EVERY PERSON IS YOUR POTENTIAL FRIEND

EVERY PERSON IS YOUR POTENTIAL FRIEND: MAULANA WAHIDUDDIN KHAN Could you kindly share something about your family background and your childhood? According to official records, I was born on January 1, 1925. I was born in a village called Badhariya, which is in the Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh. An ancestor of ours, named Hasan Khan, was a resident of Swat in Chitral, which at that time was part of Afghanistan. Hasan Khan had a brother called Husain Khan. It so happened that there was a dispute between the brothers over something. Hasan Khan moved out of Swat and migrated to an area called Jaunpur, which is in present-day Uttar Pradesh. At first, our forefathers lived there, and then later some members of the family settled in Azamgarh district, which is where I was born. Could you please share something about your educational background? As a child, I would often wander out of the house and head towards the orchards and fields. Outside the village, there was a bridge over a river. I would sit there, spending a long time watching the river flow and keenly observing other phenomena of nature. Sometime later, I began my initial formal education, in a maktab (religious seminary) in the village. After that, in 1938, I took admission at the Madrasat-ul-Islah at Saraimir (located in Azamgarh district) for Arabic and Islamic studies. After graduating from there, I found that I was actually irrelevant in society. I found out that my education had not been able to make me beneficial to contemporary society. I began studying commentaries on the Quran, Hadith, etc. once again. I also learnt the English language This is an interview of 2021 Padma Vibhushan awardee Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. He was awarded India’s second-highest civilian honour for working tirelessly in the field of spirituality and peace for more than fifty years. This interview was published in the April 2021 issue of ‘Sirat-eMustaqeem’, an Urdu monthly published from Pakistan. It was an online interview facilitated by Mr Tarique Badr (Pakistan) and Maulana Farhad (India). It was translated into English.