Security was tight at the entrance to Gate No. 7 of the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, a 17th century mosque built by Mughal kings, and the venue on Tuesday for a gathering of Muslim leaders from across the country to debate the persecution of Muslims.

Police shooed away fruit vendors and cycle rickshaws spilling over from the crowded market nearby, while others stood around the metal detectors at the entrance while their colleagues cased out the giant white shamiana inside with sniffer dogs under the slowly revolving ceiling fans.

 A full half hour after the scheduled time, when only the first few rows of seats were occupied, Maulana Naksh Bandi of the Jama Masjid began the proceedings, inviting various leaders to the dais, and declaring in Urdu: “there is no law, there is no justice for us. It is the rule of the jungle.”

Pausing to take a call on his mobile, and to recognise leaders who slowly filed in, some helped by their assistants, the Maulana said that staying silent would only lead to a more terrible future for Muslims in the country.

Bombings by suspected Islamist militants have killed hundreds of people in recent months, and Muslim leaders accuse the police of indiscriminate arrests of young Muslim men who have been labelled as terrorists and paraded before the media.

Next came Maulana Syed Ahmed Bukhari, influential leader of the Jama Masjid mosque, the largest in north India, who said Muslims needed to draw up a blueprint to deal with the circumstances, with even such practical solutions as legal help
for those being held by the police.

His speech, also in Urdu, was by turn fiery and angry, and at all times impassioned, its rhythym broken only by latecomers whom he acknowledged, and frequent shouts of “Allah-O-Akbar” (God is Great) among the audience who now filled all the seats.

I was struck by the anger felt among the listeners, the quieter ones of whom nodded in assent and said “beshak” (certainly); it was another sign of how communal politics was growing in India and of how Muslims are fighting to be heard.

As the sun travelled higher, glasses of cold water were passed around, but there was no cooling the Maulana, who accused the major political parties of trying to curry favour with the Muslims ahead of the 2009 election.

But Muslim leaders including the Maulana were equally political, said Seema Desai, an analyst at consultancy Eurasia Group in London: “Muslim leaders will be heard more than might have been the case in the run up to the national elections,” she said.

“But as long as Indian political parties think along communal lines its hard to see how long lasting solutions will be found.”   
     

The bombings that killed 45 people in the communally sensitive city of Ahmedabad have shaken India’s establishment. It is now sinking in that India faces homegrown Islamist militant groups operating with a scale and sophistication unheard of in
previous years.   

A group called “India Mujahideen” claimed responsibility for the attacks, the same group that said it carried out the bombings in Jaipur in May that killed 63 people.

For years, India had been seen as country that had largely rejected the attractions of global militancy spurred on by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. President George W. Bush notably said there were no Indians in al Qaeda.

But mainly Hindu India is home to one of the world’s biggest Muslim populations, around 13 percent of its 1.1 billion people.

It only takes 0.0001 percent of India’s roughly 150 million Muslims to form a nucleus of 15,000 militants, as Uday Bhaskar, former director of New Delhi’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, told me.    

And the attacks on Ahmedabad may have involved dozens of people.    

“We have crossed the tipping point,” he said.

Has India being ignoring a simmering revolt from disaffected Muslim youth? Over the last two years there have been a wave of bombings, nearly all blamed by the government on some local Islamist groups funded or backed by Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Reading the Indian newspapers, they are quick to blame Pakistan and Bangladesh. The home-grown front — perhaps the banned Students Islamic Movement of India — is seen as having its roots abroad.   

But there has been signs of growing dissatisfaction within the Muslim community, especially since the 2002 riots in Gujarat when around 2,500 people, mainly Muslims, were massacred by Hindu mobs.

Take the Gujarat riots. Hardly anyone has been brought to justice. The Hindu-nationalist chief minister at the time, Narenda Modi, was accused of turning a blind eye during the riots, is now a rising political star in India.

Data also shows that Muslims are one of the poorest segments of Indian society, and some of the most neglected people.   

The years since Gujarat has also coincided with a rise in global Islamist consciousness, with television and the Internet providing people in remote Indian villages with news of what is going on in Iraq and Guantanamo.

Some commentators point to the fact that ultra-conservative versions of Islam like Wahabism have been making inroads into India in recent years.

There has been a “well-funded effort to bring these ideas and these ideologies to Muslim communities across India,” said Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management.

In May, the Indian Mujahideen threatened senior Muslim clerics including Khalid Rasheed, head of the oldest madrasa, or Islamic religious school, in Lucknow, over their pacifist stance.

Rasheed said his peace movement had received support from the influential ultra conservative Darool-Uloom Deoband madrasa in northern India, whose strict interpretation of Islamic law is said to have inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But how many young Muslim youths are now ignoring these clerics? How will these bombings in India’s most entrenched Hindu-nationalist state be received among alientated and poor Muslim youth in other parts of the country?

Or will the Indian Mujahideen tactics of bombing hospitals as well as many in their own Muslim community backfire?

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.

How much is this outspoken criticism happening in other Muslim countries? And how much is being reported in the Western press? I would be eager to know more.

 Despite a history of religious clashes, India’s tolerance often seems to win through. It was the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who was famed in the 16th century by many for his religious tolerance and who initiated scholarly debates with Muslim, Sikhs, Christians and Hindus.

Many of India’s bombings are blamed on Islamic militants, although few groups every claim responsibility and few people are ever arrested. The attacks have mostly failed to incite Muslim-Hindu tensions.

Here in New Delhi, I always enjoy taking foreign visitors to India to the Sufi shrine in Nizamuddin. My latest guest was a U.S. diplomat based in Pakistan. Hardly allowed out in Islamabad - let alone able to visit a mosque — the diplomat wallowed in the warmth of the visit and the relaxed atmosphere of the Qawwali singers.