This is where the debate truly failed to meet. Nadvi spoke at the level of personal belief and moral philosophy. Akhtar spoke at the level of society, history, and institutions.

The debate between Javed Akhtar and Mufti Shamail Abdullah Nadvi, held on 20 December 2025 at Delhi’s Constitutional Club and moderated by  Saurabh Dwivedi of Lallantop, was important simply because it took place. In India today, public disagreements on religion rarely reach the stage of an open, face-to-face discussion. They usually collapse long before any discussion into outrage, boycott calls, or cancellation. This debate broke that pattern.

The event also had a long and bitter history. Months earlier, Javed Akhtar had been invited by the Urdu Academy of West Bengal to preside over a mushaira. Mufti Nadvi publicly opposed the invitation and appealed to Muslims to reject the event. The controversy grew, the mushaira was cancelled, and the matter ended without closure.

Later, Nadvi announced that a debate with Akhtar would take place on December 20. That history gave the debate added weight. It was not just about God; it was also about how disagreement should  be handled openly.

On the surface, the topic was simple: does God exist? But the debate quickly showed that the two speakers were not addressing the same question.

Mufti Nadvi came prepared. He spoke clearly, calmly, and with structure. His arguments were rooted in classical Islamic theology and philosophy. He used familiar lines of reasoning about contingency, infinite rigorous,moral order, dependence, and meaning. He stayed focused on the question as he understood it and kept returning to it. For many viewers including myself, and a large section of Muslims, this clarity made him appear the stronger participant. 

Javed Akhtar, by contrast, relied on arguments he has repeated for years in public forums. These arguments were not necessarily weak, but they were not tailored to the debate at hand. He did not directly engage with the theological framework Nadvi was using. At times, the exchange felt less like a debate and more like a loose conversation. The difference in preparation and argument was visible.

This is why many concluded that Nadvi emerged the clear winner (I believe he had won the debate thumpingly). But the deeper problem -was not performance. It was a conceptual confusion.

Javed Akhtar’s criticism has never really been about God as a metaphysical idea. His target has always been organised religion. He opposes religion as a system of power—one that controls behaviour, enforces conformity, claims moral superiority, and often causes harm. When Akhtar speaks against God, he is usually speaking against this system, not against spirituality or inner belief.

Mufti Nadvi, however, defended a very different idea of God. He spoke of God as personal, inward, and experiential. His God was about conscience, comfort, moral grounding, and meaning. This God was not tied tightly to institutions, laws, or clerical authority. In a sense, Nadvi tried to separate God from religion itself.

Because of this, the two were talking past each other from the beginning.

Akhtar criticised a God that comes with rules, punishment, and social control. Nadvi defended a God that exists beyond institutions. Akhtar challenged religion as it functions in society. Nadvi spoke of faith as it exists in the individual heart.

This mismatch weakened Akhtar’s position in the debate. He never fully clarified whether he was rejecting God altogether, rejecting religious institutions, or rejecting the social use of religion. That lack of clarity made his arguments seem scattered.

At the same time, Nadvi’s position also has limits.

The idea of a religion-free God may work philosophically, but socially it is fragile. In real life, belief does not exist in isolation. Most people do not arrive at God through abstract thinking. They encounter God through family, community, rituals, language, and tradition. For the majority, God exists because religion exists. Remove institutions, and for most people the very idea of God becomes unclear.

Believing in God while rejecting religion entirely is possible for a small, educated, and secure section of society. It is not how belief functions for most people. Akhtar understands this reality. His skepticism comes not from metaphysics, but from observing how religion actually operates in the world.

This is where the debate truly failed to meet. Nadvi spoke at the level of personal belief and moral philosophy. Akhtar spoke at the level of society, history, and institutions. One was asking how faith should be understood. The other was describing how belief actually works.

Both positions are internally consistent. But they operate at different levels. Because this difference was never resolved, the debate became a series of parallel arguments rather than a direct engagement.

Still, the debate mattered.

It showed that disagreement does not have to lead to exclusion. It showed that difficult questions can be discussed publicly without fear. In a time when religion is often used to silence criticism and atheism is often dismissed as arrogance, this conversation—however flawed—was necessary.

More such debates are not the compulsion of the hour. A society that cannot argue openly will eventually stop thinking altogether. Disagreement, when expressed honestly and faced directly, strengthens public life far more than silence ever can.

This is a question that Muslims themselves must confront honestly and internally, rather than deflecting scrutiny by labelling all inquiry as Islamophobia.

Once again, terror has struck Australia’s Jewish community. In the aftermath, a familiar argument has surfaced in the media: that only a handful of individuals, three people out of hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide, carried out this act of extreme violence, and that the wider Muslim community has nothing to do with it. This assertion is repeatedly offered as a moral and religious defense and, on the surface, appears valid.

However, what is conveniently overlooked is that celebrations and open approval of this massacre are visible across sections of the Muslim world, particularly on social media and in private conversations. Alongside this, there has also been what can only be described as cosmetic condemnation and performative solidarity, expressed through slogans such as “Islam is against violence” and “Islam condemns this.”

In this process, the victims cease to be those who lost their lives. Instead, Islam, the religion itself is positioned as the primary victim, and the public energy shifts toward defending the religion rather than mourning the dead.

This raises a more uncomfortable but necessary question. Why does this phenomenon recur? Why does violence against Jewish civilians provoke not only silence but, in some quarters, open approval? Unless this question is confronted honestly, beyond politically correct language and defensive posturing, the cycle of denial, hypocrisy, and repetition will continue, costing more lives and deepening hatred across communities.

In the aftermath of this horrific attack on civilians, another familiar narrative has been foregrounded. Considerable emphasis has been placed on the fact that a Muslim saved people during the attack and that another Muslim stood up against the Islamist terrorists. The issue, however, is not whether a Muslim acted humanely in the face of inhuman violence. That is an expectation of any human being.

The more fundamental question is why the first individual was driven to carry out the attack in the first place. Until this question is addressed honestly, there is little meaning in celebrating the second act of resistance against jihadist violence. Acts of courage during terror attacks deserve recognition, but they cannot substitute for a serious examination of the ideological and religious conditioning that produces such violence. Without confronting these roots, such narratives risk becoming distractions rather than pathways to solutions.

