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

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

In New Delhi’s Connaught Place commuter Metro station, millions cross a flashboard message fit enough to be our national anthem: “None of us is stronger than all of us”. This is rip-snorting good to be the collective mantra of all humanity as well. Read more

A housing complex in Mumbai has blocked a move by Indian actor Emraan Hashmi to acquire an apartment in the city’s upscale Pali Hill area because he is Muslim, the actor has alleged.
 
The case has brought back the debate about prejudices Muslims face, and how our secular republic reconciles itself with equal rights guaranteed by the constitution to minorities. Read more

Holy wars and heaven go back a long time. Pope Urban II, he called for a holy war upon infidels in 1095 and promised paradise as reward.

Islam has got such bad press that slay-an-infidel, go-to-paradise is now thought to be a patently Islamic concept, its copyrights collectively belonging to Muslims and passed on to generations as heirloom. Read more

My two eyes, Gandhi called Hindus and Muslims. Like Icarus, who flew so close to the sun on wings of wax that he fell, Gandhi would go so far chasing unity, he would fall to bullets.

Had it been set in Delhi’s Birla House instead of Dublin, the opening of Irish novelist Edna O’Brien’s biography of James Joyce would have been equally true of Gandhi: Read more

Muslims are grappling with two gnawing concerns since the general elections concluded in May 2009. One is their dwindling representation in Parliament. The other is the slipping status of Jamia Millia Islamia as a minority institution. Read more

Five decades or so after it saw the light of day, the Indian Constitution towers like a monolith over our vast, undulated political landscape, holding us together and reining us in as we tend to stray. 

Just a few months ago, we were puzzling over where we were headed. Our shared destinies increasingly looked irreconcilable. Our common goalposts appeared to be shifting apart by miles before the light suddenly dawned in the form the Election 2009 results.   Read more

In the hurly-burly of reactions to the hate speeches attributed to BJP leader Varun Gandhi, something has been missing: the return fire. So far, reactionary Muslim leaders have been far more restrained than is usually seen of them. To me, this silence is golden. To me, this is good news that nobody flashed, for only bad news is good news for the media that milk discords. Read more

We as Indian Muslims are struggling to remain who we are — Indian Muslims. I am sorry to see so many people treat the term “Indian-Muslim” as the greatest oxymoron of our time. Don’t tell me that I am ‘only Muslim’. I am ‘also a Muslim’. I am also sorry to hear that we only wear our religion on our sleeves; that we fail to integrate and mainstream ourselves; and that we are not loyal enough. That’s done and over. We only have to look at our society with blinkers off. Mainstreaming is done. Assimilation is over. Loyalty is established. Read more