Maulana Azad, Islam and The Indian National Movement

The life and personality of Maulana Azad remains, to put this in a clichéd manner, an enigma. Aside from his deep scholarship, active politics and religious inclinations, there is another aspect of this enigma. Azad, unlike many other Muslim figures in India’s pantheon of great men leading the freedom struggle, seems to prove far more elusive and almost immune to the Hindu Right’s penchant for regularly testing the nationalis-tic mettle of all. It is perhaps the consistency with which Azad combined his nationalism with Islam that might explain this, unlike many prominent Muslim figures who had nationalistic phases followed by more exclusivist communal concerns, that provide the Hindu Right with the necessary grist to raise questions and doubts about their nationalism.