You may also like...

1 Response

  1. B Shantanu says:

    Excerpts from Reading between the lines of Deoband fatwa by Tavleen Singh (emphasis mine):

    “…The scariest religious institution I have ever been to is the Darul Uloom in Deoband. In the hour I spent wandering about its grounds on my single uninvited visit a couple of years ago I understood why it had inspired the Taliban. It is an institution that remains frozen in seventh century Arabia, a time when men were primitive and women got a primitive deal…

    Last week, this seminary was in the news because it declared cinema offensive to Islam and held a conference of bearded clerics at which terrorism was discussed…

    ..when I heard the Darul Uloom had condemned terrorism, I went disbelievingly to their website to download a copy of the declaration made at the end of the conference of bearded mullahs. This is what I found.

    After declaring untruly that Islam treats all mankind with equality (there should be no infidels then) the declaration says, ‘Islam sternly condemns all kinds of oppression, violence and terrorism’.

    So far so good, but the next paragraph and the one after clarifies that the Darul Uloom’s idea of terrorism is different to yours and mine. It’s not attacks by Islamist suicide bombers on us idol-worshippers that they are worried about but attacks on Muslims. Listen.

    The Conference expresses its deep concern and agony on the present global and national alarming conditions (sic) in which most of the nations are adopting such an attitude against their citizens, especially Muslims, to appease the tyrant and colonial master of the West . . . the conference strongly demands the Indian Government (sic) to curb those maligning the madrassas and Muslims’.

    As I suspected, nothing has changed in the cloistered world of the Darul Uloom. If it had the declaration should have contained at least one reference to innocent infidels being killed by Islamist suicide bombers as they prayed in temples and went home from work on Mumbai’s commuter trains.

    The problem with institutions like the Darul Uloom is they give all Muslims a bad name. The vast majority of Indian Muslims do not believe in the literalist interpretation of Islam that the Saudis propagate through seminaries like the one in Deoband. They do not think of cinemas as ‘centres of sin’ or believe that the solution to the world’s problems lies in returning to the times of the Prophet…”