THE ROLE OF WOMEN

What inspired you to devote yourself wholly to the mission? When we had attended Maulana’s lectures for a few weeks, I approached Maulana and asked him, “Maulana why are you giving lectures to only a few people in this room? The whole world needs to understand Islam in the universal way you explain.” He smiled at me and replied: “Who is stopping you? You take it to the world.” I was spellbound again. When I had earlier contacted many religious scholars and senior members of various religious institutions I had come in contact with and asked them if I could help them in any way, I was never encouraged. And here, Maulana Wahiduddin Khan was giving me—a woman—an open invitation to take his message to the world. I felt that through Maulana God had given me an open invitation to join His mission and play a role in it. My husband and I decided to dedicate ourselves to this mission. After a few months, we realized that Maulana had prepared a corpus of material. What we could do was, organize and make soft copies of the material, and develop a website to take it to the world. Under the guidance of Prof Farida Khanam and Dr Saniyasnain Khan, we initiated efforts to computerize Maulana’s English books. Navdeep put his office people on this task. Helped by the CPS team, we started making soft copies of Maulana’s books, articles and Al-Risala English magazine. I volunteered to proofread the material along with Raazia Siddiqui, Maulana’s granddaughter. When I was going through this material, I immediately realized that this material was different. It was clear; it explained Islam in a simple and rational manner and was easily understandable for modern educated people. While going through the material we realized that not only was the English of the books at par with international publications, so was its publishing. This is Dr Saniyasnain Khan’s contribution, who had set up Goodword Books to print and publish books of international standard. We also decided to start recording Maulana’s Sunday lectures, so the message can be shared globally. For this, we brought a small Sony Handycam recorder to the next class. Dr Saniyasnain Khan understood the importance of this task and took the video recordings to a whole new level. He started recording with a better camera, and in time developed the CPS Centre as a studio and started regular classes there. All of us in the CPS Team worked under the guidance of Farida Aapa and Dr Saheb to take Maulana’s material to the world.