Muslims are different here

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Muslims are different here

February 20, 2009 04:38:18 PM, Thomas L Friedman

The way people are actually living in Malegaon surprised the French student

Sarah, a French national and student of politics at Institute of Political Studies Lille, France (Institut d’ etudes politiques de Lille, France) had recently visited Malegaon for her research work on the Communal Riots in Malegaon. Malegaon has seen several communal riots in the past. But the October 2001 riot was the worst that the town had seen in its history. The intensity of the October conflict can be gauged from the remarks expressed by few political observers and analysts who after the Gujarat carnage in 2002 had said that whatever had happened in Malegaon in October 2001 was the rehearsal....Full Story

More About Malegaon

Forgotten Heroes: “I have always wondered how, the Muslims and the Hindus together, had decided to set a Mandir on fire”, said Dr. Iftekhar Ansari...Read Full

An Information Outlet: Urdu Library in Malegaon turned 100 this year and the library, which has helped many Ph. Ds in their research work, is all set to...Read Full

The Power of Reading: One enters the P. B. Kakani Vachnalay and it will be realized immediately that it is not just a library but is “an enlightening nucleus”, guiding generations of Malegaon sinc...Read Full

Malegaon, a town in India with more than 70% Muslim population has always been considered as a communally sensitive place. However, there is a place in Malegaon where a Mosque and a Mandir exist side by side with Muslims and Hindus, both living there in peace since last many years. Same is the case with the whole town. Except for the selected few who always try to create trouble, the whole town comprises the peace loving people . Still, the tag of being a communally sensitive place is attributed with the town...Full Story

Communal Harmony Campaign in Malegaon

Let’s work to bring a change: “Deadly RDX was invented by Alfred Nobel but we find Peace Prizes being given every year in his name. At one time training camps and hijacking classes were order of the day in United States. However it witnessed...Read Full

Confidence overrule the fear: The returned figure of the references resulting after a keyword search about Malegaon at any search engine on the Internet is impressive enough to envy any place. However a glance at the list relating the town with the riots and the bomb blast is so embarrassing that people are becoming shy of associating themselves with...Read Full

Sare Jahan Se Accha

Hindustan Hamara

In 1905 more than 100 years from today, when Iqbal was a lecturer at the Government College, Lahore he was invited by his student Lala Hardayal to preside over a function. Instead of making a speech, Iqbal sang Sare Jahan Se Accha Hindustan Hamara in his style. Iqbal compiled this poem in praise of India and the poem preaches the communal harmony that had unfortunately started ceasing in India by that time. Each and every word in this poem depicts an Indian’s respect and love for the motherland and the values the Indian society inherited for long...Read Full

Thomas L Friedman

There are nine bodies — all of them young men — that have been lying in a Mumbai hospital morgue since November 29. They may be stranded there for a while because no local Muslim charity is willing to bury them in its cemetery. This is good news.

The nine are the Pakistani Muslim terrorists who went on an utterly senseless killing rampage in Mumbai on 26/11 gunning down more than 170 people, including 33 Muslims, scores of Hindus, as well as Christians and Jews. It was killing for killing’s sake. They didn’t even bother to leave a note. All nine are still in the morgue because the leadership of India’s Muslim community has called them by their real name — “murderers” not “martyrs” — and is refusing to allow them to be buried in the main Muslim cemetery of Mumbai.

“People who committed this heinous crime cannot be called Muslim,” Hanif Nalkhande, a spokesman for the trust, said. Eventually, one assumes, they will have to be buried, but the Mumbai Muslims remain defiant. “Indian Muslims are proud of being both Indian and Muslim, and the Mumbai terrorism was a war against both India and Islam,” explained M J Akbar. “Terrorism has no place in Islamic doctrine. The Quranic term for the killing of innocents is ‘fasad’. Terrorists are fasadis, not jihadis.”

To be sure, Mumbai’s Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-yourface defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out. It stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets — from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan — but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and websites, as “martyrs” whose actions deserve praise.

Extolling or excusing suicide militants as “martyrs” has only led to this awful phenomenon — where young Muslim men and women are recruited to kill themselves and others — spreading wider and wider. What began in a targeted way in Lebanon and Israel has now proliferated to become an almost weekly occurrence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is a threat to any open society because when people turn themselves into bombs, they can’t be deterred, and the measures needed to interdict them require suspecting and searching everyone at any public event. And they are a particular threat to Muslim communities. You can’t build a healthy society on the back of suicidebombers, whose sole objective is to wreak havoc by exclusively and indiscriminately killing as many civilians as possible. If suicide-murder is deemed legitimate by a community when attacking its “enemies” abroad, it will eventually be used as a tactic against “enemies” at home, and that is exactly what has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The only effective way to stop this trend is for “the village” — the Muslim community itself — to say “no more”. When a culture and a faith community delegitimises this kind of behaviour, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society.

That’s why India’s Muslims, who are the second-largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia’s, and the one with the deepest democratic tradition, do a great service to Islam by delegitimising suicide-murderers by refusing to bury their bodies. It won’t stop this trend overnight, but it can help over time. The fact that Indian Muslims have stood up in this way is surely due, in part, to the fact that they live in, are the product of and feel empowered by a democratic and pluralistic society. They are not intimidated by extremist religious leaders and are not afraid to speak out against religious extremism in their midst.

It is why so few, if any, Indian Muslims are known to have joined al-Qaeda. And it is why, as outrageously expensive and as uncertain the outcome, trying to build decent, pluralistic societies in places like Iraq is not as crazy as it seems. It takes a village, and without Arab-Muslim societies where the villagers feel ownership over their lives and empowered to take on their own extremists — militarily and ideologically — this trend will not go away. (NYTNS, Courtesy The Times of India)