Unawareness of the Modern Age

or America. Once there, they do not establish any real connections with the Western world or study the conditions prevailing there. Take the instance of two books to understand this point further. The Egyptian Islamist activist Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) penned a work titled, The America I Have Seen, and the Indian Muslim religious scholar Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi (d. 1999) authored a travelogue in Urdu titled Do Mahiney Amreeka Mein (Two Months in America). Despite what their titles might suggest, both these books have nothing to do with any in-depth study of American life. If someone reads Maulana Nadvi’s book, he will be stunned that the author spends two whole months in America, but he does not meet a single American in this long period, nor does he study any American institution to understand the American philosophy of life. If someone were to read these books, he might well gain some superficial and negative impressions about America, but he will obtain absolutely no idea of the secret of American power or the heritage of thought on which America’s ideological structure is based. The bare fact is that the present-day Ulama have absolutely no understanding of Western thought. Our Ulama has a wrong picture of Westerners based on