FROM MAULANA'S DESK

FROM MAULANA’S DESK 1. The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims 2012, Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, Jordan. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, born in 1925, in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, is an Islamic spiritual scholar who is well-versed in both classical Islamic learning and modern disciplines. The mission of his life has been the establishment of worldwide peace. He has received the Padma Bhushan, the Demiurgus Peace International Award and Sayyidina Imam Al Hassan Peace award for promoting peace in Muslim societies. He has been called ’Islam’s spiritual ambassador to the world’ and is recognised as one of its most influential Muslims1. His books have been translated into sixteen languages and are part of university curricula in six countries. He is the founder of the Centre for Peace and Spirituality based in New Delhi. AMERICA staunchly opposed communist Russia, but rather than drop a nuclear bomb on it, it devised and supported a literary campaign against the communist regime. Innumerable books were published in various languages and widely disseminated, which were critical of the philosophy of Communism. A great deal of careful planning had gone into challenging Communism at the ideological level. This strategy was successful, and in 1991 the USSR collapsed, after sixty-nine years of existence. This is a good model for tackling the current so-called ‘Islamic’ terrorist movements. Terrorism in the name of Islam is based entirely on the misinterpretation of Islamic texts. One example of this misinterpretation derives from a verse of the Quran, which says: ‘All power belongs to God alone’ (12: 40). In this verse, power is used to denote the supernatural power of God. However, Muslim extremist thinkers have misinterpreted it to mean political power. Furthermore, these extremist thinkers claim that Muslims, as representatives of God, should establish God’s rule on THOUGHTS ON COUNTERING TERRORISM