It can be safely said that Muhammad Kazim was a rare scholar of our tradition. The main focus of his lifelong scholarship, the Arab culture, its philosophical contributions, literature and then religion were treated individually rather than lumped together under one grand fallacious label. And that one grand label is that of religion.
All scholars with similar focuses have attempted to see and evaluate all human endeavours and creative effort as flowing from one source and then have bent over backwards to see and establish the linkage. When they fail to do so, they either denounce it on purely religious basis or ignore it altogether -- as if it did not exist.
Perhaps, there is not all that can be explained under one label and if so, it is in very simplistic terms, making it either appear frivolous or farfetched. In most cases, it is the shutting of the eyes and just adapting to the change that is taking place without looking at it head on, while the other approach is to create two separate watertight compartments, treat the two separately with no thread running between the two.
Most scholars probably proceed with the assumption that the common ground has to be explored -- that there is a thread and it has not been properly traced, that some conspiracy had robbed the great civilisation of the commonality that was secretly found by others and now is zealously protecting it to prevent the civilisation from achieving that glory once again.
This sense of history was an important element in the approach of Muhammad Kazim -- and two of his best works were to place philosophy and literature in its historical perspective. Muslim Fikr aur Falsafa - Ahed ba Ahed and Arbi Adab Ki Tareekh were both works that did not sidestep the inevitable template of the historical process but viewed it on the canvas with lines and tones of various intellectual and artistic ideas etched on it.
Almost all in our country have been made to believe the glorious contribution made in the field of philosophy and then its more material core, the various sciences, but there is hardly anyone to actually pinpoint what those were and how did they contribute in making the fund of human knowledge bigger and better. Then there are many who do not see an integral link or relationship between the development of philosophical thought and the exponential growth of the natural sciences. If one goes through the two books, especially the one on the history of ideas, one can at least detect the pointers that were the high point of intellectual achievements and the subsequent problems that arose as the growth of the ideas and intellect came under a narrower reading. This censorship caused the decline of the intellectual growth from which the civilisation has not really been able to recover since.
Kazim delved into the formation of the various sects in Islam, the reasons and then their development, the various schools of mysticism where the sufis played a dynamic role. He discussed the origins and evolutions of the various silsilas and the historical rationale behind their growth and endurance.
He was aware of the oddity of writing the history of Arabic literature in another language like Urdu but he thought that the people who spoke and wrote Urdu have a special relationship with the Arabic language and want to know more about it for a number of reasons.
Despite the curiosity and desire, even the educated ones know very little about the broader aspects of Arabian culture, in particular, its literature. People as such do not have an adequate understanding of the Arabic language to be familiar with those broader aspects. He also blamed the Arabic critics, poets and scholars, who wrote about the history of their literature, of wanting to create a literary masterpiece rather than write in simple terms.
He divided the history of Arabic literature in eras -- Jahalia, Sadre Islam and Banu Ummiya, Abbasid era, the eras that encompassed Andulusia, Fatimid and Turkish phases and the era of the recent past, the modern one. Compared to poetry, the Arabic fiction developed in the Abbasid period but really reached its zenith in the Andulusia, Fatimid and Turkish era.
Arabic is a Semitic language and the Arabs are Semites, deriving the name of their race from Sam, the son of Noah. The language which originated in Mesopotamia was extant in the Arabian Peninsula but had reached a certain maturity. The literature produced in it at the advent of Islam was of a high quality. This period known as Jahaliya should not be confused with jihalat which means ignorance, but implies a period when there was worship of more than one god, lack of social justice, misuse of power and self-centered arrogance.
Of the two types of Arabic language, one more standardised and other localised expression, he focused on the former -- as at times the two were and are not understood by those born in any one of them.
The modern phase or era started after the conquest of Egypt in 1801 by Muhammad Ali Pasha. In this period, the Arabic literature came out of its decadence, and under European influence, many new forms were being written about, like afsana, drama and novel. Then the resistance poetry that came out of the Palestinian struggle.
Muhammad Kazim was an engineer by profession and retired as one after nearly 40 years of service. But his real passion was Arabic history and culture. He did his masters in the Arabic language and then translated into that language certain works of Maulana Maududi.
Like any other feeling and thinking and worrying Muslim, he pondered over the causes of the near static nature of these societies all around. In this context he also translated the works of Dr Fazlul Rahman and brought forth some of the stock issues confronting the Muslim community on the whole.
Basically a self-effacing person, Kazim never liked to be in the limelight, fighting battles and leading from the front. He was a scholar in the true sense, more interested in the work than the projection of his self. His death earlier this month was hardly noticed in the local media and only a few were aware of the importance of his work and mentioned this loss in their columns.