Religion As Critique by Ahmad Irfan;

Author:Ahmad, Irfan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

♦ Forceful Arguments

In 1965, Tajallī published a special double issue on Khan’s book. The issue, titled “Critique Number [tanqīd nambar],”12 contained four articles. The first, six pages long, was an excerpt from Maududi’s Tafhīmul Qurʾān explicating the notion of أَقِيمُو الدِّينَ; the second was a fourteen-page letter by Sadruddin Islahi, a key intellectual mentioned in Khan’s text as tasked by Jamaat with writing a response to Khan’s critique; and the third was a twenty-one-page article on the concept of dīn, reproduced from Fārān, a journal published from Karachi. The final article (twenty-six pages) was by the editor himself. Amir Usmani had had no plan to review Khan’s book, as it had “barely any impact either on scholars or commoners” and hence it was not Usmani’s “religious duty” to critique it. In scholarly terms, he also found it weak. But when he learned that some people of Deoband planned to publicize Khan’s book, he decided to open “the gates of critique [naqd v naz̤ar].”13 Asking his audience to read his “partial” critique along with other articles, he began with a long quote from Khan detailing his psychological condition on 7 March 1963 (at 1:00 p.m.) while doing research on Maududi’s Iṣt̤elāḥēñ. With no one else in the library and surrounded by books, Khan stood up to shelve a volume of the tafsīr by Muhammad Ibn Jarir al-Tabari (839–923). Weak from continuous study, however, he fainted. When he recovered, he felt that “to have an exchange of ideas with early scholars of Islam [aslāf-e-umma] I had gone too far and felt tired. Despite this weakness I felt happy that I came to know their viewpoints, and now I am in a position to confidently refute the concept under discussion [Maududi’s reading of Islam] on their behalf. It seemed as if the entire shelves of books are spirits [rūḥēñ] of aslāf standing behind me and I am proceeding with my weak hands and trembling feet for defense on their behalf. So happy I felt that my hunger, thirst, and tiredness disappeared and I continued my study till sunset” (Khan 1995 [1963], 15).

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