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

Perhaps, the same could be said about Political Islam. But that certainly was not the case with the inquisitive Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. He carried on with his quest for the Pristine faith, and soon developed significant differences with Mawdudi and his Party. I have explored in great details those differences before[ii] and for the sake of brevity I will not mention them again. Suffice to say that I found Maulana Wahiduddin Khan’s critique extremely profound. Mawdudi’s overly politicised interpretation of Islam was put to question by many, most notably by Maulana Husayn Ahmed Madani of Deoband, and Mawdudi’s own former associate, Maulana Manzur Numani. But what differed Maulana Wahiduddin’s Khan critique was that he knew precisely what the source of Mawdudi’s inspiration was; western Totalitarianism. In Khan, Mawdudi and the rest of the Islamists had found their worst nemesis; a theologian well versed in western thought which had hitherto remained their specialty (Traditional clergy has never accorded any significant attention to foreign ideas). According to Khan, the problem was not that of the Islamist focus on the Political aspects of Islam, but that they perceive politics as the overarching objective of Islam. He wrote: “My objection to Mawdudi’s writings is that in giving importance to the political aspects of the religion, he engaged in such inordinate exaggeration that he made it the basis of an entire interpretation of the religion. I do not object to his including politics in the religion. Everyone knows that politics, too, is included in Islam. I do not consider it wrong that he stressed political aspects in his writings, because