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Dialogue between religions needed
?Today, there is an urgent necessity for renewing a dialogue between religions to bridge the gap,? said Prof Mushirul Hasan, vice-chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia University (New Delhi).
“Today, there is an urgent necessity for renewing a dialogue between religions to bridge the gap,” said Prof Mushirul Hasan, vice-chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia University (New Delhi).
Prof Hasan was delivering a lecture on ‘Pluralism in a Locality: Awadh and Delhi in the 19th Century’ as part of Nehru Memorial Lecture at Arts faculty auditorium in Banaras Hindu University on Friday.
“The dialogue initiated by my men proved to be only a brief flicker of light across the religious and cultural divide. What we need is an expanded tolerance in our approach to different religions and our understanding of the Muslim, Hindu and Christian ways,” he said.
“Unity in diversity has to be everyone’s goal in order to keep intact, first
of all, the social equilibrium of diverse societies and second to contest the hegemonic or exclusivist vision of the world nurtured by the likes of Samuel Huntington and George W Bush,” he said.
An eminent historian, Prof Hasan said, “In these radically changed circumstances, the old rivalries cannot be renewed and the past battles cannot be fought on a modern turf.”
“The immediate urgency is to celebrate the variety in religious expressions and to reject the Christian right agenda and the Zionist, Islamist and Hindutva worldviews,” he said.
“All one can hope is that studying the histories of ‘qasbas’ and the erstwhile imperial capital will prove to be a source of knowledge of a cultural and intellectual heritage that belongs to the entirety of South Asia,” he said.
“When the history of ideas of the countries bordering India is better explored and therefore better known, the historian will recognise the currents of influence which from Pakistan to Bangladesh constitute the very fabric of history of Islam in the region.”
