MY MOTHER—AN EXEMPLARY WOMAN

to look after us, our fate might well have been no better than the little, stray, motherless kittens one sees wasting away in the streets. My eyes are witness to my mother’s total commitment over a prolonged period to our proper upbringing. But it would really take a whole book to do justice to her. How straitened were the circumstances in which we were living in those days can be judged by my not even having one paisa to buy a small piece of rubber for a catapult I was making. Hearing of this, one of our acquaintances kindly gave me the money for it. It was galling to think that once having been the biggest landowning family in the area, we had now come to such a sorry pass. To be quite honest, after our father’s death we had not even the smallest pittance to call our own. The hardships my mother faced at that time are now barely imaginable. It is greatly to her credit that she bore up as well as any man. And from within the confines of the four walls of her home—such as it was—she contrived to influence the external world. She gained the upper hand over her circumstances where such circumstances might well have proved too overwhelming. The most remarkable feature of her attainments is that she succeeded in achieving, within the limits set for her by Islam, all those objectives for which it is now considered necessary to make women emerge from the Islamic fold, in the process, divesting themselves of their essentially feminine virtues. Whatever she did, she did in the true spirit of Islam. Instead of turning to man, she turned to God. Instead of thinking in terms of the world, she focused her attention on the Hereafter. All her actions were perfectly in consonance with traditional religious thinking. She had received no such higher education as would have led her to consider the philosophical implications of the course she took. But now, her strivings, seen through the eyes of a scholar, appear as the manifestations of human greatness. Even if she had left her home in quest of such higher education as would have fitted her for a post in some secular organization, she could not have done any better for us than she did. Even to imagine her taking such a course of action is quite meaningless. Her sacrifices made it possible for her not only to give us a satisfactory upbringing but also to demonstrate what the Islamic bent of mind— She encouraged us to turn our eyes away from what had been denied us and, instead, to give our full attention to that which we still enjoyed, namely, our God-given existence.