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NCM backs fatwas against militant outfits
The National Commission for Minorities (NCM) on Tuesday extended support to Muslim clerics who have issued religious edicts against militants.
The National Commission for Minorities (NCM) on Tuesday extended support to Muslim clerics who have issued religious edicts against militants naming their outfits after Prophet Mohammad and Allah.
Islamic clerics from different parts of the country have issued four separate fatwas over the use of sacred names by militant outfits after a group that called itself Lashkar-e-Qahar, or the Army of the Subduer, claimed responsibility for the Varanasi bomb attacks.
"These (fatwas) should have come long ago. Nobody can kill innocent people in the name of God. Nobody should be allowed to use religion as a pretext to attack innocents," NCM chief Mohammad Hamid Ansari told PTI.
The All India Sunni Ulema Board, Jamiat-ul Mashqiq al-Hind, South Indian seminary Jamiat-ul-Mominath and the imam of Lucknow's Teele Wali mosque have opposed naming of militant outfits after the Prophet and Allah.
Ansari, a former Vice-Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University, also dismissed as "silly and ridiculous" UP Minister Yaqoob Qureshi's Rs 51-crore offer on the heads of the Danish cartoonists who caricatured the Prophet.
But the NCM chief, who took charge as head of the religious rights watchdog this month, also disapproved of painter M F Hussain's depiction of Mother India in the nude, saying the act was as hurtful to religious sentiments as were the Prophet cartoons.
"Hussain is a great artist. But he should be careful in not hurting anybody's sentiments. I feel Hussain and the Danish cartoonists who caricatured the Prophet are both wrong," he said.
