Every single Muslim historian of medieval India lists temples which the rulers he is writing about has destroyed and the mosques he has built instead… - Arun Shourie

‘Arrey bhai, but why don’t you write on Hindu fatwas?,’—that from a prominent intellectual who carries a haloed name. There is nothing like the fatwa among Hindus—but surely even our intellectuals know that. The point of such admonitions is different. In this view of the matter, a Hindu should stay clear of writing on Islam. Rather, that if he writes about matters Islamic or Muslim, he should only pen Hosannas—’the religion of tolerance, equality...’—he should only write books ‘understanding’, that is explaining away the ‘Muslim mind’. At the least, if he just has to allude to some unfortunate drawback in it, he must attribute it to some special time and place and exculpate Islam from it! Even more important, he must make sure that he ‘balances’ his remark about that point in Islam with denunciation about something in Hinduism, anything—the caste system, dowry deaths, looking upon foreigners as malechh, at least sati if nothing else fits the bill!

The parents who send their daughters to college are the enemies of their daughters, not their friends,' the Fatawa-i-Rahimiyyah declares, citing authorities to the effect that the friend is one who prepares one for the Hereafter, though doing so may inflict worldly loss. 'There is no doubt,' it declares, 'that a collegiate girl becomes extremely free, purdahless, immodest and shameless. This is the general consequence of English education and college atmosphere.' And 'A girl who loses modesty loses everything,' it says, citing the Hadis, 'Modesty and faith—they are inseparable companions; when either of them is taken away, the other too goes away.

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.