Decoding silence
October 01, 2021 12:34
Let me begin with a disclaimer: I oppose the Taliban in Afghanistan and their interpretation of Islam; I oppose a section of the so-called Indian ulema which celebrated the victory of the Taliban; and I oppose Hindutva's appropriation of the Taliban issue to demonize Indian Muslims.
However, I find the imagination of an elitist liberal Islam to counter religious essentialism to be equally problematic.
The self-declared liberal Muslims (who claim to assert moderate Islam) as well as the self-assured cultural Muslims (who celebrate their atheism in public life) seem to reproduce an age-old, rigid, inflexible, and elitist discourse of Muslim intellectual backwardness.
Read Hilal Ahmed's column here.