A December 2025 study examining the influence of religion on the internet revealed that belief systems are shaping digital conversations and curiosity.
Many of you might think I got something so wrong in National Interest pieces written this year. I might disagree! But some deserve a Mea Culpa. I’d deal with the most recent this week.
Talaq-e-hasan is often described as the “preferable” method because it stretches the process for three months, but it is not fair. It remains a one-sided, extrajudicial mechanism in India.
The good and the bad in the Islamic tradition are so intertwined that there is no good Islam to fight the bad one. The way out is not the true Islam, but the true nationalisation of it.
In a sea of sameness, real plot twist now isn’t perfection, it’s presence. Ten years ago, what would not have been a personality is now setting standard because no one is trying.
This is the transcript of Ep 1830 of Cut the Clutter, where Shekhar Gupta explains why strategic petroleum reserves are a national necessity & how India compares with China, US & Japan.
Tracked and wheeled variants, built in collaboration with Tata Advanced Systems and Bharat Forge, carry 30mm turrets, cross water using hydro jets, and are 65% indigenous.
American objectives are unmet. They neither have muscle nor motivation to resume the war. As for Iran, the regime didn’t just survive, it’s now led by more radical individuals.
Keep a close watch on commenters like UA…who would use anything in their book to commit STSJ and justify Zeehadism. These are precisely the closeted Ghadists that Bharat doesn’t need. We need Hinduised Muslims…Muslims who may practice the truly peaceful aspects of their mazhab while rooted in the exceptional and quintessential cultural ethos of Bharat’s Hindus ala true tolerance, true pluralism, true secularism and true live and let live philosophy. Until then keep your guard high, eyes wide and defend.
Another first-rate essay on another contentious subject by Mr. Ibn Khaldun Bharati. He is unremitting in his effort to impress upon the faithful that it is high time they started listening to reason. Despite being fully awake to the fact that Muslims have the utmost respect for each and every word of the foundational texts of Islam, he refuses to let up. He also knows that his arguments would raise the hackles of the majority of the believers. Yet he seems unstoppable. His intellectual pugnacity is such that one cannot but bow down to it. Mr. Bharati, I love to partake of your knowledge and wisdom. Thank you.
It is one thing to lament the poor realisation of the concept in the world, but to ask a Muslim to abandon belief in the أمّة ummah – the transnational, supra-ethnic community of believers – is to ask them to deny something enshrined in the Qur’ān itself with a force perhaps second only to the أركان الإسلام (pillars of Islam). Far from a modern de-nationalising invention that should be abandoned in favour of a ‘return’ to ‘national roots’, Islam essentially commands transcending national roots from its earliest sources (I am including Arabic quotes for anyone who might wish to dig into the primary sources). Allāh declares: ﴿ وَٱعْتَصِمُوا۟ بِحَبْلِ ٱللَّهِ جَمِيعًۭا وَلَا تَفَرَّقُوا۟ ۚ ﴾ – ‘And hold firmly together to the rope of Allāh and do not be divided’ (Āl ʿImrān 3:103), and ﴿ إِنَّمَا ٱلْمُؤْمِنُونَ إِخْوَةٌۭ ﴾ – ‘Without doubt the believers are brothers of one another’ (al-Ḥujurāt 49:10), and ﴿ إِنَّ هَـٰذِهِۦٓ أُمَّتُكُمْ أُمَّةًۭ وَٰحِدَةًۭ وَأَنَا۠ رَبُّكُمْ فَٱعْبُدُونِ ﴾ – ‘Indeed this, your religion (ummah), is one religion (ummah), and I am your Lord, so worship Me’ (al-Anbiyāʾ 21:92).
