Maidul Islam was born on 5th February 1980 in Calcutta. He hails from a liberal and unorthodox upper middle-class family. Maidul went to Gokul Montessori School in New Alipore and then moved to several schools in South Kolkata: South Point, St. Helen, D.A.V. Public School (Taratala). Finally, he settled down in South Point High School from where he passed the Madhyamik (secondary board examination of West Bengal) in the first division. He was quite bored with Calcutta in the late 1990s. He enrolled himself in the Commerce stream in the Senior Secondary School at Aligarh Muslim University. At Aligarh, he was a resident of Mohammad Omar Farooq Hostel at Sir Ziauddin Hall. He left Aligarh in October 1998 in the middle of junior doctors’ agitation followed by a sine die of the university. By that time, Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics. A senior geography scholar at Aligarh and a resident of Sir Syed Hall (North) who belonged to Ripon Street in Kolkata suggested that Maidul must return to Kolkata and go to Presidency College and England to follow the footsteps of Sen, at that time, his icon. Maidul’s maternal grandfather also told him that once Amartya Sen briefly stayed in the New Alipore locality, close to his residence. Thus, Maidul must work hard in studies to become a scholar.
Back to Kolkata, Maidul got admission in Andrews High School, Salimpur from where he passed his Higher Secondary Examination in the first division in 2000. As a truant child, being passionately interested in cricket, football and chess, he failed twice in South Point, once in Standard II and later in Standard VIII. Thus, getting a first division in both secondary and higher secondary examination was nothing less than a miracle for his parents. Later, he went to some great universities as a representative of that genre of pupils who were notorious for being uninterested in textbooks and syllabus. He grew up during the period of 1980s and 1990s with a range of friends from varied class, community, caste and linguistic backgrounds in urban slums and urban middle-class neighbourhoods in South Kolkata. Besides he had rural connections with various occupational groups in a peasant economy in South 24 Parganas (undivided 24 Parganas before 1980), where his forefathers have been buried. This set of friend circles during his childhood and adolescent period is quite distinct from his later friends from primarily Bengali middle-class families during his university days. Most of them have now become part of India’s growing professional middle classes.
After passing the higher secondary examination, he wanted to choose an undergraduate major that had to do with pertinent social issues. He hails from a political family whose several members have been active supporters of the Indian National Congress, the Bangla Congress, Janata Party, Janata Party (Secular), Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Trinamool. Thus, he was born and brought up in engaging political discussions at dinner tables and several adda sessions with his parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and distant relatives. Along with such animated political debates and discussions with various members of his family, the culture of reading newspapers, playing football and cricket, watching television news, teleserials, Hindi and Bangla cinema on VCP in the 1980s and 1990s were part of his formative years of childhood and adolescence that helped him to grow as a serious scholar in the long run. At the same time, some of his close and distant relatives were associated with Tablighi Jamaat, Jamaat-e-Islami and Furfura Sharif. Hazrat Minnatullah Rahmani also visited his home when he was a child. At the same time, his childhood was spent in the household of a Bengali upper-caste FRCS surgeon, educated at Edinburgh when Maidul's mother was completing her undergraduate and postgraduate studies and his father was in a transferable job of the West Bengal government. At the family doctor's place in Ballygunge, he learnt some basics about Durga pujo, Kali pujo, Bhai phota, Saraswati pujo, and Dolyatra. Thus, when he was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, religious festivals and political festivals (elections, rallies, strikes, and protest demonstrations) were an intricate part of the city life. In the year, 2000, he successfully got through the entrance examination for Bachelor of Arts (Honours) course in Political Science at St. Xavier’s College and Presidency College. He joined the prestigious Presidency with History and Economics as subsidiaries with the hope of becoming a part of the glittering alumni of political scientists from Presidency College, Calcutta. He did not repent to opt Presidency because professors like Rajat Kanta Ray and Subhash Ranjan Chakravarty in the history department and Prasanta Ray in the Political Science—the last of the Mohicans in the early 2000s, one could say, that lingered on in that immensely academic college, regarded as the jewel in the crown of Calcutta University with a rich intellectual tradition—made his stay so enriching. The other dons in Presidency’s Political Science department—Surya Kumar Bandyopadhyay, Krityapriyo Ghosh, Deepak Dasgupta and Aneek Chattopadhyay enlivened the classroom lectures with their very own style of teaching blended with everyday jokes and colloquial folklores of Bengali pasts.
The immensely academic and intellectual environment of Presidency College was an essential presence in shaping his thought and personality. By the second year of college, Maidul had already decided to work on Islamist movements, immediately after he overcame the shock of 9/11. It was during this time that he finally decided to make a career in academics following the footsteps of his beloved mother, an accomplished professor of education and a principal of a teacher’s training college in South Kolkata while negating the idea of becoming a government officer like his father.
Three years of rigorous undergraduate training helped to improve his analytical skills and build a solid theoretical foundation in Social Sciences in general, and Political Science in particular. At this point, with an Upper Second Class Honours Degree, he felt sufficiently prepared to pursue a post-graduate degree in Political Science at the exalted Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi. The M.A. programme of Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU gave an incredible exposure to advanced study in political theory, political thought, political analysis, comparative politics, political economy, Indian politics, international relations, methodology in social sciences and third world politics. In JNU, his persistent friendship with potential pollutants of Economics, History and International Relations students at Periyar Hostel and in various other hostels also helped him to synthesise his growing interest in interdisciplinary studies.
