FROM THE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

FROM THE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Dr. Farida Khanam has been a professor at the Department of Islamic Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi. A Study of World's Major Religions, A Simple Guide to Sufism are two of the books amongst others, of which she is the author. She has also translated many books on Islam authored by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. Currently, the chairperson of Centre for Peace and Spirituality (CPS International), an organization founded by her father Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, she is a regular contributor of articles to journals, newspapers and magazines. Dr. Khanam has edited Maulana’s English translation of the Quran and has also translated his Urdu commentary of the Quran into English. Under Maulana Wahiduddin Khan Peace Foundation, along with the CPS team, she has designed a series of courses on peace-building, countering extremism and conflict resolution. THE CONCEPT OF SPIRITUALITY IN ISLAM S PIRITUALITY as a philosophy has a long history of five thousand years. In ancient Greece there were great philosophers like Plato and Aristotle whose thinking was spiritual in character. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, spiritualism is the philosophy of higher reality, which has been defined by different philosophers in different words such as, “immaterial reality”, “a universal mind”, “a supreme being”, “spiritual cosmic force”, “infinite personal God”, etc. Spirituality, being a subjective discipline, it cannot be described in objective terms. Every person is composed of two things—body and spirit. The body is related to objective science while the spirit is related to subjective science. There are two different concepts of spirituality: God-oriented spirituality which is based on the concept of God Almighty, and manoriented spirituality, which is based on man’s soul itself being the treasure-house of spirituality. As for the former concept, spirituality results in God-realization while in the latter, spirituality results from self-realization. The concept of self-realization is based on the assumption that the treasure of spirituality exists within man himself. And through meditation man can peep into his inner self and discover spirituality. However this concept of man-oriented spirituality is not corroborated