JEDDAH, 7 June 2006 — As a member of the delegation of Indian academics who recently visited Saudi Arabia, Mushirul Hasan, vice chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, told Arab News that India was ready to strengthen its educational ties with Saudi Arabia and said that he saw many potential areas for cooperation.
Jamia Millia Islamia was founded in 1920 as a response to Aligarh Muslim University which was thought by a number of Muslim scholars — including Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar, the doyen of Khilafat Movement, and Shaikh-ul-Hind Maulana Mahmudul Hasan, who is also known as the Prisoner of Malta and for his beautiful translation of the Holy Qur’an in Urdu — at that time to be less Islamic than it should have been. In 1962, Jamia was given the status of a deemed university. Twenty-six years down the line, the institution got the status of a central university, fully funded by the Indian government. Today, Jamia has a cosmopolitan look.
Hasan attributes much of India’s economic success today to the preservation of educational institutions and high academic standards in the period after the country achieved independence from British rule. India, he said, owed a great debt to Jawaharlal Nehru, its first prime minister, who laid the groundwork for India’s great success in information technology before information technology existed.
“The temples of learning that Nehru spoke of and created — whether technology institutes, medical colleges or universities, the IITs and IIMs — are the direct consequence of that investment made in the first two decades of independence,” he said. “The good thing is successive governments after Nehru have built on that. The beneficiaries of the IT sector today are not just an elite group but many other groups as well.”
Unlike many Asian and African countries where those institutions were weakened and destroyed or undermined, that didn’t happen in India, Hasan said. “Most importantly, these institutions in India didn’t remain confined to the elite. Because of what was done between 1947 and 1964, we are now reaping the rewards of those investments. I’m not talking in terms of monetary investment but intellectual investment.”
Hasan said he was a little dejected that India’s age-old ties with Saudi Arabia had not been kept up as they should have been. “The real purpose of the visit has to be seen in the context of the Saudi king’s visit to India,” Hasan said. “We gave him an honorary degree, which he was gracious enough to accept, and we thought it would be useful to build on his visit and create a fresh academic impetus and renew intellectual ties with Saudi Arabia. I thought there would be big impetus, but the links have not been very strong. The academic impetus has not been as strong as it should have been.”
Hasan says cultural ties between the nations also should be strengthened. “In New Delhi, for example, there is an American center, and there is the Iran Cultural House — all these countries have a cultural presence,” he said. “I feel Saudis should also have a cultural presence. They could have a cultural center, preferably in the university. Since we have people who speak Arabic and who know the region, why not have such a center in our university? We want to project Arab culture. There is a department of Islamic studies, and the fact that we have Arabic teachers could form a base. We have already done a lot of groundwork. With the kind of infrastructure we now have, it is possible to create something like that.”
Hasan said the university was ready to offer assistance in many ways. “Jamia Millia has a world-class mass communications center; we have a full-fledged faculty of engineering; we have a faculty of architecture, and we have a very well-known center for computer and information technology,” he said. “We can train teachers because our faculty of education is both old and good. Even if we identify one or two areas out of these that I have listed, in the end it could make a big difference.”
The vice chancellor noted that people in India in general did not neglect the humanities for the sciences. “The humanities still attract very good students,” he said. “Obviously, in any society, the balance will always be tilted in favor of areas that can result in quick money, but there is no evidence to suggest that there is big slump in social sciences. Maybe it doesn’t attract the most talented students, but we continue to produce good economists, good historians and good sociologists.”
The university is also open to assisting Saudi Arabia to bolster facilities here, such as a mass communications research center. “If the Saudis wanted us to set it up for them, we would love to do it,” Hasan said. “We have the expertise — if they have the resources we would be delighted to do that. As a university we would require the necessary clearance from the Indian government to do so. But it should be possible and quite desirable, too.”
Hasan said India welcomed a stronger Saudi presence on the world stage. “It has taken a long time for this society to open up in the way that it has,” Hasan said. “Saudi Arabia has a very important role to play in this region. We cannot have friendship with the Arab world without having a close relationship with Saudi Arabia. That is a fact.”
And the scholarly leader of one of India’s most respected universities — a university that is allowed to flourish and is supported by a secular state and held in high regard by the hundreds of millions from other religions who help support it — sees new hope as the message of friendship begins to issue forth from the birthplace of Islam.
“There are a number of major developments that have taken place since Sept. 11, 2001, that have brought to light various aspects of Saudi society,” Hasan said. “I am sure the Saudis are aware and have already begun the process of thinking and rethinking, and I hope that process will lead to a positive outcome.”
