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

practice of Islam: it also became the basis of my career in the media. To me, Maulana’s style of storytelling mirrored that of the Holy Quran. You do not give all the details of the story. The only details you have to give are the ones that are essential to the moral of the story. It is not the details of the story that are crucial in themselves. The crucial point of the story is the moral of the story. This is a revolutionary approach to journalism. Ever since the time of Rudyard Kipling, one of the pioneers both of modern storytelling and journalism in the subcontinent, journalism had been all about “who did what, when, why, where and how.” Because of Maulana’s influence, journalism for me came to be about something else. It came to be more a question of “what are we going to do about it.” In other words, whatever the problem or issue might be, what can we do to address it, how can we solve it? And even more importantly, what we can learn from it. “There is a lesson in their stories,” as the Quran puts it (12:111) I learned this point from Maulana, and from continuous translation of his articles in Al-Risala. I would like to think I have been putting this principle into practice in my journalism and storytelling ever since. So like Talha, I feel I have been able to think out of the box. Like Talha was not constrained by Deobandi thinking, I also have not been constrained by Maulana’s thought. I have been able, I hope, to be true to Maulana’s thought, while thinking independently.