Click to play videoHyderabad: Yunus Khan spends most of his time in a seminary, teaching students about Islam . But today the 28-year-old teacher is travelling around the country with a message of peace.
He feels it's high time people like him took a stand against terror.
“We teach children to live in harmony. Islam doesn't encourage terror and this message needs to be sent out,” he says.
Yunus Khan is among the 4,000 Muslim clerics who came together in Hyderabad from seminaries as far as Deoband in UP, West Bengal and Gujarat.
The two-day event at Hyderbabad comes eight months after Deoband, India’s most well-known seminary, announced a fatwa on terrorism.
The fatwa declares that "Islam does not permit killings of innocent persons in retaliation of any criminal act."
“We’ve signed this document and shows to the world we are not for terrorism,” says a cleric Ahmed Shabir, who’s also the state president for the Jamiat-ul-Uloom seminary.
Several politicians, too, attended the event, indicating their role in organising this event. But the clerics remained diplomatic about the extent to which they were aided by the Andhra government
“The state government has always helped the Jamaat and hope will continue to do so,” says Shabir.
So in an election year where terror is emerging as a key issue, clerics like Yunus Khan are making sure their message and their vote matters just like everyone else.
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