What is the place of terror in Islam?’’ It was in response to this question by poet-lyricist Javed Akhtar, a few days after the serial blasts on Mumbai’s local trains, that Fuzail-ur-Rahman Usmani, Punjab’s chief mufti, issued a fatwa against Terrible Tuesday’s terror.
‘‘There’s a world of difference between Islamic jihad and terrorism,’’ said Usmani, reading out the page-long fatwa at ‘Citizens Against Terror’, a public meeting held at K C College on Thursday evening. ‘‘A jihad secures for people their basic rights and freedoms while terrorism snatches away these very rights and freedoms.’’ Organisers of the event will translate and distribute Usmani’s fatwa in the coming days.
At the meeting, Usmani and Veer Bhadra Mishra, the priest of Varanasi’s Sankatmochan temple that was bombed on March 7 last year, saluted the city’s courage in the face of terror and urged Mumbaikars to maintain religious unity and ensure there’s no repeat of the 1993 communal riots.
As investigators assert that Islamic militant groups are behind the 7/11 bombings so far, speakers at the event were at pains to urge that Islam, indeed no religion, permitted the taking of lives.
An emotionally charged Akhtar told the gathering: ‘‘When I think of the train blasts, I ask myself, what do the people who do these acts look like? Did they see the faces of the people who came and sat in the train beside the bombs they had placed? Did they go home that night and play with their children, talk to their parents, smile at their wives? Could they sleep at night?’’
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