49 / 54
46
Spirit of Islam Issue 35 November 2015
ASK MAULANA
Your Questions Answered
Q&A With Maulana Wahiduddin Khan on
Challenges in Life
Maulana, this world is aggressively competitive.
Competition, you say, is good, but it often
escalates into aggressive confrontation. How
should one manage this?
Competition is part of nature. Take the case of
children. They fight with each other every other
day. But then they quickly make up. This is nature.
Your question reflects a concern about relating to negative people,
who see competition as aggression or who react to competition with
aggression. If someone like this gets angry with you, quickly say, ‘You
are right, and I am wrong.’ At once you will find that the problem has
been solved!
It is in your hands, not in someone else’s. It all depends on how you
handle the situation.
You repeatedly stress that we should save ourselves from distractions
and that we should focus on positivity. But in the corporate world
where I work, vindictiveness is a part of the culture, and often leads
to confrontation. Because of this, one gets embroiled in distractions
and sinks into negativity.
If you try to be competitive, confrontation with vindictive people is
inevitable. If I adopt the formula you suggest, saying, ‘You are right,
and I am wrong’, wouldn’t I be stunting my intellectual development?
I’ll say just one thing here—that you need to learn the art of retreat.
Be ready to retreat at any moment. You must realise that no situation
can be entirely good or entirely bad; it’s always a mix of the two. So,
in every situation, focus on the good and ignore the bad, and you can
progress. Otherwise, you will be constantly escaping from challenging
situations, constantly running or seeking to run away.
I don’t hesitate to retreat when I need to. My sole concern is that
the process of my intellectual development should not stop. And so,
whenever I need to, I quickly and willingly retreat.