TORONTO – One of India’s most famous comedians has died in a Toronto hospital, years after abandoning cinema to start special academic Islamic studies, Arabic, and Urdu, India Today reported.
“Though deeply immersed in Bollywood, around the early 1990s, he bowed before the wishes of his aged father, the late Maulana Abdul Rahman Khan, to take forward his ideals for propagating Islamic studies and help clear misconceptions among the minds of people by using simplified language with their meanings,” said Javed Jamaluddin, a veteran Urdu journalist and close friend of the late actor.
Originally hailing from Kabul, Afghanistan, Khan’s father was a renowned Islamic scholar who remained in India post-Partition and in the early 1950s, migrated to the Netherlands, where he set up the Arabic and Islamic Institute.
At the top of his Bollywood career, Kader adhered to his father’s wishes, setting up a team of experts in Mumbai and also at his bungalow in Pune’s posh Koregaon Park where he designed various Islamic courses for students from nursery to post-graduate levels covering Islamic tenets, Shari`ah laws and the like.
He followed up by opening the KK Institute of Arabic Language & Islamic Studies in Dubai and later in Canada to impart training in Arabic and Islamic laws as preached in the Holy Quran, said Jamaluddin.
“The secret was simplifying and interpreting the Quran for the common masses, creating an entire syllabus from nursery to post-graduation in Islamic studies in an easy-to-understand format with their meanings, which could be understood easily even by non-Muslims,” he added.