Religious Leaders and Peace

The purpose of every religion is to create social amity and global unity. Peace is the first job of all religions. Unfortunately some of the religions have become conflict manufacturing zones in the recent past. It is crucial to revive the original purpose of religious and religious leaders. Today's religious leaders are stooping to the lowest level. The consumer creed hasn't spared the highly respected religious leaders. No wonder the fundamentalists are targeting electronic media, MNCs, and external exposure. Caught between the devil and deep sea we are forced to opt for the less harmful. Now it is the turn of public and religious leaders to understand the larger consequences of the violence and hatred on society. Now it is high time for the religious leaders to return to their original path of peace making.

The Times of India writes on 17 November 2009

Even now I can still feel the ambience of a house that had so much love and warmth inside," says Rabbi Abraham Cooper, tears welling his eyes as he passed through each bullet-ridden room, dusty and pocked marked, at Nariman House.

Six Jewish inmates died in the building also known as Chabad Housem, when terrorists held hostage the five-storey building at Colaba for around 45 hours last November. Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which hunts Nazi criminals, revisited 26/11 terror sites like Nariman House, CST and Cama Hospital on Monday and expressed solidarity with the victims.

As head of the largest Jewish human rights organisation in world with around half-million members in USA alone, Cooper has been studying in detail broad trends emerging from terror attacks, be it the London Underground blasts, Madrid terror strikes or serial car bombings in Bali. "The language of the terrorist is the same everywhere, that is to isolate people from each other. But the terrorists don't realise that nations who are hit by terror come closer like never before and today the West listens when India talks about terror attacks."

He says Indian intelligence agencies should look at new digital methods used by terrorists as it has become very tough to trace them in the vast worldwide web. "Our research studies that looked at terror strikes across the world show that terrorists are using the Internet in a big way to not only co-ordinate with their sympathisers and accomplices but to even learn to how to make a bomb," he says.

"The technology to make a bomb in your kitchen is given in detail in many of these sites," he adds. Cooper emphasises that religious leaders should come forward and play a role in fighting the menace."

Religious Unity Against Homosexuality

Every religion tries to safeguard its sacrosant nature. Homosexuality and the other unnatural sexual activities are opposed tooth and nail by every religion. It is because of the social chaos these activities create provokes religious leaders to fight against it.

The Times of India writes (23 September 2009)


What could cause the Darul Uloom Deoband and the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind to join forces with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad? Answer: homosexuality, which
according to all of the above should be severely punished by the law. Sikh and Christian bodies are also negative about repealing the parts of Section 377 which criminalise homosexuality. Joining them is a motley group of godmen, astrologers, politicians and now even a child rights group, the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights.

Such a grand alliance is bound to make any move to decriminalise homosexuality a political hot potato, even if that is what the Indian Constitution's guarantee of equal rights to all citizens demands. Not surprisingly the Union cabinet played safe and lobbed the ball back to the Supreme Court, when asked for the government's position on whether gay sex ought to be legalised or not, following landmark legislation by the Delhi high court which declared much of Section 377 unconstitutional.

When India, in general, is keen to protect minorities of all sorts, what is it about this particular minority the homosexual community that presents seemingly intractable problems? It's that homosexuals snap the bond between sex and procreation, invoking the spectre of individual pleasure that exceeds any collective, utilitarian ethic.

The interesting thing about Section 377 is that it outlaws not just homosexual behaviour, but most forms of heterosexual activity that even lawfully married couples engage in. The only kind the law permits is that with direct procreative potential. Canute-like, Section 377 attempts to lock sex into a utilitarian grid.

Historically, most societies have sought utilitarian control over sex. Religions, especially proselytising ones, would like to multiply their numbers. Thus the biblical injunction to go forth and multiply. Socialism enforces an all-embracing altruism. According to its calculus individual pleasure can open the floodgates to selfish bourgeois vices. That's why most communist countries brutally suppressed homosexuality. Ditto for fascist states. Authoritarian societies, in general, tend to see homosexuality as disruptive of social order and cohesion, a quality they prize above anything else.

Early industrial capitalism, too, would like to expand the labour force to multiply production and profits. That gives it an interest in encouraging procreative heterosexual behaviour and driving homosexuality underground. It's only in late 20th century, post-industrial capitalism predicated on consumption as much as it is on production that the equation begins to shift. With the modern consumer, individual pleasure matters and choice comes into play. Procreation and perpetuation of race/religion/society/nation aren't everything. Add to that the green imperatives of the early 21st century, and growing populations with expanding ecological footprints even begin to look menacing.

