Murder in the Name of Allah — Page 27
up 17. A Rebuttal of Maududian Philosophy the task. So, in the first instalments of his articles, he pointed out to. Hindus that Islam was not a religion of the sword. But our author was born and bred in a Muslim kingdom where the Hindu majority was under a Muslim leader. . The writer of two books on the history of Hyderabad¹³ was steeped in the power of political authority. He soon contradicted his own arguments against the jihad of the sword. This Hyderabadi Muslim was to assert: 'It is fallacious to say that the sword did not play any role in conversion. ' The young journalist was neither a historian nor a scholar of religion. He could not understand that though Muslim dynasties ruled the Deccan for 600 years, the overwhelming majority of that area remained Hindu. . Political power in Muslim hands has never helped conversion to Islam. . The author of Jihad fil Islam was just 24 years old. And the Maulana, even at the age of 65, remained ‘superficial'. As Prof. Fazlur Rahman observed:. Maududi, though not an alim, was nevertheless a self-taught man of considerable intelligence and sufficient knowledge. . . . He was by no means an accurate or profound scholar, but he was undoubtedly like a fresh wind in the stifling Islamic atmosphere created by the traditional madrasas. . . . But Maududi displays nowhere the larger and more profound vision of Islam's role in the world. Being a journalist rather than a serious scholar he wrote at great speed and with resultant superficiality in order to feed his eager young readers - and he wrote incessantly………. Not one of Maududi's followers ever became a serious student of Islam, the result being that, for the faithful, Maududi's statements represented the last word on Islam - no matter how much and how blatantly he contradicted himself from time to time on such basic issues as economic policy and political theory. 19. The late Mufti Kifayatullah of Delhi held the same opinion. He said: 'I know Maulana Abul Ala Maududi. He has neither learned from nor been disciplined by a scholar of repute. He is very well read but his understanding of religion is weak. 20. The late Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani foresaw the danger very clearly and said:. His pamphlets and books contain opinions which are anti-religious and heretic, though written with theological trappings. Lay readers cannot see through these trappings. As a result they find the Islam brought by the. Holy Prophet repugnant; the Islam which has been followed by the. Ummat-i-Muhammadiya for the last 1350 years. 21. In one of his letters, Maualana Qari Muhammad Tayyab wrote: 27