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“WHEN I arrived here about 25 years ago as a young lecturer, there were barely a few buildings that served as administration offices and classrooms. We had only a few departments back then,” said the senior professor at Shah Abdul Latif University (SALU), Khairpur, while narrating the early history of the university, with a faraway look in his eyes. He told the story a few years ago when this writer was at SALU to conduct a viva voce examination of a PhD candidate. The tale interested this writer much, seeing that the campus that sprawled across a huge area was buzzing with activity.
“There were barely any facilities and in the morning we, the newly appointed lecturers, had to draw underground water through a small donkey pump to take a bath. Ultimately we decided that enough was enough and took a bus to sneak to Hyderabad, thinking that we could find another job, any job, rather than braving the harsh weather, struggling to find water in the morning and then taking classes on meagre salaries in the unfinished buildings.”
“Then how come you are still here, serving at a senior post and taking pride in the fact that the university just turned 28, with so many departments awarding PhDs?” I asked. He smiled heartily and said “it was the then vice chancellor, a visionary, who somehow traced us, phoned us, shamed us for our attitude, and asked what would become of a university established in a rural area if young scholars like us did not sacrifice their comfort to educate the youngsters from that backward area. We realised our mistake, came back and joined hands in building the university. And here it stands today, with all modern facilities, holding international research conferences and inviting scholars from all over the world.”
His pride was justified. And there are many more like him who sacrificed so much to build the university from scratch.
He has retired since. But life must go on and the brilliant men and women from younger generations must take over to make sure that what we have achieved is not squandered. As George Bernard Shaw has put it, “life is no brief candle for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
The torch flamed in 1976 at SALU is burning even brighter today, with scholars from the new generation, such as Prof Dr Muhammad Yousuf Khushk taking it over from the old boys. Comparing the nascent SALU with other universities of the country would not be fair, but it is heartening to note that a university as young as SALU is giving due importance to research activities since a university, the highest seat of learning, is known by the research it carries out and research publications it brings out.
SALU’s dean of faculty of social sciences and arts, Prof Yousuf Khushk, recently informed this writer that the faculty of social sciences has been emphasising the promotion of research activities and, aside from MPhil and PhD programmes at the university’s different departments, research publications are a regular feature of the faculty.
Prof Khushk joined SALU’s Urdu department as a lecturer in 1992. He did his PhD from Sindh University and was made head of department. Later, he carried out postdoctoral research at Heidelberg University, Germany. Khushk was made professor and a few years ago he was promoted as dean. As head of the department, he launched Urdu department’s research journal Almas in 2000. The journal has won accolades from scholars and the Higher Education Commission recently upgraded it from ‘Z’ category journals to ‘Y’ category for its high standards.
The latest issue of Almas carries the research papers read out at the international conference on literature and society, organised at SALU in 2015. It was one of the three such international conferences on Urdu organised at SALU and one was surprised to see many internationally known scholars presenting their papers at a town like Khairpur, in interior Sindh. The moving spirit behind these events was none other than Dr Khushk.
SALU’s faculty of social sciences has come up with two more research publications. One is Bayan-ul-Hikmah, the newly launched research journal of the Institute of Islamic Studies, SALU. Edited by Dr Sajjad Ali Raeesi and published in Urdu, it includes papers on Islamic history. Though all the papers are worth reading, the one on Mukhtar Saqafi, a controversial figure in Islamic history, is an absorbing read as it tries to clear the mist surrounding the personality of Saqafi.
The other is Bhitai, the Sindhi language research journal of SALU’s Sindhi department. Under the editorship of Dr Allah Wasayo Soomro, the journal has been re-launched after a gap of about 10 years. These research journals, published from SALU’s arts faculty, supervised by Dr Khushk, are a good omen and one hopes other universities in Sindh will take a cue.
Published in Dawn, July 11th, 2016
