The issue is not of communalism or secularism. It is about the Rule of Law. Do Indian politicians believe in the Rule of Law or not? The answer is that they do only when they can use it as a stick to beat their opponents with. This issue will not go away. When the problem of Babri Masjid comes up, we will have to face it. The VHP/RSS consider that the location of the Masjid on Ram Janmabhoomi is a fundamentally aggressive act by the Muslims on the Hindu ‘nation’, although it may have been done five hundred years ago. The historicity of Ramchandra cannot be questioned nor can we point out similar destruction of Buddhist places of worship and their conversion into Hindu temples ,for example the Jagannath temple at Puri. We need another approach.

The issue of mandir/masjid was live in the 1980s and early 1990s when India was unsure of itself. Two prime ministers had been assassinated by then and there had been an economic crisis. Now, there is a new generation ready to vote. India is a success story and the future is bright. Does new India care about a 16th century dispute being revived in the 21st century? This is the issue which needs to be settled not in a court of law but by a verdict of the people of India. I propose we hold a nationwide referendum on the mandir/masjid issue. Let the nation decide whether we need continuing strife on this question or whether—as I would like us to—consecrate the ground with a multi-faith site of worship. -- Meghnad Desai

I would like to draw their attention to two books. The first is the autobiography of Maulavi Abdul Majid Dariabadi, whose name I am sure they all know and revere. As is well known to his admirers, he went through a long period of ten years when he rejected all religions and was a votary of pure reason. Eventually he regained his faith in religion in general and Islam in particular, some might say with a vengeance. Be that as it may, he gives a vivid and honest account of those states of mind in the book Apbiti. According to him his faith in religion returned with his readings in Buddhist and Hindu texts, including the Bhagawad Gita, and his return to Islam was very much facilitated by his chance discovery of the English translation of the Qur’an by “Muhammad Ali Lahori Ahmadi (in common parlance Qadiani).”  (That was, incidentally, the first English translation by any Muslim.)

This is what he wrote: I impatiently pulled it out from the cabinet and began to read, and, God be praised, the more I read the more my faith increased … May Allah give that Muhammad Ali a place in Paradise [karwaT karwaT jannat de]. What he believed about the Mirza [Ghulam Ahmad] Sahib [the founder of the sect] is of no concern to me. Was he right or was he wrong, I don’t care. I can’t help but tell my personal experience, for it was he who hammered in the final nail into the coffin of my disbelief and rejection (kufr wa irtidad).” (Apbiti, Lucknow, 1978, p. 254.) Surely, not one of the worthies mentioned above can claim to have served Islam similarly. -- C.M. Naim

God did not create the universe, Stephen Hawking revealed yesterday. In the flurry of publicity preceding his new book, The Grand Design, to be published next week, he does some serious dissing of the Almighty, declaring him/her/it irrelevant. The point is, he says, that our universe followed inevitably from the laws of nature. But, we might ask, where did they come from? It is perhaps a bit rich for Hawking to make God redundant after granting him/her/it a celebrity cameo at the end of his multi-million selling A Brief History of Time. In his famous conclusion to the book, Hawking wrote that if scientists could find the most fundamental laws of nature "then we should know the mind of God". To be fair, he was writing metaphorically – we all know what he meant. -- Graham Farmello

The attack structure against Muslims in particular is fairly simple. You begin with the game of “six degrees of Bin Laden.” In this game, you connect a Muslim you don’t like through a connect-the-dots scenario to Bin Laden. For example, did you know that the Cordoba Initiative sent election monitors to Sudan, and Bin Laden was once believed to have been in Sudan? It is a game that trades in absurdity and conspiracy theories. The other approach is to take quotes out of context and use them to prove that the speaker or author is duplicitous. The term for that is now “Sherroding.” Then, finally, is the ever popular and constant smearcasting, where one just hurls mud and hopes one does not get called on the misinformation. -- Hussein Rashid

FOR some time now — especially since the electronic media was unwittingly liberated by the military government of Gen Pervez Musharraf — cynics and pessimists have been writing off Pakistan.

Since the closing days of July when devastating floods brought large chunks of the country under water, the question being raised by numerous analysts and commentators is how long would Pakistan survive. Zubeida Mustafa

The much maligned security forces have had to bear the brunt not only of protests and stone pelting but daily abuse for more than two months. The CRPF, more out of place in Kashmir than Dantewada, is not suited to patrol the streets of downtown Srinagar; they would not only not understand the Kashmiri psyche, but the language as well.