Each time such an attack occurs, a familiar defence is invoked: that this is not true Islam, that this is not the Islam followed by the vast majority of Muslims. While this may be factually correct, it leaves a deeper and more unsettling question unanswered.

Why are these acts of terror repeatedly carried out in the name of Islam? This is a question that Muslims themselves must confront honestly and internally, rather than deflecting scrutiny by labelling all inquiry as Islamophobia. Genuine introspection is not an attack on faith. It is a necessary condition for preventing its distortion into an instrument of violence.

Until this question is faced squarely, moral disclaimers will continue to ring hollow and fail to address the root of the problem.

Arfa Khanum Sherwani, described the Bondi Beach attack as Islamist terrorist violence targeting a peaceful gathering. In response, she was subjected to sharp criticism from sections of the Muslim intelligentsia. She was accused of liberal hypocrisy, of playing into the hands of the West, and of immaturity, among other charges.

This reaction is revealing. It shows how even naming and condemning violence carried out in the name of Islam provokes hostility rather than introspection. The focus shifts away from the crime itself and toward discrediting the individual who dares to call it out.

If thirteen or fifteen people are killed in the name of any ideology, that ideology must be subjected to scrutiny. The problem lies not with those who identify and condemn ideological violence, but with the refusal to examine the ideas that legitimize it. The instinct to silence criticism rather than engage with it reflects a deeper discomfort with accountability.

Many argue that such attacks are a consequence of the war in Gaza and Israel’s military actions. However, this particular attack targeted Jews in Australia, was carried out by a man of Pakistani origin, and occurred on Australian soil. It had no direct connection to the conflict in Gaza.

Until recently, some of our left-liberal circles argued that the attack of 7 October was justified, claiming it was inevitable because seventy-five years of history lay behind it. Even if one were to accept the relevance of historical context, a basic question remains unanswered. What had Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Australia done to people living far away in Pakistan to provoke such violence?

Yet the attack exposes something more troubling. The Gaza conflict is increasingly being conflated and weaponised to justify hostility toward Jewish communities across the world. Political anger over a distant war is redirected into hatred against civilians who have no role in that conflict.

This is deeply concerning. Slogans such as “from the river to the sea” can easily be stripped of political context and transformed into rhetoric that legitimises indiscriminate violence. What begins as a political position risks mutating into a justification for collective punishment and terror.

This slippage between protest and violence must be recognized and confronted before it becomes normalized, and the texts that give moral justification to Muslims to carry out such attacks such as Sahih Bukhari’s Hadees in which Prophet Mohammed reported to have said that ‘The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

What it does require is a responsible, contextual explanation of such texts—how they emerged in specific historical circumstances, how classical scholars understood their limits, and why they cannot be mechanically or morally applied to contemporary civilian life.

Islamic history itself offers clear counterpoints to extremist readings. Jewish–Muslim collaboration was not an anomaly but a lived reality: the Jewish physician who served Sultan Salahuddin Ayyubi, or the Jewish neighbour of the great scholar Abdullah bin Mubarak, are reminders that coexistence, trust, and shared civic life were integral to Muslim societies. These realities stand in direct contradiction to modern attempts to universalise selective texts into timeless mandates of violence.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

A community that refuses to ask hard questions cannot meaningfully oppose the violence committed in its name.

The Delhi blast has exposed a deep intellectual dishonesty that is rampant in our public discourse. Within minutes of the attack, a cliched line of action and thought emerged: that the attack was meant to “break the nation,” to “polarise,” and therefore must be treated cautiously. But this narrative sidesteps the central truth—that the perpetrator acted in the name of an ideology, a self-declared inspiration that many refuse to confront.

To put the facts straight, the individual now proven to have carried out the attack was a doctor, Umar Nabi — a detail that makes the incident even more unsettling.

It  demolishes a comfortable myth long circulated in public: that education, development, economic upliftment, social recognition and what not can automatically neutralise religious and specifically Islamic radicalisation. This narrative has failed repeatedly. Many of the individuals behind major terror attacks across the world have been highly educated, trained in elite institutions, and fully integrated into modern life.

Terrorism i.e killings of civilians for any reason whatsoever, therefore, is not simply the product of deprivation, nor the natural extension of religious identity. It is far more complex. Recognising this complexity is the first step to find a solution.

Recognising this complexity is essential. If we fall back into predictable patterns — one side painting an entire community as suspect, the other denying any internal crisis — we learn nothing.

The attack should force us to confront uncomfortable questions: How do educated individuals embrace violence against fellow human beings? What makes a successful Doctor transform himself into a Human Bomb, what shapes his conviction? What ideological, psychological, or political currents draw them in? What failures — institutional, social, intelligence-related — allowed this to happen? And what safeguards must be built so that it never happens again?

The 10th November 2025 attack in Delhi has cracked public discourse wide open. A large section of the Hindu community has responded with chest-thumping triumphalism, claiming the blast has finally vindicated their suspicions about Muslims. In turn, many Muslims have rushed to defend Islam as inherently peaceful, and sections of the left-liberal commentators have unquestioningly adopted this defensive posture. Amid this noise, the one thing the country urgently needs—honest introspection—is almost entirely missing. Families have lost loved ones. People have died. Yet the national conversation is trapped in accusation and denial instead of truth-seeking.

The identity of the attacker makes the event even more unsettling. Umar Nabi was not an impoverished drifter or an undereducated youth; he was a doctor. His profile obliterates the comforting myth that education, economic mobility, professional success or integration automatically inoculates individuals against radicalisation.

This narrative has been disproved repeatedly. Some of the most destructive terrorists—from Al-Qaeda to ISIS to Indian Mujahideen—have come from elite institutions. Radicalisation is not the child of poverty, it is the child of conviction. That conviction may be ideological, theological, psychological, or political—but it is conviction, not deprivation, that transforms an educated doctor into a human bomb.

