Thanking the man who built boarding school network to educate impoverished Muslim kids
Telegraph | 16 January 2026
Rabindra Tirtha was packed to capacity on a Sunday afternoon for a film screening. The film had an unusual title — Dear Secretary Sir. It was centred on an unusual man — Md. Nurul Islam — and his equally extraordinary mission — to pull underprivileged Muslim boys and girls from darkness into light through education. And the film was a tribute to him from a batch of students that received this gift of education.
The 2002 Higher Secondary batch of 71 students produced 31 doctors, including 17 MBBS graduates, several engineers, an astrophysicist and a state cadre bureaucrat.
Al-Ameen Mission, a residential educational institute that was born in a tin shed with seven students in Khalatpur village on the Howrah-Hooghly border in 1986, today is spread across 77 branches in Bengal and beyond, with a total of 12,871 boys and 7,851 girls as students.
The 45-minute film showed how, in the late 70s in Bengal, when barely 25 per cent Muslim children regularly went to school, a 17-year-old boy, himself then a student of a local madrasa, was enrolled as the founder-secretary cum teacher of an Islamic junior school. In 1982, he passed out and enrolled in Maulana Azad College in Calcutta.
He used to visit Arup Bhattacharya for political science tuitions. “A Ramakrishna-Vivekananda devotee, he used to tell me about their teachings and about Ramakrishna Mission. The seeds of Al-Ameen Mission were planted in my mind in the course of those interactions and I started visiting the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture in Golpark to listen to the speeches of Swami Lokeswarananda and others. That is why Al-Ameen Mission was initially named Islamic Institute of Culture,” he says, in an interview in the film.
It pained him to see that a large section of his community offered upturned palms to receive zakat, a donation of 2.5 per cent of one’s savings mandated in Islam for the well-to-do, or other endowments all their lives. They never reached a position to give. His ambition was to “turn zakat-takers into zakat-givers”.
At every door for donations
The film showcases the difficulties the young Islam faced in funding the fledgling institute. He would go door to door collecting zakat. In the villages, this would usually be in the form of fistfuls of rice. But many would also turn him away.
Nanigopal Chowdhury, a 90-year-old former MLA of Udaynarayanpur, Howrah, whom Islam describes as a father figure, speaks in the film of how it was against social convention in those days among Muslim families to make zakat donations for educational causes. “They believed it was only meant to feed the poor.”
The lack of support sometimes led to financial crises that required him to mortgage his wife’s jewellery to pay teachers’ salaries or take away cooked food from home to feed students at the hostel. In later years, when he took up a teacher’s job in a government school after completing post-graduation, a large part of his salary was used for the mission.
His travails were movingly narrated at the screening by his ex-student Abdul Mabud Mondal, the film’s executive producer and an engineer with a well-known company, who got emotional at the recollection. Astrophysicist Sowgat Muzahid, an associate professor with the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics who flew down from Pune, also belongs to the batch.
The welcome address was given by Sk Hammadur Rahaman, an endocrinologist who resides in BA Block in New Town. The Al-Ameen alumnus, who came 10th in the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination (medical) in the pre-NEET-UG days, spoke of the special classes they received from the teachers to clear competitive examinations.
“We understood even as 16-17 year olds, how backward our community was in education and culture. Three guardians used to make us dream — Secretary sir, our teacher Maroof Azam sahab and (hostel superintendent) Abdul Hasem Mallick sahab, whom we lost to Covid. We, friends, had resolved at that age to give back to society someday.”
The result of that resolution was the formation 20 years later of Al-Ameen Protyay Foundation. It is that foundation, of which Rahaman is the president, which produced the film.
“We shot and edited the film from April to June last year,” said Palash Das, the film’s director, who travelled with his crew to Howrah’s Khalatpur, where the mission is headquartered. “They have a boys’ school and hostel, and a girls’ school and hostel, along with separate playing fields,” he recalled.
While Al-Ameen’s boarding schools are for Muslims, there are also 25 non-residential primary and secondary schools across the state that accept students of all communities. Of the 77 branches, 67 are Bengali medium and 10 teach in English. There is also an orphanage called Shantineer.
“Here is a mastermoshai who has nurtured not just students all his life but an entire community. We always complain about being backward but instead of complaining, he took responsibility to bring about a positive change,” said mayor and minister Firhad Hakim, who attended the screening. Islam, 67, received the Bangabhushan award from the state government in 2015.
The film also acknowledges substantial help that the mission received from individuals. One was filmmaker Mrinal Sen, who allocated Rs 88 lakh from his MPLAD fund in 2002, when he was a member of the Rajya Sabha.
Medical mission
The film marks a milestone in Pratyay foundation’s ongoing journey. “We hold health camps in fringe areas, undertake relief operations during natural calamities and give scholarships to meritorious students. This winter, we have distributed blankets in the districts,” Rahaman told The Telegraph Salt Lake.
Al-Ameen Mission has 3,500 graduate doctors, including over a dozen superspecialists among its alumni. About 2,500 more are in various stages of graduation in medical colleges. “Many of us are serving as block medical officers of health. While most doctors tend to avoid rural postings, our pass-outs are happy to serve there as they are from impoverished backgrounds in remote areas,” said Rahaman, who is attached to Manipur Hospital EM Bypass (formerly Medica Superspeciality Hospital) and travels to see patients in Khalatpur and Salar twice a month.
There are four polyclinics running under Al-Ameen Mission near its schools in Beldanga and Salar in Murshidabad, Belpurkur in Uttar Dinajpur and Khalatpur in Howrah.
The big dream, though, is to build a multi-speciality hospital, with colleges for medical and para-medical training, which will treat patients from all communities. “We have identified land in the outskirts of Rajarhat,” Rahaman said. The location will be about half an hour’s drive from Biswa Bangla Gate and therefore should serve residents of New Town as well.