If anything, Guha is being soft on those Moslem League idiots.

According to blurb the book has little known facts about the pressure that USA exerted on Britain to give India independence and how the British having realized that Indian congress would not join them in the great game against soviet union, used Muslim League,Jinnah and partition to achieve their strategic objectives.

Will do from now on. Thanks for pointing it out.

Those are all lame excuses. The truth is “Nehruvian secularism” has come to mean “appeasement of the minorities”.

Come on Krishnan, calling Ambedkar as the leader of the Hindu community is a big stretch. .. He ended up a non-Hindu. If you think about it both Nehru and Ambedkar are non-Hindus but pushed through reforms in Hindu personal law.

–> I didnt say Ambedkar was the leader of hindu community. He was one among them(which is how I referred to him). If Nehru had similar support from political leaders from other religions for reform, he might have succeeded. Ambedkar became a buddhist in 1956. Before that, he wasnt an atheist or agnostic, right ?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50097-2004Jan2.html

Arlington, Va.: I would hate for you to blame the separation requirements solely on one ethnic group, the Arabs. I used to attend a mosque in Cleveland, Ohio that was primarily Pakastani and the board members of the mosque mostly Pakastani. They required all women to enter from a different door and pray on the upper level as opposed to the lower level where the men prayed. This is hurtful to the Muslim society to put the blame on one ethnic group. Who and what is to blame is ignorance and backwardness that comes from a small minority of men and women that control the majority of the Muslim community. Asra Nomani: Dearest friend, Your point is very legitimate, and one that I have thought about deeply. After all, of the five members on our board, one is from India (my father) and the other from Pakistan. And let’s acknowledge that, along with Wahhabis and Salafis, scholars from other schools of jurisprudence have accepted the segregation and absence of women from mosques. I will tell you why my experience and reporting prompted me to identify Arab culture. In part, Islamic scholars chronicle the introduction of segregation and partition in Islamic history to Arab culture. Also, in talking to so many members of mosques in America, it is with the arrival of students and immigrants from Arab countries that partitions started getting higher and higher in mosques. You are absolutely right, however, that Muslims of other ethnicities cling to these ideas of separation and silence. I, too, am very sensitive to the point that you are making for in my travels through India and Pakistan, I was able to enter only three mosques and was not allowed to even enter the mosque next to my ancestral village home. Ultimately, you are absolutely right. We must liberate ourselves from oppressive thinking expressed quite universally throughout not only the Muslim world, but the larger global community.

This is an Islamic perspective from Bangladesh on why women should be allowed inside mosques. The writer is the Chairman of Islamic Information Bureau Bangladesh.

Women constitute fifty percent of the population. Without the active participation of women no society can make any meaningful progress, neither materially nor spiritually. Our society however hardly realizes this. We therefore see that women, with a few exception, are still not been allowed to enter the Masjid (mosque) in Bangladesh although nobody can think of changing this morbid society without the active participation of the half of its population.

Hindus / Hinduism has been hammered so long for its treatment of Dalits / restricting their access to the places of worship etc.. etc.. and have been told that the egalitarian religions of Christianity/Islam allowed them free access and that’s the reason for conversion of lower caste into those religions etc..etc.. Never knew until a couple of years back that the egalitarian aspect stops with just the men..

A Jamaat is a community of male elders who adjudicate on family matters. For the last five years STEPS has been concentrating on issues concerning Muslim women because they have been receiving petitions from Muslim women regarding the injustice being meted out to Muslim women by the Jamaat. To tackle this issue, STEPS organised several workshops, seminars and conferences. From this evolved the idea to build a separate mosque for women as a space to pray, to meet, to talk, to discuss grievances and to adjudicate on family matters. Sharifa and the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat Committee have been directly confronting religious leaders and male scholars who have been arguing that Muslim women have more respect in their community than a Hindu or a Christian. They point out that Islam accepts widow remarriage, the right to divorce and access to property. According to Sharifa, all this might have been true in the Prophet’s period when women had free access to the mosque and also to the Prophet’s abode to clarify their doubts. But at present, the Muslim woman’s fate is decided by some of the practices that have become part of Islamic customs. Today’s Muslim woman has to pay a huge dowry in order to get married. The Islamic custom of mehar is also there but while the mehar is a token amount, the dowry demanded by the groom’s family can be an exorbitant amount. Talaq has three stages before the separation can be pronounced finally but most men who have said Talaq over the phone, by letter, through the Jamaat and even through the internet, have treated this casually. And the Jamaat decides on issues like dowry, divorce, domestic violence, custody and child abuse without the presence of the woman concerned, for, the Jamaat sits in the mosque where the women are not allowed. The woman cannot give her side of the story nor can she hear the judgement although what is being discussed intimately concerns her as a person.

I used to oppose the implementation of the Uniform Commercial Code but I support it now. The regressive elements in the Indian Muslim Personal Law Board, the Sunni Waqf Board and whatever other organizations control the Muslim personal law issues are incapable/unwilling to modernize the Muslim personal law especially when it comes to issues of alimony/child support.

Muslims have now had over 60 years to fix their personal laws and though they have made changes, the changes are too late and too few. The state needs to step in and modernize the laws.