THE ROLE OF WOMEN

The next step was to take the message to the world. The CPS Team developed the website, www.cpsglobal.org and started placing all of Maulana’s books and material there for the world. An exercise of preserving the material for online consumption has been ongoing for more than a decade: Quran translations, commentary, magazines— Al-Risala, Spirit of Islam, books, FAQs, audio and video lectures among others. With the help of God today most of the material is available online. People from all over the world who were already a part of Maulana’s mission, and many new people joined the CPS Team thereafter. Not only did the mission give us all a purpose in life, but it also gave us a divine mission whereby we could share our discovery with others. All of us realized that if we wanted eternal Paradise for ourselves, we had to involve ourselves in the mission of proclaiming the divine truth to all humankind. Maulana’s central teaching was about being connected to God. Kindly share with us the most inspiring teaching of Maulana which helped you in this connection. From early in my life, especially after my dream, I always felt close to God. But I did not know how to connect with Him and stand for Him. What Maulana’s writings and lectures helped me to do was that I realized my Creator and understood His Creation Plan. I think my realization of God grew deeper when Maulana’s book Kitabe-Marefat was published and Aapa started translating it into English. At that time, I was helping Aapa to organize the English translations. I was involved in proofreading. Going through the English translations of Discovering God and The Purpose of Creation, I realized that perhaps one of the greatest contributions of Maulana is to help people realize God, i.e. marifah and connect with Him. I had heard Maulana say we need to live in Alhamdulillah (being grateful to God) culture. Now I realized how to do it so as to have a deeper realization of God. God Almighty is the source of all the blessings we receive in the world: our existence, our life-support system, food, water and so much more. Maulana helped us to realize everything we receive as a blessing of God and acknowledge Him as the Giver, while we are all simply receivers. Maulana used to say that the strongest feeling is the emotion of love. The Quran says that “those who believe love God most” (2:165). I realized that if we realize that God is the Giver of each and everything we receive, we will develop a deep love of God. Then we can make God our