Gurugram manager finds 1995 AMU certificate for Prophet Muhammad competition
A 46-year-old senior manager at a Gurugram-based private company, Sharad Kumar Sharma, recently discovered a 1995 school certificate recognizing his participation in Islamic history competitions while searching through old family records.
Sharma unearthed the yellowing certificate from AMU City High School in Aligarh while looking for documents in Delhi. The search was prompted by the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, as Sharma tried to trace his parents' names from when his family relocated from Aligarh to Delhi in 2002-03.
The 30-year-old document bears the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) seal and the blue-ink signature of the then-principal, Badrul Islam. It specifically recognizes Sharma, a Hindu student, for representing his school in Seerat competitions, which focus on the life of Prophet Muhammad.
The certificate reads: "Being a non-Muslim student he has represented this school through his participation in Seerat competitions (Character of Mohammad Prophet)..."
"I had completely forgotten about it," Sharma said. "I wasn't looking for this. I was looking for documents."
The unexpected find prompted Sharma to reconnect with former school classmates, including a journalist and an anaesthetist, who had also studied Urdu and participated in similar competitions. Their conversations sparked nostalgia for a period when Hindu families in Aligarh routinely hired Urdu tutors to prepare their children for the AMU entrance process, which included elementary Urdu.
"Back then, if you wanted to study at AMU, you learnt Urdu," Sharma recalled. "Hindu families, including mine, hired tutors because admission mattered more than anything else. Nobody found that unusual."
Other Aligarh residents echoed these memories. Parveen Jahan, who taught Urdu to dozens of children from her home in Aligarh's Upper Kot neighbourhood, recalled that elementary Urdu was a necessity for non-Muslim students seeking admission. However, she noted that she no longer sees Hindu students participating in Seerat competitions today.
For Sharma, the competitions were a normal part of his youth. He recalled volunteering for public-speaking contests, including one at AMU's Kennedy Hall where he was the sole non-Muslim finalist.
The certificate took on a new meaning when Sharma showed it to his children, who asked him what "Seerat" meant.
"That's when I realised they were growing up in a very different world from the one I did," Sharma said.
The certificate has since been returned to the cardboard file where it lay for nearly three decades, as Sharma continues to search for the family's electoral records.
