SELECTIONS FROM MAULANA’S DIARY

Thinking about all people while letting go of greed and personal gain, and thinking about the welfare of all is the secret of success. ideas that arose in the world of the 19th century and the reaction of the Muslims as a result of colonial dominance, Jamaat-e-Islami and the like organizations found centrestage. This thought is the product of a particular political period, not really a product of Islam. These ideologies presented Islam as a political revolution. The political interpretation of Islam is primarily a reaction to the political conditions of its time. And this time is fast coming to an end. Today’s man wants to stand on the ground of nature. For the future person who wants to stand on the ground of nature, his intellectual satisfaction will only be in the message of AlRisala and it will probably not take more than ten years for this time to come. February 2, 1991 The Times of India of February 2, 1991 carried an article by Mr Sham Lal, Win the War; Lose the Peace. I liked the heading better than the contents of the article. In the two weeks of fighting in the Gulf, nearly 50 billion dollars have been spent. The expenditure will spiral upward every day. Irrespective of who wins the war, the peace has been lost. India won the war of Bangladesh in 1971. But what followed was violence, inflation and rampant corruption, destroying the peace and tranquility forever. The same story will be repeated, albeit on a much larger scale after the Gulf War. No matter which side is victorious, the misery of the common man will only increase a hundred-fold. The impact will be felt even by the victor. Regardless of the scale—small or big—on which wars are fought, they are all fought to find a solution to some problem. But every war in turn has created even more problems. A noted western thinker has said: “Problems are created by problem-solving activity.” There is, however, an exception to this rule—the course embarked upon by the Prophet of Islam. Like other leaders he found himself in confrontational situations, but the difference in his case was that the number of times he actually chose to go to war was almost negligible. In the annals of human history his humanitarianism in solving problems has remained unparalleled.