistence, and vernacular exchange, Shirani displaced notions of purity with those of encounter and translation. This sensibility finds its most mature articulation in Maqlt-i-Hafiz Mahmood Shirani, a veritable mine of knowledge in which literary history, textual criticism, comparative philology, and cultural theory converge. These essays are not only repositories of information but models of method — demonstrating how rigorous engagement with classical sources can unsettle modern anxieties about identity, belonging, and ownership. That such work emerged from Oriental College affirms the institution’s role as a space where classical learning functioned as an antidote to reductive narratives of origin and exclusion — narratives that continue to animate contemporary xenophobia under new guises.

Towering above even this formidable contribution is Moulvi Muhammad Shafi, whose life and scholarship crystallise the deepest theoretical commitments of Oriental College. Educated at Cambridge yet profoundly anchored in Islamic intellectual traditions, Shafi embodied the possibility of a scholarship that is at once classical and modern, local and cosmopolitan. He understood, with rare clarity, that classical knowledge does not survive by insulation or reverence alone, but by translation — across languages, disciplines, and publics. This vision is preserved most vividly in Maqlt-i-Maulvi Muhammad Shafi, a corpus that spans Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, and traverses history, bibliography, textual criticism, and intellectual biography. These essays are not incidental writings; they are conceptual maps of an entire scholarly world, demonstrating how the humanities can remain rigorous without becoming exclusionary, and expansive without becoming shallow.

The legacy of Muhammad Shafi did not end with his own formidable corpus. It endured institutionally and intellectually through scholars such as Syed Abdullah, who carried forward the Encyclopaedia of Islam project in Urdu, transforming his teacher’s vision into a lasting scholarly infrastructure. Through Syed Abdullah, the classical-humanist ethos of Oriental College entered a new phase — one marked by editorial discipline, collaborative scholarship, and public pedagogy. This lineage was further sustained by figures like Waheed Qureshi, whose work in literary history and criticism reflected the same commitment to textual depth and cultural plurality; Akram Shah, whose scholarship reinforced the continuity of Arabic and Islamic studies; and Aftab Asghar, whose academic labour preserved and transmitted this tradition to subsequent generations of students.

What unites these figures is not merely institutional affiliation but a shared ethical orientation toward knowledge: the belief that scholarship is an act of stewardship. The works of Shirani and Shafi — especially Maqlt-i-Hafiz Mahmood Shirani and Maqlt-i-Maulvi Muhammad Shafi — are not closed monuments but open archives, inviting rereading, reinterpretation, and renewal. To highlight and preserve the contributions of Syed Abdullah, Waheed Qureshi, Khawaja Zakariya, Shakoor Ahsan, Akram Shah, and Aftab Asghar is therefore not an exercise in commemoration alone; it is a reminder that traditions survive only when they are consciously carried forward, taught with integrity, and defended against the pressures of intellectual amnesia. In an age increasingly hostile to complexity, this lineage of Oriental College stands as a quiet yet resolute affirmation: that classical learning, when grounded in ethical seriousness and historical depth, remains one of the most powerful resources for resisting cultural fragmentation and recovering a shared humanity.

Seen through this lens, the classical tradition at Oriental College was never an antiquarian exercise. It was, and remains, a form of ethical resistance. In an age marked by intellectual shallowness, accelerated judgment, and mutual alienation, classical learning offers an alternative anthropology. It teaches slowness against haste, interpretation against slogan, and disagreement without erasure. Arabic grammar disciplines relational thought; Persian poetry refines moral imagination; Islamic intellectual history models pluralism within commitment.

The pages of Oriental College journals — many now preserved at Rekhta — bear witness to this lived practice of scholarship: adab as method, ikhtilaf as virtue, and learning as a pathway toward shared humanity. The commencement of the classical tradition at Oriental College, Lahore, was therefore not a nostalgic gesture but a civilisational wager — that humanity can still be retrieved through depth, patience, and disciplined inheritance. To return to this tradition today is not to retreat from the present, but to recover the moral grammar without which no future can remain human.

Published in Dawn, January 25th, 2026