Correspondence with Maulana Jalil Ahsan Nadwi

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE dated September 6, 1962, I found that it differed from the understanding I had derived from your previous words. In this letter, there was no discussion on my arguments or reasoning. Instead, it contained questions of a purely abstract nature, with no indication of their relevance to the core issue, critique of my argument, or the specific point of mine to which they were related and why. Clearly, if I do not consider such questions irrelevant, what else can I call them? You mention that if I asked how many hairs are on your head or what the ratio of sand to soil is on the embankment at Azamgarh, that would be entirely unrelated to the topic of your writing. I would say that this isn’t the only kind of irrelevant question. Another type of irrelevant question is this: for example, if I say that the idea of the Islamic mission presented by Jamaat-e-Islami isn’t based on the Quran, and that the verses cited in support of it don’t, in my view, serve as its foundation. Instead of addressing this claim, you respond with abstract questions like, ‘Tell me, what type of laam is in li-yaqoom, or what is the grammatical attachment of the waaw in wa kazaalik?’ In such cases, at least in terms of the wording, these questions are unrelated to the main issue. Your approach has been deeply surprising to me. For the past nine months, since I brought up this issue