Literary notes:Moulvi Syed Mumtaz Ali and other feminist Moulvis.

IT is a general perception, albeit flawed, that religious-minded Muslims and especially Muslim scholars are against women's rights. They do not support the idea of women's education, many say.

The fact is Muslim scholars have always been in favour of educating women and have advocated giving them the rights that Islam has given them. But at the hands of Muslims, some of these Muslim scholars have suffered much for supporting women's rights and favouring female education. Moulvi Syed Mumtaz Ali was one such person. He launched an Urdu magazine for women and made Muhammadi Begum, his wife, its editor. It was the year 1898. And modern trolling techniques used by social media zealots today were not available in good old days, but postal services were very much in place in British India and Mumtaz Ali regularly received hate mail, threats and curses.

The magazine was named Tehzeeb-e-Niswan (also written as Tehzeeb-un-Niswan at masthead, but was generally called Tehzeeb-e-Niswan). As the name suggests, the magazine intended to reform the women, but Moulvi Mumtaz Ali's fellow Muslims disagreed and many of them felt he was bent upon 'misleading' innocent Muslim women.

Interestingly, Mumtaz Ali had consulted Sir Syed Ahmed Khan before naming his periodical and Sir Syed, while suggesting a title among a few ones sent to him, wrote back angrily that he was not in favour of launching a journal for women in the first place. Sir Syed, one of the most revered modernists and reformers, was not in favour of women's education. But Mumtaz Ali was determined and Tehzeeb-e-Niswan, a monthly, was launched from Lahore in 1898. It became the first-ever magazine in the subcontinent to have had a woman as its editor. Though Tehzeeb-e-Niswan was not Urdu's first periodical published exclusively for women, such earlier magazines had no female staffers and editors were male.

Before Moulvi Mumtaz Ali, Urdu literature had seen a couple of feminist writers: Moulvi Nazeer Ahmed Dehlvi and Altaf Husain Hali. Nazeer Ahmed, a madressah-educated scholar of Islam and Arabic, was a zealous supporter of women's education and wrote Mirat-ul-Aroos, an Urdu novel, in 1869, with intention of educating women, especially his daughters.

Although his view of the sphere of activities for women was rather narrow and the basic theme of the novel was didactic, it was a great leap forward. Hali, also educated in traditional system and a scholar of Arabic and Persian, wrote quite a few poems...

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