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My Indebtedness to Mawdudi
In writing about my personal encounters with Mawdudi, I find myself looking back over many years; in fact, back to 1953, when I was admitted as a freshman to the American University in Beirut. At that time, this university was still a Christian missionary institution. All students, the majority of whom were Muslim, were compelled to attend talks, mainly on Christian religious topics or disguised indoctrination to Western modernity, held three times a week in the university church.
It was the challenge of this experience that strongly induced me, in spite of my limited background, to consult authentic Islamic sources, to read the Qur'an for the first time in my young life. This enabled me to react with uncompromising albeit naïve responses to the unfounded criticism of my lecturers at the American University. In this state of mind, I found myself easily recruited by a small group of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement who came from different countries and faced the same problems. Chief among them was Dr. Ishaq Farhan, currently president of Zarka University in Jordan, the late Dr. Yasin Aberra from Eritrea, Drs. Nabil Mahayni and Muhammad Qoja from Syria and Dr. AIi Shubaika from Sudan. The literature of the Ikhwan was very inspiring, particularly Muhammad Qutb's classic book, Shubuhat Hawl al Islam, which was most suitable for our young generation of the 1950s. I found his eloquent Arabic poetic style, emotional assertions and uncompromising attack on Western modernity quite exhilarating.
My first encounter with Mawlana Mawdudi was when I read his classic, Towards Understanding Islam. Dr. Khurshid Ahmad, its translator, says in his introduction that this book is, "an elementary study of Islam and a simple, understandable and unsophisticated interpretation of that religion for the younger folk." Though it was first published in 1940, it continues to top the bestseller's lists of Islamic libraries and bookshops. My very understanding of Islam was completely changed by reading the first few pages of this book. Everything is assigned a place in the grand scheme assigned by God, the book states. The sun, the moon, the stars, the rotating earth on its fixed axis, the organs of the human body from the tiniest cell to the heart and brain, all are governed...