Towards Salvaging Humanity

Sayyid Abu’l-Hasan [Ali Nadwi (1913–1999), apart from being a great Islamic scholar and thinker, was also an activist in the community affairs of the Indian Muslims in post-Independence India. As the President of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, he successfully organized the campaign for the enforcement of the Shari[ah in the wake of Shah Bano case, which involved the payment of maintenance expenses to divorced Muslim women. In doing so, he strove in close collaboration with the heads of various Muslim denominations and organizations in India. Payam-i Insaniyat (Message for Humanity), a socio-cultural and moral campaign, represents another facet of Nadwi’s activism and his concern for the protection of the Indian Muslim community and upholding the life-giving moral and spiritual value system in the Indian polity. He had embarked upon this mission in the early 1950s against the backdrop of a series of horrible, well planned communal riots in various Indian towns in which thousands of innocent, helpless Muslims were brutally killed. On noting the apathy of state and civil society to these inhuman, barbaric attacks carried out on a regular basis, he resolved to appeal to the conscience of all Indians, exhorting them to uphold moral and spiritual values and to take on the divisive forces. For him, this aberration stemmed from the erosion of basic human values and disregard for and insensitivity to morals.