With one stroke a world which billowed with fertility was laid desolate, and the regions thereof became a desert, and the greater part of the living dead, and their skin and bones crumbling dust; and the mighty were humbled and immersed in the calamities of Perdition. Ala al-Din Juwanyi cited…

Had India not been Invaded by Muslims I shall not now speak of the knowledge of the Hindus. . . . of their subtle discoveries in the science of astronomy — discoveries even more ingenious than those of the Greeks and Babylonians — of their rational system of mathematics, or…

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) exemplified the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. But what was the Enlightenment about? I like Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) answer.[2] Enlightenment (Aufklärung) is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if…

After my retirement from the university, I took a 100-level course in evolutionary biology. Our Lab instructor asked us to write an essay on gossip. Until I went into the literature on gossip, I shared a commonly held view of it: that it was bad to gossip. To be called…

What if Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had not existed?[1] The Aligarh Movement was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s legacy. Its roots were in the dispatch Sir Syed sent to the British government on the causes of the 1857 revolt.[2] In less than twenty years, he ignited the flame of modernity among…

Other men have written books and founded colleges; but to arrest as with a wall the degradation of a whole people — that is the work of a Prophet and this remark conveys a correct judgement of his personality. Sir Theodore Morison, Provost, MAO College, Aligarh (1898) The 102-year-old Aligarh…

Mirza Asad Ullah Khan Beg Ghalib[1] Part I: His Life Today no one buys my verse’s wine, that it may grow in age/ To make the senses reeling many a drinker yet to come. My star rose highest in the firmament before my birth:/ My poetry will win the world’s…

Some weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about writing a piece on idleness. He drew my attention to an essay Lord Bertrand Russell wrote, “In Praise of Idleness,” in Harper’s Magazine in 1932. He uses idleness and laziness as synonymous terms, while in fact his focus is on…

For there can be no discussion without contradiction. Cicero We must see not only what each one says, but also what he thinks, and also why he thinks it. Cicero Every man likes the smell of his own dung. Adapted from Erasmus The writings of two essayists, statesmen and philosophers…