Dar-ul-Aloom's phony fatwa

The Dar-ul-Aloom seminary in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh is the most influential school of Islamic learning after Al-Azhar University in Egypt. Moreover, Dar-ul-Aloom provides the ideological underpinning for the Taliban and Islamic terrorist movements in South Asia. Small wonder that Moorthy Muthuswamy said that its influence should be "neutralized."

Dar-ul-Aloom recently issued a fatwa (link found through MEMRI) ostensibly condemning terrorism. This article Deoband plays peace card; a few call it bluff from the Times of India reviews feedback from readers about the fatwa. While the article provides considerable space to opinions of those who are rightly critical about the fatwa and the motives of the Islamic scholars, it concludes with this statement:

For the majority though, the Deoband's initiative was an important step in the war against terror.

What I read in the Dar-ul-Aloom fatwa was a cursory denunciation of terrorism. As with a fatwa issued by American Muslim groups, no Islamic terrorist individual or group is called out by name and denounced. The principal concern of the Dar-ul-Aloom fatwa is the treatment of Muslims in India and around the world, not opposition to Islamic terrorism.

The Blame Game

Sadanand Dhume wrote that "An increasingly radicalized neighborhood, fragmented domestic politics and a curiously timid mainstream discourse on Islam add up to hobble India's response to radical Islamic intimidation."

Here are two examples how fragmented domestic politics hobbles India's effectiveness in fighting terrorism:

From Naxal Terror Watch, which in turn found this article through Offstumped, comes this commentary Make Terror Victims the face of Anti-Terrorism Campaign, which criticizes the efforts of Congress and the BJP to prove that the other party has the worse record on fighting terrorism. The article argues:

By making the voice of the Terror Victims and the voice of those brave women and men in uniform who shed their lives fighting terrorism the Anti-Terrorism Campaign will not just have tremendous credibility but it would frame the public debate in the right terms.

This article Maya’s Intelligence Quotient from Hard News indicates that while there was advance knowledge of the terrorist attack on the CRPF camp in Rampur, the Uttar Pradesh government headed by Chief Minister Mayawati claimed that it had not received intelligence from the Centre. It also reveals other gaps in the state intelligence network. The article closes with this question:

If [terrorists] can attack a CRPF camp and get away, what is the fate of ordinary people?

8 killed as terrorists attack CRPF centre in Rampur

Mera Bharat Mahan's dreary task of documenting terrorist attacks in India:

From The Hindu, 8 killed as terrorists attack CRPF centre in Rampur: Uttar Pradesh police suspect the involvement of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"Eight persons including seven jawans were killed in a pre-dawn terrorist attack on the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) Group Centre in Rampur in Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday."

The article goes on to say that central intelligence agencies had alerted the UP government about terrorist attacks on the camp, only 5 days after the UP courthouse blasts.

Bomb blasts in UP

According to the New York Times (via The Jawa Report) "At least 13 people were killed and more than 60 were wounded Friday [November 23, 2007] in a series of nearly simultaneous bomb blasts outside courthouses in three cities in northern India, the authorities said."


2007-11-23 tagged map by user - Tagzania