Policing in Srinagar city and the other towns needs to be undertaken by J& K Police, with the CRPF only in assistance...

Fatigue and depression inevitably sets in in such situations and the forces on the ground must be wondering how much longer they have to be at the receiving end, now that everyone is gradually acknowledging that Kashmir is not a law and order but a political problem. -- A S Dulat

There is a subtler, deeper satisfaction to be drawn from the knowledge that there is no easy escape for certain perpetrators of mass murder and war crimes, no quick way out via a plane crash or by being hung from a lamp- post. It’s in exactly this way that I want Narendra Modi to have a very long and, at least from now on, very painful life.

It’s beautiful watching the beehive of evidence suddenly start to buzz and release its successive, stinging swarms of revelations. It’s totally happy- making to see the villains cowering and running, selling each other down the river, stabbing each other in the back, pulling each other back down into the cockroach- pit as one after the other of them tries to climb out. As an Indian I’ve been waiting for this to happen for eight years, but as a Gujarati it’s felt more like eighteen.

All through this time we’ve known that Modi and his gang of ministers were responsible for mass slaughter in 2002. -- Ruchir Joshi

If this is the case, Modi and his natural constituency do not believe in such ‘ trivial’ institutions as the Indian Constitution.

Democracy only means mobilising the masses in order to come to power.

Neither is the idea of a formal and impersonal rule of law of any consequence.

Everything is personalised; everything can be twisted to suit political expediency of one kind or the other.

Therefore, when Modi imputes that the demand to take cases against his government and ministers out of Gujarat is an assault on the judicial system, it is just another rhetorical point coming from a rabble- rouser.

The truth is that Modi has politicised the police and the criminal investigation system to an extent where the judiciary cannot function and hope to deliver justice. The suggestion by Modi that the Centre and the CBI were acting as if Gujarat was not a part of India is ironically true. While large sections of the Indian middle class admire Modi, the rest of India has not gone the way of Gujarat. -- Jyotirmaya Sharma

Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was undiplomatic in mentioning Mr. Pillai's unhelpful remarks in the same breath as Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed's inflammatory speeches against India. But people on the Indian side need to ask what the home secretary hoped to achieve by saying the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate of the Pakistan army had been involved in 26/11 “from the beginning till the end.” Indian investigators had questioned Lashkar operative David Coleman Headley well before Mr. Chidambaram and Mr. Pillai held talks with their Pakistani counterparts in Islamabad last month. One can only presume this question of ISI involvement “from the beginning till the end” was raised by them with Rehman Malik. -- Siddharth Varadarajan

A human rights lawyer in Tehran, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, "What they have in common is that they impose sentences that do not correspond with the crime committed; they ignore the defence case put by defendants and their lawyers; they approve indictments that have no legal basis; they are unfamiliar with the law and legal matters; and they undeniably come out with erroneous rulings."

Salavati is somewhat better known than his two colleagues. Millions of people remember his face from televised trials where he sat in judgement over hundreds of defendants.

At least 12 death sentences are believed to have been passed against alleged participants in the protests that followed the June 2009 re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, and Salavati was responsible for half of these, winning him the grim nickname "Judge of Death". -- Omid Memarian

The credibility of the ‘renowned terror expert’ of The Hindu, Praveen Swami, has now come down to near-zero, risking the credibility of the paper itself. Trusting the fake stories Swami files, both the editorial section of the news paper and the readers are getting misled. One example is the Mecca Masjid bombing at Hyderabad. It pays to read The Hindu editorial of October 15, 2007. Titled “Challenge of Islamic terror”, the editorial begins as follows: -- Dr Yaseen Ashraf

