Last week, tens of thousands of men—this was a strictly all-male gathering—descended on the town of Deoband in Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur district to attend the 30th annual convention of the Jamiat Ulema-I-Hind, a leading body of Muslim clerics of the ultra-conservative Deobandi sect. Sources claimed that the gathering numbered over five hundred thousand, brought in from across India. Impassable crowds clogged the narrow, dusty pathways leading to the venue of the rally, and so, although I had travelled all the way from Bangalore to report on the event, I had to content myself by listening to the speeches relayed by loudspeakers while sitting a mile away, in the portals of the Darul Uloom, possibly the world’s largest madrasa and the nerve-centre of the Deobandi movement.
The event commenced with a maulvi reciting an Urdu poem extolling the sacrifices of the ulema of the Jamiat in India’s freedom struggle. ‘Were it not for us’, he burst forth, ‘you’—by which he probably meant the Hindus of India—‘would still be labouring under the yoke of the British.’ ‘We stiffly opposed the creation of Pakistan. We have sacrificed our lives for the country. We condemn all forms of terror. We love our India, whether or not you believe this’, he went on. The men sitting around me—dressed, like the rest of the crowd, in white kurta-pyjama, and sporting unkempt beards and white skull-caps—enthusiastically shook their heads in agreement. Like the maulvi-poet, they laboured under the burden of being forced to prove their patriotism, their anti-Pakistani credentials, and their opposition to terrorism—an unenviable predicament they were compelled to share with the rest of their co-religionists at a time of heightened Islamophobia the world over.
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11:22 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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