Reviving Nadwa’s Intellectual Heritage: A Call for Literary Depth and Open Horizons

Yesterday, my article “The Narrowness of the Nadwi Horizon” was published. I am grateful to the many friends, scholars, and Nadwi colleagues who read it with such generosity and affection. They sensed the pain, goodwill, and desire for reform underlying the article. Some also wrote that, after a long time, an important aspect of Nadwa’s intellectual character had been discussed in this manner. However, a few friends took it as criticism of Nadwatul Ulama, and some perhaps even as an attempt to disparage Nadwa. I therefore think it necessary to clarify my position somewhat. Click Here To Follow Our WhatsApp Channel

First of all, my love for Nadwa is no secret. Nadwa is not merely an educational institution for me; it is one of the fundamental affiliations of my intellectual and scholarly life. I have written, to the best of my ability, a great deal about Nadwa’s history, its personalities, its intellectual character, and its influence. I wrote a two-volume History of Nadwatul Ulama in Arabic, produced numerous books and articles about Nadwa and its teachers and leading scholars, and devoted part of my life to understanding, preserving, and communicating the institution’s scholarly tradition. Therefore, when I raise questions about some aspect of Nadwa, I should not be viewed as an external critic, but as someone who has a connection to this house and who also claims some familiarity with its past.

One does not expect anything from an institution to which one has no attachment; expectations arise from love.

My purpose was not to bring Nadwa down, but to remind people of the lofty position it has held. When I mentioned the great scholars of Nadwa’s past, I did not intend to embarrass the present generation by comparing them with those figures. Rather, I wanted to show how high the scholarly standards before us once were.

Shibli, Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi, Abd al-Salam Nadwi, Abd al-Hayy Hasani, Masud Alam Nadwi, and Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi are not merely historical names for us. They represent an intellectual temperament: breadth of reading, a refined command of language, a passion for research, intellectual courage, literary sophistication, and the ability to engage in dialogue with their own age.

If we take pride in their names, we should also ask how much of their intellectual temperament remains in our present scholarly life.

There is another fundamental point to which I wish to draw attention, one which perhaps some readers did not fully understand in my previous article.

One of Nadwa’s distinctive identities has always been its engagement with the Arabic language, literature, and rhetoric. In Nadwa’s tradition, language was not merely a collection of grammatical rules. It was also taste, culture, thought, and an art of expression. A student of Nadwa was expected not merely to determine whether a sentence was grammatically correct, but also to understand why it had been expressed in that particular way: what allusion it contained, what kināyah (indirect expression) was being used, where there was simile, metaphor, figurative usage, or hyperbole, and where the author had chosen to express something indirectly through a literary form rather than state it plainly.

If literature is read only at the level of the literal wording, literature ceases to remain literature; only the wording remains.

It was in this context that I used the sentence in my article:

“What we call Modern Arabic is often the Arabic of the news reports in al-Rā’id.”

The purpose of this sentence was neither to disparage al-Rā’id nor to object to its journalistic style. Al-Rā’id has its own important journalistic tradition, and the Arabic of journalism has its own legitimate purpose and usefulness. My point was simply that, for some people, the scope of Arabic writing has contracted to this limited journalistic style: a piece of news arrives, an event is described, short sentences are formed, verbs and subjects fall into their proper places—and the writing ends there.

My question is: Is Arabic merely a language for writing news?

Arabic certainly contains news, but it is not only a language of news. It contains literature, oratory, history, philosophy, criticism, research, intellectual analysis, cultural discourse, scholarly argumentation, and countless styles of expression that have made it one of the world’s great civilizational languages.

If we write in Arabic, we should know not only journalistic Arabic but also literary Arabic. We should know not merely how to report a fact, but how to analyse and dissect an idea. We should know not only how to construct a grammatically correct sentence, but how to give prose a distinctive style.

That is why I used the expression “the Arabic of al-Rā’id’s news reports.” My criticism was not directed at a newspaper or its style, but at the tendency to confine Arabic writing to a single mould.

If a student can write a news report in Arabic but cannot write a literary essay in Arabic, analyse a historical event, present a reasoned discussion of an intellectual question, or explain a literary text, then his Arabic has not yet reached its full breadth. Grammatical correctness is the foundation of language, not its completion.

Likewise, studying rhetoric does not simply mean knowing the definition of simile, the various types of metaphor, what kināyah is, or what is meant by figurative expression. True mastery of rhetoric emerges when a person begins to recognise and employ these devices in living prose.

A writer can say, “He was very brave,” or he can say, “The moment he stepped onto the battlefield, death lowered its eyes before him.” The two sentences may point toward the same basic meaning, but their style, impact, and literary quality are not the same. That distinction cannot be learned merely from a dictionary or a grammar book; it requires extensive reading and literary sensibility.

Similarly, if someone says, “The books will remain silent, while our tongue will continue to speak,” it would show unfamiliarity with literary expression to reject the statement as a literal historical or juridical claim. It is a literary image, a satirical metaphor. Its intended meaning is that the books are physically present among us, but if we do not derive intellectual benefit from them, merely possessing their titles cannot bring our scholarly life to life.

And perhaps this is precisely where Nadwa’s own scholarly tradition should command our greatest attention.

