Prime Minister Manmohan Singh might consider his speech at the recent conference of Muslim ulemas in New Delhi as "bold". He did tell them that Islam needed to reform and that the leadership of the community must aim at modernising the 1300-year-old religion. He asked them to "provide sound leadership to all so that Muslims could march shoulder-to-shoulder (sic) to further India's progress". His reform prescription for them had wide applications - modern education in madarsas, encouraging Muslim girls to attend schools, etc. At least one of the reports noted that there was no woman at the conference.

The same day, there was another report. It was about a Sharia judge breaking the marriage of a Saudi tribal woman with two children on the ground that her alliance with a person of lower status was not valid. Significantly, the woman was not even offered a hearing. Her plea that she was happy with the marriage and that she was not willing to go back to her half-brother's house was not heard at all. In fact, she preferred going to jail to living with her brothers who were planning to marry her off to someone else.

Is there a connection between the two events? Tragically, is that there is. The Muslim community generally looks to Saudi Arabia as a role model where the religion is followed in its puritanical form. No other religious function can ever be held even in private in Saudi Arabia. Sharia is strictly implemented and women have no freedom. The law says that even in a case of rape, there has to be at least one male witness. Otherwise, the woman would be punished, treating rape as adultery. Even the slightest questioning of Islam or about existence of Allah invites death sentence.

It is to such a country that Muslims from all over the world go on an annual religious pilgrimage and come back with their conviction strengthened about an "ideal Islamic society". In addition, there is flow of funds and learning material from Saudi Arabia to Muslims in other countries. The brainwashing of young minds of the community thus begins from the madarsas, which are mostly funded by Saudi Arabia.

And what do these Saudi schools teach? As Thomas Friedman reported in the New York Times two years ago, liberal Saudi writer Raid Quasti wrote in Saudi English language daily Arab News about the "monster" terrorists that have grown up in Saudi Arabia. Friedman also quotes what another Arabic professor Hamza Qablan al-Mozainy of King Saud University wrote in daily Al Watan about "the culture of death in our schools".

After describing in details how that culture brainwashes adolescents, the professor asked, "Does the Education Ministry really know about the activities taking place in schools?" These are not Western perceptions. The quotes are from the few concerned Saudis themselves who have dared to come out despite the threat of facing a fatwa.

In many countries across the world, including some Muslim nations, seeds of terror are being sown through madarsas. The recent revelation about the plot in the UK to blow up 10 planes exposed the influence that radical Islam has on impressionable Muslim minds. The fact that two of the plotters arrested are recently converted Muslim, too, has a message. Do we find converts to any other religion so passionately tutored to killing innocents? Why is this disease infecting only the followers of Islam?

Look at the Mumbai bombings. Would it be fair to blame the police if the evidence leads to Muslim households? An entire community should not be blamed for the wrong doings of a few. But the problem arises when the community refuses to do anything internally to eradicate the springs of terror. For instance, what do the madarsas teach about the Quranic reference to killing of infidels?

Merely teaching of science and mathematics is not enough. After all, the activists involved in the recent London plot, the attack on World Trade Centre in New York, the Madrid bombings the pre-Diwali blasts in Delhi, etc., were all taught science and mathematics, too. What made them embrace terrorism?

Do the grudges the community bears justify worldwide terror? Or, is the 'grievance' only an excuse for brainwashing the entire community to believe that Islam is in danger? Or, is it all set to conquer the world and regain the glory it had between the seventh and 15th centuries?

The secularists, of course, shy away from these questions. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, for instance, could have asked the conference to declare Osama bin Laden or Jaish-e-Mohammad Azhar Masood apostates. He could have asked the community leaders to find out why their members refuse to identify these merchants of terror as the culprits of Islam, instead of holding them as heroes. But can the Prime Minister do so when one of his Cabinet colleagues had campaigned in Bihar in the last Assembly election with an Osama look-alike to garner Muslim votes?

The Saudi woman's plight, I narrated in the beginning of the article, could very well have been played out in India, too. In fact, there were many similar incidents in this country. To ask for improvement of women's status within the Muslim community is easy but the real test comes when one dares to suggest that no law, despite being claimed to be laid out by God, is immutable. Yet another test would be to exhort Muslims to have a re-look at what Sharia says about women and examine such a gender specific discrimination in the law that was laid down centuries ago in a largely different environment.

That courage is too much to expect from Indian leaders who are openly pursuing a policy of minority appeasement, thanks to vote-bank politics; the Congress Government's response to the Shah Bano case proved it in the 1980s. The 'secularists', because of their reluctance to confront the core issues behind terrorism, help perpetuate the fundamentalists among Indian Muslims that tend to see Osama bin Laden as the community's saviour rather than its shame.

Courtesy: The Pioneer, August 26, 2006