India, Muslims and a new anti-terrorism fatwa
It was another sign of how Muslim organisations in India appear to be taking the initiative as the country suffers from a string of bombings, often blamed on suspected Islamists, that has raised tensions between majority Hindus and minority Muslims.
The Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, one of India’s leading Islamic groups which has been active in the country since the start of the 20th century, endorsed on Nov 8 a fatwa against terrorism.
More than 6,000 clerics signed the edict, which follows a similar one issued earlier in the year by India’s top Islamic institution Darul Uloom Deoband. The fatwa follows a series of police crackdowns on Muslims after bomb blasts across Indian cities this year in which more than 200 people have died.
Muslim organisations are worried.
Previously Indian authorities had generally blamed Pakistan for most attacks, but evidence that these attacks were home grown has put India’s Muslim community under the eye of the police. Muslim leaders say innocent Muslim youths are being targeted by police.
Are Indian Muslims leading the way in condemning terror?
For those Western critics that say Islam does not enough to to condemn terrorism, perhaps they should look at India, home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations — around 13 percent of mainly Hindu India’s 1.1 billion people.
On Wednesday, it was the turn of Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa in the northern city of Lucknow — a traditional centre for Muslims and religious scholarship. He rejected terrorism as anti-Islamic after he and his colleagues had been accused of apostasy over their pacifist stance by at group that calls itself the Indian Mujahideen.
Indian Mujahideen made threats against the madrasa in which they also claimed responsibility for last week’s bomb blasts in Jaipur, western India, which killed 63 people.
“The reaction of terrorists to our stand against terror has shown that we were moving in the right direction,” Rasheed said.
Apparently a “Movement Against Terrorism” has been created by clerics to exhort imams to use Friday prayers at mosques across India to speak out against terrorism.
This was no flash in the pan. Earlier this year, tens of thousands of clerics and students from around India attended a meeting near Delhi at the 150-year-old Darool-Uloom Deoband — whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan — and denounced terrorism as against Islam.
It is not surprising that Rasheed said they had received support from Darool-Uloom Deoband, Indian clerics appear to be increasingly outspoken, perhaps not surprising in a country where there is a centuries-old tradition of preaching religious tolerance.
Deoband is often wrongly accused inspiring the Taleban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The early madrassas established in the NWFP were, in fact, modeled after Deoband as their founders themselves received education in Deoband prior to 1947. However, all of this changed with the US/Pakistani (CIA/ISI) efforts to recruit, train and equip the students of these madrassas to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The divergence between the Indian and Pakistani Deobandis became very clear when the religious leaders from NWFP and Deoband met for a summit in mid-2001 (just prior to 911) and disagreed strongly on the strategies/tactics used by the Taleban in Afghanistan. In fact, Maulana Marghoob, the leader of Deoband, condemned the destruction of Buddha carvings in Bamian by the Taleban. The Indian Deoband leaders clearly understood that they could not condone the destruction of Buddha statues in Afghanistan while at the same time protest against the destruction of Babri mosque in India.
Surj… [9:111] GOD has bought from the believers their lives and their money in exchange for Paradise. Thus, they fight in the cause of GOD, willing to kill and get killed. Such is His truthful pledge in the Torah, the Gospel, and the Quran – and who fulfills His pledge better than GOD? You shall rejoice in making such an exchange. This is the greatest triumph.
[9:6] If one of the idol worshipers sought safe passage with you, you shall grant him safe passage, so that he can hear the word of GOD, then send him back to his place of security. That is because they are people who do not know.