Religion

Too much hot air is being blown into Monday’s Supreme Court judgment clarifying that fatwas are not binding on Muslims. That’s possibly because there’s a new government in New Delhi that is led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and some people have a morbid tendency of contextualising issues. In fact, if anyone contextualised anything, it was the Supreme Court. The court ruled that fatwas are not illegal, but are also not legally binding on those against whom they are made. It was hardly a...

Fact No I: Journalists, by virtue of their job, are a powerful lot. They can give any twist to any story. Fact No II: The issue of Muslims/Islam is so dynamic that you can either project Muslims as a bloodthirsty breed or portray them as hapless victims of an Islamophobic dispensation. Take the two facts together, and you will know what I am driving at. There have been a number of studies about Islamophobia and the media that have found their way into the public domain. Some are accurate, others...

Twenty-year-old Nita was caught on an isolated road on a motorcycle with her boyfriend. She was whisked away by the Sharia police. The next morning the head lecturer at her campus lectured her, and told her mother that Nita should be stoned to death. Nita blurted out, “Sir, I was only trying to look for a shortcut, and I should be stoned for that? What about the officers who raped me last night?” Nita was apprehended by the Sharia police (Wilayatul Hisbah, WH) in January 2010 for the crime of...

When the burqa debate was raging across the world, a young Pakistani women's rights activist, who doesn't wear a headscarf as a rule, travelled to Jalalabad in Afghanistan to see for herself what it meant to wear one. This is her story. Gulalai Ismail, a 24-year-old university student in Islamabad, needed to go to Afghanistan in August on an assignment. The consultancy on the evaluation of a gender-based violence project made her fly to Kabul. And then onwards to Jalalabad. For someone who does...

As the US establishment tries hard to project itself as a religiously diverse country, the conviction that America is a Christian nation is gaining currency and becoming more intensified, a study has found. "Though initially paradoxical, these trends are less mysterious if the idea of a Christian America is understood, not as a description of religious demography, but as a discursive practice that seeks to align the symbolic boundaries of national belonging with the boundaries of the dominant...

Germany is increasingly turning xenophobic. One in three Germans believe that the country has too many foreigners, and over one in ten want a Führer at the helm of affairs, a survey released by a left-wing Berlin think-tank said Wednesday. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, affiliated to the Social Democratic Party (SPD), published the study titled Die Mitte in der Krise - Rechtsextreme Einstellungen in Deutschland 2010, or “The mainstream in the crisis – Right-wing extremist attitudes in Germany,”...

Two months after his right palm was chopped off by Muslim fanatics for allegedly insulting Islam's prophet in a question paper, a lecturer in Kerala has now been sacked by the diocese which runs the college. That's a classic case of what you would call adding insult to injury. Old proverbs wreaked anew. Fr Thomas Malekudy, manager of Newman College, Thodupzuah, where TJ Joseph had been a selection grade senior lecturer at the Department of Malayalam, on Saturday announced the decision to remove...

It’s now the turn of an Indian journalist to be a victim of America’s Islamophobia. Zia Haq, an assistant editor with Hindustan Times, was part of a seven-journalist delegation invited to participate in a week-long technology and farm show that began on August 28 at Iowa in the United States. The US embassy here suspended the processing of his visa on unexplained grounds, and Haq had to drop out of the tour at the last minute. The HT journalist says on his blog that he has been singled out, “All...