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

My association with Maulana Saheb dates back to the day in 1990 when he was the guest of honour at a function in Nagpur where the Chief election commissioner T. N. Seshan was the chief guest. I along with two of my friends, Abdul Ghafoor Parekh and Abdul Salam Akbani went to meet him at the hotel where he was staying. On my inviting him to my home for lunch, he declined saying his flight to Delhi is at midday. I asked him if I could join him for fajr prayer and thereafter take him home for breakfast. He smiled, and said there is always time at fajr. Maulana Saheb, being a very humble soul, never failed to appreciate the words and deeds of lesser souls like myself. He made it a point to make notes of what he appreciated. When I said, ‘Allah has distributed pain and pleasure in equal measure.” He asked me to explain and write it down for him. I wrote, “This test of life is designed in such a way wherein pain and pleasure are distributed in equal measure. If a graph could be generated, it would show that the spikes of happiness and sorrow would be almost identical among all individuals, just like an ECG or an EEG on normal humans. It is the mind which experiences pain and pleasure. There is no soul which has not experienced his moments of happiness and loads of sorrow.” Maulana Saheb was a gifted writer and his contribution to Islamic literature in English and Urdu is tremendous. His masterpieces were God-Arises and Muhammad: the Prophet of Revolution. He shall always be remembered for the crisp and piercing articles in the Urdu monthly Al-Risala and its English version now published as Spirit of Islam. His short