Seizing the initiative in these troubled times, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind expressed a consensus condemning terrorism as un-Islamic. More than 6000 clerics signed the declaration, and reminded the nation that jihad and terrorism were “poles apart” and that “terrorism is the biggest crime as per the Quran”. What’s more, they displayed a grown-up refusal to play politics over revelations about Hindu militants arrested in connection with the recent bomb blasts, saying that terrorism should not be linked to any religion.
They also pressed for a separate law to deal with communal violence, and greater representation of Muslims in education and employment. Certainly, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind’s resolution carries great moral weight and legitimacy among Indian Muslim communities, and the resolution is a sensible move away from victimhood to agency. It is a welcome attempt at reaching out to the rest of the nation and carving a moderate space to respond to the particular exigencies of the situation facing those communities.
Unfortunately, the entire spectrum of commentators that conflate Islam and terrorist activity and suggest that the religion encourages a willed surrender of independent thinking fail to recognise how any religion shape-shifts in response to changing situations. Jihad itself is a normative concept in the Quran, an ethical mission and a warlike one — variously deployed depending on political circumstance — and the Hyderabad resolution clearly distinguished between the two.
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10:11 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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