ASK MAULANA

ASK MAULANA Your Questions Answered Maulana Wahiduddin Khan in a discussion on the necessity of dialogue and working for peace When did you begin your mission, and what is it about? It’s been a very long journey. It started many years ago, but it began in an active sense in 1967, when I became the editor of the Urdu weekly Al-Jamiat. Then, in 1970, I set up the Islamic Centre in New Delhi, and launched the Urdu monthly Al-Risala in 1976. In 2001, I set up the Centre for Peace and Spirituality. This, in brief, is a description of my organisational activities. My mission is basically a dawah mission. Dawah means ‘invitation’, and this mission seeks to invite people to God. Through this mission, we seek to convey the word of God to people everywhere. At the same time, I am also interested in working for peace. Without peace, you can’t engage in positive or constructive work. If you want to do dawah work, if you want to promote spirituality, you need peace. So, we give great stress on working for peace, because our purpose is dawah, and dawah is not possible without peace. Dawah and peace are interlinked. I am thus interested in promoting both dawah and peace. There’s much talk today about interfaith dialogue. It seems to be a relatively new thing. Why do you think people are talking about it today? It isn’t that dialogue between followers of different faiths did not take place earlier. Yet, maybe not much of it took place in the formal sense, because for dialogue you need communications to relate, to dialogue with others, and in the past, means of communication were limited. Today, communications are highly advanced, and so not only is dialogue much more possible but it is also a pressing need. I think interaction and intellectual exchange between people of different faiths is very important. We are really blessed to find ourselves in a period of history where the possibilities of such exchange and interaction abound. These possibilities were very limited in earlier times, and so we are truly fortunate.