New Age Islam Editor’s note: The real issue here is not so much journalists like Praveen Swami but what information they are fed by the authorities. There is a reason for that too. Hindutva terror was completely unheard of and understandably unimaginable for authorities too for quite some time. Muslims do keep attacking mosques and shrines in different parts of the world, particularly in our neighbourhood and there has been a radicalisation of a section of our Indian Muslim society too that we are doing nothing to counter, so it was not difficult for authorities to suspect Muslims first. It is this that we should be explaining to our people rather than spreading more disaffection towards authorities and media. We should also be taking note of the fact that after all Hindutva terrorists are being caught from everywhere, though clearly reluctantly and not with as much alacrity as they should be. But they are, and as the arrests after recent Delhi Jama Masjid episodes have shown, are being arrested quite readily now. But if we merely keep pointing fingers at authorities and media and not at all looking within, as we are prone to do, we will merely create more difficulties for ourselves as Muslims are doing around the world. If Muslims can attack Daata Darbar and myriad other Sufi shrines and Shia and Sunni mosques, that too during prayer, why they can't be suspected of attacking Ajmer Sharif or Jama Masjid or Mecca Masjid? This inevitably leads to unnecessary suffering on the part of innocent Muslims and disaffection among the victims that the police authorities too should learn to avoid. In any case, the police ham-handedness is not exclusively directed against Muslims. But we cannot absolve ourselves of the blame for creating an atmosphere where for Muslims in India too all these terrorists attacks in Pakistan on mosques, shrines, temples, churches, and religious and sectarian minorities in general appear to be acceptable.

I would rather say that instead of protesting at Praveen Swami's reports or the authorities suspecting Muslim hand in every blast, we were protesting Islamist terror directed at not only non-Muslims, but also at Muslims and our mosques and shrines in Pakistan. If, for instance, we Muslims in India vociferously protested the beheading of two Sikhs in Pakistan recently on their refusal to convert to Islam under pressure, and similar such horrible incidents, we would have gradually created an atmosphere in which it would become difficult for the police authorities to suspect a Muslim terrorist hand in every terrorist episode.

Let us try and create an atmosphere in which Indian Islam is considered different from the militant Islam that is destroying lives in rest of the world. We should at least distinguish ourselves from the militant practices of Muslims in Pakistan. Instead of being a constant grievance-monger and finger-pointer, we should help the community understand what is happening and why so that it develops a positive attitude and is able to integrate better in the society at large. Let us be clear in our own minds: what is our goal? Do we want us Muslims to be constantly pitted against the authorities and the media, etc. completely oblivious of our own faults, living in denial, or do we want us to be a well-integrated part of the Indian mainstream which does protest injustices in a democratic manner but also looks within, accepts its own shortcomings and tries to appreciate other points of view?  Islam has taught us balance and moderation. Let us follow that.

The article below is completely one-sided, doesn’t try to appreciate the problems of the authorities or the media at all. We are posting it as an illustration of the dangerous direction in which our intelligentsia and leaders are seeking to take us, the road we should totally avoid. – Sultan Shahin

There were media reports that Zakir Naik had spoken in praise of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack and is said to have justified violence on those who committed violence! What happens to a citizen of Maldives who renounces Islam? He cannot be deprived of citizenship and yet he cannot continue as a "citizen" either. This is a constitutional problem for which there is no ready answer and such a piquant happened very recently during the lecture of Dr. Zakir Naik.

In a question and answer session of Dr. Naik, one Mohamed Nazim from the audience publicly declared that he is not a believer of Islam. This response would not have risen if Dr. Naik had not asked personal and intrusive questions. The media reported that Nazim was attacked by some of the people in the audience and the Police had to intervene and take him into custody. The opposition DRP called upon the government to take strong action against Nazim for apostasy. The local Islamic NGO went further and asked for death sentence for Nazim if he did not repent. There is no law in the constitution by which action could be taken against Nazim nor could the citizenship be taken away as per article 9 b of the Constitution. The only way will be to apply Shariah under article 142 of the Constitution and death sentence under Shariah is the only remedy!. -- Dr. S. Chandrasekharan, SAAG

A recent fatwa from a ‘Saudi Council of Muftis’ has this advice for fellow Muslims: Do not say [or write] ‘mosque.’ Always say ‘masjid’ because mosque may mean mosquito. Another myopic case of Saudi malaria perhaps? Certainly.  But that’s not all. The grand fatwa goes on to suggest that Muslims should not write ‘Mecca’ but Makkah, because Mecca may mean ‘house of wines.’  I am serious. But then so are the Muftis. They certainly need to get a life. But I’m not all that surprised by such fatwas that usually emanate from Saudi Arabia. While vicious reactionary literature originating in totalitarian puritanical Muslim states impact and mutate the political bearings of various religious parties and groups in Pakistan, ‘social fatwas’  like the one mentioned above also began appearing in the early 1980s to influence the more apolitical sections of Muslim societies.--Nadeem F. Paracha

What is Saudi Arabia's primary export? Most will assume it be oil. Wrong. The answer is ideology; radical Islamic ideology. According to one authority, the Saudi Arabian government spends more every three days on Islamic missions than the Southern Baptist Convention (the world's largest protestant missions organization) spends every year. Saudi Arabia is the womb that gave birth to Islam 1,400 years ago, and today, Saudi Arabia continues to give birth to radical Islam throughout the nations. ...

