Prominent Shia preacher and scholar Maulana Kalbe Sadiq died late on Tuesday after prolonged illness. At 83, he was perhaps the tallest and most reputable Shia cleric in Uttar Pradesh and its capital Lucknow.
Sadiq breathed his last at around 10 p.m., said his son Kalbe Sibtain Noori.
Sadiq was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of a private hospital on November 17.
“He was very unwell. He was deteriorating since the past three days,” said his son.
In a health bulletin issued hours before his death, Era’s Lucknow Medical College said Sadiq was suffering from colorectal cancer with metastasis with severe pneumonia, UTI and septic shock with acute kidney shutdown and paralytic ileus.
An educationist and Islamic scholar in his own right, Sadiq was also the vice-president of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.
His nephew and Shia cleric Maulana Kalbe Jawad said Sadiq’s death was a big loss not only for the family but also Shias, Muslims in general and the nation. “It is an unbearable loss,” Maulana Jawad said in a statement issued from Jammu and Kashmir.
Despite his ill health, in perhaps in one of his last public appearances, Sadiq offered his support to the protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act earlier this year.
In January, Sadiq visited the Hussainabad Clocktower protest site in old Lucknow and expressed solidarity with the women who had assembled there.
Addressing the gathering from a wheelchair, he had warned against people “planted” to tarnish the protest. Sadiq had then also firmly reacted to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s communally laced jibes that men were pushing women of their families to come out to the streets to protest while they slept in their quilts.
“ Yogiji ko baat karne ki tameez nahi hai. Tameez walo ka shehar hai, badtameezo ka shehar nahi hai (Yogiji does not have manners. This is the city of people with etiquette, not of ill-mannered people),” Sadiq had said.
Unlike several other Shia clerics and leaders, Sadiq avoided personal controversies and often spoke in favour of peace and harmony with a stress on education, especially of women and the poor.
In 2017, Sadiq had asked Muslims to peacefully accept the decision of the Supreme Court in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi title suit if the verdict went against them and asked them to give up their claim even if the verdict went in their favour, for the sake of peace.
