A THINKER NOT OF AN AGE BUT FOR ALL TIME — Dr. Muhammad Saleem Wani, Rajouri

Maulana’s scholarship guided him to adopt peace as the mission of his life. His chief concern therefore was to present Islam as an ideology of peace that was perfectly suitable for the modern age. He believed that the present problem of terrorism in every part of the globe is based on an ideology and an ideology can’t be countered through legal action or by mere condemnation. We have to develop a counter-ideology to overcome it. Endorsing UNESCO’s maxim that “Violence begins from mind” he therefore opines that it should be uprooted from the mind itself. He advocated the re-engineering of the minds of individuals by taking them away from the culture of violence and bringing them close to the culture of peace. He finds the root cause of Muslim youths to establish Islamic rule in this world in every possible manner, may it be a violent and terror stricken one. Such an ideology has in fact made suicide bombing a favorite tool of these derailed lot. Maulana terms it un-Islamic and forcefully negates this dangerous approach and therefore waged an intellectual war against this mindset by framing a counter-ideology spread over several thousand pages in his more than 200 books. He presented peace in the form of a complete ideology— an ideology which awakens human consciousness, which provides the answer to all life’s problems in term of peace; which describes the crucial importance of peace right from the individual to the international level. He ascertains, in essence, peace is not an option, it is our destiny. Today because of his efforts, we notice a radical shift in the mindset of extremist individuals and organizations across