Fatima Rafiq Zakaria was awarded the Padma Shri in recognition of her work in education in 2006
Aurangabad, Maharashtra:
Fatima Rafiq Zakaria, a Padma Shri awardee, renowned journalist, academician and chairman of Maulana Azad Educational Trust and Khairul Islam Trust Mumbai, passed away at the Bajaj Hospital in Maharashtra’s Aurangabad due to age-related illness on Tuesday noon. She was 85.
Besides being affiliated to the Maulana Azad Educational Trust and Maulana Azad Education Society, Ms Zakaria was also the executive vice-chairman of the Board of Governors of the Trust’s Institute of Hotel Management which is run in collaboration with the Taj Group of Hotels.
Ms Zakaria, who had played an eminent role in the field of education, was also honoured with the Sarojini Naidu Integration Award for Journalism in 1983.
She was awarded the Padma Shri in recognition of her work in education in 2006.
source: http://www.ndtv.com / NDTV / Home> All India / by ANI / April 06th, 2021
Sadly today there is no one of Dr Zakaria’s caliber, scholarship and forceful articulation to bat for Indian Muslims
One evening in the late 1990s, as a cub reporter working for The Asian Age, founded and then edited by eminent journalist M J Akbar, I landed at the iconic Nehru Centre in Mumbai. It was a lecture by Samuel Huntington, the famous American scholar who had stirred a huge controversy with his Clash of Civilizations hypothesis. After Huntington’s speech, Dr Zakaria spoke and, while acknowledging the renowned scholar’s debt in mentoring the Zakarias’ son the famous author and journalist Fareed Zakaria, Dr Zakaria disagreed with Huntington’s hypothesis and attacked him for spreading fear among the peace-loving section of the world community.
That was the first time I saw Dr Zakaria. Subsequently, I attended a screening of a documentary made by a British channel on the eve of 50 years of India’s Independence in 1997. The documentary, complained Zakaria, had truncated version of his interview and post-screeing Dr Zakaria was understandably disturbed and livid. In my excitement to have got a “hot” story about a leading Islamic scholar like Dr Zakaria trashing a documentary by a British channel I reported it in the paper but wrongly said that it was produced by the BBC. Next day the BBC sent a letter to my editor denying its ownership. It was a huge embarrassment for me, the editor and the paper and, the then resident editor, rapped me for such a lapse and carelessness while reporting. To my pleasant surprise Dr Zakaria didn’t pull me up, forgetting and forgiving with a remark that it was a misreporting.
Dr Zakarai and his wife Madam Fatma Zakaria were very close to M J Akbar, and he could have got me fired for the blunder that I had committed. But Dr Zakaria saw it as a minor mistake on the part of a young, fledgling reporter and didn’t make it into a big issue. I fell in love with the scholar-politician for his magnanimity and sense of justice.
For the next one decade or so I remained immensely close to the Zakarias. Hardly a week passed when I didn’t call doctor sahib or he didn’t inquire about my progress as a journalist. I can’t remember the number of times I quoted him for stories or interviewed him for The Asian Age or The India Express, the paper I left in 2005 to join The Times of India. He was happy that I joined TOI, the newspaper he had contributed to for decades. Sadly, he didn’t live long to see my works in TOI, except the first story which announced my arrival to the Times. It was about Sare Jahan Se Accha completing a century and doctor sahib, as always, was effusive in his praise for me for this front-page story which in a way also announced my arrival to the Times of India.
I cannot forget a note that he wrote on one of his books he gifted me. Seated at his spacious study at the Cuffe Parade House in South Mumbai, in long hand, doctor sahib wrote:
“To Mohammed Wajihuddin for whose bright future I am genuinely concerned.”
It was a big compliment for me. I felt adopted by the Zakarias who showered unreserved love and affection on me. There was no artificiality in doctor sahib’s expression of concern and love for a boy who had arrived in the city from the backwaters of Bihar without a godfather. After his passing away, I missed him a lot and miss him every day, every moment.
Dr Rafiq Zakaria: An Impressive Journey
Dr Zakaria belonged to a generation which had not only witnessed the horrors of partition but had deeply felt pained at the vivisection of India into Islamic Pakisan and Secular India. Son of a maulvi in Nala Sopara, Zakaria scaled the height of scholarship and politics mainly because of his love for reading and a drive to excel.
A brilliant student, he devoured books on history, fiction, law, religion and everything between them. He had befriended Bernard Shaw, heard Harold Laski and met Bapu the Mahtma who always remained a paragon of truth and non-violence to Zakaria. Even as a student, both in Bombay and in London, he wrote for some leading newspapers of the day. An argumentative mind, he would not take things on their face value. He would question the status quo and side with the victims.
A patriot to the core, Zakaria never lost hope in the Hindu-Muslim unity and never forgave Mohammed Ali Jinnah for formulating the Two-Nation Theory which caused immeasurable damage to the sub-continent’s Muslims. In his autobiographical book The Price of Partition, the release function of which I had the fortune to attend, he has detailed the circumstances leading to the partition of India. He would often quote the famous Urdu couplet about the disaster that partition brought: Lamhon ne khata ki thi/sadiyon ne saza payee.