The تفاسير tafāsīr (exegeses) reinforce this unequivocally: al-Qurṭubī records from Ibn Masʿūd that حبل الله is الجماعة, and concludes that the meaning is convergent – «فإن الله تعالى يأمر بالألفة وينهى عن الفرقة فإن الفرقة هلكة والجماعة نجاة» (Allāh commands unity and forbids division, for division is destruction and collective solidarity is salvation). Ibn ʿAbbās admonished Simāk al-Ḥanafī: «يا حنفي، الجماعة الجماعة! فإنما هلكت الأمم الخالية لتفرقها» (O Ḥanafī – the Jamāʿah! The Jamāʿah! For verily the nations before you perished only through their fragmentation). Meanwhile, the doctrine of الولاء والبراء al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ – loyalty and disavowal – is not an optional extra but a corollary of إيمان iman (faith) itself. The Prophet ﷺ asked Abū Dharr: «أيّ عرى الإيمان أوثق؟» – Which bond of faith is the strongest? – and answered: «الموالاة في الله والمعاداة في الله والحب في الله والبغض في الله» (Loyalty for Allāh’s sake, enmity for Allāh’s sake, love for Allāh’s sake, and hatred for Allāh’s sake). الولاء والبراء al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ thus obligates Muslims to confer exclusive allegiance to Allāh, His Prophet, and the أمّة ummah of believers who uphold توحيد tawhid (divine unicity). To sever this bond is not to modernise the Muslim – it is to ask him to amputate a limb of his عقيدة aqeedah (creed).
Looking at more modern scholars and thinkers, both Dr. Isrār Aḥmad and Maulānā Mawdūdī understood this with crystalline clarity, despite their different emphases. Dr. Isrār wrote that ‘according to strict Islamic spirit and principles, the term “Muslim nation” is a self-contradiction,’ since ‘the Qur’ān and Ḥadīth state clearly that all Muslims from any part of the world form one Ummah or Ḥizb, community or party, not various geographical entities or nations,’ and that ‘they are unified in an indivisible religious communion with no possibility of internal divisiveness or of multiplicity of identity.’ He traced the present fracture to Western colonialism, which ‘completely smashed the unity of the Muslim Ummah’ by planting ‘such seeds of racial and regional prejudices as are still yielding bitter fruits.’
Mawdūdī, for his part, strongly opposed the concept of nationalism, believing it to be شرك shirk (polytheism) and declared that the principles of nationalism are totally contradictory to the principles of Islam. He taught that the common bonds uniting all Muslims are ‘common beliefs and thought, common culture, common moral system, civilisational relationship, vitality of the concept of one Ummah, universal brotherhood and geographical location of the Muslim world.’ Nasr summarises Mawdūdī’s overarching aim as putting forth ‘a view of Islam whose invigorated, pristine, and uncompromising outlook would galvanise Muslims into an ideologically uniform and hence politically indivisible community.’
Thus, to reiterate, expecting Muslims to simply shed this consciousness treats the أمّة ummah as a geopolitical club one may resign from, when in truth it is a theological reality woven into the very fabric of لا إله إلا الله Lā ilāha illā llāhu – a reality that Qur’ān, سنّة sunnah, تفسير tafsīr, and the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century all affirm with one voice.
References:
– Ahmad, Dr Israr, مسلم امت: عروج و زوال Muslim Ummah: Urooj o Zawal (The Rise and Fall of the Muslim Ummah)
– Amanullah, Muhammad and Tazul Islam, ‘Understanding the Problems and Prospects of the Muslim Unity: An Analysis of Mawdūdī’s Views’
– Al-Qurtubi, Abu ‘Abdullah, Tafsir al-Qurtubi
– Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza, ‘Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism’
– The Qur’an (Translations synthesised from Saheeh International and Mustafa Khattab’s The Clear Qur’an)
– Subhani, Ayatullah Ja’far, The Islamic Moral System: Commentary of Surah Al-Hujurat, trans. Saleem Bhimji
It’s a good article and what differentiates Christians from Muslims in general. Don’t get me wrong I still don’t like the proselytizing aspect of both religions but no one accuses Christians of “lack of patriotism” or “loyalty”.
Do I see this changing ? No. People like you are far few and less. I mean the amount of Indian Muslims who brag about “golden age of Islam” or should I say “golden age of Arab-Islam” is just outright pathetic. I don’t see many of them bragging about their Indic discoveries like Hindus or others do.
The concept of global ummah exists because there is a propaganda around Indian Muslims about who they are and where their roots are from. Like I said I don’t see it changing unless Muslim leaders (some do) start talking about it.
Nice piece of moral panic, neat package, thin argument.
Quoting a few respected names and calling the global ummah a threat does not magically turn a social diagnosis into a policy plan. It just makes fear sound scholarly.
