THE ROLE OF WOMEN

Through campus recruitment, I was selected for a management programme at one of the premier corporate organizations of India immediately upon graduating from Delhi University in 1983. I joined the organization and received excellent training in the fields of advertisement and media there. Upon getting married, I ventured into business in the same field. My business flourished. I gained fame and fortune. During the next two decades, my material life was flourishing. But I was living in a sense of dissatisfaction. I wanted more from life. I always felt I had a higher calling and was wasting my life in material pursuits. What did you think of religion before you met Maulana Wahiduddin Khan? My parents brought us up to be good Muslims and good human beings. We prayed five times a day, kept all the fasts, paid the zakat, all of us performed our Hajj early in life and tried to be good Muslims. However, my life and my religion seemed like two separate compartments of my life. Islam was never integrated into my life. Wanting to understand Islam better, I started asking questions from my elders. But neither did I receive any answers nor any encouragement. So I stopped questioning, while continuing ritualistic Islam, though I had always had an inner urge to stand for God and Islam. In the early 2000s, I was jolted out of my spiritual slumber, through a health setback. It was one shock after another. Both my grandmothers, who had been the source of my religious strength passed away. Later my sister-in-law died within just a few months of an illness at the age of 52. I regularly prayed to God not to let me die till He had shown me my purpose and role in life and helped me to perform it. I even got up for tahajjud prayers and started reading material on Islam that I could get my hands on. As I only knew English, I first went through all the material on Islam in English. I have fond memories of my father visiting the Urdu Bazar, Jamia Masjid to buy books on Islam. I often visited the Goodword Bookstore at Nizamuddin, though I had not yet been introduced to the writings of Maulana Wahiduddin Khan. Over time, I collected more than 500 books in my home library, all of which I then read. But tragically, I had not found my answers or the purpose of my life. The 9/11 incident in 2001 made me start questioning Islam itself. I went to one scholar after another asking them about the Islamic position on the issue: Was Islam a religion of violence or peace? Was this jihad?