ASK MAULANA

Maulana Wahiduddin Khan answers your questions on society and spirituality.

Some people talk about a world without borders, what is your opinion about this?

A world without borders is one in which people should be able to live anywhere, work anywhere and contribute anywhere—for the world is one.

All thinking people have a beautiful dream—that of living in a world without borders. But for all these people, this only remains a dream, as no one has ever been able to actualize it. As far as I am concerned I can say that I have made it a reality. I always actually live in a world without borders. In my experience, the concept of a world without borders is quite an achievable target.

In a single sentence, I can say that a world without physical borders may not be achievable, but a world without psychological borders is quite attainable for anyone who so desires it. There is no need for external permission for this purpose: every individual can enter into this state—by his own decision.

In one of your articles you have presented spirituality as a solution to eradicate corruption. My question is, how to inculcate spirituality among people?

Basically I feel it is a part of education, both formal and informal. Education means the training of the mind, with special emphasis on inculcating high values. To spread spiritual values in society, we need value-based education, especially during schooling, which is a preparatory period of life, and if we want to build a spiritual society, we must adopt a spirituality-oriented form of education.

Kindly explain how exactly spirituality will stop a person from being corrupt?

One aspect of spirituality is that it makes one evaluate actions in terms of their results—a major factor in having a sense of responsibility. One who is a spiritually developed person is able to see things in terms of value. He is able to differentiate between right and wrong. There is a saying: ‘A wise man is one who knows the relative value of things.’ The spiritually developed person is a wise person and a wise person is one who has a predictable character. All these qualities stem from spiritual training. It is the responsibility of reformers, therefore, to train people to become duty conscious by enhancing their thinking capacity—for the duty-conscious person can never involve himself in any such negative activity as corruption.

There is much discussion about the necessity for social reform but this has not come about. What is the reason for this?

Though Himalayan efforts have been made with regard to bringing about social reform, they have proved infructuous. In my opinion this is so because the starting point is not the right one. The starting point must be to bring about change in the individual. The mind of the individual must be addressed in order to revolutionize his thinking. This is the right and only way to carry out social reform. Other methods have proved ineffective.

When we are living in a society we face many unpleasant experiences from people we deal with. How to love all human beings in spite of such negative experiences?

The rationale behind the ‘love all’ formula is that you should consider every person as a benefactor irrespective of the type of experience you have with them. It is lack of awareness of this fact that makes you unable to adopt this love-all culture. For example, a person who was in need of some help approached his relative requesting him to come to his assistance. This relative instead of extending his help gave advice about the importance of self-help. Though hurt and disappointed the person returned vowing to himself to never ask for help and worked hard to make himself self-sufficient. Later in life whenever he thought about his relative, he felt he had actually been his benefactor and found that he did not have any negative feelings for him in his heart. In fact, he looked at him as his benefactor. The above is an example of an individual.

Let us understand this in terms of love for all humanity. We are living in a civilization. Civilization is an advanced stage of refinement in ethical and material matters resulting from continuous effort on the part of all humankind. It has taken thousands of years of the joint efforts of humanity to bring civilization into existence. The whole of humanity was involved in this process. The discovery of this reality about history gives rise to the culture of ‘love for all’, while unawareness of this leads to hate culture. The truth is that in this world the most realistic principle is that of ‘love for all’. We cannot afford the opposite of this.