Āzād, Abū l-Kalām - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
Minault, Gail
Leiden
Brill
(1,557 words)
Abū l-Kalām Āzād (1888-1958) was a leading Indo-Muslim nationalist, religious scholar, and Urdu journalist. He served as the first minister of education in the government of India following its independence from Britain in 1947. Āzād was born as Muḥyī l-Dīn on 11 November 1888 in Mecca. He took the name Āzād as his takhalluṣ (pen name) when he began writing Urdu poetry as a young man in India. His father, Shaykh Khayr al-Dīn Dihlawī (1831-1908), was a scholar of Islam and a Ṣūfī pīr