…Then there is the Vande Mataram fatwa. Last week’s gathering of 10,000 Muslim clerics banned Muslims from singing this song. Vande Mataram is not the national anthem, nobody is forced to sing it, so it is not clear why a fatwa was needed at all unless it was to hint at a rejection of something bigger and more important: Pre-Islamic Indian culture, civilisation and history. I very much fear that this was the fatwa’s real intention. On the Darul Uloom’s website I came across a line that described the state of India before this fine institution came into being. ‘The old madaris in India had almost become extinct and condition of the two or four that had survived the ravages of time was not better than that of glow worms in a dark night’.

Is ‘dark night’ a description of India before Islam came to ‘enlighten’ us infidels? I ask because when I read the words I was reminded of a board outside the grave of an Iraqi preacher who came to Rajasthan many centuries ago to spread Islam. He ended up in Nagaur and the board outside the shrine that preserves his remains says that he came to India because he saw it as a ‘vast darkness’. So the Vedas, the Puranas, that extraordinary treasure of Sanskrit literature, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, all get dismissed as pre-Islamic garbage. Right? They cannot possibly have come out of the ‘darkness’ that was India and cannot compare even with the ‘glow-worms’ that existed before the great enlightenment that has come since the creation of the Darul Uloom.

It really is no surprise that the Darul Uloom spawned the Taliban.

The Deoband mullahs have never helped their community in making economic, social and educational progress. At any moment of a social crisis among Muslims, they have delayed any decision or taken a retrograde stand.

The “shining” examples of their fossilized mentality were too visible during the Shah Bano case, Gudiya’s tragic story and equal right to Muslim women. They kept a studied silence when five lakh Hindus were driven out of their homes in the Kashmir valley, after announcements were blared out on the dreadful night of January 11,1989, asking Pandits to get out and leave behind their women.

Jammu & Kashmir is the only Muslim-majority state in India and if Deoband is “concerned” about Islam’s peaceful, and humanitarian face, why should it not try to influence the terror groups operating in the name of their religion and in turn, as the maulvis say, bringing bad name to their great message of universal brotherhood?

Interestingly, in an evident response to anti-jihadist clerics who have in recent months attacked the Indian Mujahideen, the e-mail lays claim to the legacy of famous regional jihadists. “We have carried out this attack in the memory of two most eminent Mujahids of India, Sayyed Ahmed, Shaheed and Shah Ismail, Shaheed (may Allah bestow His Mercy upon them), who had raised the glorious banner of Jihad against the disbelievers in this very city of Delhi.”

Sayyid Ahmad of Rai Bareilly and Shah Ismail died at Balakote, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, in May 1831, in what is present-day Pakistan-administered Kashmir, while waging an unsuccessful jihad against Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom. Ahmad’s followers went on to set up the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadis — a neo-fundamentalist order that has drawn million of mainly-peaceful followers, but has also inspired south Asia’s largest terrorist group, the Lashkar-e-Taiba.