Prof. Metcalf has written extensively on the history of Muslim population of India and Pakistan.
Prof. Metcalf has written extensively on the history of Muslim population of India and Pakistan.
Noted American historian Barbara Metcalf on Monday said the histories of Muslims of India were “understudied” and “were essential to telling India’s history well.”
Prof. Metcalf was delivering the acceptance speech after being awarded the Sir Syed Excellence Award for 2022 by the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) on the 205 th birth anniversary of its founder Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.
A specialist
A specialist in the history of South Asia, especially the colonial period, Prof. Metcalf has written extensively on the history of Muslim population of India and Pakistan. “Muslims constituted a full quarter of the population at the time of Independence and an important share of the Indian citizenry in the Republic of India thereafter. Yet their histories are understudied and are essential to telling India’s history well,” she said.
The Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Davis, USA, remarked, “Sir Syed’s modernist interventions preceded those of the Egypt-based modernists who too often are taken as founders of these trends of thought.”
Prof. Metcalf, who has studied the role of ulama or Islamic scholars, underlined that Aligarh and Deoband schools had a great deal in common, something that is not appreciated. “My starting premise of when I worked on my dissertation ‘A Study of the Founding and Early Years of the Madrasa at Deoband’ was the fact that Aligarh and Deoband had a great deal in common – their leaders emerging from the same reformist intellectual milieu in Delhi, their sharing a concern for Muslim well-being, their embrace of institutional models for schooling taken from British patterns.”
Speaking on the dominating perceptions about the role of Indian ulama like Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madni of the Deoband School during the freedom movement, she said these Islamic scholars had asserted that for Indian Muslims, the very soil of India was sacred, and for them, India’s natural marvels were like the Garden of Eden.
She said the award carried the name of Sir Syed, one of the truly great intellectuals and institution builders in India’s modern history, whose life well deserved remembering. “It also brings attention to scholarship in fields relevant to Sir Syed’s life and to his work, including, above all, the foundation of the extraordinary college, now university, that Sir Syed founded.”
“When I say ‘extraordinary’ about AMU,” she emphasised, “that description is of course true in many ways, but as a historian, I have to single out university’s truly legendary Department of History from among the many fields in which the university has contributed, and continues to contribute.”
