Related Posts

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…

(Un)Created(?) – Quran Desecration, part 2

A question for the Muslim community: why we are offended when the Qur’an is desecrated? (See previous post for details.) Echoing the grand debate most associated with the Mutazilah, the Qur’an is either created, or uncreated. If it is uncreated, then that means the Qur’an is co-eternal with God, meaning that something else exists with God. So, as a second “eternal,” I can understand why Muslims would be upset; of course, it also means that they are only superficially believers in tawhid. To be offended, is to deny what it means to be Muslim. If you argue that the Qur’an…