Deliriously successful when first released way back in 1996, Lucky Ali’s O Sanam, once again sparked interest when a video-blogger by the name of Saad Khan recently released a video of Lucky Ali singing the song. Within a couple of days Saad Khan’s video went viral and raked in a huge amount of nostalgia for the India of the nineties. Lost in this surge of emotion was the fact that the Lucky Ali we saw in the video was far from the Lucky Ali we first saw in the mid-nineties. The man in Saad Khan’s blog video was older, with a face marked by the passage of time and more importantly marked by a beard and a skull cap, which seemed to suggest that he was a pious Muslim. The fact that this markedly Muslim accoutrement went unremarked upon in a time of general hostility to Muslims in India is surprising. But this silence could also imply apathy, which is a shame since this image does have a message for contemporary India even as the country bathes in the nostalgia for the nineties.
Tag: Islam
Justices Ramana and Shantanagounder of the Supreme Court have come under a lot of flak especially from the liberals for their judgment in a case that was to settle inheritance in a disputed inter-religious marriage. Most newspapers and social media commentators reported the judgment as having called marriages between Muslim men and non-Muslim women as “irregular” – thereby giving the impression that the judges were being deliberately misogynist and in the process adding substantially to all-pervasive Muslimophobia – spreading a false impression that legally Muslim men can “irregularly” marry non Muslim women – a completely false claim – and this was being spread because of shoddy and lazy reportage apart from of course Muslimophobia which is ever ready homogenize Muslims and ready to accept anything that paints Muslims as backward readily.
Most books in English on the subject matter are about Muslims and address non-Muslim readers—painstakingly defending or decrying Islam. Till Talaq Do Us Part by Zia Us Salam is refreshing in also addressing Muslim readers. It is positioned as a primer on the issue of Talaq busting myths of all kinds and making a strong case for potential for gender justice from within Islam.
Hadiya is being treated not as a LEGAL SUBJECT by India. Therefore, her case must be transferred to the International Criminal Court… Indian State has deprived Dr. Hadiya of four fundamental HUMAN rights (Not just rights). And, not even our greatest champions of human rights are protesting it.
On January 21, 2017, early morning an everyday Kashmiri feminist died quietly in her sleep [this “her” is a typo, but I prefer to leave it here; for if anything he always felt it was an honor to be a woman] after few bedridden years, which he absolutely hated. This was also the first ever, I had seen my maternal grandfather Gulam Ahmed Lone, who I call Daddy like everyone else in the family, cower before life a little. Even asking the universe to let him go rather than for wellness. He thought he had lived it all, and ended if not the best but still a little better.
We, ordinary citizens, artists, intellectuals, writers, poets from the Muslim community, want to emphasis that the Muslim community in India is diverse, plural and heterogeneous. No single organization or group of people/organisations can claim to speak on behalf of the whole community. Muslims and people of Muslim descent living in India follow different customs and celebrate a large number of festivals some common to all and some different from each other depending on the local cultural practices of the region where they reside. They speak different languages and engage at multiple levels of the thought process.
Any careful analysis of Salafism must take into consideration the diversity within the movement before lumping all self-identified or suspected Salafis or Salafi personalities together and expressing a blanket demonization of a monolithic Salafism
The decision of the World Sufi Forum to invite Narendra Modi is going to be a new episode in the political plan of the BJP government. By doing so, the right-wing government continues the otherisation and exclusion of Muslims by supporting one Islam over another Islam – if only one interpretation of Islam (i.e. peace-loving Sufi Islam) is palatable to Modi, then what happens to Muslims who might be critical of the systems of power, oppression and exploitation that Modi’s government perpetuates? Are these “bad” and “political” Muslims no longer able to be peace-loving, Sufi or considered acceptable by the Indian state?
In most societies the acts of religious conversion do ruffle the feathers of those who take the task of policing group boundaries zealously. In India too the issue of proselytization has been a matter of immense anxiety for the majoritarian groups belonging to Hindu religion
ISIS fuels Islamophobia and leads to alienation of Muslims in many countries. As a result ISIS also capitalizes on the alienation of these disillusioned Muslims and easily recruits them.
The Marginal Utility of Sharjeel Imam
The position that the left-liberals have adopted in regard to Sharjeel is this—we don’t agree with Sharjeel but he should not be charged with sedition. In place of sedition, these are the charges that the left-liberals level against him:
Sharjeel asks non-Muslims to stand with Muslims on their terms—communalism
Sharjeel’s speech helps the BJP because ‘the time is not right’—political stupidity
The left-liberals, who seem to have either not heard the speech or not understood it, miss the lip-smacking irony that these were the exact charges laid against the Barelvi Ulema by the Congress and their supporters, the Deobandi Ulema. Sharjeel reminds us in his speech that the unpardonable sin of the Barelvis was to oppose the Congress. Today, the unpardonable sin of Sharjeel Imam is the same, opposing the left-liberal combine. Only if he supports the left-liberal combine against the BJP will they recognize the validity of his position. Otherwise, he will be silenced and side-lined in favour of those Muslims who are more favourable to left-liberal Hindu nationalism.
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