Dr Zakaria’s views about Muhammad Ali Jinnah
In his lucid prose which, as Zakaria confesses in almost all his books that he authored, was fine-tuned by the veteran editor and his better half Madam Fatma, Zakaria has quoted several interesting anecdotes about Jinnah whom his supporters called Quaid-e-Azam (the leader) but who actually misled the sub-continent’s Muslims. The pork-eating Jinnah who loved his whisky had nothing to do with the genuine concerns of the Muslims. He was authoritarian, egotist and desperate to see his dream of carving out Pakistan, the so-called Pure land for Muslims. One of the anecdotes in Zakaria’s immensely readable book goes like this:
“Jinnah had started reorganizing the League after the assembly elections in 1937; he was on an enticing spree. Hasrat Mohani, who was a firebrand, went to see Jinnah on some urgent work at his bungalow. He had not taken an appointment. It was after dusk; Jinnah was enjoying his peg of whisky. He called Mohani to his room and thinking then that he was more a revolutionary than an orthodox Muslim, offered him a drink. Mohani, somewhat baffled, said that he wished he had as little fear of God as Jinnah had. Jinnah retorted: “No, Maulana! You are wrong. I have more faith in His mercy than you have.”
Dr Rafiq Zakaria: A Successful Politician
He was a successful politician who even represented India at the United States to counter the arguments of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then Pakistan’s foreign minister and later the Prime Minister, on the dispute over Kashmir. Besides, Zakaria was a passionate scholar of Islam. His seminal work Muhammad and the Quran, written in response to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, is a labour of love for which Muslims will be eternally indebted to him. About the huge positive response this book received from noted scholars from across the world, Dr Zakaria once told me:
“After reading this book, a big Pakistani Maulana said, “Mujhe nahim maloom Dr Zakaria ne kitni neki or aur kitne gunah kiye hain lekin main gawahi deta hoon key eh kitab unki bakhshayesh ka zariya banegi. [Truly, if nothing else, at least this book will inshallah help our late doctor sahib find a place in jannah.]
Dr Rafiq Zakaria’s love for Allama Iqbal
His love for the poet-philosopher Allama Iqbal was immense. He defended Iqbal like few in India did. His book on Allama Iqbal, penned to prove that Iqbal was wrongly credited with fathering the idea of Pakistan, is testimony to Zakaria’s love and respect for Iqabl who was undoubtedly a great poet but a failed politician. Dr Zakaria never failed to quote the famous line from Iqbal’s Naya Shivala –Pather ki moorton mein samjha hai tu khuda hai/khake watan ka mujhko har zarra devta hai–whenever he needed to show Iqbal or other Indian Muslims as nationalists.
One thing that is of great relevance to us today is Dr Zakaria’s unshakeable faith in Kashmir’s accession to India. He had even penned a poem on Kashmir, expressing his love for the valley and why it needed to be with India. He justifiably believed that, if Kashmir secedes from India, it will not only be ruinous for the Kashmiris, but Muslims in the rest of India will have to pay heavily for this crime. As anti-Muslim hysteria grips parts of India in the aftermath of the recent terror attack on the Amarnath Yatri, Dr Zakaria’s fears only seem true. It is in the interest of Indian Muslims that Kashmir remains an integral part of India.
Sadly today there is no one of Dr Zakaria’s caliber, scholarship and forceful articulation to bat for Indian Muslims either in the media or in the corridors of power, the two arenas that are increasingly getting poisoned. As majotarianism marches ahead, threatening to turn the secular India into a Hindu rashtra, the absence of a patriot, politician and scholar like Zakaria is greatly felt.
(The author, a journalist with The Times of India, presented this paper at the one-day seminar on Dr Rafiq Zakaria on July 15, 2017 at Aurangabad. The article is reproduced here with the permission of the writer on the occasion of the 15th death anniversary of Dr Rafiq Zakari on July 9.)
source: http://www.ummid.com / Ummid.com / Home> India> Views & Analysis / by Mohammed Wajihuddin / July 17th, 2020
Katihar (Azamgarh) BIHAR / Mumbai, MAHARASHTRA / Kolkata, WEST BENGAL / Azamgarh, UTTAR PRADESH / NEW DELHI :
Ghazala Tasneem, a housewife and mother of two from the Katihar district in Bihar, was selected for the Bihar Judicial Services Competive Examination with a 65th rank (IANS Photo)
Katihar / Azamgarh/New Delhi :
For Ghazala Tasneem, Oct. 31 was not a normal day. It was the day her dream came true and she was rewarded for her hard struggle of three years. She was selected for the Bihar Judicial Services Competitive Examination with a 65th rank and can soon aspire to be a judge.
“Indeed, it was difficult, but thanks to Allah, due to the continuous support and motivation from my husband and other family members, I have achieved what I deserved,” says Tasneem, a housewife from the Katihar district in Bihar with two sons.
