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Spirit of Islam Issue 35 November 2015
FROM MAULANA’S DESK
1. The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims 2012, Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, Jordan.
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
, born in 1925, in
Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, is an Islamic spiritual
scholar who is well-versed in both classical Islamic
learning and modern disciplines. The mission of his life
has been the establishment of worldwide peace. He has
received the Padma Bhushan, the Demiurgus Peace
International Award and Sayyidina Imam Al Hassan
Peace award for promoting peace in Muslim societies.
He has been called ’Islam’s spiritual ambassador to the
world’ and is recognised as one of its most influential
Muslims
1
. His books have been translated into sixteen
languages and are part of university curricula in six
countries. He is the founder of the Centre for Peace
and Spirituality based in New Delhi.
A
MERICA staunchly opposed communist Russia, but rather than
drop a nuclear bomb on it, it devised and supported a literary
campaign against the communist regime. Innumerable books
were published in various languages and widely disseminated, which
were critical of the philosophy of Communism. A great deal of careful
planning had gone into challenging Communism at the ideological
level. This strategy was successful, and in 1991 the USSR collapsed,
after sixty-nine years of existence.
This is a good model for tackling the current so-called ‘Islamic’ terrorist
movements.
Terrorism in the name of Islam is based entirely on themisinterpretation
of Islamic texts. One example of this misinterpretation derives from
a verse of the Quran, which says: ‘All power belongs to God alone’
(12: 40)
. In this verse,
power
is used to denote the supernatural power
of God. However, Muslim extremist thinkers have misinterpreted it
to mean political power. Furthermore, these extremist thinkers claim
that Muslims, as representatives of God, should establish God’s rule on
THOUGHTS ON COUNTERING TERRORISM