This demands serious inquiry. How do educated individuals embrace violent extremism? What shapes their certainty? What ideological ecosystems make violence feel morally justified—or even sacred? What political or communal narratives fertilise such thinking? What institutional failures—intelligence, policing, community engagement—allowed this to unfold? And what safeguards must be built so it never happens again?

The inconsistency is glaring. When a Muslim figure achieves something remarkable—whether Salahuddin Ayyubi in history or Zohran Mamdani in contemporary politics—the global Ummah celebrates it as a victory of Islam. Young men in Kurla proudly claim Zohran’s win as their own. But when violence is committed explicitly in the name of Islam, the same Ummah retreats behind denial. Success is collective; violence is conveniently individualised. This is moral incoherence.

Even if one grants, for argument’s sake, that false-flag operations occur in global geopolitics, a car exploding in the heart of the capital cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy without evidence. Such claims have become an intellectual opium for the left-liberal class terrified of being labelled Islamophobic. Rather than interrogate the ideological motivations behind the blast, they cling to comfortable fantasises.

The situation mirrors October 7. There too, defenders justified mass killings under the language of “resistance,” while blaming Israel’s intelligence for failing to prevent an attack whose ideological basis was plainly declared. The question practically writes itself: if these same intellectuals were told that someone like Umar Nabi planned to massacre civilians at the Red Fort, would they alert the state? Or would they they go gungho over how the Muslims are oppressed.

The claim that “terror has no religion” collapses when perpetrators themselves invoke Quranic verses and Hadith as justification. External commentators have no authority to dismiss the ideological motivations confessed by the attackers. Muslim communities must confront this directly. Calling for introspection is not endorsing the Hindutva narrative; it is demanding moral responsibility from within.

Many Muslims who hesitate to condemn the blast forget that Muslims themselves increasingly become targets of Islamist violence. The attack is not only against innocents; it desecrates the dignity of the religion they claim to honour. If alleged blasphemy by Nupur Sharma could summon tens of thousands into the streets, then the murder of thirteen people in the name of Islam should evoke ten times the outrage. Yet instead, some justify the killings privately or downplay them publicly. This selective morality is hypocrisy of the highest order.

The left-liberal ecosystem reacts predictably: blame intelligence failure, demand resignations, stop the inquiry there. What they refuse to examine is the ideological worldview that produces such massacres. 13 individuals died. Yet the conversation instantly shifts to the fear of Islamophobia—as if hypothetical prejudice outweighs actual corpses lying on Delhi’s streets. This inversion of moral priority is staggering.

Muslims must confront this honestly. Three choices remain: fully accept literalist readings, reinterpret the tradition rigorously, or abandon passages irreconcilable with contemporary ethics. Anything else is intellectual beating around the bush.

A community that refuses to ask hard questions cannot meaningfully oppose the violence committed in its name. At this moment, moral clarity can not be optional—it is the only path forward.

If we retreat into binaries—one side criminalising an entire community, the other denying any internal crisis—we learn nothing. This moment should not deepen fault lines; it should be the beginning of an honest resolution. Only a society capable of honest, uncomfortable introspection—free from vindictiveness on one side and denial on the other—can hope to prevent the next act of violence.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

When asked what finally broke the camel’s back, he explained that tensions within SIMI had been simmering…

The interviewee is a senior jailed leader of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), imprisoned for over 15 years across various district and central prisons, with several trials still pending. This reporter met him during a court hearing. SIMI, banned in 2001, was a student organization accused of extremist activities. 

His name appears in Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within by Shishir Gupta as an attendee of the 2006 Ujjain meeting, and in multiple intelligence and media reports linking him closely to Safdar Nagori and other top SIMI leaders. And at the time of his arrest undoubtedly top 10 leaders of the organization. He spoke on strict conditions of anonymity.

The interview has been edited and condensed.

He says his journey into SIMI began rather innocuously — through a study centre in his locality operated by the organization. “I used to go there simply to study. They had good study material,” recalls the senior leader, now in his mid forties. But, he admits, that space gradually became his entry point into a world of ideas that would go on to take him to the path of Political Islam.

“Before the ban, I was not very active, I came into contact with them only eight months before the Ban” he says candidly. But the government’s ban on SIMI in 2001, he says, was a turning point. “It made me rethink my ideas, and the larger question of how Islam is being attacked in India. I began to ask myself — if an organization or an ideology is so vehemently targeted by the state, then perhaps there’s something in it that unsettles the powers that be.”

It was this line of thought that pushed him deeper into the Underground Islamist movement. “I began reading more, and became more active after the Ban,” he says. 

By Mid 2004, he found himself drawn into the organization’s inner circles. He recalls being part of several meetings that would later culminate in the eventual split within SIMI.

When asked what finally broke the camel’s back, he explained that tensions within SIMI had been simmering since Shahid Badr Falahi, SIMI President’s release from prison. By then, Falahi had already developed ideological differences with Safdar Nagori’s faction. 

Yet, the breaking point came with a meeting in Bengaluru, where a committee was formed to promote and campaign for an international Caliphate ( Khilafat) and explore possible approaches for jihad in India. When Falahi returned to Azamgarh, he and his supporters denounced these resolutions as reckless and suicidal.

Within twenty days, another meeting was convened in Azamgarh to revoke the Bengaluru decisions—an episode that coincided with Falahi’s formal retirement. “The revocation unsettled me no end, I realized then that they lacked the conviction to carry the struggle forward. The split that followed was inevitable—they were cowardly and hypocritical, willing to sacrifice Islam and the so-called radicals, to preserve SIMI’s image.”

When Falahi retired, he directed his supporters to withdraw completely from all forms of organizational work and activism. He instructed them to suspend any plans for agitation or mobilization and instead focus their entire effort on challenging the government’s proscription of SIMI before the Tribunal. 

This marked a decisive shift in SIMI’s internal orientation, signaling Falahi’s preference for a legal and defensive strategy over the confrontational path advocated by Nagori’s faction.

When asked about the approach of Falahi to go to the Tribunal to lift the ban, he scoffed: “How long have they been running to the Tribunal?” After this reporter answered “about 24 years,” he said, “There’s your answer. The Tribunal won’t solve this. We’ve wasted lakhs on that foolish body — seeking justice from the court of Batil (False Hood) will never restore the forces of Allah and His Messenger. 