You collapse five different things into one: violent politics, foreign state interests, theological reform movements, diaspora solidarity, and private piety. Treating all of them as a single malign force is lazy thinking, not insight. If you want to spot a threat, name the threat. Do not throw a net over everything and then declare the catch proof of a conspiracy.
There is a double standard here. Transnational networks exist for Christians, Hindus, Jews, secular activists and corporations too. Money, ideas and loyalties flow across borders in every direction. Singling out Muslims as uniquely prone to deracination reads like bias with footnotes, not careful analysis.
Labeling solidarity as inherently militant has a policy consequence. Once you call a community existentially dangerous the default response becomes surveillance, policing and exclusion. Those tools rarely fix the problems that produce alienation. They tend to amplify them. If your priority is national cohesion, stop prescribing the blunt instruments that make cohesion impossible.
The rhetoric you use is familiar. It mirrors the exact majoritarian playbook it claims to critique: identify a group, mark them as foreign, stoke panic, then justify legal and administrative measures. You diagnose deracination while practicing it. That is hypocrisy, not scholarship.
If you want serious outcomes instead of rhetorical victory, try this simple rule: distinguish violent actors from peaceful solidarities, and then treat grievances as grievances rather than as proof of treason. Equality under the law, targeted social investment where exclusion is real, and restraint from securitizing everyday religious life would do far more to reduce alienation than another op-ed sermon.
Final note: alarm sells, nuance does not. But if your goal is a safer, more stable society, try solving insecurities instead writing half-assed shit pieces that create more of it.
It’s giving icono-anankist Hindutva core.
But that’s a global Hindutva dream you’d rather not talk about.
The same non-assimilationist, racinated, ‘foreign-fealty’ arguments can be made of many communities very easily.
I expect nothing more from this toilet paper of a news outlet that platforms people like Seshadri Chari and Amana who Shekhar sees as kindred spirits while co-opting liberal vernacular as a veneer.
Laughable op-ed rooted in icono-anankist imagination, with securitization of ANYTHING that doesn’t conform to it.
That is TRUE intellectual suppression.
All your tired tropes unravel really easily for any half-decent, discerning person.
I’m not even muslim btw, and even I see through your crap. The same bigoted “Hindutva-core” arguments are used by your rw contributing authors for all faiths, including Shekhar himself.
Of course, the Print would know you personally. And of course, you need to be anonymous — who’d want to own such shit writing and pass it off as an op-ed?
It’s OpIndia in liberal lip-gloss. No that people don’t see through it.
Why do we worry so much about these tangential issues. Let Indian Muslims be treated with fairness and dignity, like normal Indian citizens. Neither more ( recall “ Appeasement “ ) nor less. One would commend the columnist to observe the high level messaging coming from Assam.
Keep a close watch on commenters like UA…who would use anything in their book to commit STSJ and justify Zeehadism. These are precisely the closeted Ghadists that Bharat doesn’t need. We need Hinduised Muslims…Muslims who may practice the truly peaceful aspects of their mazhab while rooted in the exceptional and quintessential cultural ethos of Bharat’s Hindus ala true tolerance, true pluralism, true secularism and true live and let live philosophy. Until then keep your guard high, eyes wide and defend.
Another first-rate essay on another contentious subject by Mr. Ibn Khaldun Bharati. He is unremitting in his effort to impress upon the faithful that it is high time they started listening to reason. Despite being fully awake to the fact that Muslims have the utmost respect for each and every word of the foundational texts of Islam, he refuses to let up. He also knows that his arguments would raise the hackles of the majority of the believers. Yet he seems unstoppable. His intellectual pugnacity is such that one cannot but bow down to it. Mr. Bharati, I love to partake of your knowledge and wisdom. Thank you.
