It was a nice winter day in Delhi when I and my wife visited Jamia Millia Islamia in January 2008. My publishers in India, Orient Longmans (now Orient Blackswan), had published the revised edition of my book Language, Ideology and Power: Language-learning among the Muslims of Pakistan and North India first published by the Oxford University Press from Karachi in 2002. I was told by Ketaki Bose, head of the press in Delhi, that the Vice Chancellor of the University, Professor Mushirul Hasan, would preside over the event and introduce my book. This was exhilarating news for me for I had read Mushirul Hasan’s work and respected his scholarship. I had met him very briefly in a conference or dinner but had never got the chance to talk to him in some detail. So I was excited and looking forward to his address. And, sure enough, I was not disappointed. He gave a learned introduction placing my book in its historical perspective. The book is about the learning of languages of the Muslims of South Asia and he was an expert on the history of these people. They were, after all, his own people and also mine. After the event I met him informally and had a brief talk with him. I also met his wife, Professor Zoya Hasan, when she visited Islamabad later but this too was a brief meeting at an academic event. I had the chance of attending a conference later in 2011 in Jamia Millia and there I saw the university closely since I stayed there. It was, indeed, very well organized and I was told by people that Mushirul Hasan Sahib had modernized it and transformed into a top university of India. The atmosphere was quite unlike that of Aligarh, Mushir’s alma mater, and more like that of the famous Jawaharlal Nehru University in the same city. Boys and girls dressed in casual modern clothes chatted animatedly and the buildings had a contemporary look. While Aligarh still plodded on in the middle of the twentieth century, Jamia had raced ahead and become a modern Indian university. And a large share of the credit for this change went to Mushirul Hasan who was pro-vice chancellor of the Jamia from 1992 to 1996 and vice chancellor from 2004 to 2009. He established the Dalit Studies Centre, the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, the Centre for the study of comparative religions and a centre for minorities. As one can see, these centres were meant to promote peace, pluralism, tolerance and inclusiveness—all very near his heart and that of all liberals. As the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey remarked to a friend on the 3rd August 1914 on the eve of World War 1: ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time’. Well, now the lamps are going out one by one all over the world and Professor Mushirul Hasan was one of those lamps Incidentally, I used this high praise for his administrative skills in my ongoing debate with those people—and there are many of them—in Pakistan who persist in believing in the myth that good academics cannot be good administrators. There is no proof for this prejudiced assertion but it is used to exclude a number of deserving scholars and scientists from high administrative positions in our universities. Of course, not all scholars are necessarily good administrators but then; likewise for those of inferior academic achievements. Professor Mushir was the product of Congress ruled India. It was an India where, officially at least, pluralism was the value which had to be promoted. He went to Cambridge where he got his Ph.D and came back to India to write his fifteen books with the central theme of pluralism. I have read most of them and found in them the prominence of this theme. One of his books Islam, Pluralism, Nationhood: Legacy of Maulana Azad (2014), is about a figure who stands out as a symbol of this ideal of pluralism. His scholarship was widely respected both in his own country and abroad. India gave him the Padma Shri civil award in 2007 and two Indian universities bestowed the honourary D. Litt degree upon him in recognition of his work. He was also made the Director General of the National Archives of India in Delhi in 2010 and was given several other honours. Abroad, he held academic positions in the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, the Centre for Indian and South Asian Studies in Paris, St. Antony’s College, Oxford and the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge. France also bestowed upon him its high civil honour Ordre des palmes academiques. In November 2014 he suffered an accident sustaining a head injury which made him bedridden for the next four years. Even worse, his kidneys started to fail and Zoya Hasan, his faithful wife, had to take him to the hospital for dialysis. I learned this from Professor Mohammad Waseem who was a friend of the couple and who was much grieved at this turn of affairs. Death when it came must have been a relief for him but he left a void not only for his family and friends but also for the study of the Muslim civilization in India. Moreover, his death removes another champion of pluralism and tolerance in an India from the scene. And this has happened when the world needs such people to stand up to the strong tide of right wing nationalism which is taking up the world. Indeed, in Modi’s India people like Mushirul Hasan have an increasingly shrinking space. As the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey remarked to a friend on the 3rd August 1914 on the eve of World War 1: ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time’. Well, now the lamps are going out one by one all over the world and Professor Mushirul Hasan was one of those lamps. The author is an occasional, freelance columnist. Published in Daily Times, January 2nd 2019