– Mohammed Atherulla Shariff
As a saying goes ‘if you fish for a man, you feed him for a day; if you teach him fishing you, feed him for his life’, there are many centres which facilitate people especially the poor in leaning fishing. One such is the BIFT Professional Library in Bangalore.
Established by the Bangalore Islamic Foundation Trust, the library caters to the need of students who intend to go to high profiled professions like civil services, chartered accountancy, IT, engineering, medicines, etc. Since its inception in 1993 thousands of ambitious students have benefited from the library.
Located at Darus Salam building, a central place on Queen’s Road, surrounded by many media houses, the state assembly Vidhana Soudha, the high court, governor’s house Raj Bhavan and Cantonment railway station, Professional Library has beautiful ambience.
With a seating capacity of around 50 persons, the library has arrangements for use of laptops and remains open for sixteen hours daily. A separate hall adjacent to the library is dedicated by the Darus Salam management for Namaz and learning theology.
Beginning from pre-university courses to civil services, the library has thousands of books for various disciplines such as medical, dental, chartered accountancy, management, computer science, journalism etc.
Mr. Rahim Khan, the caretaker of the library is a very friendly and motivational person. He is working with like-minded persons in three more major cities in Karnataka to establish professional libraries. Mysore, Mangalore and Gulbarga are the identified cities which have universities and good many number of professional colleges.
Another Professional Library has come up recently at Hidayat Centre in Sang Tarash Wadi area in Gulbarga. More spacious and modern, it functions on the lines of BIFT library in Bangalore. Located close to the city bus terminus, the campus of Hidayat Centre has a Masjid and bookstall with Islamic literature in different languages. Mr. Zakir Husain, the city president of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind is instrumental in establishing the professional library in Gulbarga.
Mr. Rahim Khan is happy that most of the beneficiaries of the BIFT library are well settled in their professional career. Some have crashed civil services and state services exams. Many of them went abroad for higher studies and settled there as IT professionals and doctors. They are still connected with the library and contribute in different ways to make it more beneficial and fruitful.
