Maulana Sayyid Abul Kalam Ghulam Muhiyuddin Ahmed bin Khairuddin Al-Hussaini Azad, he was the First Minister of Education for INDIA after Independence. Azad was born on 11 November 1888 in Makkah, then a part of the Ottoman Empire. His real name was Sayyid Ghulam Muhiyuddin Ahmed bin Khairuddin Al Hussaini, but he eventually became known as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Azad's father was a Bengali Muslim scholar of Afghan ancestry, who lived in Delhi with his maternal grandfather, as his father had died at a very young age. During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, he left India and settled in Mecca.

His father Maulana Sayyid Muhammad Khairuddin bin Ahmed Al Hussaini wrote twelve books, had thousands of disciples, and claimed noble ancestry, while his mother was Sheikha Alia bint Mohammad, the daughter of Sheikh Mohammad bin Zaher AlWatri, himself a reputed scholar from Medina who had a reputation that extended even outside of Arabia. 

The Guardian : Sir Vidia, born in Trinidad of Indian parentage, who travelled extensively in the Muslim world for his books Among the Believers and Beyond Belief, launched his attack after a reading of his new book, Half a Life, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Islam, he claimed, had both enslaved and attempted to wipe out other cultures."It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples.

To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'." Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books in our weekly email Read more Sir Vidia claimed what he called "this abolition of the self demanded by Muslims was worse than the similar colonial abolition of identity. It is much, much worse in fact... You cannot just say you came out of nothing." He argued that Pakistan was the living proof of the damage Islam could wreak.

"The story of Pakistan is a terror story actually. It started with a poet who thought that Muslims were so highly evolved that they should have a special place in India for themselves. "This wish to sift countries of unnecessary and irrelevant populations is terrible and this is exactly what happened in Pakistan."