How can they say this? Please understand one thing, the way people are being killed, ordinary Indians are beginning to find it difficult to walk on the streets… I said this in Parliament, too, that ordinary Indians are beginning to feel insecure, that if they go to the mosque or the temple and they may be killed… But the Muslim community is now facing two kinds of insecurity. The first, like other Indians, that they may be killed in terrorist attacks, and the second, that in the name of investigation, the arrests will start... It has happened to me as well. I was at the airport and I heard a small voice telling his mother: “Mother, look, here’s bin Laden!”
Osama bin Laden?
He didn’t say Osama, he only said bin Laden. When I turned around to see, he was such a small boy, a boy who could not even have been reading or made to understand what is going on. That if you see someone with a beard or cap or kurta-pyjama that he is not bin Laden. Just like when you show a school-going child a picture of a man with horns on his head and long teeth on either side, and you ask him, who is this, and he will say, it’s a rakshas, a demon. He will say that, won’t he? Muslims are beginning to acquire the same face.
The whole situation has become so fragile and so serious at the same time that civil society, the political class and the police must together work at fixing it.
I will give you another example. A senior leader of the Samajwadi Party, today, is holding several meetings and talking about Muslims being killed in fake encounters, about human rights. I feel good about it too. But I question their motives. When their party was in power in Uttar Pradesh, a maulvi named Maulvi Zubair Iman was picked up from the mosque, killed in one place and shown that he died somewhere else. Even till today, nothing has been proved.
It is all a political game that is being played out in the name of national security. On the one side, there are these people who are provoking Muslims, on the other hand, there are those people who are saying that if we have a judicial inquiry (into the Batla House encounter), then the morale of the police will be lowered. What does this mean?
So, on the one hand, there is the Samajwadi Party and, on the other, there is the BJP?
I am talking about all parties, including people in the Congress party.
In 1947, your grandfather, Maulana Ahmad Madani was a big leader who spoke up against Mohammed Ali Jinnah…
Absolutely true. He opposed the two-nation theory and looked at composite nationalism in the framework of Islam. He said it was un-Islamic to demand the two-nation theory. He wrote a book called Nationalism and Islam and invoked the Quran and the Hadees to prove that the demand of the two-nation theory is not Islamic. That was composite nationalism, and we still believe in this firmly.
Today, after 60 years, do you feel there is a partition of the mind in India today?
Absolutely right. We cannot divide our India, but the people are being divided today, their minds are being divided. And to a great extent, they are succeeding. (But) for Muslims, there is no better country than India, no country in which Muslims are doing as well as they are doing in India. Our complaints, our objections, our problems exist, and we will continue to fight our fight for justice, but in other countries the situation is much worse.
One question on Darul Uloom Deoband. People such as Osama bin Laden said they get inspiration from the Deobandi school of thought…