INCREASING INFLUENCE OF ISLAM AND THE FUTURE DANGER

An excellent article by Tavleen Singh. It is not a saffornite who is writing this article but a secular media person. Finally, the secular crowd is seeing the writing on the wall, but still are afraid to say it. There are a very few persons in this secular crowd like Tavleen Singh who are now gathering enough courage to say the truth. The serious concern expressed by the author in the last paragraph is extremely ominous.

Please forward this article to all.
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De-Indianising Indian Muslims
Tavleen Singh
Cybernoon
May 31, 2007
Gone is the easygoing, Indianised Islam of before which gave us some of our great poets, musicians, writers, thinkers and movie stars.

Writing a book requires solitude and as I am in the last stages of one I have spent the last ten days holed up alone in a house by the sea, away from the seductions of city life. I spend the mornings writing and revising and the afternoons reading. The solitude has given me time to read two books that I recommend to our policy makers and to those who believe that Indian Muslims have been unaffected by the worldwide jehad. The first is 'Infidel' by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the second is 'The Islamist' by Ed Husain. Both books describe in frightening detail the changes that occurred in the interpretation of Islam in the nineties and how a literal understanding of the Koran by Islamists has created an aggressive, new religion whose stated objective is world domination through the resurrection of a caliphate, or an international Islamic republic.

Global domination
Ed Husain, a British Muslim of Bangladeshi origin, was an Islamist himself for a while and writes this about the objective of radicalising Muslims in Europe. "All this, we were convinced, was based on the sira, or the life of the Prophet Mohammed. He had bequeathed a political system for us to implement, a total ideology for global domination: Islam. This ideology would be carried to other parts of the world by means of a jihad, which was the raison d' etre of the army of the future Islamic state."
What makes the books important is that they have been written by Muslims who have observed what is happening in Europe from the inside. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somalian woman who became a Dutch citizen and Member of Parliament and who lives under permanent guard now because she angered Islamists by pointing out that the position of women in Islam was that of slaves. She worked with the Dutch film maker, Theo Van Gogh, on a film about Muslim women called 'Submission' and it resulted in the brutal murder of Van Gogh two years ago by an Islamist fanatic.

Overt influence
What does all this have to do with India? Well, we have the second largest population of Muslims in the world and since the early nineties they have been gradually radicalised. Most Indian analysts are too politically correct to acknowledge this and those of us who do blame it on the demolition of the Babri Masjid. After the mosque was demolished in December 1992 there were riots across the country and especially bad ones in Mumbai in which more than a thousand Muslims lost their lives. We even sort of justify the bomb blasts that happened in March 1993 by saying they were a reaction to the riots.

We refuse to accept that there is a movement to de-Indianise Indian Muslims by imposing an Arabic idea of Islam. Travel to any Indian city with a large Muslim population and you will see more veiled women than ever before, more children in Islamic schools and more overt influence of the religion than before. Gone is the easygoing, Indianised Islam of before which gave us some of our greatest poets, musicians, writers, thinkers and movie stars. Gone are the movies of yore, the Muslim family dramas, that gave us "Chaudhvin ka Chand" and "Mere Mehboob". Have we stopped to ask why they are not made any more?

What is more worrying is the manner in which our 'secular' politicians are making the same mistake Europe made by inadvertently encouraging the worst kind of Islamism through their policies. Ever since the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government came to power in Delhi three years ago it has revived the old Congress policy of encouraging Muslims to believe they have valid reasons for a sense of grievance. The Sachar Committee was set up with the specific purpose of establishing that Muslims do not get their share of the Indian pie without anyone bothering to point out that the problem lies mostly with the community refusing to understand the importance of women's education. Uneducated women usually produce educationally handicapped children because half a child's learning comes from its mother.

The UPA government has gone beyond Sachar in its efforts to create a sense of insecurity among Muslims. Banks have recently been ordered to give priority loans to Muslims and there are at least two Congress states that have started reserving jobs for Muslims. It was similar mistakes in England and Europe that allowed the Islamists to feed on insecurities and lure Muslims into their fold with ideas of pan-Islamism. If we take our blinkers off and look around we will notice that the same thing is beginning to happen in India. The recent municipal election in Malegaon was won by an Islamic party called the Indian Muslim Congress. It is a religious party that was born out of insecurities in the community that resulted from the bomb blasts in September last year. Muslims felt they were being targeted by the police and discriminated against by the Maharashtra government.

How long will it be before we see Muslim religious parties winning elections in other parts of India? How long will it be before these religious parties become involved in the international jehad because let us not forget that Hindus are as much the enemy as other kafirs like Jews and Christians?