It is one thing to lament the poor realisation of the concept in the world, but to ask a Muslim to abandon belief in the أمّة ummah – the transnational, supra-ethnic community of believers – is to ask them to deny something enshrined in the Qur’ān itself with a force perhaps second only to the أركان الإسلام (pillars of Islam). Far from a modern de-nationalising invention that should be abandoned in favour of a ‘return’ to ‘national roots’, Islam essentially commands transcending national roots from its earliest sources (I am including Arabic quotes for anyone who might wish to dig into the primary sources). Allāh declares: ﴿ وَٱعْتَصِمُوا۟ بِحَبْلِ ٱللَّهِ جَمِيعًۭا وَلَا تَفَرَّقُوا۟ ۚ ﴾ – ‘And hold firmly together to the rope of Allāh and do not be divided’ (Āl ʿImrān 3:103), and ﴿ إِنَّمَا ٱلْمُؤْمِنُونَ إِخْوَةٌۭ ﴾ – ‘Without doubt the believers are brothers of one another’ (al-Ḥujurāt 49:10), and ﴿ إِنَّ هَـٰذِهِۦٓ أُمَّتُكُمْ أُمَّةًۭ وَٰحِدَةًۭ وَأَنَا۠ رَبُّكُمْ فَٱعْبُدُونِ ﴾ – ‘Indeed this, your religion (ummah), is one religion (ummah), and I am your Lord, so worship Me’ (al-Anbiyāʾ 21:92).
The تفاسير tafāsīr (exegeses) reinforce this unequivocally: al-Qurṭubī records from Ibn Masʿūd that حبل الله is الجماعة, and concludes that the meaning is convergent – «فإن الله تعالى يأمر بالألفة وينهى عن الفرقة فإن الفرقة هلكة والجماعة نجاة» (Allāh commands unity and forbids division, for division is destruction and collective solidarity is salvation). Ibn ʿAbbās admonished Simāk al-Ḥanafī: «يا حنفي، الجماعة الجماعة! فإنما هلكت الأمم الخالية لتفرقها» (O Ḥanafī – the Jamāʿah! The Jamāʿah! For verily the nations before you perished only through their fragmentation). Meanwhile, the doctrine of الولاء والبراء al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ – loyalty and disavowal – is not an optional extra but a corollary of إيمان iman (faith) itself. The Prophet ﷺ asked Abū Dharr: «أيّ عرى الإيمان أوثق؟» – Which bond of faith is the strongest? – and answered: «الموالاة في الله والمعاداة في الله والحب في الله والبغض في الله» (Loyalty for Allāh’s sake, enmity for Allāh’s sake, love for Allāh’s sake, and hatred for Allāh’s sake). الولاء والبراء al-walāʾ wa-l-barāʾ thus obligates Muslims to confer exclusive allegiance to Allāh, His Prophet, and the أمّة ummah of believers who uphold توحيد tawhid (divine unicity). To sever this bond is not to modernise the Muslim – it is to ask him to amputate a limb of his عقيدة aqeedah (creed).
Looking at more modern scholars and thinkers, both Dr. Isrār Aḥmad and Maulānā Mawdūdī understood this with crystalline clarity, despite their different emphases. Dr. Isrār wrote that ‘according to strict Islamic spirit and principles, the term “Muslim nation” is a self-contradiction,’ since ‘the Qur’ān and Ḥadīth state clearly that all Muslims from any part of the world form one Ummah or Ḥizb, community or party, not various geographical entities or nations,’ and that ‘they are unified in an indivisible religious communion with no possibility of internal divisiveness or of multiplicity of identity.’ He traced the present fracture to Western colonialism, which ‘completely smashed the unity of the Muslim Ummah’ by planting ‘such seeds of racial and regional prejudices as are still yielding bitter fruits.’
Mawdūdī, for his part, strongly opposed the concept of nationalism, believing it to be شرك shirk (polytheism) and declared that the principles of nationalism are totally contradictory to the principles of Islam. He taught that the common bonds uniting all Muslims are ‘common beliefs and thought, common culture, common moral system, civilisational relationship, vitality of the concept of one Ummah, universal brotherhood and geographical location of the Muslim world.’ Nasr summarises Mawdūdī’s overarching aim as putting forth ‘a view of Islam whose invigorated, pristine, and uncompromising outlook would galvanise Muslims into an ideologically uniform and hence politically indivisible community.’
Thus, to reiterate, expecting Muslims to simply shed this consciousness treats the أمّة ummah as a geopolitical club one may resign from, when in truth it is a theological reality woven into the very fabric of لا إله إلا الله Lā ilāha illā llāhu – a reality that Qur’ān, سنّة sunnah, تفسير tafsīr, and the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century all affirm with one voice.
