Predictably, in Maulana Ahmad Riza Khan’s reckoning the Shias are not Muslims at all. Their ‘mosques’ are not mosques—and remember, as Mir Baqi and h… - Arun Shourie

Next comes the Urdu press. It has been one of the most potent allies of, in some ways the instrument of the ulema, as we saw in reviewing the campaigns against Dr Zakir Hussain and Maulana Azad. We saw the same role and the same potency in the campaigns in 1992 against Mushirul Hasan, pro-vice-chancellor of Jamia Millia in Delhi, and Abid Reza Bedar, director of the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna. A shrill tone, wholesale distortions, creating echoes upon echoes of their allegations, fomenting an extreme insecurity and then presenting everything as an assault on Islam—these are its hallmarks. And they invariably end up being deployed to fortify the world view which the ulema want the community to retain.

Is an institution the Indian history course of which covers only the period from the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi to 1947, the geography course of which focuses on the Arabian peninsula, an institution of and for India?

The forfeiture is exactly the sort of thing which has landed us where we are : where intellectual inquiry is shut out ; where our tradition are not examined and reassessed and where as a consequence there is no dialogue.