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| India-Pakistan |
| Deobandis attack BBC film for Osama link |
| 2007-10-30 |
| A BBC documentary shown last [Sunday] night came under attack from one of India’s largest Islamic groups for linking their movement to Osama Bin Laden and “extremist” Muslim groups around the world, the Guardian reported on Monday. It reported the Deoband school, whose main madrassa Darul Uloom lies 90 miles north-east of Delhi, said it had allowed a television crew making a three-part documentary called Clash of Worlds into its grounds to explain its “message of peace and historic role in Indian affairs”. “However, Muslim scholars in Delhi became alarmed to hear the programme’s presenters talk of their part in the anti-British uprising in the nineteenth century being similar to the role played by Osama today,” it said. Mohammad Anwer, a spokesman for the Deoband school, said he had protested to the film’s producers about the link with Osama and many other mistakes, Guardian said. “We protested at the time but it made no difference. We do not advocate violence nor are we asking others to do violence,” the Guardian quoted Anwer as saying. Cleric annoyed: According to the Guardian, clerics in Delhi have also been incensed that their creed has been termed an Indian version of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi school, seen as a hardline, revivalist form of Islam. God’s Terrorists, the book written by Charles Allen, a historian and one of the documentary’s presenters, advances the theory that the “hidden roots of modern jihad and the Wahabi cult” spring from the subcontinent, the paper said. However, this goes against the grain of contemporary thinking on the subject, the Guardian reported, and added that many accept the Deoband school as strict but essentially law-abiding. |
| Posted by:Fred |