Murder in the Name of Allah — Page 39
:. Prophets and Troopers of what the Maulana wrote in Al-Jihad fil Islam and his other works, the reader may reasonably be led to believe that the author is not even remotely concerned with the teachings of the Holy Prophets and that his claim to be a loyal follower is false. That would be a very serious charge. . Since I belong to a sect which has been falsely accused of showing disrespect to the Holy Prophetsa, I would be the last to doubt the. Maulana's loyalty to our Lord and Master, Muhammad - may Allah bless him and grant him peace. 2 That the Maulana's sense of values has been confused, so he has as much difficulty in telling good from evil as a colour-blind person does in telling red from green. 3 That the Maulana is obsessed - obsessed with a desire for political power and authority. Obsession has been defined as ‘A persistent or recurrent idea, usually strongly tinged with emotion, frequently involving an urge towards some form of action; the whole mental situation being pathological. ”4. Pierre Janet found that an obsessive person was scrupulous, everconscientious and stricken by a sense of worthlessness. " Elton Mayo has summarised Janet's and his own characterisation of obsessives in these terms: 'They are the experts in arduous rethinking of the obvious - they substitute an exaggerated precision in minor activities for that activity in major affairs of which they are or feel themselves to be incapable. . The Maulana's childhood memories and adolescent experiences in. Hyderabad, as we have seen earlier, led him towards one source of behavioural control - political power. Kurt Lewin has observed that if an individual's behaviour is to be understood, it must be in terms of his life-space- one has to relate the individual to his environment over the course of time and at the particular moment. Lewin's field of interest is thus: the life-space, containing the person and his psychological environment. " Woodsworth and Sheehan elaborate Lewin's theory and say:. The psychological (or behavioural) environment is, of course, the environment as perceived and understood by the person, but more than that, it is the environment as related to his present needs and quasineeds. Many objects which are perceived are of no present concern to him and so exist only in the background of his psychological environment. Other objects have positive or negative ‘valence' - positive if they promise to meet his present needs, negative if they threaten injury. . Objects of positive valence attract him, while objects of negative valence repel him. ³ 39