“Welcome to the school of terror. Let me show you our terrorists, 3,800 in all,” jokes 70-year-old public relations officer Adil Siddiqui, pointing to students milling around a notice board in the main courtyard of Darul-Uloom, Deoband.

Siddiqui’s humour borders on sarcasm: “Had it not been for bin Laden, you would not have come visiting us.” [Read more]

Cheap thrills come at a price and it must have run into crores. How else can you get half a million clerics to oppose India’s sanitized national song, Vande Mataram? [Read more]

I had no consternation that, as one of the many hosts and facilitators of the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, I would be attending to guests at a gala dinner where President George W. Bush would be the star attraction.

Here was a man who I think had wrecked much of the Muslim world. [Read more]

There is a thing or two about the government’s approach towards Muslims that is worrisome. One of them is that the government sometimes takes Muslims too seriously!

Take for instance the UPA government’s somewhat anxious efforts to streamline madrassa education, a system of education which is not just largely informal but its curriculum is also often viewed as irrelevant. [Read more]

If Muslim-perpetrated terror creates Islamophobia; smart counter-insurgency should be able to purge it (by eliminating terrorism). Abusive counter-terrorism on the other hand fuels more terror and, therefore, more Islamophobia. Muslims clearly have more at stake in the war on terror than others do. [Read more]