When Justice Gita Mittal’s tribunal lifted the SIMI ban on 5 August 2008, the Union government immediately ran to the Supreme Court and obtained a stay the very next day. Even if the Tribunal decides in our favour it is of no use to us.

“The so-called moderate SIMI was filled with corrupt people,” he remarked sharply. 

“Let me tell you an incident—you know X , right?” he asked this reporter, I nodded in recognition. “He was suspended because he embezzled one lakh rupees from SIMI’s funds for his personal use. That’s your ‘moderate’ SIMI—the one celebrated by Muslim activists and sections of the left-leaning media as the real, legitimate organization.” 

He paused before adding, “They were morally compromised. That’s precisely why they were accepted by the mainstream.”

“This was not a one-off incident,” he emphasized. “It kept happening. The so-called Islamist activists, the self-styled mujahids, were involved in such acts repeatedly—even as they projected piety and hurled moral questions at others. We at the lower ranks had no idea. 

Only after rising within the organization did I begin to see how deep it ran. It was rampant, pervasive, and never made public, there was widespread corruption at the upper echelons of SIMI.”

He also accused Falahi faction of siding with the state and framing the Nagori Group, while projecting that a “hardline group” within SIMI pushed for militancy, and had hijacked the organization and he was fighting the same people that the state was fighting. 

By March 2006, the movement had practically become defunct, he says. Those who came to be labelled by the media as the Nagori group, he adds, were trying to revive the movement and continue its work.

Reflecting on his own activism and ideas , he says many of those later branded as the Nagori group were influenced by the Taliban’s regime in Afghanistan, which he saw as the only “true” example of social justice and Islam. 

“I read that a bag of money lay untouched for three days in Kabul,” he said. “That is Islam’s justice.” If we seek to implement the same in India, what is wrong?

If Hindutva forces can openly demand a Hindu Rashtra with the ruling party’s and its parent organizations blessing, why should Muslims be ashamed to assert their own religious aspirations? 

In a democracy, we have the same right to state our convictions — not a version concocted by mullahs or madrasas, but one grounded in the teachings of Allah and His Prophet. We are not inventing Islam; we are reclaiming the faith’s principles and asking for the muslims to follow what they claim to follow.

“Modi and Yogi have made our work easier—the rage is already there. The Muslim masses are crying out for a movement like SIMI. But the cowards and hypocrites who call themselves leaders of the Muslim community, this spineless leadership, cannot channelize that anger. They have betrayed the very people they claim to represent.”

On being asked about his thoughts of SIMI being involved in Terrorist acts? He said, “At the 2006 Ujjain meeting we resolved to carry out targeted attacks on Hindutva leaders and state agents we held responsible for crimes against Muslims — but we explicitly rejected suicide bombings and indiscriminate terror”.

Although the state has blamed SIMI for many attacks, he insisted, “We have never killed an Indian civilian” and categorically denied involvement in terrorist attacks.

He conceded the organisation discussed and even shortlisted targets — naming Pravin Togadia and L.K. Advani — arguing such killings would “send a strong message” to those who, in his view, violated the sanctity of their faith.

Apart from that admission, he told the reporter that much of what is already in the public record about the group’s activities is broadly accurate except the aspect mentioned above, that “SIMI was involved in terrorist activities”.

As the interview neared its end, he was asked about his thoughts on Safdar Nagori. His response was firm, “Safdar Nagori is a hero. He has never bowed before batil (falsehood), and he never will. We are proud of him and confident in his resolve. We expect nothing but our eventual release or martyrdom, Inshallah.”

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

The most powerful sections of Son of Hamas describe Yousef’s encounters with ordinary Israelis and Palestinians who refuse to kill….

Since the announcement of the ceasefire in Palestine, my thoughts have instinctively turned toward Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef. I’d been meaning to read it ever since a friend recommended it to me in late August. I finally sat down to read it four days ago — and it’s one of those rare books that leaves you troubled and thinking long after you’ve put it down.

In Son of Hamas, Mosab Hassan Yousef narrates one of the most morally fraught journeys of our time—the story of the son of a founding leader of Hamas who becomes an informant for Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet. The book is a profound and an insider’s reflection on one of the most complex human conflicts in modern history.

What stands out in Yousef’s account is not merely his personal reflections, but the human complexity he brings to the political tragedy of Palestine as the protagonist of his memoirs. He writes neither as a Palestinian nor as a sympathizer of Israel, but as a man shaped by ceaseless violence—prisons, bombings, raids, and death.

His politicization, unlike what is often imagined in Western commentary, does not stem from religious indoctrination but from lived experience: from watching his father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, and brutalized by Israeli forces. Politics, as Yousef’s story reminds us, does not grow out of ideology alone and primarily ; it takes root in suffering and in the injustices people endure in their daily lives.

Portrayal of his father might be deeply unsettling for Israeli readers. Far from the caricature of a fanatic and bloodthirsty cleric that dominates Israeli and Western discourse, Sheikh Hassan appears as a compassionate, devout, and humane man—a moral role model for a community often portrayed as barbaric and violent.

The dissonance between this portrayal and the over-demonized image of Hamas in mainstream narratives exposes the intellectual dishonesty that drives much of Western discourse. Israel, as experts point out, has inflated the image of Hamas to justify its militarization and continued occupation. The refusal to see humanity in the adversary is the first act of moral failure that sustains the cycle of violence.

Hamas’s ideology presents a profound obstacle to negotiated peace: its charter and public rhetoric leave little conceptual space for a permanent political settlement that recognises a Jewish national presence in historic Palestine.

That is not merely a tactical or strategic problem; it is a moral problem with no easy answers. If a movement’s stated aim is the elimination or delegitimization of ownership of land of a whole people, then conventional diplomatic tools — ceasefires, confidence-building measures, or even a two-state framework negotiated at elite levels — cannot by themselves resolve the underlying moral impasse.

Any political solution that ignores or paper-over these existential claims will be unstable at best and fraudulent at worst, because it fails to subject foundational ideas to the scrutiny they urgently require.

