India’s groupthink on Islam: reflections from Jaipur, Islam and Human Rights, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and Human Rights

India’s groupthink on Islam: reflections from Jaipur

By Sadanand Dhume

If you’re looking for a defining image from the fifth Jaipur Literature Festival, which ended on Monday, there are plenty to choose from: laughter rippling across the front lawns of the Diggi Palace hotel as Alexander McCall Smith recalled the travails of his fictional female detective from Botswana, an electric evening performance by the Tamil singer Susheela Raman, a moving speech on the power of literature by the Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan. But none was as arresting as the unannounced (for security reasons) appearance of the controversial Dutch-Somali writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Speaking to a packed hall, with her burly bodyguard unobtrusively off-stage, Hirsi Ali spoke about Islam—and its problems with individualism, women’s rights and sexuality—with a frankness unfamiliar to most Indians. She described the faith she was born into as “a dangerous, totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion”. She argued against the moral relativism that has prevented Western intellectuals from scrutinizing Islam as they do Christianity and Judaism. She asked why it seemed impossible to have a sober discussion about the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad without riling Muslim sentiment, and made the case for bringing the Enlightenment to the blighted lands of West Asia and Muslim South Asia. Hirsi Ali touched upon India only briefly, to contrast the country’s success with the dismal state of neighbouring Muslim-majority Pakistan.

http://newageislam.com/india's-groupthink-on-islam--reflections-from-jaipur/islam-and-human-rights/d/2449

Indonesian lessons for secular India: insidious impact of Saudi-exported Wahhabism, The War within Islam, NewAgeIslam.com

The War within Islam

Indonesian lessons for secular India: insidious impact of Saudi-exported Wahhabism

By Sadanand Dhume

22 November 2009

If you had to pick the place in the Muslim world least susceptible to any kind of religious extremism, it would be hard to find a better candidate than Indonesia. The world's most populous Muslim country is on Islam's eastern edge, separated from the faith's Arabian birthplace by space and time. Islam washed up in the archipelago in the 12th century, took root in the 15th and became dominant as late as the 17th. For the most part, it arrived through trade rather than conquest, by Indian dhow rather than Arab charger. It was preceded by more than a millennium of Hinduism and Buddhism, whose achievements included Borobudur, a massive 9th-century Buddhist stupa.

As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in comparing Indonesia to Morocco: "In Indonesia Islam did not construct a civilization, it appropriated one."

In India, a strain of Islamic orthodoxy was sometimes in open conflict with Hinduism. But in Indonesia, the new faith sat comfortably atop a Hindu-Buddhist past. Like most Indians, and unlike the Arabs, most Indonesians continued to believe that there are many paths to God. Indeed, until recently, Indonesian Islam - steeped in a culture of music and mysticism - was synonymous with tolerance. By and large, the one-in-eight Indonesians who are Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Animist, rarely faced discrimination, much less religious violence.

http://newageislam.com/indonesian-lessons-for-secular-india--insidious-impact-of-saudi-exported-wahhabism/the-war-within-islam/d/2123