And while nearly everyone has acknowledged the convincing nature of this perspective, nearly everyone asks, "But why would the radical nations that make up the Islamic beast empire turn on Saudi Arabia to destroy her?" For anyone who understands the geopolitical climate of the Middle East, the answer is actually quite simple. While the Saudis pour open their treasuries to fund the radical jihadis globally, as well as to bribe and influence various world leaders and major universities, this cannot compare to the amount of money they spend to fund their own defense. The Saudis greatest enemy has always been the radical monster they created. Throughout the Middle East, the Saudi royals are viewed as a filthy rich, corrupt and compromised monarchy and an affront to true Islam. -- Joel Richardson

It is a general view among Muslims in India that the English-Language media does not project a true and positive picture of the community. They also believe that there is a bias in the international media against the Muslims in general. This, of course, is an over-simplified analysis of an otherwise complicated situation- portraying the image of Muslims as the largest religious minority in India, as well as that of a stereotyped monolithic community living in a Hindu-majority country. The reality is that the variation of the image of Indian Muslims projected by the Indian media varies vastly but the expectations are unfair in the given circumstances. My point of reference is the English language media–for the simple reason that, being an insider, I am closely aware of the reality and more of limitations. Though I do not fully agree with the perception of Indian Muslims as far as their media image is concerned but I will not directly contest their perception, I would rather go into detail of the features of this psyche along with the problems of the media. For only this reason, I shall also speak from the stand-point of the Urdu press in India as it is only the Urdu press run by Muslims that has done more damage to the Muslim image in India than any other language media. -- Chandan Mitra

So, Bamiyan's Buddhas present a conundrum. Brutal though it may have been, the Taliban legacy is an important part of Afghanistan's recent past. The empty niches of Bamiyan are testament to a ruthlessness that should not be forgotten — rebuilding the Buddhas would be a kind of erasure. "The present condition of the Buddhas is in itself an expression of our history," says Abassy. "No matter how good or bad the Taliban were, we cannot tear that page from the book." Aryn Baker reflects.

There is nothing in the Qur’an or the Sunnah to suggest that women must cover their faces in public. In fact there is evidence to the contrary. According to all four schools of thought women need not cover their faces or their hands, up to their wrists, writes Adil Salah iin his column in Arab News.

Some Muslims are troubled by the fact that Muslim ulema are vociferously disassociating themselves and their religion Islam from Terrorism while the religious leaders of other religions are not doing so. They are demanding, as is Dr.Mustafa Kamal Sherwani, that other religious leaders also do so. The question before us is: Is this the right attitude? Is this conducive to peace? Should we allow our egos to get the better of us? Can we not understand that other religious leaders do not need to do so because the terrorists belonging to their religion do not use their religion as a shield as Muslim terrorists do? Did Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, the chief ideologue of Jamaat-e-Islami and the chief instigator of terrorism in the world today, along with Syed Qutub, himself not say that Islam spread with the splendour of the sword that the Prophet took in his hands? Do the so-called Islamic terrorists not proclaim the award of the keys of Heavenly bliss to terrorists who are taking innocent lives in total contravention of Islamic tenets and the explicit instructions of the Holy Quran?

Farid Chaudhari on Sultan Shahin’s essay: 'Muslim Ulema urgently need to introspect'

As for a change in the attitude of Indian Muslims towards the Hindu brothers, I agree that conciliatory steps need to be taken urgently. I have been suggesting this for no less than 20 - 25 years or so...including that we should give 12 % of our Zakat to poor Hindus. I have not asked myself yet if they are Ahl-e-Kitab...but I find it to be a question worth pondering, writes Farid Chaudhari on Muslim Agenda responding to Sultan Shahin’s essay: 'Muslim Ulema urgently need to introspect'.

Does Islam allow us Muslims to be patriotic, proud nationalists while also being good Muslims? Arabs seem to think so, as do Persians, Turks, Indonesians, Malaysians, Bangladeshis, Punjabis, Pathans, Sindhis, Balochs, Tajiks, and so on. Would it be a good idea then for Indian Muslims, for instance, to develop a sense of pride in Indian nationalism, asks Sultan Shahin.