Oscar Winner and India's Islamic Renaissance

[SedesDomi]

                           [The first thing](http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/eboo_patel/2009/03/a_r_rahman_and_the_islamic_ren.html) Allah Rakha (A R) Rahman did when he arrived back on Indian soil after picking up two Oscars in Hollywood was to offer prayers at a Sufi shrine. Rahman, who won two Oscars for the music he created for "Slumdog Millionaire", accepted Islam in the late 1980s, after experiencing a dream sequence calling him into the faith. He has been on Haj multiple times and is regular in his five daily prayers. That he makes dance music for Indian beauties and seeks guidance at the mausoleums of Muslim saints only affirms his place in the mainstream of Indian Islam.

                                                                                                               India has long been at the center of Muslim pluralism, a movement with three core elements:

1. A spiritual ethic defined by the Islamic concept of Tawheed, the idea that God is all-pervasive;
2. A social ethic that views those of other creeds as partners in the journey to serve God and humanity;
3. A cultural ethic that seeks to absorb the multiple identities of faith, nation, ethnicity and language, understanding this multiplicity as mutually enriching rather than mutually exclusive.

Artists like AR Rahman are not the only exemplars of Muslim pluralism in India. Many of India’s most important historical figures embodied this ethic as well. The 16th Century Mughal Emperor Akbar once wrote, “Divine mercy attaches itself to every form of creed … The eternal God is bounteous to all souls and conditions of men.”
…
On my recent trip to India, I found Muslim pluralism alive and well in both the civic and intellectual life in India. In Delhi, Dr. Syed Zafar Mahmood opened a meeting of the Interfaith Coalition for Peace by pointing out that the Qur’an says that God has sent messengers to every nation, and certainly would not have ignored a great nation like India. “Therefore I conclude that Lord Krishna and Lord Buddha are part of the many messengers that God sent to humanity, and I worship and respect them along with the Prophet Muhammad.” His organization has been organizing interfaith peace camps with religiously diverse young people and interfaith women’s journeys across India.

 

[Cracker_Mom]

SedesDomi:
So what happened in Bombay back in November?

 

[SedesDomi]

So what happened in Bombay back in November?

Those Muslims were from Pakistan.