References:
– Ahmad, Dr Israr, مسلم امت: عروج و زوال Muslim Ummah: Urooj o Zawal (The Rise and Fall of the Muslim Ummah)
– Amanullah, Muhammad and Tazul Islam, ‘Understanding the Problems and Prospects of the Muslim Unity: An Analysis of Mawdūdī’s Views’
– Al-Qurtubi, Abu ‘Abdullah, Tafsir al-Qurtubi
– Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza, ‘Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism’
– The Qur’an (Translations synthesised from Saheeh International and Mustafa Khattab’s The Clear Qur’an)
– Subhani, Ayatullah Ja’far, The Islamic Moral System: Commentary of Surah Al-Hujurat, trans. Saleem Bhimji
It’s a good article and what differentiates Christians from Muslims in general. Don’t get me wrong I still don’t like the proselytizing aspect of both religions but no one accuses Christians of “lack of patriotism” or “loyalty”.
Do I see this changing ? No. People like you are far few and less. I mean the amount of Indian Muslims who brag about “golden age of Islam” or should I say “golden age of Arab-Islam” is just outright pathetic. I don’t see many of them bragging about their Indic discoveries like Hindus or others do.
The concept of global ummah exists because there is a propaganda around Indian Muslims about who they are and where their roots are from. Like I said I don’t see it changing unless Muslim leaders (some do) start talking about it.
Nice piece of moral panic, neat package, thin argument.
Quoting a few respected names and calling the global ummah a threat does not magically turn a social diagnosis into a policy plan. It just makes fear sound scholarly.
You collapse five different things into one: violent politics, foreign state interests, theological reform movements, diaspora solidarity, and private piety. Treating all of them as a single malign force is lazy thinking, not insight. If you want to spot a threat, name the threat. Do not throw a net over everything and then declare the catch proof of a conspiracy.
There is a double standard here. Transnational networks exist for Christians, Hindus, Jews, secular activists and corporations too. Money, ideas and loyalties flow across borders in every direction. Singling out Muslims as uniquely prone to deracination reads like bias with footnotes, not careful analysis.
Labeling solidarity as inherently militant has a policy consequence. Once you call a community existentially dangerous the default response becomes surveillance, policing and exclusion. Those tools rarely fix the problems that produce alienation. They tend to amplify them. If your priority is national cohesion, stop prescribing the blunt instruments that make cohesion impossible.
The rhetoric you use is familiar. It mirrors the exact majoritarian playbook it claims to critique: identify a group, mark them as foreign, stoke panic, then justify legal and administrative measures. You diagnose deracination while practicing it. That is hypocrisy, not scholarship.
If you want serious outcomes instead of rhetorical victory, try this simple rule: distinguish violent actors from peaceful solidarities, and then treat grievances as grievances rather than as proof of treason. Equality under the law, targeted social investment where exclusion is real, and restraint from securitizing everyday religious life would do far more to reduce alienation than another op-ed sermon.
Final note: alarm sells, nuance does not. But if your goal is a safer, more stable society, try solving insecurities instead writing half-assed shit pieces that create more of it.
It’s giving icono-anankist Hindutva core.
But that’s a global Hindutva dream you’d rather not talk about.
The same non-assimilationist, racinated, ‘foreign-fealty’ arguments can be made of many communities very easily.
I expect nothing more from this toilet paper of a news outlet that platforms people like Seshadri Chari and Amana who Shekhar sees as kindred spirits while co-opting liberal vernacular as a veneer.
Laughable op-ed rooted in icono-anankist imagination, with securitization of ANYTHING that doesn’t conform to it.
That is TRUE intellectual suppression.
All your tired tropes unravel really easily for any half-decent, discerning person.
I’m not even muslim btw, and even I see through your crap. The same bigoted “Hindutva-core” arguments are used by your rw contributing authors for all faiths, including Shekhar himself.
Of course, the Print would know you personally. And of course, you need to be anonymous — who’d want to own such shit writing and pass it off as an op-ed?
It’s OpIndia in liberal lip-gloss. No that people don’t see through it.
Why do we worry so much about these tangential issues. Let Indian Muslims be treated with fairness and dignity, like normal Indian citizens. Neither more ( recall “ Appeasement “ ) nor less. One would commend the columnist to observe the high level messaging coming from Assam.