Throughout history, crime and punishment have gone hand in hand. Protesters in Delhi, infuriated by a grotesque gang rape of a 23-year-old girl, have demanded the death penalty for such offenders, which was first publicly raised by BJP leader LK Advani many years ago. Read more

I was in the UK last month. I could see that despite rising far-right threats, multi-faith is making slow but sure progress. Read more

Muslims, from Libya to Hong Kong, have exploded again. The rage is against an anti-Islam film, made in the US, and cartoons in France. Read more

Poor Subramanian Swamy. The prospects of Islamic finance and banking options in India make him nervous as a rain-drenched cat. Read more

Muslims, like Hindus and Sikhs, will not like to surrender their personal laws because they are just that: personal. Read more

What after all is jihad? From an India-Pakistan perspective, few people can answer this question better than Pakistani-American writer and Mary Richardson professor of history at Tufts University, Ayesha Jalal. Her book, Partisans of Allah: Meanings of Jihad in South Asia (2008), puts this core concept of Islam in perspective for the subcontinental audience. Read more

I have never tried my hands at magic realism or lampooning of the kind that drips venom. But it’s worth trying. Deal with it.

General Shutman Ruddie had long abandoned his land of birth, Freeforallistan, to conquer the rest of the world. Read more

To bay for Salman Rushdie’s blood is to let the “absolutism of the pure” fight a gory battle against the “hybridity” and “impurities” of cosmopolitan “mongrelization”. Not acceptable. Read more

“You can crush the flowers, but that will not delay the Spring.” – Protest graffiti in a Cairo mosque Read more

Journeying across the Maghreb region – the northernmost belt of Africa across the Mediterranean – last month pretty much got me what I consider to be a front-row seat to the Arab Spring. Read more