Ma'arif
Ma'arif is an Urdu monthly literary and scholarly magazine published from Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh,by the Darul Musannefin Shibli Academy. Its first issue appeared in July 1916,and it has been published continuously ever since — a run of more than a century that is widely described as making it the longest-surviving Urdu journal in the world. The magazine was conceived by the scholar Shibli Nomani and, after his death, founded and edited by his disciple Sulaiman Nadvi, who shaped it for more than three decades. Covering theology,culture,history,philosophy,literature,poetry,science and education,Ma'arif became the house journal of one of India's most respected Muslim research academies and a central platform of Urdu scholarly prose in the twentieth century. It carries ISSN 0974-7346,appears monthly in Urdu,and is currently edited by Zafarul Islam Khan,Umair al-Siddiq Nadvi and Kaleem Sifaat Islahi.
Conception: Shibli Nomani's Unfinished Plan
Ma'arif was initially proposed by Shibli Nomani,the historian and biographer whose life of the Prophet,Siratun Nabi,is regarded as a landmark of Urdu scholarship. Nomani prepared plans for a research academy — Darul Musannefin, the house of authors — intended to nurture a body of scholarly writers who could produce authentic,researched literature in Urdu and meet the intellectual challenges facing the Muslims of the subcontinent after the collapse of their political authority and its replacement by British power. He failed to establish the academy in Lucknow,and it was founded instead on land he had donated, his own mango orchard in Azamgarh, supplemented by parcels donated by close relatives. The academy was established on 21 November 1914, three days after Nomani's death, by his disciples headed by Hamiduddin Farahi; other accounts describe its formal establishment in early 1915. The magazine Nomani had envisaged was implemented posthumously: Ma'arif was founded in July 1916 under the academy's auspices as its primary platform for scholarly engagement, addressing both classical and contemporary intellectual issues.
The Founding Editor and the First Issue
Sulaiman Nadvi — Nomani's student, the completer of Siratun Nabi's later volumes and the magazine's first editor — defined Ma'arif's programme in its inaugural issue. As summarised by historians of the academy, the magazine sought to reinterpret and organise the classical Islamic sciences through modern scholarly methods; to document the historical development of Islamic knowledge; to examine contemporary philosophical ideas; to offer reasoned articulations of Islamic beliefs; to present biographies of notable scholars, emphasising their independent reasoning and intellectual works; and to review rare or little-known Arabic texts. The founding editorial board included Nadvi as chief editor alongside Abdul Majid Daryabadi, Hafiz and Abdul Salam Nadwi. Its scope encompassed philosophy, history, science, literature, poetry and education, with critical analyses of classical texts and curated scholarly extracts from journals published in Europe, Egypt and Beirut. Alongside the scholarship, the magazine carried literary essays, contemporary debates and critical commentary to remain accessible to a broader readership. Its editorial philosophy, inspired by the integrative and reformative approaches of Abbasid-era scholars, aimed to preserve traditional knowledge while engaging with modern intellectual developments.
A Century of Editors
The magazine's editorial succession is unusually well documented. Sulaiman Nadvi served as editor-in-chief from 1916 to 1949, managing all editorial responsibilities largely independently for many years. Abdul Majid Daryabadi deputised for eight months in 1920 during Nadvi's visit to Europe. In 1936 Moinuddin Ahmad Nadvi oversaw day-to-day editing while Nadvi served as Chief Officer of Religious Affairs in Bhopal, and Riyasat Ali Nadvi contributed as editor in 1937 and again for a year in 1947; Moinuddin Ahmad Nadvi, who had long managed editorial work in practice, was formally listed as co-editor by 1949 and then served as editor-in-chief from 1949 until December 1974. Abdul Salam Qidwai Nadvi and Sabahuddin Abdur Rahman Nadvi were co-editors from January 1975 to September 1979, followed by Sabahuddin Abdur Rahman Nadvi alone until November 1987, and then Ziauddin Islahi from December 1987 to February 2008. Ishtiyaq Ahmad Zilli and Umair al-Siddiq Nadvi were co-editors from March 2008 to October 2021. From November 2021 Zafarul Islam Khan joined Umair al-Siddiq Nadvi as co-editor, and since March 2023 the magazine has been edited by Zafarul Islam Khan, Umair al-Siddiq Nadvi and Kaleem Sifaat Islahi. Few journals anywhere can present so complete a century-long editorial lineage.
The Academy Behind the Magazine
Ma'arif cannot be separated from the Darul Musannefin Shibli Academy, which publishes it and within whose Azamgarh campus it is produced. The academy describes itself as the oldest research institution established by the Muslims of the Indo-Pak subcontinent, and it has published more than 250 — by its current count, over 275 — books of high-class research, many in multiple volumes, translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish, English, Hindi, Malayalam and other languages. Its best-known works include Siratun Nabi, Al Faruq and Seerat-e-Aisha. The academy's departments include its research division, publications division, printing press and a library holding rare books and manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English, among them copies of the Akbarnama, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri and the Fatawa Alamgiri. The Press Information Bureau of the Government of India, on the occasion of the academy's golden jubilee in the 1960s, praised the institution in terms that compared its band of devoted scholars to those of ancient centres of learning. The academy's admirers and life members over the years have included Muhammad Iqbal, Abul Kalam Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Motilal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Zakir Husain; its golden jubilee celebrations in 1965 were presided over by Dr. Zakir Husain.