Nadwa did not merely claim to produce religious scholars. It sought to produce scholars who understood the language of their age, could converse with their age, and could present their scholarly tradition in new forms of expression.

For Shibli, history was not merely a register of events; it was a fusion of thought and literature. In Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi, research was not dry information; it possessed linguistic freshness and expressive power. In Abd al-Salam Nadwi’s prose, one finds a distinctive fusion of Arabic and Urdu that illuminates the cultural relationship between the two languages. In Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, Arabic is not merely grammatically correct prose; thought, religious advocacy, history, civilization, and feeling speak together through it.

This is the breadth to which my article was pointing.

My concern is not that every Nadwi today is not a Shibli. That is neither possible nor desirable. Every age has its own needs, personalities, and circumstances. The real question is whether we have kept our intellectual horizon sufficiently broad that the possibility remains of producing new kinds of Shibli, new kinds of Sulayman Nadwi, and new kinds of Abul Hasan.

If Arabic is a central component of our education, we must establish a relationship with Sibawayh, al-Jurjani, Ibn Ya’ish, and the other great authorities of language and literature. If Hadith is part of our scholarly inheritance, then after Mishkat we must enter the vast world of the methods of the hadith scholars, biographical evaluation of narrators, the study of hidden defects, and principles of critical assessment.

If jurisprudence is our field, we must understand not merely legal questions and fatwas, but also legal methodologies, principles of reasoning, the history of jurisprudence, and the causes of scholarly disagreement.

If Qur’anic exegesis is part of our scholarly identity, we must approach the Qur’an not merely through translation and a brief commentary, but through the interconnected disciplines of lexicography, rhetoric, principles of tafsir, Qur’anic sciences, jurisprudence, theology, and history.

And if we call ourselves people of knowledge, we should not close the doors of philosophy, logic, history, intellectual thought, and the modern sciences to ourselves.

The river of knowledge cannot be confined to a single seminary, a single book, a single school of thought, or a single curriculum.

This is the real problem of “narrowness of the hem.” If the hem of one’s garment is too small, one should try to enlarge it. But if, instead of enlarging it, a person begins to think that there are very few things worth possessing in the first place, then the problem is no longer simply a lack of knowledge; it has become a narrowness of intellectual temperament.

And when excessive self-confidence is added to this narrowness, matters become even more complicated: limited reading, but categorical judgments; little information, but sweeping commentary; a handful of books read, but opinions formed about the entirety of an intellectual heritage.

This is not necessarily the condition of any one individual. It can be a general intellectual attitude, which is why I described it in a humorous and satirical manner.

One of the functions of literature is also to hold up a mirror.

A mirror neither praises nor condemns. It simply shows the reflection. If the face is beautiful, its beauty appears; if there is a blemish, that too becomes visible. One cannot break the mirror by saying, “Why did you show the blemish?”

But here we must remember the point once again: my article was not a fatwa.

If it is read as though it were a juridical text, much of it may be misunderstood. It was a literary piece. It contained satire, hyperbole, simile, metaphor, indirect expression, and, in some places, deliberately sharpened language. From those associated with an institution as literary as Nadwa, I expect something more: that they will read not only the apparent words of a piece, but also its style and context.

In a fatwa, the several possible meanings of a word may sometimes create a legal problem; in literature, those same possibilities can become part of its beauty.

The purpose of a fatwa is to clarify a ruling; one purpose of literature is also to make meaning layered and multidimensional.

Therefore, if a literary sentence is read in such a way that its metaphor becomes a literal claim, its hyperbole becomes a historical statement, and its satire becomes a personal accusation, then not only is the purpose of my article lost, but the entire literary tradition is also harmed.

I was not writing against Nadwa; I was writing in favour of Nadwa’s possibilities.

I do not regard Nadwa as small; that is precisely why I expect it to become greater.

I was not criticising its past; I was turning its past into a question for the present.

I was not rejecting our predecessors; I was saying that before taking pride in their names, we should cultivate some part of their intellectual taste and sensibility in our own lives.

Shibli is our heritage, but studying Shibli is also our responsibility.

Sayyid Sulayman Nadwi is our pride, but striving toward his intellectual breadth is also our responsibility.

Abd al-Hayy Hasani and Masud Alam Nadwi are part of our tradition, but opening their books is also our responsibility.

It is easy to invoke the name of Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi; it is not easy to develop his breadth of reading, his taste for Arabic, his civilizational awareness, and his intellectual insight.

Names can be inherited; intellectual stature cannot.

My fundamental wish for Nadwa is simply that its intellectual hem should once again become broader: in language, in literature, in Hadith, in jurisprudence, in Qur’anic exegesis, in history, in thought, and above all in the capacity to read widely and ask questions.

For the Nadwa that, from its very beginning, sought to understand the needs of its age should not become merely a museum of its own past. It should carry the spirit of its past into a dialogue with the future.

Therefore, if yesterday’s article is to be understood in a single sentence, I would put it this way:

This is not a complaint against Nadwa; it is an expectation from Nadwa. And expectations are placed only in those whom one loves.

And if there is satire in what I have said, it should not be understood as the satire of an enemy. It is the satire of someone who is unwilling to accept that his own home should be regarded as ordinary.

I do not want to see Nadwa become small; that is why I write about the narrowness of Nadwa’s intellectual horizon.