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

this case, Islam) serve as a political ideology? Or to put it in another way, can religion which was primarily designed to address soteriological and eschatological themes, be turned into a sociopolitical model? For a few centuries, this question was posed only by the orientalists who were interested in understanding this mysterious Arabian faith. But since the middle half of the 20th century, and particularly in the 21st century, this has become a common question that almost all intellectually sentient denizens of the world often ask. What happened in the 20th century that made people realise the importance of this question? A new idea was born. A different interpretation of Islam was expounded by Syed Qutb and Hasan-al-Bannah in Egypt, Syed Abul Ala Mawdudi in Indian Subcontinent, and Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. This interpretation stressed the “inherent” political dimensions of Islam and offered an Islamic sociopolitical alternative to the western political ideologies, most notably Liberal democracy and Communism. But, for many decades, this remained an area of interest only for academics. However, the beginning of the 21st century showed us what this new interpretation of Islam was capable of. It was so powerful in its message that it motivated people to do horrendous deeds often at the expense of their own lives. The September 11 attacks marked the beginning of an era when religion once again became the motivator for global violence. This had been almost non-existent in the west ever since the Enlightenment. Whereas most of the violence in the 20th century was the doing of secular ideologies and