OCTOBER 17 marks birth anniversary of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817-1898), one of the colossi who helped shape not only the political, educational and religious world view of people of Indo-Pak subcontinent in a changing world, but also changed their destiny and course of history.

Dr Ata Khursheed has come up with an invaluable work: Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s speeches and lectures — including newly discovered ones — and has published them in three volumes, along with the ones already in print.

Now before we discuss this monumental work, let us have a few words about this strange fellow called Dr Ata Khursheed who has carried out this all-important work. Dr Khursheed has served Maulana Azad Library, the central library of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), India, for several decades as assistant librarian. The library holds over a million books, magazines, manuscripts and other material, some of them extremely rare. He devotes much of his time for disseminating knowledge and facilitating those who seek knowledge.

Aside from his professional duties as a librarian, he has contributed enormously by penning or compiling many other works that would help scholars, researchers and students as well as common readers looking for some rare information. The bibliographies, indexes and rare works that he has compiled and published — some of them extremely hard to come by — have been great help for researchers.

Dr Khursheed has helped procure some rare works by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan before the current work, too. For instance, AMU’s central library did not have the complete record of certain issues of Tehzeeb-ul-Akhlaq, a magazine launched by Sir Syed in 1870. Dr Khursheed with his solemn efforts was able to find the missing volumes and secure their copied versions, thereby completing the record at the library, making it the only library in the world that has entire collection of this magazine under one roof.

Now Dr Khursheed has embarked upon another gigantic task: compiling the entire works of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and has begun with publishing Sir Syed’s speeches and lectures. In these three volumes, published this year under the title Kulliyaat-i-Khutbaat-i-Sir Syed, by Lucknow’s publisher Extra-Ordinary Life Media, Dr Khursheed has presented 202 such pieces. Previously it was wrongly believed that Ismail Panipati had collected every speech and lecture by Sir Syed, but with 100 or so new speeches of Sir Syed discovered by Dr Khursheed, the number has doubled.

In his intro to the first volume of Sir Syed’s collected speeches and lectures, Dr Khursheed says: “The task of collecting and publishing Sir Syed’s writings had begun during his lifetime. In 1888, Pioneer had published from Allahabad an English translation of some of Sir Syed’s speeches and letters. In 1890, Munshi Sirajuddin Ahmed published Sir Syed’s 40 lectures, titled Lecturon Ka Majmoo’a from Lahore.”

Dr Khursheed says that after Sir Syed’s death in 1898, several scholars began working on collecting Sir Syed’s writings and Muhammad Imamuddin Gujrati published in 1900 from Lahore a collection of Sir Syed’s 80 lectures with the title Mukammal Majmoo’a Lectures-o-Speeches. But definitely it was not mukammal, or complete, as later on Ismail Panipati collected Sir Syed’s 100 lectures and speeches and Lahore’s Majlis-i-Taraqqi-i-Adab published them in two volumes in 1972 and 1973.

Titled Khutbaat-i-Sir Syed, Panipati’s work was reprinted in 2009 with three more speeches, taking the total to 103. But Dr Khursheed has some reservations. He says these were in fact not new pieces and were simply copied from a different source, which did not make them different speeches. Also, adds Khursheed, one of them is not a speech but introductory remarks written by the compiler of the report of Muhammadan Educational Conference. It was not penned by Sir Syed. So the correct number remained 98, as was in the first edition of Panipati’s work.

Sir Syed’s speeches and lectures were published originally in his three magazines, namely, Aligarh Institute Gazette, Tehzeeb-ul-Akhlaq and Akhbar Scientific Society. Dr Khursheed dug out the old issues of these magazines and discovered 104 pieces that were not part of any book claiming to be Sir Syed’s “complete works”, hence, making his work the true ‘complete collection’ of Sir Syed’s speeches and lectures.

Three volumes, spreading over 1,390 pages, proffer these pieces in chronological order, putting an asterisk to mention the newly discovered pieces. Dr Khursheed has based his work on the original sources, most of which are available at AMU’s library. This hard work paid richly as he was able to correct the errors that have crept in Panipati’s work, especially where dates and years are mentioned.

One hopes Dr Khursheed would be successful in his endeavours to compile Sir Syed’s entire works with the help of original sources.

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Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2022