100,000 people displaced from their homes. In
both 1992 and 2002, the victims were overwhelm-
ingly Muslim, making the identity of the site one
of the most critical, yet intransigent, challenges to
India’s multireligious polity. In 2003, the Indian
Supreme Court ordered the Archaeological Survey
of India (ASI) to conduct excavations of the site,
but the results have proved too indefinite to bring
about any resolution.
See also hindUism and islam; mUghal dynasty.
Anna Bigelow
Further reading: Sarvepalli Gopal, ed., Anatomy of a
Confrontation: The Rise of Communal Politics in India
(London: Zed Books, 1993); Sushil, Srivastava, The Dis-
puted Mosque: A Historical Inquiry (New Delhi: Vistaar
Publications, 1991); Peter Van der Veer, Gods on Earth:
Religious Experience and Identity in Ayodhya (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
Azad, Abu al-Kalam (1888–1958) Indian
Muslim intellectual and nationalist leader
Abu al-Kalam Azad was a leader in india’s struggle
to gain independence from Britain in the early
20th century, and he served as the country’s first
minister of education from 1947 until his death
in 1958. His most important religious work was
Tarjuman al-Quran (1931), a two-volume Urdu
language translation and commentary on the
qUran, which he wrote while in prison.
Azad was born in mecca to an Indian father
and Arab mother and moved with his parents to
Calcutta, India, when he was around 10 years old.
His father, Khairuddin Dihlawi (1831–1908), was
a religious man who chose to give his son a tra-
ditional Islamic education at home. Azad proved
to be a gifted student who was attracted to the
modern ideas of sayyid ahmad khan (1817–98),
which conflicted with the traditional Sufi outlook
of his father. His thinking was further affected by
his travels in the Middle East in 1908–09, when
he met with nationalists and religious reformers in
iran, iraq, tUrkey, and egypt. After returning to
India, he established a weekly Urdu journal in 1912
called Al-Hilal (crescent moon), in which he called
upon India’s Muslims to unite and join with other
Indians in a nonviolent campaign for independence
from Britain. After the British imprisoned Azad
for three and a half years, he joined with the great
Indian nationalist leader Mohandas K. Gandhi
(1869–1948) in the khilaFat movement in 1920
and then continued as a leader in the Congress
Party, where he worked to bring Muslims and Hin-
dus together in the independence movement. He
used his knowledge of the Quran and Islamic his-
tory to win support for this effort, as can be seen in
his Tarjuman al-Quran, but many Indian Muslims
felt that they had to work separately from Hindus
to create their own state. The British imprisoned
him several more times in the 1930s and 1940s,
but from 1940 to 1946 he served as president of
the All-India National Congress, after which he
became India’s first minister of education. Azad was
completely against the division of India into two
states and was deeply disappointed when pakistan
and India were partitioned in 1947.
See also all-india mUslim leagUe; hindUism
and islam; Jinnah, mUhammad ali.Further reading: Ian Henderson Douglas, Abul Kalam
Azad: An Intellectual and Religious Biography, eds. Gail
Minault and Christian W. Troll (New Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1988); Syeda Saiyidain Hameed, Islamic
Seal on India’s Independence: Abul Kalam Azad, A Fresh
Look (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998).al-Azhar (Arabic: the brilliant one)
Al-Azhar is now the most important center of
Islamic learning in and the institution most sym-
bolic of the world of Sunni Islam. It was built by
the Fatimid rulers of egypt (r. 969–1171) as the
primary mosqUe and center of missionary out-
reach in their new capital of cairo. With the rise
to power of the Ayyubid dynasty under saladin
in 1171, al-Azhar lost much of its prestige, par-
ticularly to other madrasas that arose at this time.al-Azhar 79 J