When Hamas consistently takes refuge in the Hadees of Prophet Mohammed in Sahih Muslim: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him”.

Is any viable, durable political solution possible without directly confronting the religious texts and beliefs that many cite as justification for violence? If a scripture — widely read and accepted by a large community — is interpreted to endorse the destruction of another people, can we realistically expect those who are referenced to be killed to simply sit back and await their own predicted annihilation? This isn’t a fringe citation; it is drawn from material many Sunni Muslims regard as authoritative and prophetic.

If political strategy proceeds while ignoring such claims, can we honestly expect peaceful coexistence —Public debate must therefore address not only borders and security arrangements, but also the ideational premises that have been used to justify the killing and dispossession and continues to do so of so many innocent people.

The book offers no comfort to either side. Yousef’s critique of Hamas is scathing; he does not romanticize its militancy and calls it for what it is. Yet he insists that such movements do not arise in a vacuum. They emerge from genuine political grievances, collective despair, and the absence of any viable political solution.

To dismiss every act of violence as “terrorism,” without engaging meaningfully with the structural causes that produce it, is to perpetuate a conflict that has already consumed generations.

At one point, Yousef recalls how his friend Saleh was killed by the Shin Bet and the IDF, and how his Israeli handler, Loai, broke down, lamenting: “He really believed he was doing something good for his people.” That admission—from within the Israeli intelligence establishment—captures the absurdity of the conflict. When both sides believe they are doing good, ridiculous and genocidal slogans begin to masquerade as viable solutions, solution is the most difficult thing to come to.

Yousef’s reflections on the futility of the so-called “peace process” are particularly poignant. The Oslo Accords, and the idea of peace imposed from above, were always bound to fail because the masses on both sides had not reconciled to peace itself. When mainstream political space is suffocated, it inevitably gives rise to the fringes. 

The most powerful sections of Son of Hamas describe Yousef’s encounters with ordinary Israelis and Palestinians who refuse to kill—not out of weakness, but out of conviction that every human life is sacred. He tells the story of a Jewish man who converted to Christianity and refused to serve in the Israeli army, enduring imprisonment for his belief that killing an unarmed human being violates the essence of his faith.

Yousef recognizes in this man a mirror of himself: someone who seeks to end violence, not perpetuate it. If such individuals multiplied on both sides, peace could one day become a reality.

Yousef’s honesty is also his tragedy. He is deeply naïve at times, believing that moral clarity can transcend the politics of power. His condemnation of suicide bombings, while morally correct, risks ignoring their political context. The bombers of the al-Qassam Brigades and other factions, however horrifying their acts, acted out of conviction that they were striking back against decades of occupation and humiliation. To understand such acts is not to condone them, but to recognize that they are not born of madness, but of genuine grievances that remain unaddressed to this idea and Israel has only worsened this crisis .

The Israeli and Western refusal to engage with that reality—the insistence on treating all Palestinian violence as irrational evil—has only deepened the wounds.

Israel’s strategy of assassination, collective punishment, and mass incarceration has not destroyed Hamas; it has made it stronger. The assassinations of leaders such as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Yahya Sinwar, and Mohammed Deif have not ended the movement, because Hamas is not reducible to its leaders. It is an organization rooted in the lived experience of occupation and the genuine concerns of the Palestinian people.

As Yousef notes, to think Hamas can be eliminated militarily is a dangerous delusion.

Son of Hamas ultimately reveals that both Israel and Hamas are trapped in a moral stalemate. Israel’s power is absolute, but its legitimacy is eroding. Hamas’s resistance is enduring, but its methods remain morally corrosive. Between these poles, the ordinary people—the ones who refuse to kill, betray, or dehumanize—remain invisible.

Yousef’s story, then, is not one of a Spy, as both Israelis and Palestinians have claimed. It is a story of impossible choices and moral courage, of a man who tried to humanize both sides and found himself alienated from each.

In the end,  Son of Hamas forces us to confront a painful truth: no ideology, whether Zionism or Islamism, can contain the full humanity of those caught in its machinery. The challenge is not to destroy the other, but to recover the human within ourselves and try to work out a solution that could restore our humanity.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Deoband’s embrace of the Taliban foreign minister is dangerous — but also offers an opening.

Amir Khan Muttaqi, Foreign Minister of the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan and a senior figure in its political and ideological leadership, has recently completed a six-day visit to India — an episode loaded with meaning.

From his informal ban on female journalists, to the cancellation of his Agra leg, and his carefully choreographed stop at the Vivekananda Foundation. Yet, it is his visit to Dar ul Uloom Deoband, the theological heart of South Asian Deobandi Islam, that has invited sharpest scrutiny.

For years, Indian Muslims — particularly those aligned with the Deobandi school — have tried to draw a distinction between “their Islam,” described as democratic and egalitarian, and the Taliban’s brutal, patriarchal regime. Muttaqi’s pilgrimage to his ideological fountainhead has challenged that narrative.

When the Taliban’s foreign minister visits Deoband, and the seminary receives him with honor, it becomes almost impossible to sustain the claim that the Taliban are merely “misguided” Muslims. Why, then, should men who have subjugated women and silenced dissent be treated as heroes?

What emerges instead is a chilling recognition: the Taliban are not a deviation from Deobandi Islam according to the seminary, but one of its most literal political manifestations.

The confusion within India’s religiously-inclined Muslim intelligentsia over how to respond to this visit is telling — and repetitive. Some rush to rationalize it as “cultural diplomacy” or a gesture of goodwill in the national interest, strangely bringing the Muslim right and the Hindu right onto the same page.

Others recoil in discomfort but stop short of open criticism. Deoband’s endorsement of Muttaqi symbolically affirms the very doctrines that have justified gender apartheid, banned girls from education, and institutionalized moral policing across Afghanistan.

This moment is not merely about Afghanistan; it reflects a moral crisis within Indian muslims as well — a refusal to confront its own regressive solidarities under the pretext of religious kinship. The spectacle of Deoband greeting Muttaqi with reverence reveals the unbroken theological thread linking the 19th seminary to the taliban led theocratic governance.

