As a student of Hamdard (12 years of my 21 year old life have been spent there) I feel the need to pay tribute to the founding father of Hamdard and Madinat-ul-Hikmah.
Shaheed Hakim Muhmmad Said was a role model who not only inspired my but every hamadrian and countless others. He was a man of choices, challenges and commitments. Hakim Sahab was a friend, traveler and a patriot but nothing best describes his character and personality than "visionary" and "realist".
Everyone has a vision, a dream and each of us strives to attain that goal in our own way, each one of us marching to the beat of our drums. The vision of Hakim Mohammad Said was a vision of the heart. But what was it that made him different from other visionaries? What motivational force inspired him and drove him to turn his visions into a reality? It was his sense and belief of a tryst with destiny. He believed that he had something to do, something to give and a way to give it. But the heart of his humanitarian mission and his vision for Pakistan lay in the world of children, child development and human development through education. It was his belief that Pakistan could progress and prosper if the educations were educated and this was his mission and it was his dream to see that someday Pakistan would be one of the developed nations of the world and a role model to for others to follow. To see his dream turn into a reality he established Madinat-ul-Hikman the city of education and wisdom in a land of sand and scrub.
Hakim Muhammad Said's vision and he himself symbolized the ethos and aspirations of the Pakistani nation and their fulfillment as enshrined in the creation of this country by Quaid-e-Azam and the ideal of Allam Iqbal. The idea of Pakistan according to Hakim Sahab could only come to fruition if education became the rock hard foundation of our nation, harmonizing the imperative of modern life and quintessential values of Islam.
He had a vision the Pakistan would stand shoulder to shoulder with the developed countries and each and everyone of us, the people of Pakistan would leave a legacy of greatness that the future generations of the world will remember for eternity and aspire to reach. This is what he did, he left an undying legacy of greatness and it is up to us to carry out his work and carve a legacy of our own, in the history of humanity.
Hakim Sahab's cruel and untimely death was a terrible blow to his family, friends and the institutions he build. His adventure in life came a full circle ending in a coda of achievements. His legacy is not riches, possessions or worldly goods of any kind. It was the way he lived, the lives he touched, the promises he kept. It was the kind of man he was. He looked on life as a journey and one of his favorite quotations was a passage from Robert Frost:
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep............,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep"
© 2010 posted by Mustafa Ali Khan Afreedi (DarkMystic)