Content and Character
Ma'arif is classified across theology, culture, dawah, literature and education, and its pages mix genres in the manner its founder intended: learned articles on history, philosophy and the Islamic sciences; literary essays and poetry; reviews of Arabic and Urdu books, including rare and little-known texts; biographies of scholars; extracts and discussions drawn from journals in Europe, Egypt and Beirut; and commentary on contemporary debates. The academy counts the magazine as its highly acclaimed monthly journal, and external admirers have rated it higher still: the scholar Muhammad Hamidullah is reported by the academy to have considered it the Muslim world's best journal, and a famed Arab scholar, Shaikh Abdul Fattah Abu Ghuddah, is likewise cited among its admirers. Such judgements reflect the magazine's particular combination — Urdu as the medium, classical Islamic learning as the foundation, modern scholarly method as the standard — which gave it a readership among the Urdu-literate scholarly classes of the subcontinent and a reputation in the wider Muslim world disproportionate to the small town from which it is published.
Continuity Through a Century of Change
The magazine's most quoted fact is its unbroken run: published continuously since July 1916, through the late colonial period, the Partition of 1947, and the entire history of independent India, it completed one hundred years of uninterrupted publication in 2016 and is described by the academy and by commentators as the longest-surviving Urdu journal in the world. Continuity on that scale required institutional stubbornness. The academy that sustains it has long been financially strained: before independence it received grants from the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Nawab of Bhopal and other patrons, streams that later dried up, and modern accounts describe a cash-strapped institution whose library patronage has dwindled as Urdu readership has shrunk, with appeals for readers to subscribe to Ma'arif — quoted rates have included a few hundred rupees for an annual subscription and larger sums for life membership — to build a corpus for the academy's survival. In February 2016 the academy declined a grant of five lakh rupees from the Government of Uttar Pradesh, stating that it was inappropriate for an Islamic institution — a decision that illustrates the independence the magazine and its publisher have prized. The journal has nonetheless kept appearing, month after month, from the same Azamgarh institution.
Scholarly Attention and Sources
Ma'arif has itself become an object of scholarship. Doctoral theses at Panjab University, Aligarh Muslim University, the University of Mumbai, Veer Bahadur Singh Purvanchal University and the University of Dhaka have examined the academy's literary and historical services, the magazine's contribution to Urdu literature, Urdu journalism by religious scholars to 1960, and Sulaiman Nadvi's contribution to Urdu letters, drawing heavily on Ma'arif's files. A published index of the journal, produced at the University of Karachi, catalogued its contents, and a volume of its obituaries has also appeared — fitting tributes to a magazine whose own pages chronicled the passing of generations of scholars. Books on Darul Musannefin's history devote long chapters to the magazine, and studies of Nadvi's life and works treat his editorship as a central part of his legacy. For researchers, the run of Ma'arif is thus both a primary source for twentieth-century Urdu intellectual history and a subject in its own right.
Digital Afterlife: Rekhta and the Academy Online
The magazine's second century is also a digital one. All issues of Ma'arif are available through Rekhta, the Urdu literature platform, whose digital library also presents a selected portion of the academy's books and journals; the academy's collection page notes that these resources are now accessible to readers and researchers around the world. The academy maintains its own website, which presents the institution, its publications and the journal's uninterrupted publication since 1916, and serves as the magazine's listed web home. Digitisation matters for a journal like Ma'arif in two ways: it preserves fragile early volumes whose paper copies survive in few libraries, and it reconnects the journal with the global Urdu-reading diaspora at a moment when its local print constituency has contracted. The scholar in Karachi, Dhaka, Delhi or London can now consult the same back files that were once reachable only in Azamgarh or in a handful of research libraries.
Place in Urdu Journalism
Urdu journalism is rich in famous titles, most of them newspapers; Ma'arif's distinction is to have outlasted nearly all of them as a monthly journal of learning. Founded when Urdu scholarly prose was searching for modern forms, it demonstrated that a small academy in eastern Uttar Pradesh could sustain a journal of theology, history and literature at a standard noticed from Beirut to Karachi. Its founding generation — Nomani the conceiver, Nadvi the editor, and the circle of the Nadvi and Islahi scholars who succeeded them — made the magazine a vehicle for a distinctive intellectual project: the reinterpretation of classical Islamic sciences by modern methods, in Urdu, for a reading public formed by both traditions. The succession of editors, the academy's book programme, the library and the printing press formed a single ecosystem of which Ma'arif was the monthly heartbeat. That the heartbeat continues into the magazine's second century, under editors appointed in the 2020s, is the central fact of its modern history.
Assessment
Ma'arif is an Urdu monthly magazine of literature and theology published by the Darul Musannefin Shibli Academy in Azamgarh, founded in July 1916 by Sulaiman Nadvi on a plan left by Shibli Nomani, edited by Nadvi until 1949 and by an unbroken line of successors since, and still appearing today. Its verified distinction — more than a century of continuous publication, described as the longest run of any Urdu journal in the world — makes it a landmark of Indian periodical history regardless of subject. Add its content, its role as the academy journal of the institution that produced Siratun Nabi, the admiration it attracted from scholars across the Muslim world, and its new availability through digital libraries, and Ma'arif emerges as one of the most historically significant magazines in this directory: not the largest, not the most widely read, but among the most durable, and the clearest proof that a magazine can be the life's work of an institution.
