Click to play videoDeoband (Uttar Pradesh): In the aftermath of the terror attack in Mumbai, Pakistan’s permanent envoy to UN Mohammad Haroon had invited Islamic scholars from the powerful and the orthodox Muslim seminary Darul Uloom of Deoband in Uttar Pradesh to terror-infested areas of Pakistan.
The idea was to take the seminary’s help and convince terrorists to give up arms.
But was it shrewd attempt to pass the blame on the orthodox Islamic seminary? At least that’s what the clerics of the seminary seem to believe.
When a CNN-IBN team traveled to Deoband to gauge the mood, it found the corridors of Darul Uloom buzzing with muffled laughter. Students of the 150-year-old Islamic seminary are relishing every detail that appears in the Urdu press about the man who hurled his shoe at the American President
“It says they have announced a Rs 30-crore prize for the shoe,” chuckled a student flashing one of such reports.
Iraqi journalist Muntader al Zaidi seems to have become an overnight celebrity at Darul Uloom but the elders are cautioning the young to mind their humour.
They fear that overzealous journalists visiting the guarded campus might see an element of fundamentalism in their jokes.
“We are against some policies of President Bush, but we are defintely not sympathetic towards terrorism,” says Darul Uloom’s information coordinator Adil Siddiqui.
In recent years, an unspoken fear has dissolved into the atmosphere of this orthodox seminary – a fear that someone, somewhere might use its name and its teachings to justify an act of violence.
In recent years, Deoband had to face the heat for being source of hardline Islam followed by the likes of Taliban.
Perhaps it was the clout which Deoband wields in the subcontinent's madrassas that the Pakistan's UN envoy referred to. But the clerics are not amused
“It’s an attempt to damage Darul Uloom's image and attempt a character assassination of Deoband. They are trying to break the backbone of our movement , our coalition to fight against terrorism,” says cleric Maulana Mohd Khaliq Madrasi.
Throughout 2008, Darul Uloom has been pushing for an image makeover, even issuing the first ever fatwa against the mindless killing of innocents in the name of Islam
So while on the one hand, it’s an attempt by Darul Uloom to distance itself from any subject pertaining to terror by giving a cold snub to Pakistan, the Deobandi Ulema have also reasserted their nationalist credentials which it was renowned for during the days of India freedom struggle.
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