Muslims Are Not Violent or Barbarians, Nor Is The Book They Revere Most a Book of Hate

Listen to excerpts from Outlook's Islamophobia issue,by Pragya Vats  #outlookmagazine #muslims #islamophobia

Transcript

00:00 This is Pragya and I bring to you excerpts from current issue of Outlook on Islamophobia.

00:05 "Muslims are not violent or barbarians, nor is the book they revere most a book of hate,"

00:10 says political anthropologist Irfan Ahmed, who is a professor of anthropology and sociology

00:16 at Istanbul's İbn Haldun University in Turkey.

00:19 He is known for his work on various aspects of Islam and Islamophobia,

00:23 including Western and Indian thought.

00:26 He spoke to Snegdendu Bhattacharya from the Outlook.

00:29 When asked, "If we look at Islamophobia as a phenomena prevailing in many countries outside the Arab world,

00:35 how bad is the situation in India?"

00:37 Irfan says, "Muslims are living in a state of terror and without a choice.

00:41 Islamophobia has led to ugly consequences.

00:44 Muslims' lives are marked by social dispossession, routine humiliation,

00:49 worsening economic status, and attacks on their cultural symbols like the hijab, mosques, and Urdu."

00:55 "We have recurring cases of Muslims being lynched, with the authorities doing nothing or very little.

01:00 What they eat, wear, watch, speak, and how they behave in public space

01:05 are all dictated by the ideology of a Hindu nation."

01:09 A democracy that robs its own citizens to pursue their own choice and aspirations

01:13 is clearly anything but democracy.

01:16 Notice that phrases vilifying Muslims seem to have become acceptable.

01:20 Love jihad, corona jihad, land jihad,

01:23 in use are slur words denoting Muslim-wretched economic conditions too.

01:27 Red jihad, puncture wala, because Muslims are automobile mechanics.

01:31 What is worse is that amidst such rampant dispossession against Muslims,

01:35 it is the talk of Hindu genocide that people like Major Surendra Poonia,

01:40 with 6 lakh Twitter followers, promote on social media.

01:43 To transform aggressors into victims, it happened in the 1984 Sixth Programme too.

01:49 An anthropologist Veena Das noted, "is to defy facts and justice."

01:54 Among Western states, aggressive French Islamophobia is similar to the one in India.

01:59 Compared to other countries in both France and India,

02:02 the state and non-state actors have been more widely involved tacitly,

02:06 or otherwise, as the driver of Islamophobia.

02:09 Today is getting darker than yesterday, and tomorrow seems no less dark.

02:14 But we must nurse hope and work for a better future.

02:17 Without hope, an ethical life is almost impossible.

02:21 As oxygen is indispensable to biological life, so is hope for a moral life.

02:26 To read these and more, read the current issue of Outlook magazine.