Deoband’s embrace of the Taliban foreign minister is dangerous — but also offers an opening. If the Taliban truly draw their ideological legitimacy from Deoband, then Deoband carries a moral responsibility: to humanize that ideology, to insist that justice and compassion, not repression, define Islam.

The seminary has a proud history of standing against colonial injustice and for India’s freedom. Can it now stand for Afghan women denied education, or men imprisoned for thought?

If Dar ul Uloom Deoband wishes to remain relevant in a plural democracy, it must decide where it stands — with democracy, gender justice, and education, or with those who burn books, bury dissent, and blind the future of half their population.

It was interpreted, and often celebrated, as the echo of a much larger frenzy that commemorates and normalises violence against Hindus.

Pakistan opener Sahibzada Farhan has found himself at the center of fresh controversy after his explosive 58 off 45 balls against India in the Asia Cup 2025 Super Four. His half-century celebration, mimicking an AK47-firing action with his bat, set off a storm. The gesture, performed moments after he dispatched Axar Patel for six to bring up his fifty, was instantly polarizing.

Some hailed it as audacious. Many condemned it as provocative. Farhan himself defended it as nothing more than a spontaneous act he “does not care to over-explain.”

At first, I dismissed the idea of writing on this episode. At first sight this problematisation of his act appeared nothing more than a Hindu right-wing frenzy and a product of jingoism. But when I turned to the Pakistani discourse around it, I was jolted.

What I had imagined to be a lone, reckless gesture of a cricketer was in fact celebrated as a collective act of defiance against “Kafir Hindus.” Across the spectrum, with sensible exceptions of course, Pakistanis were glorifying him as a lion who had put Indians in their place. A hero who had demonstrated that if killing could happen in Pahalgam, it could happen anywhere.

The celebration was not of an individual’s defiance but of a deeper national consciousness. It is a consciousness that has always defined itself in negation, sustained by the singular idea that “we are not Hindus.” That founding negation continues to fuel Pakistan’s politics, its nationalism, and, as I saw, even its cricketing pride.

I was surprised, though not shocked, to hear such views. The very idea of Pakistan is voluntarist in nature. It was not founded on a shared language, culture, or territory, but on the deliberate assertion of religion as the sole basis of nationhood. In such a framework, every sphere of public life is inevitably tethered to religion. Nothing escapes the grip of the mullahs.

Even a cricket pitch, which elsewhere might be a space for sport and competition, becomes in Pakistan a stage for propagating anti-human, exclusionary and supremacist ideologies. This collapse of the boundary between religion and public life is not incidental. It renders even the most ordinary gestures freighted with political and sectarian meaning.

In the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre, which killed 26 tourists on April 22, 2025, India accused Pakistan of sponsoring cross-border terrorism. The atmosphere between the two states was volatile. In that context, a celebratory gesture by a Pakistani cricketer on the pitch cannot be read as an innocent, isolated act. It was interpreted, and often celebrated, as the echo of a much larger frenzy that commemorates and normalises violence against Hindus.

Let us be blunt. 26 people were murdered because they were Hindus. To call this anything other than a crime driven by communal motive is to obscure the reality of targeted violence. If calling this Islamophobia alarms some, then so be it. Naming hatred clearly is the first step to fighting it. To fight for a just world, we must insist on that clarity.

Even if we assume the cricketer’s gesture was not meant to signal more than individual bravado, what matters is what the masses took from it. In the wake of the Pahalgam massacre, a jubilant or triumphalist response on the pitch could not be read as innocent. It became a public echo of a wider, sectarian celebration that normalises violence against Hindus.

The executive deserves blame as well. Despite nationwide protests and heightened sensitivities after the attack, authorities allowed the match to proceed. It was a failure of accountability that made the pitch a stage for humiliation rather than for sport.

The spectacle mattered because it showed how national identity in Pakistan is repeatedly remade through negation and ritualised hostility. It is a politics rooted in the two-nation idea that defines Pakistan as “not Hindu.”

If the only way some political communities can sustain themselves is by staging childish, violent affirmations of identity, then those identities are brittle and dangerous. They must be dismantled if we are to imagine a region where public life is not a theatre of hatred.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Our self-styled “left liberal” intelligentsia, otherwise loud in denouncing Hindu majoritarianism, suddenly turned mute when confronted with Muslim right-wing pressure.

An Urdu poetry gathering (Mushaira) planned by the West Bengal Urdu Academy in Kolkata, India, was set to feature Javed Akhtar—one of South Asia’s most celebrated poets, lyricists, and scriptwriters—as its chief guest on September 1. Just days before the event, however, the Academy abruptly postponed it, officially citing “unavoidable circumstances.”

In reality, the decision came after pressure from powerful Muslim religious groups, including the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind and the Wahyahin Foundation, who objected to Akhtar’s participation on grounds of alleged “blasphemy.” Critics argue that the move reflects a pattern of political appeasement, often highlighted by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), where cultural freedoms are curtailed under clerical demands.

Since then, a debate has emerged in the public domain. Our self-styled “left liberal” intelligentsia, otherwise loud in denouncing Hindu majoritarianism, suddenly turned mute when confronted with Muslim right-wing pressure. If a program had been canceled under Hindu Right pressure, the outcry would have been deafening. Op-eds, reportage, and fiery essays warning of fascism’s arrival would have saturated every public platform.

But when Muslim clerics strong-arm a cultural body into silencing a poet, silence reigns. Many intellectuals believe that calling out Muslim bigotry amounts to Islamophobia and would endanger an already threatened community. This view is simplistic and cowardly. If the true enemy is oppression, it must be opposed wherever it arises, across communities and within them. What the oppressed deserve is critical solidarity, a support that is constructive, accompanied by food for thought.

The Jamiat’s letter to the Academy, dated August 25, begins with praise but quickly hardens. It “forcefully” appeals that Akhtar not be invited, demanding a “man of integrity” take his place, “of any religion, but not a blasphemer of God.” It threatens “democratic means” if ignored, invoking the precedent of Taslima Nasreen who was hounded out of Kolkata. It expresses confidence the Academy will comply, which it did. The letter denounces Akhtar as a “blasphemer,” unfit for a literary stage.

