Times may be hard but why add to the sum of national misery? Some of our afflictions, like the economic downturn and the war raging along the Afghan frontier, may be beyond anyone's control. But some are entirely self-created.
We are not a police state in the political sense of the term. This is not a country behind any kind of iron curtain and, the notoriety of our intelligence services notwithstanding, we do not have anything like the East German Stasi prying into every aspect of national life. We have one of the freest media in the Islamic world. Our kind of talk shows would not be permitted in most Muslim countries.
While we should count our blessings we should not forget that in the social sense this is a very repressed society.
The pity of it is that it wasn't always like this. Once upon a time mosque and tavern stood side by side (in a metaphorical sense of course) and even as they did, no one said Islam was in danger. How distant that time seems.
We were Muslims in 1947; we are Muslims now. There is a difference, however. Today we wear our religion on our sleeves and shout it from the housetops.
Protesting too much about anything betrays a sense of insecurity. An honest man, not given to self-righteousness, feels no necessity to proclaim his honesty. An honest woman, normally, does not protest her virtue -- unless there be the memory of a past sitting uneasily on her conscience.
Just as Italy will always be Catholic, and just as there will always be a Pope in the Vatican, we will be Muslims until the end of time. This is our destiny, something that we were born into. So what is there to be so worked up about? Hinduism stood in danger at the hands of Islam. Islam in the sub-continent was never threatened by Hinduism.
Categories : 
2:14 AM
Moderate Islamist here