There is a general perception that Muslim women rarely pursue higher education, or go for competitive exams, and the social odds are stacked even higher once they get married and have kids. But women like Tasneem challenge such stereotypes.
India has the largest Muslim population after Indonesia, which is about 14.2 percent of its 1.34 billion population, and the 2011 census says that about half of the population of Muslim women is illiterate. But women like Tasneem think that the situation is changing fast.
“Though in areas like law and judiciary, still the number of Muslim girls is very less. But in general, the situation is changing now and there are many more Muslim girls going to school,” Tasneem said.
Zebun Nisa Khan, associate professor at the Department of Education in Aligarh Muslim University, says that situation has already changed. “The trend is not changing, but it has already changed. For the last few years, the number of Muslim girls in schools has increased massively,” Khan said.
Muslim women’s literacy rate is on the increase in Uttar Pradesh, but the situation in states like Bihar and West Bengal needs to further improve.
Moonisa Bushra Abidi teaches physics at Maharashtra College of Arts, Science and Commerce in Mumbai. She also thinks that educating the girl child is an increasing trend among Muslims and an increasing number of Muslims girls – encouraged by their parents, particularly mothers –are going for higher education.
“One can see a larger number of girls with hijab in many institutions now. In the early 1990s, when I was pursuing my M.Sc. from the University of Mumbai, I was the only girl in the entire university with a hijab,” Abidi explains.
She says that during her days in the same college, at the intermediate level, there used to be one division of girls against four of boys, but now there are four divisions of girls against one for boys. At UG and PG levels, there are hardly 8 to 10 boys in each class against 80 to 90 girls.
The college is being run under the presidentship of a woman, Fatima Zakaria, a Padma Shri awardee, journalist and academician, and mother of veteran journalist Fareed Zakaria.
“The situation is not good because the number of boys is decreasing and now our college is becoming a girls’ college,” Abidi said.
But what had been the major issues for educating Muslim girl child in India? Khan lists poverty and lack of awareness as some of the major problems in the path of girl child education.
“The major obstacles are poverty and lack of awareness. Many Muslim families are below the poverty line and they are unable to educate girls,” she explained.
Sadia Rahman, Ph.D. scholar of international relations at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan, thinks that widespread poverty and financial constraints are the major causes that prevent Muslim girls from accessing modern education. “Also, the poor quality schools in Muslim populated areas is also responsible for it,” says Rahman who hails from Kolkata and completed an M.A. from Presidency University.
According to Islamic teaching arrangements of classes, male and female students should be separated and many people believe that it is also one of the important reasons for the low literacy rate of Muslim women in various places.
“I think the biggest obstacle for girls’ education was co-education and less availability of Muslim-management colleges. Sometimes a girl with a hijab becomes the butt of jokes, because of which religious-minded girls are hesitant to go to colleges run by non-Muslim managements,” Abidi added.
Abidi believes that Muslim girls from conservative families don’t feel comfortable in the co-education system and the community should think about opening more separate colleges for them.
“In rural areas, even Hindu girls prefer girls-only colleges and avoid co-education,” Khan pointed out.
Neyaz Ahmad Daudi, who runs Fatima Girls Inter College in Daudpur village in the Azamgarh district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, has another story to tell. Daudi, who has doctorate in psychology from Banaras Hindu University and served at Shibli National Intermediate College as principal for over a decade, says that he chose to start a girls’ college because boys can go far and there were not enough girls’ colleges at nearby villages and towns.
Non-availability of schools and colleges nearby is also one of the major obstacles and a major issue in many areas.
Daudi says that in places like Azamgarh, where most of the guardians are away in the Gulf countries or in metro cities earning a livelihood, people are cautious about the security of girls and don’t allow them to be sent too far; they also seek a safe and secure transportation system from home to school.
At 73.01 percent, Azamgarh has the highest Muslim female literacy rate in Uttar Pradesh. But being a small place, it is still difficult to gain higher education here.
“Now girls are educated but they have less opportunity for higher studies and competitive exams because usually it is available only in bigger cities,” Daudi explained.
There is another misconception that some people think that educating a girl child – especially modern education – is against the religion, but Khan believes that getting an education is a religious duty.
“The very first revelation on Prophet Mohammed was the word ‘Iqra’ which means ‘you read’ and such words are mentioned in many places in the Holy Quran. It is general guidance for both males and females,” Khan says.
“Islam and Muslims are not against education. Islam teaches one to gain knowledge from cradle to grave, but some people misinterpret Islam,” says Tasneem.
“All educational goals can be achieved being in veil. There are a number of examples in the early Islamic period where women were very much involved in education and nursing sectors,” Tasneem added.
(This feature is part of a special series that seeks to bring unique and extraordinary stories of ordinary people, groups and communities from across a diverse, plural and inclusive India, and has been made possible by a collaboration between IANS and the Frank Islam Foundation. Abu Zafar can be contacted at abuzafar@journalist.com)
source: http://www.indiawest.com / IndiaWest / Home> Feature / by Abu Zafar, IANS – Special Series / November 18th, 2017
