Muslims apologize for attacking Christians

From the "catch 'em being good" file.

Two Muslims have apologized for an anti-Christian rampage in the Punjab city of Gojra two years ago that left 10 Catholics dead.

At an interfaith seminar at the Sacred Heart Church in Gojra on Monday to mark the second anniversary of the incident, two Sufi masters expressed regret for the violence, saying it went against the “spirit of Islam.”

In August 2009, more than 800 Muslims went on the rampage against Christian communities Gojra and a nearby village, torching buildings and attacking inhabitants. The anti-terrorism court in Faisalabad in June acquitted all 70 people arrested in connection with the attacks.

Two honor killings in two days

Muslims in Pakistan? No, Hindus in Uttar Pradesh.

Finding out that his granddaughter, Malti (19), a resident of Sarojni Naidu Nagar under Bilhaur police station, was planning to elope with a neighbour belonging to another caste, 65-year-old Babulal Kashyap killed her with an axe on Tuesday and kept her body inside the house. Neighbours, who heard Malti’s cries for mercy, informed the police, who recovered the body and arrested Kashyap. An unrepentant Kashyap told media persons: “Nothing is bigger than family honour, therefore I murdered my granddaughter.” [...]

In the other case, a girl was shot dead allegedly by her brother after she disappeared from home for a few days. Meena (18), a resident of Manauri village, went to Allahabad three days ago with a youth and returned on Monday after which her brothers, Satish and Sanju, quizzed her. She was shot dead, allegedly by Sanju, after she failed to give a satisfactory reply, the police said.

Somebody hurry up and invent a Paxil bomb.

What a baroque religion Hinduism is...

I'm reading William Dalrymple's Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. Some of the rituals he mentions are preserved on YouTube. Like theyyam dancing, where dancers travel from village to village, invoking the deities and taking prayer requests from the locals. And singing the epic of Pabuji, a medieval warrior from Rajasthan whom time and renown has promoted to godhood, in that region. The performers sing his story for nights on end, before a phad, an illustrated tapestry of the epic, which doubles as a portable shrine. In the media age, with fewer people keeping to the old ways, fewer people have time to devote to listening to the whole thing, and so this tradition is slowly dying out.

Compare and contrast

Obeying their religious tenets, Muslims in Kerala state, India, try to kill a suspected blasphemer. Obeying his religious tenets, the Christian victim forgives his attackers.

In the lion's den...

Hindus attack Christians in Orissa state in India:

Gangs of Hindu extremists have been attacking Christians, looting and setting fire to their homes and places of worship and social care. This violence is now extending to other states, causing great concern to Salvation Army leadership.

The Salvation Army boys' home in Paburia housed 40 young boys who study in a nearby government school. The boys, from six to 15 years old, lived at the home because of poverty and other family reasons. After the Sunday meeting on 24 August, a group of 2,000-3,000 people entered the compound shouting slogans. Each person carried a weapon of some description.

As the mob destroyed the home, officer-in-charge Major Paul Kumar Sahani took his wife and family, gathered the boys together and ran to the forest. From a vantage point they saw the home and all their possessions destroyed by fire. All the houses owned by Christians in the area were torched and a number of people were killed.

More here and here. A stunned Indian Christian reacts here.

The hospitality of the Deobandis

Via Family Security Matters comes this affront to multi-cultism in The Times of London: "Hardline takeover of British mosques"

It concerns the proliferation and entrenchment in Britain of the fundamentalist Deobandi branch of Islam, named after the north Indian city of Deoband where the sect is based. Pull quote:

A commentator on religious radicalism in Pakistan, where Deobandis wield significant political influence, told The Times that "blind ignorance" on the part of the Government in Britain had allowed the Deobandis to become the dominant voice of Islam in Britain's mosques.

Khaled Ahmed said: "The UK has been ruined by the puritanism of the Deobandis. You've allowed the takeover of the mosques. You can't run multiculturalism like that, because that's a way of destroying yourself. In Britain, the Deobandi message has become even more extreme than it is in Pakistan. It's mind-boggling."

Alarming stuff, however depressingly familiar it may be by now. However, the story reminded me of this anecdote, which was the fist I'd heard of the Deobandis, by name at least:

I had not realized it was possible. But the mullahs of Deoband, the center of Islamic orthodoxy in south Asia, had managed to circumvent a fatwa[...]out of courtesy to me. They did it so that I could drink a cup of coffee. I was visiting Dar-ul-Uloom--the House of Knowledge--a large Islamic school in the town of Deoband, about ninety miles north of New Delhi. [...] I was sitting on the ground in the study of Maulana (an honorific given to learned Muslim men) Abdul Khalik Madrasi, vice-chancellor of Deoband, with a group of his students [in October 2001...]

