Acknowledgements
Iam deeply grateful to many colleagues and friends for their guidance
and help in the preparationof these volumes.
To Mr. Mohammad Yunus who was the first to place
confidence in
my ability to do the job, and to Mr. Sharada Prasad who gave me
excellent advice and help with the subject matter, I express ny
foremost gratitude.
I wish to thank Mr. S.M.H. Burney, Chairman Minorities
Commission, for his advice and help with all the volumes. Mr. Malik
Ram, scholar and writer, and Mr. Shahid Ali Khan, General Manager,
Maktaba Jamia, have been most generous with their time and advice,
particularly about the Urdu volume. To Professor Mujeeb Rizvi and
Dr. Sughra Mehdi, my sincerest gratitude for agreeing to co-edit
Volume III(Hindi) and Volume IV (Urdu), respectively.
At ICCRI have worked with excellent people. They are too
many
to mention individually but, in particular, I want to thank the Director
General of the ICCR, Veena Sikri for her enthusiastic support of this
project; Ashok Srinivasan for his encouragement and heip from day
one of the project right through until the end, O.P. Madan for his
conscientious and meticulous help with the finalization of the
manuscript. Of the Library staff Icannot say enough since they made
my work at the Azad Bhavan Library a pleasure by creating a
congenial work environment, and by readily providing every research
facility I asked for. My sincerest thanks to Gulzar Naqvi, Chief
Librarian, and his colleagues Pakeeza Sultan and Khwaja Munir
Ahmed. A special thanks to Amarjit Kaur for her responsible and
cheerful secretarial assistance.
The frontispiece is based on a portrait of Maulana Abul Kalam
Azad by K.K. Hebbar.
At the end, I wish to remember my late husband Dr. S.M.A.
Hamecd who gave me every moral support needed to undertake such
a massive project, and my father, the late Dr. K.G. Saiyidain for
creating interest and veneration in my heart for Maulana Sahib, very
carly in my life. Three decades later, I was able to draw upon that
fecling for giving my best to this prestigious project.
- Editor