What is striking is not just the intolerance of the demand, but the attempt to normalize religious authority in public life, where writers and poets must either submit to clerical approval or face ostracism.

Mufti Shamail Nadvi, a leading voice of the protest, said he was “shocked” Akhtar was invited. But what is shocking about inviting Javed Akhtar to preside over a mushaira? He is first and foremost a poet, heir to four generations of Urdu literary contribution, the author of lyrics that define the golden era of Hindi cinema, and an uncontested literary figure. Nadvi’s “shock” reveals not moral concern but clerical disdain for a man who openly opposes them. Whom did he want instead? Someone with no claim to poetry but unquestioned theological orthodoxy?

Nadvi later claimed he did not demand cancellation, only that “true Muslims” boycott the event. But a boycott called by clerics is never benign. It lays the groundwork for ostracism and, in volatile contexts, mob violence. Imagine if a Hindu leader called for boycotting an event because the guest was Muslim. It would spark outrage. Yet when Muslim clerics do the same, many Muslims and their media representatives applaud it as a victory. This sets a dangerous precedent: must every intellectual first pass a theological litmus test before entering the muslim public sphere( public space where muslims form a sizable chunk) ?

Nadvi also proposed a debate with Akhtar on the existence of God, accusing him of defaming religion and promoting atheism. But here the clerics stumble on their own contradictions. The Qur’an itself instructs believers not to insult others’ gods precisely because early Muslims did so and provoked offense. Offense is woven into Islam’s very beginnings. Why then is offense suddenly intolerable when directed at Islam?

Will Muslims extend the same courtesy of not offending others’ beliefs? Within Islam itself, sects routinely accuse one another of blasphemy. In Pakistan, Nadvi’s counterparts have hurled the same charge at Engineer Mirza, a fellow Muslim preacher. Even Mufti Tariq Masood, from Nadvi’s own sect, has faced accusations of blasphemy. To brand someone a blasphemer is a political weapon, a tool to reclaim fading authority rather than a defense of truth.

If religion trembles before a single poet, then it is the clerics who insult the faith, not Akhtar. Nadvi insists Akhtar is famous for mocking Islam, when in fact his reputation rests on films, lyrics, and poetry. His atheistic remarks, when they appear, are marginal and occasional. Reducing his legacy to blasphemy is either ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation to score points.

Worse, Nadvi’s rhetoric paints a target on Akhtar’s back. By invoking the precedent of Taslima Nasreen and repeating that Akhtar’s presence is an insult, he encourages hostility in an environment where blasphemy accusations can easily invite death. Calling for a “debate” in such circumstances is a provocation for hardliners to do the job.

Akhtar was invited to preside over a mushaira, not to preach atheism. To object to his private unbelief is irrelevant. Does Nadvi mean to say a godless person has nothing valuable to contribute to literature, culture, or cinema? By that logic Muslims should shun modern intellectual life, where atheism and agnosticism are common, and confine themselves to insular ghettos of their own making. Such isolationism is disastrous. It strangles Muslims’ cultural life and reduces them to a community fearful of thought itself.

For so many years, he has attended thousands of mushairas and public programmes and no Muslim was ever offended by his supposed blasphemy. But suddenly when Nadwi comes out and declares that we should be offended and are offended everyone seems to fall in line. This politics of being offended must stop somewhere

 Meanwhile, Nadvi’s own 26-minute press conference did not cite a single Qur’anic verse or Hadith. It was a pure rant, a bid for relevance. His YouTube channel, once stagnant with 26,000 subscribers, surged to 32,000 after this controversy, with his video on Akhtar becoming the most viewed. The episode is less about defending faith and more about clerics chasing attention.

The Prophet of Islam urged believers to “seek knowledge even if it takes you to China,” meaning even from non-believers. Clerics like Nadvi are unable to come out of their archaic mindset of being offended. They demand isolation, echoing the Hindu Right’s charge that Muslims cannot coexist with others. 

The cancellation of Javed Akhtar’s invitation may seem small, but it reflects a deeper malaise: the religionization of Muslim identity, where culture, literature, and art must bow to clerical approval. If unchecked, this mindset will strangle public life, silence intellectuals, and confine Muslims to an ever-shrinking ghetto of thought. The tragedy is not Akhtar’s disinvitation but that in 2025, clerics still dictate what ordinary Muslims are allowed to do, and ordinary Muslims can still be mobilized at the clerics’ whim.

What any society needs, and what Pakistan so urgently lacks, is an open environment where questions can be asked, where ideas can be challenged

A man of lean build, unhurried in his gait, his long hair flowing beneath the turban that he never parts with, and clad in a simple kurta pajama, Engineer Mohammed Ali Mirza has become one of the most recognisable religious figures in the South Asian Muslim imagination. 

His speech is bland and direct, yet his tongue is sharp and restless, forever tethered to a verse of the Qur’an or a reference from Hadith. He is not a man of rhetorical excess; rather, his words derive their force from citation, from a painstaking return to texts that most of his critics would hesitate to touch. 

His unconventional style, bordering on the audacious, has earned him both reverence and relentless vilification. For many among the youth of the Subcontinent and beyond, he represents a breath of fresh air and a decisive break from the sectarian Muslim approach of religion in the region, in a suffocating atmosphere of clerical monopoly. For the traditional clergy of every sect, he is nothing short of a threat.

His arrest sent tremors across the Subcontinent on that fateful night. Within hours it was splashed across television screens and mobile feeds, debated in drawing rooms and tea shops, dissected by anchors and discussed by clerics. 

The clergy, who seldom agree on anything, found themselves celebrating this arrest in a rare show of unity amongst subcontinental Muslims. 

Mufti Hanif Qureshi, infamous for his role in inspiring Mumtaz Qadri to assassinate Governor Salman Taseer, could barely contain his joy. In a recorded message he wailed about how long it had taken to bring him to justice for hurting religious sentiments, and he gloated as if a divine order had finally been fulfilled. 