The principle of choice can also extend to sexual lifestyles. Homosexual activity has been around for ages. But the notion of 'lifestyle', a peg on which one hangs one's very identity, emerges only under modern consumer capitalism. One can 'consume' alternate sexualities. In that context the emergence of sexual minorities is a marker of ongoing globalisation. It's no accident that with liberalising and globalising tendencies washing up on Indian shores, the question of gay rights has come to the fore as well.

Take the gay pride parades which are being held in more and more Indian cities, reaching Bhubaneswar and Chennai this year. The annual parades are held in sync with similar events in cities across the world, and commemorate the Stonewall riots that took place in New York's Greenwich village in 1969. On June 27 of that year police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in the area. While such raids had been routine, on that occasion the crowds fought back and the neighbourhood erupted in riots and protests for the next few days. That event sparked the worldwide gay liberation movement. No wonder that Bhim Singh of the Jammu and Kashmir Panthers' Party describes the movement to legalise homosexuality as an "American invasion".

It's the 1960s that mark the shift to post-industrial capitalism, spurred by the global communications revolution which began that decade (causing Marshall McLuhan to quip, famously, that electronic technology was contracting the world into a "global village"). According to social thinker Anthony Giddens the communications revolution dating from the 1960s ushered in a more radical and thoroughgoing modernity than that of the Enlightenment, touching the core of private life and incorporating what he calls 'emotional democracy'. This is associated with the rise of new social movements that emphasise life politics (to do with private life) rather than emancipatory politics (to do only with public institutions).

When Vikram Seth and others wrote an open letter addressing the government and judiciary, urging the overturning of Section 377 which "punitively criminalises romantic love and private, consensual sexual acts", quite apart from the utilitarian value of combating HIV/AIDS, it's also the private rights of the citizen that they are concerned to defend. It's time for the state to treat Indian citizens as adults, moving away from the patron-client relationship preferred by our political and bureaucratic elites.

Muslims Discriminated in Mumbai?

The prominent Muslims especially those from Bollywood are complaining about the discrimination of non Muslims in renting out to selling their property to Muslims merely on the grounds of religion. Earlier Shabana Azmi and Emran Hashmi have complained the same. This kind of discrimination should end immediately.

The Times of India writes (4 August 2009)


The waters have been muddied further in the Emraan Hashmi imbroglio. The actor has been in the limelight for filing a complaint with the State
Minorities Commission regarding his difficulties in purchasing a flat in Mumbai. Allegedly, this has been because of an anti-Muslim bias on the part of the cooperative housing society involved. However, BJP worker Sanjay Bedia has now filed a complaint against Hashmi and director Mahesh Bhatt for making statements along communal lines. And not unexpectedly, various other celebrities have chimed in as well, some castigating Hashmi, others backing him. It is par for the course when such issues are raised in the public sphere in this country. But that does not make the general approach to the debate any less disappointing.

It is unclear whether there actually was religious prejudice as Hashmi alleged or not. In a sense, it is also irrelevant. The matter is being looked into and the truth ought to be ascertained at some point. More important than this specific instance of discrimination or not, as the case may be is the reactions it has evoked in a larger context. The problem of religious bias cannot be wished away. What is needed is a constructive, mutually respectful public dialogue.

The reality of what happens when such issues are brought up, unfortunately, is quite different as evidenced by Bedia's complaint. It is an unjustified, wholly unnecessary attempt to stifle free speech. Hashmi has spoken out for what he perceives to be an infringement on his constitutional rights. How this can be interpreted to be communal in nature is difficult to comprehend.

Bedia's gambit is a pointer towards the dominant trend in Indian public discourse. Hot-button topics such as religion and caste invite knee-jerk reactions characterised by shrill demagoguery and unbridled aggression. Such conflicts are waged at two levels inflammatory protests on the streets, often with little understanding of the issues at stake, and a war of sound bites and pithy putdowns waged via the media. Neither approach is particularly conducive to arriving at a lasting solution. Whatever the truth of the complaint lodged by Hashmi, he deserves to be heard.

