BEYOND EXCUSES

bridges. Opportunity belongs to those who know how to create it with wisdom and respect. How did you stay in constant contact with Maulana—letters, phone calls, or meetings? Besides personal meetings, we had a living correspondence. I have more than a hundred letters from him. Whenever I wrote, he replied. We spoke on the phone at times. But more than any of this, his books were my primary means of connection. In those pages, I could hear his voice even when he was far away. Books have a way of turning absence into presence. What did you learn from your personal interactions with Maulana? Every moment was a lesson. Even in private, he would share wisdom—about the greatness of God, about the purity of monotheism, about the discipline of thought and the humility of spirit. In 1996, he visited my new house. We prayed Asr there. After the prayer, he turned to me and said, “Mr Samad, you did not receive this house because some elder or Maulana visited here. You got this house purely as God’s blessing. So always learn to be thankful to Him.” Those words struck deep. They were a gentle reminder to keep the heart anchored in gratitude, not superstition; in the Giver, not in occasions. How did you serve under the Al-Risala Mission? In the beginning, I would carry several copies of Al-Risala monthly (Urdu version of Spirit of Islam) in a bag and distribute them wherever I went. If I met someone in a mosque, I would hand them a copy. It was simple work, but it felt like planting seeds. Some seeds sprouted quickly, some took time, and some are still growing in ways I may never see. In what fields did you contribute? We translated nearly twelve of Maulana’s books into Marathi. The Secret of Successful Family Life and The Prophet for All Humanity were among them. For a large book like God Arises, we divided the work into segments rather than doing a full translation at once. And the Marathi translation of the Quran is