It was a pleasure to have read Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian:

Last week Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch polemicist, spoke to a gathering of what The Spectator called “Britain’s biggest brains - politicians, editors, academics”. She told them that they were “actually at war, not just with Islamism, but with Islam itself”. Apparently, a good Muslim has no choice but to strive “to establish Sharia law”. Martin Amis, too, has recently informed us that moderate Muslims, if they ever existed, have lost out to radicals in Islam’s civil war. In any case, Islam is “totalist”: “There is no individual; there is only the umma - the community of believers.”

Never perhaps in history has so much nonsense been so confidently peddled about a population as large and diverse as this planet’s billion-plus Muslims. Within the past decade an Islamic movement has led Indonesia towards democracy, while market reforms in Turkey have created a new and religious middle class that now challenges the power of a secular elite.

Each one of the national realities Muslims inhabit is prodigiously complex and ceaselessly evolving, shaped as much by geopolitics - imperial conquest, the cold war, the war on terror - as by internal conflicts of class, religion and ethnicity. Closely examined, Muslim societies briskly dissolve our complacent, parochial notions about religion, democracy, secularism and capitalism. They expose, too, the notion of a monolithic Islam pressing down uniformly on all believers everywhere as a crude caricature.

Read the full article here

I am grateful to Saadi to have forwarded me the this amazing ancient text.

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The Letter of Prophet Muhammad

Below is the English translation of the extra-ordinary letter by Prophet Muhammad as a Charter of Privileges to Christians monks of St. Catherine Monastery at Mt. Sinai. It consists of several clauses covering all aspects of human rights including such topics as the protection of Christians, freedom of worship and movement, freedom to appoint their own judges and to own and maintain their property, exemption from military service, and the right to protection in war. It bears the hallmark of Islam and Prophet’s attitude about the right[s] of other religious practitioners. (more…)

The gruesome Nandigram murders, the death of Rizwanul who married an upper caste Muslim girl and Taslima Nasreen’s expulsion from West Bengal are all three interlinked events. Had it happened anywhere else, it might have been easy to understand. That it happened in West Bengal ruled by an ostensible progressive party with an ‘ideology’ of sorts was most depressing. Is it the case that finally we are witnessing the end of the secular, progressive politics of West Bengal that we all had envied for so long..

A young Muslim computer graphics teacher, Rizwanur Rahman, was found dead in highly suspicious circumstances on September 21, one month after marrying his sweetheart Priyanka Todi. It quickly emerged that the police, including senior police officials, had harassed and threatened Rahman at the urging of Todi’s father, Arun Kumar Todi, a rich and well-connected Hindu industrialist, who was bent on breaking up the marriage.

The couple was repeatedly summoned to appear before the police after they started living together in Rahman’s modest dwelling and Rahman was repeatedly threatened with arrest if Priyanka did not “voluntarily” return to her parents for a week. Twelve days after Prikanya went back to her parent’s house, Rizwanur’s body was found beside a railway track.

This shocking episode caused widespread demands for an independent enquiry, but for weeks the Left Front government failed to take any serious action against the police involved in the Rahman case and lent credence to police claims that Rizwanur had committed suicide. On October 11 Chief Minister Bhattacharjee ruled out both a CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) probe into Rahman’s death and the removal of three senior police officers, including Kolkata Police Commissioner Prasun Mukherjee, who were allegedly involved in the harassment campaign against Rahman.

The government indifference to police corruption and the blatant class and communal character of Arun Kumar Todi’s opposition to his daughter’s marriage caused a public outcry. “This incident has inflamed the people,” explained sociologist Bula Bhadra, “because they have realized that if the police can meddle in a marriage between two consenting adults, our very civil liberty is at risk—and at risk from those who are supposed to uphold it.”

Read more here on the related issues and the sad decline of an era.

Came across this brilliant quote from Einstein:

“In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests.” (more…)

Excerpts from here:

•  Sentence of death is allowed only through the process of justice, but even then, forgiveness is better. “Nor take life – which Allah has made sacred – except for just cause…” (17:33). (more…)

Taslima Nasrin is now a “sensation” of another kind in India. She has attracted the attention of those segments of Indian media that love to sell anything that brings Islam and Muslims related controversies into the public domain. (more…)

On a long tiring flight, I was not too amused by another predictable rant on “Intimidation in Tehran” in the Time magazine. However, while browsing through, I could not help notice a stunning photograph taken by Olivia Arthur. (more…)

 I am a child whose teacher is love.
surely my master won’t let me grow
to be a fool* (more…)