MAKE YOURSELF ELIGIBLE
Spirit of Islam, June 2017, p. 14
By Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan is named as the default author of the periodical; a piece that carries another writer’s byline is credited to that writer.
Before 1959, the Russian language was given hardly any importance in America. But when in that year Russia sent a rocket into space, travelling at the speed of 7000 miles per hour and reaching the moon in a little more than 30 hours, all of a sudden the Russian language acquired great importance in intellectual circles in the West. This rocket signified that Russia had surpassed America in space technology. It led American experts to believe that their knowledge of space technology was incomplete until they had read all the available literature on the subject in Russian. This engendered a sea-change in attitudes towards the Russian language in America. America began to arrange to obtain Russian scientific journals and to translate them into English. All important scientific treatises in Russian were rendered into English. This sudden importance that the Russian language acquired in America was not a result of any group staging demonstrations or making demands. Rather, it was because the language was able to prove that it was useful and, therefore, deserving of such attention. The same is true for the Japanese language today. Till the mid-20th century, not many people in the West cared to learn Japanese. But today, scientific treatises written in Japanese are quickly translated into Western languages and enjoy great respect and popularity in Western countries. This is because of Japan’s amazing progress in the field of electronics. Western scholars realize that their understanding of electronics will remain far from complete unless they are able to read the latest research being conducted in this field in Japan. This is one reason why there are so many scholars of the Japanese language in the West today. By proving its importance and usefulness, the Japanese language has won for itself a very respectable position in the West, one that it did not enjoy before. The actual problem with Urdu is that the corpus of Urdu writing consists largely of just two genres: one is poetry, and the other is religious sermons, written in a preachy mode. In today’s scientific age, these two genres have lost their importance. There is now no area of research where high-quality books are being written in Urdu, books that people think that if they do not read, they will not be able to get a complete and proper understanding of their subject of interest. In any discipline, be it philosophy, history, sociology or technology or whatever, there are no Because this world can never be free from unfavourable conditions, people whose thinking is overwhelmed by the unpleasant conditions they face always think in terms of complaints.

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