i am an indian and hindu. and i have very little scriptural knowledge about ISLAM. i am a researcher in a leading university in india and fortunately my PhD superviser is a professor (lady ) who follows islam. i never had an instance in my interaction of more than 10 years with her that our different religious denominations conflict in analysing any context.

what i feel that intelligentia class no more take the scriptural words as final, but the not so educated common man takes it, he doesnot have properly developed power of objective assessment.

so its your secular education which helps

we in india and pakistan need to provide high quality education to our masses and develop scientific temper…..that can only be the panacea for ills plaguing our societies.

I do not have much knowledge of Islam but I feel Religion is a personal matter and one should interpret centuries old religious text in modern context.

The educated Pakistanis have a big role to play in guiding Pakistani masses to focus their efforts on improving their economic condition and modern education, instead of extremism.

I wish you all well.

Islam, in my view, is undergoing a similar pointless debate to determine ‘true Islam’. Meanwhile, Muslim countries continue to lag behind the rest of the world in almost every measure of human rights, scientific achievement, economic vitality, and standard of living.

While the rest of the world is finding cures for cancer and planning missions to Mars, we are debating the lagality of stoning women to death. At some point we need to realize that ancient Arab tribal customs (like women’s veils, stoning and lashes) suited to the deserts of 7th century Arabia have no place in a modern world. We need to distinguish between the timeless teachings of the Quran and the anachronistic 7th century Arabian tribal customs.

In Pakistan, we will never climb out of our 62 year old morass until we realize that religion should be a private matter, to be practised in one’s home. Political Islam is a recipe for disaster in a modern multicultural society. We already have simmering ethnic conflicts within Pakistan. The last thing we need is to create more divides based on who is and is not a ‘true’ Muslim. Not to mention the Christians, Parsis, Hindus and other non-Muslim Pakistanis who are made to feel like outcasts in their own country because of our eternal obsession with political Islam. We already persecuted, alienated and lost our Bengali brothers in East Pakistan. Will we never learn to live and let live?

On the matter of blaming foreign operatives for terrorism within Pakistan, that strawman argument is easily answered. Even if foriegn powers are orchestrating all this terrorism within Pakistan, why are they not able to do the same in other countries? Why not in North Korea or Iran? What is it about Pakistan that makes this evil plot work here only? The answer, of course, is that it is our Frankenstein Taliban that is coming back to bite us. In this matter we should learn from India. India hatched and initially supported the LTTE terrorists in Sri Lanka. But when the LTTE got ambitious and started supporting Tamil separatist movements within India itself, the Indians turned 100% against their Frankenstein LTTE. They made it clear to the LTTE that any subversive activities within India would NOT be tolerated.

Finally, as a footnote, I would respectfully suggest that you really need to ease up on the thesaurus. The haphazard peppering of overly obtuse words does not ring true with the otherwise mediocre quality of English prose in your articles. By using simpler language, your articles would be accessible to a wider audience.