S. Irfan Habib
Syed Irfan Habib is an Indian historian of science and a renowned public intellectual. Till recently he was the Abul Kalam Azad Chair at the National University for Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), New Delhi. His intellectual collaboration with Dhruv Raina has initiated the publication of a series of articles and books on social history of science in India. Before joining NUEPA, he was a scientist at the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS), New Delhi.
Prof. S. Irfan Habib's work on Bhagat Singh and his comrades (To Make the Deaf Hear: Ideology and Programme of Bhagat Singh and His Comrades, 2007), established Bhagat Singh as a revolutionary ideologue of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. Till few years ago he was just remembered as a martyr while Prof. Habib's reading of Bhagat Singh's original writings and archival sources presented him as a thinker. K.N. Panikkar in his review of the book underscores this by stating that "Irfan Habib's account is a meticulously documented and analytical work which takes particular care to portray the political and intellectual evolution of Bhagat Singh as a revolutionary. The focus of this well-researched work is not on events, but on the ideological processes which enabled Bhagat Singh to espouse a revolutionary philosophy and a programme of political action". The book has been translated into Hindi, Tamil, Malyalam and Bengali. Punjabi edition will come out by the end of 2016.
For the last ten years Prof. Habib has been writing and speaking about Islam and the decline of critical imagination. A book reflecting on this issue was published in 2012 called Jihad or Ijtihad. wherein he explores the critical traditions of Islamic scholarship in South Asia. Soon an intellectual biography of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad will be published, locating him in the present day global Islamic context.
His name is often confused with the Marxist Historian of the Mughal Period, Irfan Habib.
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