In spite of this lapse of a quarter century, A.M.A. Azeez lives on, his memory untainted, with an increasing realization of his historical role – what he had done for Zahira College, Colombo, for Muslim education in general, for the role he played in the public life of his times, and above all, for the intellectual enrichment of this country through his writings in both English and Tamil.
For those of us of that generation of students who studied at Zahira (and a very few had the opportunity of teaching there too) during his Principalship (1948-1961), it was a time of unforgettable intellectual guidance and opening up of new intellectual vistas. Zahira, under Azeez, especially in the mid and late fifties realized its full potential as an educational institution, the foundation for which was laid by T.B. Jayah.
Many of the teachers who worked during that time and a substantial number of students who passed through Zahira rose to be quite important figures in the intellectual and public life of this country – Kamaldeen, Wijeratne, Bahar, Roy de Mel, Stanley Tillakaratne, Mahroof, Sivagnanam, Uwise, Shibly Cassim, H.M.P. Mohideen, Sameem, Furkhan, Sivagurunathan, Sivarajah, Ameer Ali, Jameel, Thalifdeen, Wesumperuma, Sivasubramaniam, Saldin, Abeysinghe, Barrie, Tuley de Silva, Ishaq, Shukri, Cader, Neville Edirisinghe, Macky Hashim, Selvanayagam, Balasingham, Suhaib, Gaffoor, Hamza Haniffa – to mention a few, in fact a very few.
In the late fifties there was a time when universities expansion beyond Peradeniya and Colombo was thought in terms of cultural iniversities. At that time Azeez was grooming Zahira to be the cultural university for the Muslims; Zahira, in his own words, was to be the “radiating centre of Islam”. He had even thought of bringing down students from the sub-sahara region of Africa to this university.
Even without that promise of a cultural university – which never worked out – Zahira was the premier institution for Muslim education. In those days, in the eyes of an average Muslim villager being a student at Zahira mattered even more than being an undergraduate. “After all the boy is studying under Azeez – what better do you need”.
His lasting contribution to the education of the Muslims of this country should be seen in the Ceylon Muslim Scholarship Fund he created in 1945. Many of the young Muslim intellectuals, who came up in the late fifties to seventies, owe their position to that Fund, which saw them through the university. A full list of the beneficiaries will be very revealing. Azeez widened the base of higher education for Muslims in Sri Lanka.
If the Muslim Scholarship Fund catered to the needs of the growing number of promising young Muslim students from villages and towns, the YMMA movement he started (The Young Men’s Muslim Association – 1950) created a new socio-political awareness among the Muslim youth. In a way it was a fore-runner to the Islamic Socialist Front (ISF) started later by Badiudin Mahmud. With YMMAs in action throughout the Muslim areas of the country, the changing needs and priority of the post 1956 era brought forth the ISF. It lay in the logic of expanding Muslim education and changing political loyalties. To us, his non-Muslim students it was his intellectual earnestness, and sincere concern in our development, that drew us very close to him.
With his basic training in history, Azeez was interested in the history of the Muslims in Sri Lanka from a national perspective. His contribution on Islam in Sri Lanka to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, and his work “The West Reappraised” are known to all the scholars working in these fields.
In my opinion, Azeez’s contribution to Sri Lankan historiography lies in that he highlighted the Muslim response to British colonialist domination. He discovered Siddi Lebbe as the Muslim counterpart of the Hindu Arumuga Navalar and the Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala.
Azeez was trying to orient the consciousness of the emerging Muslim youth towards a nation wide participation but firmly rooted within their reliigio-cultural identity. He was solely responsible for the introduction of Iqbal to Sri Lankan Muslims. This led to the discovery of Nazrul Islam and other important Muslim poets by his students.
It was during his post-Zahira days that he emerged as a Tamil writer of significance. With time in hand, and reawakened interest in his cultural roots, Azeez began to write in Tamil.
It was then, I became very close to him by assisting as a scribe. It was a journey to great intellectual depths and to broadening of vision and vistas. It was during that period of inter-action with him, he enabled me to become a Professional Academic. It was the association with him that led me on to the Assistant Lecturership at the then Vidyodaya University. Mr. Azeez was more confident about my knowledge of Tamil than me myself!
In spite of long years of life as a Colombo-based Muslim leader, his basic flair for language, the way he could tap the idiom of the language within which he grew up in Jaffna in early twenties was marvellous. During the early sixties, Tamil writing provided a cathartic release for him from the many harrowing problems which some of his erstwhile friends and beneficiaries created for him.
In Tamil writing Azeez made a name for himself as a travel writer.
His travelogues on his visits to Malaysia (First International Tamil Conference – 1966) and to Egypt are two outstanding pieces of travel writing in Tamil in Sri Lanka. The historian in him widened the focus and enriched the contents of his writing. He was not made to be a politician. But the pressure of Muslim public life in Colombo and perhaps that of his own family demanded that he be more than an educationist. Perhaps Jayah’s career as educationist cum politician was too enticing. Azeez was a made a Senator in 1952 and continued on till 1963.
It is unfortunate that much is not said today about his speeches in the Senate. Some of them were really outstanding. I remember his speech on Sinhala Only bill. He argued very effectively for a definite place for Tamil which he did not specify earlier, and the continued use of English. He was a much respected member of the second chamber serving in many of the important committees. It is high time that a select collection of his Senate speeches are brought out.
Remembering Azeez is remembering the human being in him, and with some of us who were his students, he opened his mind and heart and shared with us his joys and sorrows.
The Azeez we knew thus, was a man of great warmth, vision and sensitivity.
To a few of us, an early morning visit to ‘Meadow Sweet’, Barnes Place, where he lived was a must, to speak to him, to listen to him and quite often to work with him.
He had a wonderful library. As students we used to admire his calligraphic signature.
Mr. Azeez loved his family. His life was woven round his wife – a great lady. And when his wife passed away, he could not live much longer after that. It was a case of the proverbial Anril bird in Tamil literature pining for the lost partner.
Azeez was more than a man, he was an institution. We lovingly remember the way he used to walk up to his office with his driver Ibrahim Nana walking behind with his wooden box of the civil service days.
In spite of the thirty four years that have passed by, to us his students, friends and student-friends, remembering Azeez is an act of gratitude and of rediscovering our own past – a past in which he had a significant role to play.
May His Soul rest in Peace.
(Prof. Sivathamby was a student of Zahira College, Colombo (1949-1952) during the Azeez era. He graduated from the University of Ceylon and was a teacher at Zahira (1956-1961). He obtained a M.A. from the University of Ceylon and Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham, England. Later he was on the academic staff of Vidyodaya, Jaffna and Eastern Universities).
