Who will be the scholars of Sindh tomorrow, its chroniclers, asks worried old guard

Our educational institutions are not training the new Dr Nabi Baksh Balochs.

KARACHI: Once upon a time, in 1975, Abdul Hamid Akhund was driving the late Sindhi scholar Dr Nabi Baksh Baloch to Nagarparkar for a seminar. Dr Baloch asked him to see if they could find a man by the name Darhun Sheedi. After some inquiries they came upon a group from which an old man raised his hand.

For five hours that ran late into the night, Dr Baloch interviewed Darhun Sheedi. What emerged was a 600-page history of the legend of Dodo Chanesar - such was the nature of Dr Baloch’s method of inquiry.

There is a saying that a man is dead not when he dies but when he is forgotten. Dr Baloch may not be physically among us any more but he lives on in his works. This was a man who turned down a professorship at Columbia University. What was this Ivy League’s loss was Sindh’s gain.

Dr Baloch, who died in 2011, was remembered on Saturday at the National Museum at a memorial lecture in his name for which Hameed Haroon of the Endowment Fund Trust had invited Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, OBE, former principal of Aitchison College.

Hamida Khuhro, Shehnaz Ismail, Amin Gulgee, Zubeida Mustafa, Dr Noman Ahmed, Suhail Zaheer Lari and Rumana Husain were just some of the people who came to hear Aijazuddin speak at the event, which was also chosen as an occasion to launch the inventory of historic sites of Shikarpur by Dr Anila Naeem.



The question that seemed to weigh on Haroon and Aijazuddin’s minds was whether the young people of today in Sindh, and indeed the other provinces, are being equipped to be the historians, writers, researchers of tomorrow? Are there any future Dr Nabi Baksh Balochs in the making?

Haroon felt that a majority of young people today had “breadth but not depth” to create a better cultural tomorrow. Educational institutions need to ensure they are able to carry forward work in cultural knowledge and management systems.

Aijazuddin spoke of the challenges teachers and students faced today. “We teach what we learnt in the 20th century,” he said referring to teachers, “But they need to learn about what they need in the 21st century,” he added, referring to students.

Aijazuddin’s short tight talk dwelt on questions on culture which young people today often debate in a mostly uninformed fashion. Mercifully, he chose this focus instead of boring the audience by attempting to compress 5,000 years of our history into 30 minutes.

He framed his questions by pegging them to and debunking the theories put forward by the late political scientist Samuel P Huntington in ‘Clash of Civilisations’. This controversial book published in 1996 argues that cultural and religious differences would fuel violent conflict among major civilisations. Much like Sir Cyril Radcliffe who drew a line to partition India, Huntington drew one on the world’s map to divide it by religion. But Aijazuddin is not so sure he agrees with this. For example, WWI and WWII were not wars between the German Lutherans, the Shinto Japanese and the Anglican Americans. It was nations fighting each other.

As a litmus test of Huntington’s theory we can look at the Islamic world. Can it be seen as a unified, composite whole, asked Aijazuddin? Despite the efforts of bodies such as the OIC, Islam remains a common faith and at times a common cause but unlike Roman Catholicism it does not have an identifiable hierarchical structure.

Hot and cold climates?

Do communities living in cold climates, such as northern Europe, the Americas, have a more advanced culture than those in hotter zones? According to Aijazuddin this doesn’t explain why the Scandinavian countries, Canada and Alaska to name a few were 5,000 years ago culturally far behind their contemporaries in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Columbian South America, China and our own Indus Valley.

At odds with modernity?

Aijazuddin argued that we need to ask ourselves whether we belong to the east or to the west? Or are we simply east of the west? Or just west of the east? Do we wish to include ourselves in the company of progressive cultures? Or should we reconcile ourselves to being relegated amongst what are known as static cultures?

Progressive cultures emphasise the future, static ones extol the past. Education is key in progressive cultures and given marginal attention in static ones. Merit is given prominence in progressive cultures. Only connections count in static ones. The community is far more important than the individual in progressive cultures. The self or the family are at the centre of static cultures. And lastly, and perhaps controversially, progressive cultures aim towards secularism. Heterodoxy and dissent are encouraged. Static cultures take refuge in orthodoxy and unquestioning uniformity.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 8^th, 2013.