Finishing his M.A. with a First Class, he was determined to get into research and joined the MPhil programme at CPS. After the MPhil first semester, briefly, in the winter holidays, he reversed his position in the class of Presidency’s Political Science (Honours) by not sitting in the bench as he did in his undergraduate student days. Instead, he taught Indian politics to Presidency undergraduates as an invitee lecturer. This kind of voluntary service to his alma mater gave him a sense of supreme satisfaction as he realised that actually, he made some positive contributions to an institution that taught him so many things. While doing his MPhil coursework, he qualified the National Eligibility Test for Lectureship in Political Science conducted by the University Grants Commission of India. It made him eligible to teach in any College or University in India. This served as a tremendous morale booster to his academic aspirations. Returning to the University for MPhil second semester in January 2006, he joined as a Project Associate in the then Programme for the Study of Discrimination and Exclusion (PSDE), now a Centre (CSDE) in the School of Social Sciences at JNU. At PSDE, he was engaged with primarily two research projects, namely, ‘Mapping Socio-Economic Status of Indian Muslims: A Factual Analysis’ and ‘Labour Market Discrimination in Gurgaon, India’. The survey-based fieldwork experience and working with data entry at PSDE improved his skills in handling, tabulating and analysing both qualitative and quantitative data while nurturing himself adequately for higher academic research in the form of doctoral studies. In the MPhil, he got a First Class.
Maidul was active in mainstream left student politics in both Presidency and JNU. His emergence into the measureless natural forest of JNU—the rocks, stones and trees with a politically and intellectually charged campus—was not simple, particularly for a homesick Bengali man. JNU became a continuation of his cosmopolitan lived experience in Kolkata, albeit with its specifically complex and nuanced character. JNU threw up a dialectic within Delhi. Although situated in the close vicinities of posh and elite South Delhi, yet, it is so detached from the grandeur of commoditised urban culture.
Contrary to the depoliticised and urbane glossy-glitzy nature of South Delhi, JNU had a thriving public domain constituted of debates, discussions and intense political activities with a sense and element of anti-consumerism and anti-establishment tendencies that shape its ‘broad left’ political culture. It is in this intellectual and political milieu that Maidul came across the identity of a ‘Muslim Other’ in the North Indian public discourse constructed by the resurgence of majoritarian nationalism during the 1980s and 1990s. Such an identity was already discovered by him during his short stint at Aligarh. In this context, he also noticed that a large number of North Indian Muslims, socially and economically deprived in comparison with their fellow religious compatriots were sometimes captive to metaphysical overtones in their imagination. In this regard, a return to the fundamentals of Islam becomes a solace for significant sections within the Muslim minorities in India.
At Oxford, Maidul, often popularly known as Moid, a nickname given by his friends during his undergraduate days at Presidency, had a gala time, attending several seminars in various departments and centres, doing library work, socialisation at high table dinners and college parties, and of course, playing cricket. At Oxford, he was influenced mainly by the works of Michael Freeden, who was engaged in stimulating discussions at various events of the Centre for Political Ideologies in the Department of Politics and International Relations. Apart from Ernesto Laclau, whose theoretical framework, Maidul followed in his works, the evocative interactions with Michael Freeden strengthened his conceptual clarity in advanced political theory. Besides Michael, during his stay at Oxford, Maidul had steady and regular interactions with several professors and Fellows: Faisal Devji, Nandini Gooptu, Marc Stears, Stuart White, Francis Robinson, Roger Cashmore, Andrew Stockley, Richard Cooper, Abigail Green, Vernon Bogdanor, Dave Leal and occasionally with Stephen Mulhall, Simon Caney, Marc Mulholland, Kanti Bajpai, Michael Drolet, Benjamin Jackson, Lawrence Whitehead, Rosalind (Polly) O’Hanlon, Judith Brown, Richard Haydon, J. Mordaunt Crook, Muhammad Talib, Barbara Hariss-White and Harry Judge, not to mention several South Asian, British, Euro-American, Middle-Eastern and Asian students. Some of the names mentioned above were regarded as Oxford dons during 2007-2012. Historians like Francis Robinson and Steven Zipperstein (both of whom were associated with Brasenose, often known as BNC in Oxonian parlance) were also important interlocutors during his formative years as an academic. His social association with the elite Oxford Union as a Life Member and his political relationship with the subaltern and precariat members of the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society made him strong in matters of political argumentation and political maturity. Besides political activism and scholarly endeavours at Oxford, he frequently attended several events of the Oxford India Society, the reading group of the Bahais and the Quranic classes of MECO in Summertown. Such exposure to various theological schools was instrumental in making him a serious scholar in distinguishing between the universal appeals of organised religions and the dogmatism embedded in the contemporary religious fundamentalist movements that use the discursive tradition of organised religions.
Besides the theoretical and philosophical issues that Maidul had engaged in his research, there has also been a practical element to his studies on Islamism and Muslim identity. His research work is immensely helpful for academic and policymaking audience in understanding the problems and prospects of South Asian stability by pointing out the possible strengths and weaknesses in Indo-Bangladesh Relations and the problems of Indian Muslims apart from looking at new and alternative ways into the contemporary Islamic and International politics.
At present, Maidul has moved on from researching on Islam and Muslims. After two academic books in which he has mostly applied political theory in understanding the complexity of Muslim political identity and Islamist political mobilisation, he is now more interested in the universalist questions of political theory and political economy with specific reference to the issues of populist political mobilisation, the promise of alternative particularly concerning the transformation of global capitalism in the 21st century, and cooperative theory of justice. His hobbies include singing ghazals, popular Bollywood melodies and Tagore songs, listening to western classical and Indian classical music, watching Bollywood and Bangla movies, and playing cricket and chess.
