The Reminiscences of Zafrulla Khan — Page 81
81 REMINISCENCES OF SIR MUHAMMAD ZAFRULLA KHAN as was necessary to them, I would be very glad if he would take them over, and I would assist him as much as I could as Minister in charge. That was the arrangement that was put through by the Viceroy. Question : I wonder, Sir, if you might now like to talk a little about religion, how it has influenced you, how it has influenced your political life, how you came to it and so on. Khan : That is both a solemn and a wide topic. It is wide in the sense that to my way of thinking, and I believe to the way of thinking of most Muslims, religion comprehends every aspect of one's life. With me it began very early, as it should with everybody. I was particularly fortunate that my mother was such a very outstanding personality in our household. She had no book learning; indeed, she was not even competently literate, if I might so put it. She had been born at a time when our part of the country, the Punjab, was under Sikh rule, and in rural areas such arrangements for education and cultural advancement as had existed during the earlier period of Mogul rule had by that time faded out. So that all that she had acquired by way of what might be called literacy was that she could barely read the Qur’an, which has the same script as Urdu, but without comprehending its meaning because she did not know any Arabic at all. She could just pronounce the text correctly, which is often the case with people who are not educated, but are anxious that they should at least be able to recite the Qur’an. But she was a deeply religious woman, and her religious experiences started early in life. Many of them were connected with the loss of her first three children, before I was born. I will not go into too much detail about them, because I would then be talking for days. I have written a biographical sketch of her in Urdu which I have called "My Mother. " It is not very long, about 150 pages, and I have set out most of these things briefly in it. By the time I began to perceive anything at all, I began to perceive that both my father and mother were deeply religious persons. The picture of my father that comes most often to my mind is that in the afternoon, when he returned from his business in court and we were all waiting for him to join us at tea, he would first wash and engage in prayer in the corner where a prayer carpet had been spread for him. He would be at prayer much longer than I was accustomed to see other people at prayer. Sometimes we were impatient that he should finish