Yet such pronouncements must be weighed against Qureshi’s own record, one littered with fatwas of exclusion, branding Muslims as kafir, and hurling entire sects outside the pale of Islam as if it were as simple as breathing. His words, then, tell us less about the man arrested and more about a long-standing culture of clerical monopoly that has now found in him a grave threat.

What sets him apart is not only his willingness to take on the religious establishment but the method by which he does so. 

His strategy is simple but devastating: he exposes contradictions in clerical positions by holding them up against their own sources. If a cleric challenges him, he points back to the texts themselves and insists that the real debate must be with the Qur’an and the Hadith, not with him. 

This insistence has disarmed many of his detractors and frustrated others, for it robs them of the usual tactics of authority. His critics brand him dangerous; some even accuse him of being spokesperson of the Ahmadis, who have been officially declared non-Muslim by the Pakistani state. 

These charges are hurled so that clerics don’t have to answer uncomfortable questions. But whether one agrees with his readings or not, the question remains whether challenging sectarian dogma and returning to foundational texts can ever be criminal in a society that professes faith in Islam.

The reactions to his arrest illuminate the deeper anxieties of Pakistan’s religious order. His popularity among youth, especially those disillusioned with sectarian divisions, suggests that his voice resonates far beyond clerical echo chambers. 

Young Muslims across South Asia and in Urdu-speaking diasporas find in him an uncompromising Critic of the clerical order.

All his life, he spoke against the culture of mob lynching, against the brutal witch-hunting of those accused of blasphemy, against the spectacle of men and women being dragged to death in the name of religion without trial or evidence. 

His voice stood in solidarity with those who had been silenced by mobs and abandoned by institutions. And yet, in a strange and tragic contrast, he now finds himself in the very position of those victims he once defended, hounded by the same forces of intolerance that he warned against. 

One may disagree with his interpretations, one may even find his style abrasive, but his arrest is not a victory for the clerical order. It is a sign of insecurity, a confession that the establishment has no answer but silencing. 

Agreement or disagreement with a person’s religious views cannot be delivered through mobs on the street or by throwing someone into jail. Faith cannot be protected by violence, nor can truth be reached through silencing. 

What any society needs, and what Pakistan so urgently lacks, is an open environment where questions can be asked, where ideas can be challenged, and where arguments can be measured against reason and evidence. 

Debate and discussion are the only path by which humanity moves closer to truth, and without them, we descend only into fear and conformity. 

If his arguments are flawed, let them be defeated in the realm of ideas. If his interpretations are flawed, let them be countered by the ‘right ones’. If there is no courage to engage with ideas, and only fear of mob and violence are presented as counter to ideas, they must read history that ideas do not bow to mobs. They outlast them, and in the end, they win.

Since the end of the Cold War, much of the Muslim world has framed terrorism carried out in Islam’s name as an “American-Zionist conspiracy.” This argument draws on the undeniable reality of U.S. imperialism in West Asia, from Washington’s support of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s to its disastrous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which helped incubate groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS.

It is undeniable how American foreign policy not only created conditions for militant Islamism but at times directly facilitated its growth. Yet to reduce all Muslim terrorism to an American creation is dangerously simplistic. Many Jihadists act from their own interpretations of Islamic texts, local grievances, and visions of a divinely mandated order, not to serve what the left-liberal have been calling American Imperialism.

Muslims globally have worked hard to defend their religion against the stigma of terrorism, insisting that Islam teaches peace and condemns violence. But crucial questions remain unanswered, questions that the far-right in India exploits and is using to perpetuate misconceptions against Muslims. The community’s defensive posture often remains confined to echo chambers, leaving outsiders unconvinced. 

Moreover, the demonization of Muslim identity in India is not simply the product of hatred for Islam as a religion; it also emerges from socio-political matters that are shown as a pattern of a global conspiracy. Yet Islamism cannot be understood merely as a reaction to deprivation, it derives itself from the interpretations of scripture that demand serious engagement.

This is where a major weakness lies. Muslims who commit acts of terror openly identify their violence with religion. If ordinary Muslims want to challenge them, they must engage with the ideological and theological claims rather than dismiss them as conspiracies against Islam. 

A friend of mine, once an Islamist and now a humanist, recalls that when he quoted scripture to justify his radicalism and impending desire to kill Kafirs and make Allah’s word supreme, his parents simply said, “This is wrong,” without offering any substantive rebuttal from the Quran or Hadith. 

Their inability to engage with the texts and his ideas and by extension the ideas of thousands of young muslims across the world, left him more convinced than before of his righteousness. This gap between religious conviction and theological illiteracy of ordinary Muslims is what Jihadists have been exploiting .

In India, this dynamic has produced troubling patterns. The 1993 Mumbai bombings, which killed 257 people and injured over 700, were often justified within sections of the Muslim community as “necessary retaliation” for the demolition of Babri Masjid and subsequent riots. Such selective justification creates a dangerous double standard: if killing innocents can be rationalized in one context, then why not in another? By this logic, pogroms, lynchings, and bulldozing of Muslim homes could also be justified as retaliation. This moral inconsistency weakens the Muslim community’s credibility and inadvertently plays into the hand of the far-right.

The way forward requires honesty and courage. Muslims must acknowledge that some within their community do commit acts of terror in the name of Islam and their motivation as an individual is purely religious,and that extremists draw solely from  scripture to justify themselves, which an average Muslim also derives his peace and brotherhood from.

These claims must be confronted theologically, politically, and morally, not brushed aside. The task is to reclaim religious texts from radicals through serious scholarship, foster intra-community debate, and build a universal moral compass where the life of a Hindu, Christian, Jew or an atheist is as sacred as that of a Muslim. 

Selective outrage, and Humanism condemning violence against Muslims while justifying violence committed by Muslims and even some situations even glorifying, only entrenches radicalism, fuels Muslimophobia, and strengthens hatred against Muslims. Unless Muslims embrace a consistent, universal ethic of non-violence against innocents as a rule with no ifs and buts, without this they will remain trapped in denial and conspiracy theories, deepening and perpetuating the very cycle of hate they seek to escape.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.