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The Maulvi From Leh
By Yoginder Sikand
Maulvi Muhammad Umar Nadvi is the Imam of the Sunni Jami‘a Masjid in Leh. Apart from being actively involved in anti-smoking awareness camps across Ladakh, he talks on social issues in his Friday sermons.
Tucked away in northern Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh occupies some 65% of the state’s area, but accounts for less than 3% of its population. Ladakh’s roughly two lakh population is somewhat equally divided between Buddhists and Shi’a Muslims, with a small Sunni minority, known as Argons.
Maulvi Muhammad Umar Nadvi is the Imam of the Sunni Jami‘a Masjid in Leh, Ladakh’s main town. As his title suggests, he is a graduate of the renowned Nadwat ul-‘Ulama madrasa in Lucknow, one of the most well-known centres of Sunni Islamic learning in India. He also holds a degree from Kashmir University and works as the principal of the government middle school in the Buddhist-majority village of Saboo, near Leh.
Nadvi sees himself not simply as a religious functionary, but also as a community activist. He is one of the major spokesmen of the Sunni community in Leh, and is involved in various community-related activities. He tells me, for instance, about his work with a voluntary agency, LASH (Ladakh Action for Smoking and Health), which conducts anti-smoking awareness camps across Ladakh. He has also served on the board of the Students Educational Cultural Movement of Ladakh, a multi-religious organisation that focuses on educational issues. He is a senior office-bearer of the Anjuman Moin ul-Islam, a local Sunni community organisation, which, among other activities, arranges to collect zakat money for widows and scholarships for poor students. In the village of Saboo, where he teaches, he works with his students, Buddhists and Muslims, to promote awareness about the hazards of drinking. ‘The Buddhists of the village respect me’, he says. He tells me about how an Indian army officer once offered him some money for the local madrasa, but how he, instead, chose to use the money to build a good room in the school to keep the children warm in winter.
This message of social involvement, Nadvi tells me, is something that he also preaches from the pulpit of the mosque. In his Friday sermons, he often focuses on social issues. ‘Just last week’, he tells me; ‘I spoke about the need to save electricity, to go in for modern education and to support the efforts of the local administration’. He admits that, often, Friday sermons in mosques are ‘obsessed with rituals’, and are ‘not life-related’, and insists that this has to change.
‘I don’t want to talk about the past’, Nadvi tells me when I ask him about the boycott of the Muslims instituted by the Ladakh Buddhist Association in 1989, which lasted three years and severely impacted on Buddhist-Muslim relations. ‘I am concerned about the future, about peace and how to rebuild our relations’. Despite his various commitments he does take this task with particular seriousness. He tells me that he sometimes speaks on the local radio station on peace and development issues, in which he quotes from both Islamic as well as Buddhist scriptures to make his point. One of the several community projects that Nadvi is involved in is the newly established Madrasa ‘Ulum ul-Qur’an at the village of Thiksey, not far from Leh. Established in 1997, it is the only Sunni madrasa in the whole of Leh district.
The writer can be reached at ysikand@yahoo.com
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