"Before writing this book it is clear that Professor Habib drank deep both of the teachings of Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan and of western intellectual potions of a generation ago. There is the ‘protestant’ view of Islam as against the ‘catholic’—the urge to return to the Prophet and away from the accretions of later ages. There is, too, the western distinction between religion as social and religion as personal, the western urge to study the interpenetration and interaction of religious, social, and economic factors in the life of a society, the organic revolutionary conception of society and. of historical change. The whole tonc of the book is rational, secular, urbane, and dispassionate. The author's political position at the time of publication appears to be that of an Indian nationalist who, though he speaks as ‘a Muslim—for he feels the need to put Mahmud in a proper historical perspective—yet believes that differences in religion are private and personal and to be submerged in the larger unity of Indian nationhood."
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Peter Hardy in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. by Philips, C. H. (Cyril Henry), 1912-
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohammad_Habib
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Mohammad Habib
1895 – 1971
Mohammad Habib (1895–1971) was an Indian historian, who taught at the Aligarh Muslim University. He was involved in the Indian Independence movement, and was an associate of both Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1947, the year of India's independence, he delivered the presidential address to the Indian History Congress.
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