Mangaluru, May 16: Hawwa Aboobakar, mother of Sharafuddin Soofi, a Mangalurean orator, died of heart attack in a moving car on the outskirts of the city today. She was 77.
The end came when she was travelling from her youngest daughter’s house near Thokkottu to her eldest son’s house in Gurupura Kaikamaba. She was suffering from multiple ailments and was bedridden for last two years.
Born and brought up in Uppinangady of Dakshina Kannada district, Hawwa was the first Muslim girl to pursue high school education in her town in the early 1950s when traditional Muslim girls were hardly provided formal education in the region.
A voracious reader of Islamic literature in Urdu, Malayalam and Kannada languages, Hawwa learnt Quranic Arabic at an early age through self-study.
Daughter of Late Aboobakar Mukri, a cloth merchant and leader of Jamaath-e-Islami Hind in Uppinangady, she was closely associated with the organization though she avoided limelight.
After marrying K A Muhammed Soofi, another cloth merchant, she had settled in Banakal village of Chikkamagaluru district. After the demise of her husband in 1998, she spent 20 years of widowhood with her children.
In 2013, Mangaluru-based publishing house Shanthi Prakashana, as part of its silver jubilee, felicitated her in recognition of her efforts towards promoting Islamic literature.
She is survived by six sons, three daughters, several grandchildren, great-grandchildren and a large number of relatives.
Her eldest son, Muhammad Iqbal Soofi, an NRI, has translated a few chapters of Quran into Kannada. Her second son, Sharafuddin Soofi, who works for a petrochemical company in Kuwait, is popular for his Islamic oratory in English, Urdu and Kannada in coastal Karnataka and Middle East. He is also a visiting professor at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and an official Khateeb in Kuwait. A former journalist, he has also translated several books from Urdu to Kannada. Her youngest son, Naeem, is the editor-in-chief of coastaldigest.com. Her teenaged granddaughter Mafazah Sharafuddin is a poetess, whose debut anthology of poems, Labyrinths of Emotions, was released earlier this year.
Funeral
The funeral prayers were held on Thursday (May 17) morning at Huda Masjid in Uppinangady. Her son Sharafuddin Soofi led the prayer. She was buried at the cemetery adjacent to the same Masjid.


Comments
إِنَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّـا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ
innalillahi... may allah grant her jannah.
Add new comment