Had they made a timely assessment of what created the hiatus between Muslims and other nations, they would have set the feet of Muslims on the path o… - Wahiduddin Khan

Any conflict has to perpetrators, and there are invariably faults on each side which cause and exacerbate it. It take two to make a fight. If one party withdraws itself from the region of conflict then the other will remain alone there: it will have none to fight against and the conflict will disappear. If, on the other hand, each party waits for peace initiatives to come from the other side before undertaking conciliatory moves of its own, then the mistrust between the two sides will continue to grow. The inevitable result will be escalation of the conflict between then. Hindu-Muslim communal riots, which have become regular feature of Indian life, are an example of such conflict, which can only be ended by unilateral action from one side. There are examples in the life of the Prophet Muhammad which show that it is the Muslims who should take this initiative. Worldly rivalry and conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims means that the latter see Islam, not in it true light, but through the tainted vision of their own prejudice: Muslims are their enemies so they adopt an antagonistic posture toward Islam as well. This is a situation which should be intolerable to Muslims, whose overriding concern should be for the true message of Islam to reach other people in all its purity, and in an atmosphere conducive to objective and dispassionate consideration. Seeing that such an atmosphere cannot be generated where there is conflict and mistrust, they should ensure an end to conflicts with other people; they should take unilateral steps for peace, without waiting for the initiative to come from the other side.

This great movement generally known as the Tablighi Jama’at has inspired a new fervour, a new zeal to serve the divine cause…Its founder surprisingly was a slight, short-statured individual rather unimpressive in personality…It was this extraordinary figure known as Maulana Ilyas who founded the Tablighi Jama‘at which was to inspire in thousands of people a religious zeal which had been unknown for centuries…

A particularly dark aspect of the Muslims’ existence in India seems to be communal riots. It is a fact that communal riots have taken place on a large scale in modern India over the last forty-five years and, regrettably, in some parts are still continuing. I repeat, nevertheless, that the occurrence of communal riots is not linked to the system of governance developed after Independence. It is related rather to the Muslims’ own rabble-rousing leadership and yellow journalism. What is the logic behind the riots? Let us again take an example from Bombay where, about twenty years before independence, an issue was made of a Hindu procession passing by a mosque: As it approached the mosque, the Mutawalli (the Keeper of the mosque) objected to its passage, and tried to stop it. When his request was not complied with, he registered a case in a Bombay court, demanding that a court order be issued, banning any Hindu procession in future in front of the Mosque. At that time Muhammad Ali Jinnah was living in Bombay, and it was he who acted as advocate for the mosque keeper. The judge, an Englishman, ordered that the relevant prohibitory notice be put up near the mosque in question. This successful advocacy of their case by Jinnah so enthralled the Muslims that they dubbed him Qaid-e-Azam, the great leader. But this was not leadership. It was more like leading the people astray. Jinnah should have told the Muslims that the solution to the problem of processions is not to try to stop them, but simply to ignore them. And that even if you manage to carve out a separate area of your own, as was done in the formation of Pakistan, there is no guarantee that processions will not again be leed through the streets. The truth is that the choice for Muslims did not lie between having, or not having processions. It was between tolerating processions or having riots. But the Muslims self-serving leadership and irresponsible journalism did nothing to steer Muslims away from wrong choices. As a result, in a bid to stop Hindu processions, riots have broken out from time to time in various places, with little hope of their ever ceasing in certain parts. Most of the riots in both India and Pakistan have this as their root cause.