The burly Maulana, whose beard almost reached down to his rotund belly, then asked if I wanted a refreshment. I said I would like a Nescafe, which is the only kind of coffee usually available in north India outside the cities. "No, no," he said sternly. "We have issued a fatwa forbidding the faithful from buying any American or British products." I tried in vain to argue that I was not one of the faithful so the fatwa should not apply to me. They laughed it off. Then I tried and failed to convince them that Nescafe is owned by Nestle, which is a Swiss company. But they had either never heard of Switzerland or could not see the difference. In much of India the word *Angrezi*--English--simply means "foreign", or "Western". No, they said, wagging their fingers, as if they had caught me pulling a fast one, Nescafe is Angrezi.

Then something occured to the Maulana, who was a member of the committee that issues Deobandi fatwas. "I have thought of a legitimate loophole," the Maulana announced with a smile. "The fatwa applies only to products bought after September 11. Does anyone here possess Nescafe that is older?" A student raised his hand. The mildewed sachet of instant coffee that he fetched from his room considerably predated 9/11. It was one of the most satisfying coffees I have ever had.
-- Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of
Modern India, 2007

Cute, eh? In a creepy sort of way? So maybe I do have a suitable 9/11 anniversary post, after all. Maybe the common courtesies, which Near Easterners have historically been so famous for, will have some hand in bringing about peace. Wouldn't bet my kids' futures on it, but wouldn't it be...sweet?

Poor, oppressed Muslims. No, really!

cross-posted at Protein Wisdom

So I was getting my fill of the daily Jihad over at TROP one day, and started wondering, could there possibly be another side to this? Are there really Muslims who are as despised and persecuted as well-heeled First World Muslim advocacy groups claim that they themselves are? (I exclude Palestinians, since a) their woes are all self-inflicted; b)I remember what a horror-show they turned beautiful, sophisticated Lebanon into in the 70s; c) their hands have been purple and smoking with the blood of Jews and Americans for as long as I can remember, and they recently voted for a gang of killers who promised much more of the same. So, off to the nth power, they should feel free to sod.)

After clicking around, I'd say it's very hard to argue that the Muslims of Gujarat, in western India, have deserved the outrages visited upon them five years ago. Short version: a train of Hindu pilgrims was set on fire, and in retaliation, and with the connivance of authorities in certain precincts, entire neighborhoods of Muslims were wiped out. A Hindu filmmaker, Rakesh Sharma, made a documentary about the atrocity, the chilling conclusion of which is here. On his blog, he tartly responds to non-resident Indians who protest screenings of the film in the U.S. :

"What about the burnt train", thunders a Gujarati NRI, "what happened was a reaction to Godhra". I pose a counter question - " Do you think post-911, every New Yorker should have gone out to on the streets to rape any Muslim woman, murder Muslim babies and kill old and young men? That New Yorkers should have burnt all Muslim cafes and shops, set fire to Muslim homes and that the NYPD should've helped them do it? That mobs led by local politicians should have ruled the streets of New York in the same way they did in Gujarat?" Like a proud American citizen, he recoils and says no.

So, why should Hindus and Muslims battering each other matter to the war on terror? They've only been at it since the 13th century or so. But the matter isn't as localized as it may at first seem. In Edward Luce's excellent new book In Spite of the Gods: the strange rise of modern India, we learn that, while many individual young Hindu volunteers did come to Gujarat to try to help the refugees, the Hindu ultra-nationalist dominated state government pretty much let the victims fester where they fell. There was no institution to turn to--except for Saudi relief agencies. And we all know what baggage comes along with their help.

So, consider: all the al-Qaeda that have been bagged overseas have been Saudi, Paki, British, Jordanian, and etc., but not so much from India. If that changes, if we start seeing Indian Muslims on the battlefields of The Jihad, we can in part thank the BJP and RSS parties of India, as short-sighted as they are bigoted. Let's hope those Indians involved in the Glasgow airport bombing were anomalies, rather than trend-setters.

2006 Indian religious riots in review

En route to looking up something else, I found this Indian Muslim website, which has a quite detailed and seemingly objective account of India's religious and communal riots for the past year. According to the site, it was a pretty mild year, all things considered. That's not to say that what actually happened wasn't appalling enough, of course. In addition to the bloodletting itself, there were archaeological atrocities like this:

Baroda, communally highly inflammable place since early eighties, once again was in flames on May 1st when a three hundred year old dargah of Chishti Rashiduddin was demolished by Vadodara Municipal Corporation which sparked riots in which 4 persons were killed and more than 12 were injured in police firing. Two of the dead had bullet injuries while other two were stabbed. It was demolished as an ‘illegal structure’. How can a three hundred year old dargah be declared as illegal?

A dargah is a shrine over a gravesite, and Chishti refers to an order of Sufism. Just awful. I felt the same way when Iraqi Sunni extremists blew up the Shia shrine in Samarra, and earlier when the Saudis knocked down an Ottoman castle in Mecca, to make way for a hotel.