Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: ipocrisia musulmana: un commento indiano

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/intolerance-is-a-twoway-street/553460/1
Intolerance is a two-way street
Sudheendra Kulkarni
Underground and secretly maintained Krishna temples in Iran? Yes. And
I’ll tell you why I am beginning this column on the raging global
debate on the recent Swiss ban on the construction of new minarets by
recalling a stunning personal experience in Iran.
When I first visited Iran a decade after the Khomeini revolution, an
Indian friend working for an Indian company in the country said to me,
“Let me take you to a vegetarian restaurant in Tehran that serves
Indian food.” I enjoyed the meal and complimented the restaurant’s
owner, who happened to be a highly placed scientist in a university.
My friend then said to the owner, “Why don’t you show him the special
place in your restaurant?” The owner led us to the basement, and then
to an underground room with narrow steps whose entrance was concealed.
The room was filled with the aroma of agarbatti, sandalwood paste and
flowers, kept in front of an icon of Krishna and Radha. The music
system was playing, at a barely audible volume, the rhythmic chant
‘Rama Rama Hare Hare, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare’. The owner told me
that he and a small group of Krishna devotees (all of them Iranians)
use the place as a temple for daily prayers. I didn’t ask him why his
group prayed at a clandestine temple. It’s stupid to ask questions
whose answers you know.
During a subsequent visit to Iran, this time as a member of Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s delegation, I discovered that one of
the interpreters, an educated woman in black chador, was a devotee of
Sai Baba. “We have several devotees in Iran,” she said, “Also of
Ramana Maharshi. We have secret congregations. I go to Puttaparthi
whenever I visit India.”
Surprised? You can read an entire chapter devoted to the secret
followers of “Krishnaism” in Iran, and how they are routinely
persecuted by the authorities, in Aatish Taseer’s wonderfully written
Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands.
The global outcry against the Swiss referendum prompts me to ask
myself a troubling question which is hardly debated in the Indian
media: “The ban is wrong and condemnable, but why is there no protest
against, and not even a discussion on, the near-total denial of
religious freedom for non-Muslims in most Muslim countries?” Saudi
Arabia prohibits the construction of any non-Muslim place of worship
on its soil. A non-Muslim cannot even enter Mecca and Medina. Most
Gulf countries disallow building of churches and synagogues. Hindu
temples, of course, are a no-no. A friend who worked in Saudi Arabia
once told me that he was not allowed to carry even pictures of Hindu
deities to be used for worship at home. “The immigration staff at the
airport found the pictures in my bag and simply threw them aside.” Non-
Muslim employees cannot celebrate their festivals in public. This, in
spite of the fact that millions of non-Muslim immigrants have been
working in these countries for many years, contributing immensely to
their economic prosperity and social wellbeing.
In the debate on the Swiss ban, here is a European blogger’s comment
on the Net: “Muslims are allowed to do dawa, build/repair mosques, and
openly practice their faith in the West. Yet, in the Islamic world,
these activities for Christians are severely restricted if not
outright prohibited. Muslims can convert us, but the other way around
is viewed as a provocation. Only one demographic group in Europe has
created literally hundreds of no-go areas. You don’t hear about
Hindus, Buddhists, or any other faith group creating these kinds of
areas. I want to see the gap bridged between the two civilisations,
but it takes two to dance.”
There are also other asymmetries. The US, Canada and almost all
European countries accept Muslim immigrants from around the world and
even grant them citizenship. This accounts for the rapid rise in the
Muslim population in the West. On the contrary, very few Muslim
countries grant citizenship to non-Muslim immigrants if they refuse to
embrace Islam. Indeed, even the population of native religious
minorities in the Islamic world is shrinking each year, largely due to
official and unofficial persecution. In Sadanand Dhume’s extremely
readable debut book My Friend The Fanatic, which describes the steady
Arabisation of Indonesia, he says this about neighbouring Malaysia,
another Muslim majority country: “A Yemeni or a Pakistani might show
up today and his children would be considered sons of the soil and
given preferences in everything from college admissions to business
contracts. The children of a Buddhist or Christian Chinese or of a
Hindu Tamil who had lived there a hundred years remained foreign.”
Yes, the Swiss move on minarets is unjustified. Yet, many liberals who
oppose the ban are alarmed by the illiberal voices that have emanated
from the Muslim world. They especially refer to the words of Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey who heads an Islamist
party in a country that is still secular: “The minarets are our
bayonets, the domes our helmets, the mosques our barracks and the
faithful our army.”
Clearly, Muslims around the world need to do some self-reflection on
inter-religious relations in our globalised world. If secularism,
pluralism and tolerance are necessary in Muslim-minority countries,
they are equally necessary in Muslim-majority countries. Double
standards won’t do.

 buon segno di tolleranza. O mi sbaglio?
No, non sbagli.  Potrebbe darsi che il buono aspetto inverso
dell'intolleranza dell'islam ed il cristianesimo, e della loro
ossessione colla conversione degli aderenti di altre religioni, sia
una certa attitudine piu' aperta, naturalmente, verso gli
extracomunitari, mentre gli indu', in quanto non si interessano,
generalmente, nelle idee altrui, sono tanto piu' chiusi all'idea di
uno che volesse convertirsi volentieri alla vita induista.  Ma cio'
detto, devo dire che benche' la societa' indu' sia estremamente
chiusa, sembra a me che pre tutta la societa' indiana non sia meno
chiusa, sia agli stranieri che ai membri di comunita' e caste di altri
indiani, anche quelli che condividono la stessa religione.

 che investo le mie passioni.
Per me, lo è, ma pure questo mi mette fuori della comprensione dei
miei in India, perché essendo essenzialmente, come te, una persona
occidentale, e comunque in qualsiasi società un fuoricasta, il mio
rapporto col divino è individualista e filosofico.  Ma ci capiamo,
credo.