Related Posts

Weep not

What do you call someone who doesn’t follow the tradition of Prophet Muhammad? Who in fact does the opposite of the tradition of the Prophet? What do you call someone who relishes in the death of the Prophet’s family? Who celebrates the murder of the Prophet’s grandson by killing those who believe it to be a sorrowful event? Muslims (not most, all) would call him a murderer. To everyone else they are Muslims. We Muslims are more than a nationality, an ethnicity, a collection of people who speak the same language. We are those who have promised to submit ourselves…

Hindu followers of Imam Husayn

Yoginder Sikand, a scholar whose transnational work on Islamist movements is what I’m most familiar with, has an interesting article on Hindu followers of Imam Husayn. The piece is mostly historical, but the last paragraph is interesting: The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. The younger generation abandoning their ancestral heritage, often now seen as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can a comfortable liminality be sustained, and ambiguous identities seem crushed under the relentless pressure to conform to the logic of neatly demarcated ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities. And…