With the dawn of modern times, the art of persuasion as represented by Oratory and Rhetorics had to undergo a positive loss of value. Beyond the second quarter of the twentieth century, every grand, high-pitched monodrama, every thunderous staginess or full-lunged declamatory style appealing to the raw passions of the masses was being retired and declared out of commission.

For, by now radio broadcasting and television did beautifully and sympathetically take the wind out of the pipes of ageing and croaking men who were wallowing in grandiloquence. As the present decades rolled by, communication to the audience at large became highly intimate, chummy, pally, personal to the degree of a cousinly feeling and thus it turned into exquisite fireside dialogues, gentle, low-toned and soft-spoken.

Our great academician of the spoken word, Allama Rasheed Turabi was acutely conscious of this whole span of stream that coursed through the period-wise modern era. His was a know-how that was able to envisage not only the demands of here and now, but also the challenging timbre or the ringing distinctive quality of a voice that would hold in spell the rising generation of the unborn tomorrow.

To him, Demosthenes, Cicero, Abul Kalam Azad, Right Honourable Srinavas Shastri, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Hadi Hasan, Bahadur Yar Jung, Churchill and a host of otherword spinners the world over were gain-sayingly great, precious and venerated names. Yet there were high moments when Turabi’s mind — whose holdings were extended beyond the reach of thought, out, out into the ken of metaphysics — would treat all these names, by and large, as mere dead yesterdays! Without any reflection on these grand names, he did justifiably hold that during the last quarter of a century none of these figures from the hierarchy of speech making was consigned by circumstances to combat so contemporaneously in the ampitheatre of elocution. How true, it was no other than Turabi to brave the scrutiny of diamond-eyed spectators in the arena from all around.

How did he electrify the dry intellectual atmosphere of yet another set of people who were guided by glamourless Faith, who did take a special delight in spurning materialism, and who did invariably traverse in the “holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics”? How did he stir the sluggish minds of motley Moharrum crowd to wonder, enchantment and to spellbinding spiritualism?

During the ten days of Moharrum he was able to assume the whole life style of a dedicated mourner, joining the confraternity of those who had fallen on the pain of Kerbala. This could remind one of prophet Joseph who was lost to home, and over the separation of whom, his father prophet Jacob, as recorded by the Holy Quran, was so aggrieved that weeping and wailing to no end did ultimately turn him blind.

But there was a great majority in the audience of Rasheed Turabi, who in its own basic right, would not subscribe to the theme of tear-shedding and lamentation. Arrayed against this non-elegiac stance was the seminal idea of Aristotelian “Catharsis” or the purging of emotions which had been nurtured since more than fourteen hundred years, developing into a well-established doctrine of Aalay-Rasool. Confronted by this dilemma, Rasheed Turabi kept his head and for the greater good of the unity of the Muslim world he did bend all his energies, and this without working himself into an undue lather of self-righteousness.

Without the slightest fear of contradiction, he devoted himself to the uphill task of bringing closer the two great streams of consciousness; and Moharrum for him was an ideal period when the art of persuasion could work miracles in terms of uniformity in diversity. Like a trial lawyer shouting at a witness, Turabi would then hold mirror to both the “fraternal” parties, and hammer them home the great hinge-point as represented by Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him). In his endeavour to project the greatness of the Messenger of Allah who can still act as a cementing force, Rasheed Turabi did outperform and outclass many a learned figure of this sub-continent.

Yes, as an artist of the spoken word, he knew it for a fact that the ear is a gateway to the soul; and he equally realized that the ear of an angry young man can never be attuned to authoritative statements or to ex-cathedra judgements, say, from the throne of a pope. This was the reason that his meaning-laden words never for a moment carried the meaningless or unwanted didactic strain. His sermons always accumulated immense pyramids of facts; and such was his hatred of overbearing commands from the pulpit and such was his natural love for logic and for happy reason that he did prefer to wait until scores of facts would fall into line to prove his point.

Like a bee winging its way from flower to flower, Rasheed Turabi in a lifelong form could be seen pursuing diverse disciplines of knowledge with the sole aim to coordinate them conductively. From Categorical Imperative to Logical Positivism in Ethics, from Cosmogony to Phenomenology; from Psychology of Religion to General Semantics, all were ranges that he would scan with an effortless superiority and yet his eyes were all the more glued on Ontology, i.e., on the science that treats of the principles of pure being. And when he would talk of the Here-after with might and main, he would easily send a tingle down many a spine; or again when he would touch the chord of piety as enunciated by Huqooq-ul-Ebad, it was as if the listener had by mistake tampered with a faulty light switch and did get in the bargain a sudden jolt up his arm!