Reinventing Islam

No doubt that the Islamic civilization was vibrant,meaningful and constructive in the past. It contributed for the high growth of trade, architecture and culture around the world. In these testing times where it is under attack,the broadminded Islamic people should join hands and assert the positive side of the religion. Otherwise the negative Islamic people will continue to damage the image of the age-old good civilization. They undo the devastation contributed by the rich oil merchants in the Gulf in aiding and abetting the merchants of terror.

Raza Elahi writes in The Times of India (1 August 2009)

US president Barack Obama's historic speech in Cairo, which called for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims, had references to
Islam's contribution to civilisation. It is a befitting reply to Islam bashers, who have boxed Islamic culture, particularly Arab culture, into crude stereotypes. Post-9/11 Islam-bashing has almost become fashionable among western scholars. A whole bunch of intellectuals has sprung up in the West, linking Arab culture to violence, hate and fanaticism. Any violence committed by any group, or any unrest in Palestine or Iraq, is a specific response to a specific pathological, political circumstance, not an endemic variable of Arab culture as Samuel Huntingdon's ''clash of civilisations'' and other western theories describe such face-offs.

Since time immemorial the essence of Arab culture has been trade, not war or suicide bombings. The region gave birth to civilisations such as the Assyrian and Babylonian in Iraq, Phoenician and Canaan in Syria and the Pharaonic in Egypt. After the advent of Islam, each of these cities was a major capital of huge empires through various stages of history that presented the world with sciences, art, culture, philosophical thought and civilisations that form the basis of study in all major modern universities.

Islam was an extraordinary gift to the world of business with its pragmatic, tolerant, humane, logical and international ethos at a time when other cultures were busy burning witches and widows in other parts of the so-called civilised world. The evolution of market hubs such as Baghdad and Cairo, the emergence of Arabic as the business lingua franca from Spain to Sindh, the missionary activities of Arab merchants in South East Asia were all legacies of the advent of Islam.

Seven centuries ago, Baghdad and Damascus were world financial hubs. The Arab world, under the Abbasid caliphs, had trade relations with all major nations from China to Italy. The Assyrians mapped out a road network to enable them to transport African ivory, Caspian furs and Indian spices across their empire. Two millennia before the advent of the dollar and pound sterling, the gold coin, Persian daric, introduced by Darius the Great, was the currency of choice from Greece to the kingdoms of India. The financiers of Mecca and Damascus set up letters of credit, bills of exchange, foreign agencies, primitive contract laws and custom duties centuries before the bankers of Renaissance Florence and Tudor London.

Empires came and went, kingdoms were established and fell, but trade remains one of the institutions that truly defines Arab culture. The earliest civilisations of the Middle East evolved on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Their trading links with Mohenjadaro on the Indus, Dilmun in the Arabian Gulf and the Hellenic ports of the Aegean islands demonstrate that international markets existed centuries before Christ.

The Silk Road to China, the Amber Route to the Baltic, the evolution of trade-linked cities such as Petra, Baghdad, Mecca, Sidon and Damascus were the centres of Arab power politics for centuries. From ancient times till modern days trade activities have always flourished in the region.

The modern example is the rapid progress of the ancient trading and pearling settlement of Dubai, which was on the trade route between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley civilisation. In 1830, it was taken over by a sect of the Bani Yas clan led by the Maktoum family that still rules Dubai. The elders of this family decided to build on the expertise of the inhabitants of Dubai and concentrate on trade. This policy powers the economic miracle of Dubai.

The ruling family recognised the value of international trade as an engine for wealth creation decades before the petrodollar era. When oil was discovered in 1960, the bulk of its revenue was invested in creating the world's biggest man-made harbour in Dubai's Jebal Ali. Today, some estimates peg Dubai's non-oil revenues at over 90 per cent of its GDP, and the average per capita income in excess of $19,000.

Excellent infrastructure coupled with business acumen has helped the nationals to expand their trading horizons. Dubai encouraged Indian, Yemeni, Lebanese and Persian traders to settle. At a time when socialism and command economies were prevalent in other parts of the world, Dubai was unique in its preference for an open economy and regional trade. At no time, however, has the Dubai government forgotten its Islamic roots. It is the government's endeavour to ensure that no Muslim will need to travel more than 500 metres to pray in a mosque. Dubai is certainly a winning mix of trade and religion.

Commentators who have concluded the Islamic world is a 'failed and violent' society are wrong as religion and trade walk hand in hand in Islamic culture. Obama's approach to the Islamic world is a positive shift in official US policy, and some compensation for the hostile environment created by Islam bashers.