T h e V i s i o n o f I s l a m
6
and on my work. They will climb and by my stair. They will find
truth and through me.
Perhaps there can be no better allegory for the present work
than the above.
I was born on January 1, 1925. My father, Fariduddin Khan, died
on 30
th
December 1929, when I was just five. Then I was brought
up in my family home, in Azamgarh (U.P., India) in a traditional,
religious atmosphere. My circumstances demanded that I look at
everything with a curious eye.When I came of age and learnt that
the religion which, “in the old days”, had ruled human thought for
one thousand years, was languishing in every respect in modern
times, I felt that this was an issue on which I should do some
research. I then began to make a regular study of the subject.
Many people regard me as a University educated person. But
the truth is that my formal education was confined to studies in an
Arabic school, after which I learnt English on my own. The result
of a regular study of books in English was that the modern style
came to influence my writing.
My educational and intellectual background had given me only
a traditional knowledge of Islam, which was obviously insufficient
for an understanding of Islam in relation to the modern world. In
1948, therefore, I decided to go directly to the sources of modern
thought in order to increase my understanding of it. At the same
time, I started to study the Quran and the
hadith
and related
subjects, in order to have a fresh understanding of Islam. If the first
15 years of my life were engaged in traditional education, the next
25 years were taken up by the above-mentioned research. Today,
now that I am over fifty, I have the good fortune to be able to offer
to the world this book which is the result of my long research.
Having cut steps out of the theoretical rock, I was confronted with
another range: now it was necessary to give a practical shape to my
Islamic endeavours in the light of the discovered truths.
I feel that I have exhausted my strength. The hard struggle of
the past which this work entailed has aged me before my time.
