Eleven years later, his absence is more visible than his presence ever was. In the faltering voices of orators who try to imitate him. In the hesitant footsteps of politicians who cannot match his conviction. In the collective sigh of a community that still whispers, “Ask one who lost a father like Molvi Iftikhar Hussain Ansari.”

By Muzamil Malik:

There are losses that history records in dates and monuments. And then there are losses that creep into the bloodstream of a people, that gnaw at the marrow of memory, that echo in the silence of gatherings where a voice once thundered, where a hand once steadied trembling shoulders.

September 30, 2014. 04 Zilhajah, 1435 AH.

A date. A wound. A shadow that does not recede. On that day, Kashmir lost more than a man. It lost the kind of leader whose absence cannot be repaired with committees or conferences or manifestos. It lost a gardener of faith, a sculptor of courage, an orator who spoke not in sentences but in avalanches.

The Birth of a Voice

He was born on April 26, 1942, in Khanqah-e-Sokhta, Srinagar. A child of a city that has always been a theatre of faith and fire, a child who would one day inherit not just his father’s mantle but his people’s wounds. He studied in the seminaries of Iran, Egypt, Iraq—lands that had themselves been classrooms of resistance and resurrection. And when he returned, he did not return as a scholar alone. He returned as a man who carried in his chest the entire tumult of Karbala, a man who knew that to call yourself a Shia in Kashmir was not a confession of faith but a wager with death.

At the age of twenty, he became President of the All Jammu and Kashmir Shia Association. The world was still learning his name, but his community had already placed their survival in his hands.

A Man Who Was a Movement

What do you call a man who is at once a scholar, a politician, a revolutionary, and a target? What name do you give to a man who refuses to bow, even when bending would have been easier, safer, more profitable?

You call him Moulana Iftikhar Hussain Ansari (r.a).

He was a man of steel nerves, yet porous with compassion. He could thunder from the pulpit, his voice quaking through packed imambaras, and in the same breath, he could console the widow in a back alley, or sit with a student lost in doubt. His enemies feared his resilience. His people loved his stubbornness. And the state—whether friend or foe—never quite knew how to contain him.

Blood and Fire: The Attempted Silencing

His life was stalked by shadows. He was hunted not for what he did, but for what he dared to represent: the dignity of Kashmiri Shias who refused to disappear.

The most harrowing was June 2, 2000. The day of the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.w) and Imam Hasan Mujtaba (a.s). Terrorists attacked at Gund Khwaja Qasim. Twelve Shia Muslims were slain, their blood soaking the soil, their families shattered forever. Ansari survived. Miraculously. Destiny seemed to conspire to keep him alive, to keep him standing as the last bastion of his people’s hope.
His survival became a sign. To his community, he was not just a leader anymore; he was a chosen one, a man pulled back from death so he could continue to carry their burdens.

The Refusal That Defined Him

There was a moment, whispered in corridors of power, when India’s Prime Minister offered him a glittering post: High Commissioner to Iran. The kind of offer that seduces, that tempts even the strongest. But Ansari refused. He said, “I wish not to be India’s envoy to Iran, but Imam Khomeini’s envoy to India.”

How do you measure such defiance? It was not just a refusal of position. It was the acceptance of destiny. It was a declaration that his loyalty was not to power but to truth, not to thrones but to Karbala. Imam Khomeini (r.a) acknowledged him as his representative in India. Later, even Ayatollah Sistani would affirm this role.

Thus, Ansari became not merely a leader of Kashmiri Shias, but a node in the larger tapestry of the Shia world—a man who stood in Srinagar and yet whose shadow stretched across Najaf, Qom, and Karbala.

The Builder, The Rebuilder

His oratory was fire, but his work was stone. Jamia Imam Sadiq (a.s) in Shadipora Sumbal—his gift to generations of students who could not afford the luxury of education but who deserved it nonetheless. Marif-ul-Aloom schools—scattered across villages like seeds, sprouting knowledge in places where ignorance had been cultivated by design.

When the Markazi Imambargah Zadibal was torched by those who could not tolerate its light, it was Ansari who rebuilt it, brick by brick, even selling his own property to keep it alive. When the Imam Hussain (a.s) Hospital was about to collapse under the weight of debt, it was Ansari who saved it from seizure.

He did not just preach resilience. He embodied it.

The Day the Voice Fell Silent

And then came that dark September day in 2014. Death came quietly, not with a gunshot or a bomb, but with the inevitability of mortality. Yet for his people, it felt like assassination. As though fate itself had conspired to rob them of their shield.

The Persian poet had asked:

Every flower may leave the garden in time,

But when the gardener is gone, what remains of the garden?

Kashmir became that garden. The flowers still bloom. The processions still march. The Majalis still echo with lament. But the gardener—the one who knew how to prune despair and water courage—is gone.

The Legacy, the Void

He was not perfect. No leader is. But he was rare. He was a leader who knew that politics without principle is cowardice, and religion without activism is ritual. He was a yeoman in the truest sense—a servant of his people, tireless, stubborn, relentless.

Eleven years later, his absence is more visible than his presence ever was. In the faltering voices of orators who try to imitate him. In the hesitant footsteps of politicians who cannot match his conviction. In the collective sigh of a community that still whispers, “Ask one who lost a father like Molvi Iftikhar Hussain Ansari.”

A Closing Whisper

We stand at his grave today, not only to mourn but to confess our own inadequacy. He gave his life to shield his people, to raise their dignity, to carve out a space for them in a hostile world. The least we can do is remember. The least we can do is not betray the soil that cradles him.
For leaders like him are not born every season. They are carved once in centuries, and when they go, they leave behind a silence that even the loudest cries cannot fill.

His was not merely a life lived.

It was a testament of what it means to stand, to resist, to serve. And so we say: Kashmir lost a visionary. Shias lost a global orator. The world lost a man whose words were weapons, whose silences were shields, and whose absence remains a wound we are still learning how to carry.