Preface

In this way, throughout our correspondence, Maulana Maududi failed to satisfactorily reply to any of the issues I had raised. Instead, what he did was to say all sorts of things about me. When I insisted that he should come to the point, he finally said I should publish my views, sarcastically remarking that adding one more name to his already long list of ‘well-wishers’ would make no difference. Gauging from Maulana Maududi’s reaction, you can decide for yourself if he was indeed impelled by the spirit of the Caliphate or the spirit of Monarchical Despotism. The Maulana imagined himself to be in position from where he could afford to criticize the renewer of the faith (mujaddidin) without any exception, and, even beyond that, to point out the mistakes of the Companions of the Prophet, and, going beyond even that, to even inspect the Righteous Caliphs. But if someone were to critique him, it was as if he deserved the same sort of punishment that the Maulana noted that monarchical despots used to administer to their critics—the only difference being that these despots could go to the extent of, in the Maulana’s words, ‘imprisoning and killing and lashing’ their critics, while the Maulana himself had the power only of punishing his critics through his pen. This is a classic example of what, as I mentioned at the outset, Maulana Darybadi termed as a ‘diseased mindset’.