Our Mission is a peace mission. It is the dream of our founder, Maulana Wahiduddin Khan to have a peaceful world. Peace for him is not just an academic subject. It is the goal of his existence. He is a born pacifist, and leading a peace-loving life has always been a source of great spiritual solace for him. It is his aim to spread the ideology of peace throughout the world to usher in an era of global peace.
It has been rightly said that “Man is a rational animal” and also that “man is an explanation-seeking animal.” Both these sayings convey the same point: that man derives mental satisfaction from his actions only when the goals at which they are aimed have been established as right by rational argument. Attempting to evolve a complete ideology on the basis of peace is indeed as important a goal as peace itself, and vice versa. Both are interdependent. The one cannot exist without the other.
Such violence as has been witnessed in modern times has never hitherto been experienced. Wartime depredations and violence by unauthorized groups in the form of proxy or guerilla warfare have inflicted such great harm upon humanity that this seems to be undoing all our progress. This is a reality which is being experienced by all concerned inhabitants of the earth.
How can this be explained? The reason is clear: people do not possess a complete ideology, which favours peace, whereas the sole justification for violence is the force of public sentiment. When an activist feels the urge to become a world leader or when a community is provoked into avenging the losses it has suffered, no need of logical or rational justification is felt. The force of sentiment is sufficient to activate leaders and followers alike. But where adhering to peace or adopting a peaceful course of action is concerned this is possible only when there is a very strong justification for peace. While violence is instinctive, peace calls for the exercise of strict mental discipline and self control, Everyone wants to assert himself by negating others, so that, one short emotional outburst is all that is needed for violence to be indulged in, unlike peaceful action, which requires serious thought to be given to it.
The only solution to this serious problem is for man to be in possession of a complete ideology of peace. The actual problem of today is that there exists no ideology of peace in the real sense of the words. Why is there this negative side to human psychology? It is directly related to the creation plan of the Creator. It acquires meaningfulness only in terms of God’s plan of creation.
Advocating Islam as a complete ideology of peace, Maulana says that the present world has been designed by its Creator as a testing ground for mankind. Man has been granted full freedom of will in this world. But this freedom is not meant to produce anarchy. Its objective is to demonstrate whether man, despite having full freedom, can lead a disciplined life.
He has to raise himself from the level of animal amorality to the level of human ethics. In spite of experiencing feelings of hatred and having the urge to be violent, he should become the embodiment of love and peace. When negative sentiments corrode his heart, he should be able to rid himself of them and make himself a positive thinker.
To put it briefly, despite possessing total freedom, he should of his own free will become an example of moral, disciplined behaviour. One who thus conducts himself will pass God’s test. Only those who act in this way will be selected by the Lord, the Creator and Sustainer of this universe, as the beneficiaries of that most wonderful blessing—eternal paradise.
Giving the practical model to obtain peace, Maulana analyzes that people world over are acting intolerantly and indulging in acts of violence in the name of justice, saying, “Give us justice and peace will ensue”. When people are indulging in acts of violence in the name of justice, peace will not prevail. According to him, peace is always desirable for its own sake. Everything else comes after peace, not along with peace. So, the formula for peace, derived from the Islamic Scriptures, is: "Ignore the problems, and avail the opportunities."
When people become tolerant and obtain peace for the sake of peace, what peace actually does is, it opens up opportunities – it creates favourable conditions that enable people to strive. When people avail the opportunities thus created, they eventually obtain justice and other constructive ends. Maulana has developed a full-fledged ideology of peace – derived directly from the Islamic Scriptures – to counter the mentality of violence that banishes the notion that there can be anything acceptable about terrorism. He has presented this ideology of peace in his books: Islam and Peace and The True Jihad, his latest book, The Ideology of Peace, which have re-engineered the minds of people the world over.
There are some who call this kind of peace negative. They say peace has no value unless justice accompanies it. “Peace with justice” is their watchword. This shows a lack of realism in their thinking. The truth is that justice does not directly follow on from a state of peace. The aim of establishing peace is, in fact, to open up opportunities for the achievement of justice, rather than the actual bringing of justice into being. Peace, of course, is a highly desirable state of being because, once it is established, everyone has the opportunity to make plans, and then achieve whatever he wants. But those who insist on the prior condition of justice going hand in hand with peace will find neither peace nor justice.
Excerpts from Ideology of Peace by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
According to Maulana, violence always begins in the mind, so we have to uproot it from the mind itself. This would call for a total mental re-conditioning of the minds of individuals. That is, we have to rid the minds of the individuals of the ideology of violence, which is activating them and replace it with the ideology of peace. The ideology of peace – presented in his books – has successfully re-oriented individual’s minds all over the world. They have abandoned violent ways in favour of a peaceful course of action and engaged themselves in constructive activities. The ideology of peace presented in the Islamic Scriptures thus presents to the world the only practical formula for peace.