At the end of July, Muslims will celebrate Eid al-Adha, the second of the two great Islamic festivals. It honors the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God’s command. God had mercy on him and spared Abraham from losing his son. Abraham sacrificed a sheep...
Ever since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act that discriminates specifically against Muslim asylum seekers, India’s Muslim minority has been protesting and agitating. It is reacting against what it perceives to be majoritarian tyranny that has been...
Students at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi, India, staged a protest lasting more than two weeks against the appointment of Dr. Firoz Khan as a faculty member at the Sanskrit Vidya Dharma Vijnan (SVDV). At the crux of the matter is the fact that a Muslim scholar was appointed to...
The re-election of India’s Hindu right-wing government could put minorities at risk. India’s general elections were the most wide-ranging and possibly most expensive election campaign in the nation’s history. In emphatic style, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the ruling Bharatiya Janata...
Across India's main religions, crimes committed by spiritual leaders normalize criminality among their followers. Karl Marx's notion that religion is the opium of the masses could not have been truer in India. By a crude extension of the postulate, religious leaders play the part of opium...
The ruling against instant divorce is a victory for Indian Muslim women, but there is a long way to go before real change occurs. On August 22, the Supreme Court of India declared the practice of instant divorce in Islam, known as triple talaq, to be unconstitutional and un-Islamic. The judgment...
The issue of eating beef unveils underlying Hindu-Muslim tensions in India. Mahatma Gandhi once said: “If someone was to ask me what the most important outward manifestation of Hinduism was, I would suggest that it was the idea of cow protection.” For most Indians, therefore, cows are...
India, and the world, should be wary of Narendra Modi India may elect as its next prime minister a far-right Hindu nationalist who, as governor of Gujarat, directed his state's police force to look the other way during a mass slaughter of Muslims in 2002. Narendra Modi is a self-made...
In its 66 years of existence, Pakistan has been far from democracy and nowhere near a beacon of Islam. In a recent Fair Observer article, Pakistan: Democracy in a Confessional State, Dr. Ishtiaq Ahmed states: “There is no denying that the erstwhile modernist Pakistani leadership tried to...
