ME AND MAULANA: A PERSONAL RECOLLECTION OF WAHIDUDDIN KHAN - John M. Butt

and my religion were as if two separate compartments. I prayed five times a day, kept all the fasts, paid the zakat when I was required to, performed hajj in 1991 and tried to do right by my deen to whatever capacity I could. But I felt I was only performing rituals based on form. Their spirit was missing. Islam was never an integral part of my life. I tried to ask my grandmother and other religious people around me questions about Islam and the purpose of my life. But neither did I receive any answers, nor any encouragement. Eventually I stopped questioning. I think I started living in a state of spiritual slumber and focused on my career and business. As a result, for more than two-decades, my outward life flourished, but my spirit remained starved. In the late 1990s I think God wanted to jolt me out of my slumber. My health suffered and I received one shock treatment after another as innumerable deaths took place in my family, especially that of my sister-in-law who died within just a few months of an illness at the age of 52. I prayed to God to not let me die till He had shown me the purpose of my life and I had performed it. I turned to God and Islam for guidance. As I only knew English, I tried to find books and material on Islam in English from the Internet, Urdu Bazar and Nizamuddin Market to find the meaning of life. I remember at the time my library of books included more than 500 books, all of which I had read. But the tragedy was that in spite of reading so many books, I had not found answers to my quest. These books did not address my mind. I still did not know what the purpose of my life was.