Rich tributes paid to wakf campaigner

JEDDAH: Masood Mahmood Shamsi, the former state officer, Punjab Wakf Board, died on Sunday peacefully at his home in Muzaffar Nagar, the Uttar Pradesh, India, said Najmi Bahjat, the president of the Maulana Hifzur Rahman Seoharvi Academy, in Jeddah.
He said that Shamsi was 70, and is survived by his wife and five children,
The news might not have elicited the kind of response appropriate for a community leader, but the fact is that in his death the Indian community has lost a man who during his tenure of 32 years in the wakf board, had singlehanded launched a campaign to free thousands of those mosques, madrassahs, and graveyards in the Punjab region, which were left behind by Muslims while migrating to Pakistan during the 1947 partition, and which were since then occupied by Hindus and Sikhs.
The occupiers had turned these places of religious importance into cowsheds, and fodder storehouses for their livestock. The late Shamsi used his position in the Wakf Board effectively to take back those Muslim properties, and adopted a two-pronged strategy: Reconciliation and legal course.
The late ‘mujahid’ freed close to 1,000 mosques-madrasas from the clutches of other communities; he got 5 percent of the property back through reconciliation and the rest through legal courses, Najmi said. Shamsi’s unrelenting efforts had landed him in labyrinthine legal battles and all through his life — even after retirement a few years ago — Shamsi kept fighting through the legal wrangle.
The Punjab Wakf Board, considered as the richest wakf board in India, has turned many of the freed, but defunct madrassahs, into community musafikhana (inns), besides huge renovation work of those mosques. Shamsi also played his important part in getting a qabristan (graveyard) released, and in helping construct a huge Jama Masjid in Chandigarh, the capital city of Punjab. The rising Muslim community, mainly in the major districts of Jalandhar, Ambala and Amritsar, finds these upcoming mosques handy for their prayers as well as maktabs.
“Muslims could win back those properties because we had all the papers intact, as also thanks to the impartial and credible judicial system of the country,” Najmi said.
Thousands of mosques and other religious properties are still in clutch of other people, but the Wakf Board is doing its best to claim them too.
The Muslims of India perhaps may not extend to Masood Shamsi the honor he deserved, but such people of mettle hardly crave for such temporal honors, he said.
“We pray, he get from Allah what he deserved for the humble and silent works for which he had devoted his life,” he said.