Question:
Please forgive me for asking this question a third time in three months. My sister e-mailed me saying – “As the question always lingers in the mind if a guide is needed or not – while reading surah Sajada I came across “intercessor”. As Sufi’s lay a lot of emphasis on intercession not only from the Prophet saw but also from their Shaykh. I was reading from Maulana Maududi’s translation which you say is opposed to Sufism so I looked up the meaning on Quran Explorer. I found 5 tanslations in English and 3 in Urdu, all saying the same thing.”
(3) Allah it is Who created the heavens and the earth, and that which is between them, in six Days. Then He mounted the Throne. Ye have not, beside Him, a protecting friend or mediator. Will ye not then remember?
Answer:
On the one hand your sister took Maulana Maududi as her protecting friend and mediator in the understanding and practice of the Word of Allah and His Religion, i.e. a Pakistani journalist whom the majority of the scholars of his time in his country denounced in writing as “a heretic who tried to make others heretics”, then she took five other unnamed translators for a single verse rendered in English.
On the other hand Sufis take the Prophet, upon him blessings and peace, his Family, his Companions, and his Inheritors as protecting friend and mediators not “beside Allah” but in obedience to Him, and they approach the Qur’an as the whole Ummah approaches it, coherently with all its 6,000+ verses and with the Hadith and Consensus (Ijma`), not in a vacuum of some individual’s mind at the tail-end of the 20th century.
It is clear which of the two ways is safer here and hereafter and we pray Allah Most High Who is One without partner that you and your sister can see it and leave tergiversation.
Hajj Gibril Haddad
