Religion Archive

You think Mother Teresa was a saint, right? Perhaps you also believe she lifted millions of poor people around the world out of poverty. Think again.

Mother Teresa received 120 prestigious awards and honors during her lifetime, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work helping the poor in Calcutta (now Kolkata). She became known as “the saint of the gutters” as a result of her charity work, before being officially canonized by Pope Francis in September 2016.

A number of songs are being uploaded on YouTube and other music and social media platforms that are calling for the genocide of Hindus, Kafirs and beheading of those who commit “blasphemy”. Not only songs but videos of large crowds calling for beheading have been circulating for years. Satyaagrah looked for some songs and tried to understand the message they were conveying. The songs that often have catchy background music have been seen lakhs of times.

In today’s world, spitting is considered an unclean and unhygienic act. There are laws against spitting in public places in many countries around the world carrying huge fines, especially Singapore, where the monetary fine for spitting can go up to $1000. Especially in the post-Coronavirus world, where spitting can also be a vector for the spread of COVID-19, the act of spitting, especially in public places, is looked down upon throughout the world. However, in Islam, spitting carries a special meaning, especially, to ward off the ‘evil spirit’ or ‘Satan’.

While residents in Gurugram are protesting against Muslims occupying public places every week for namaz prayers, Guardian has claimed that those public places are Muslim sites, and the Muslims in India have no place for praying now.

Many Sikhs today continuously try to draw differences between Hinduism and Sikhism. They describe Sikhism as a huge advance over Hinduism. Due to this increasing Hinduphobia among this particular section of the Sikh community, a false narrative is peddled that the Hindus in India were only saved from Islamic invader Aurangzeb’s atrocities and barbarism because the Sikh Guru paid the highest sacrifice for members of ‘other’ religious community and did us Hindus a favour.

For the past few weeks, conscientious locals and residents have been resolutely protesting against the public offering of namaz by Muslims. The opposition to namaz at public places reached a crescendo this week as the demonstrators organised a protest to rail against the Gurugram administration for allowing Muslims to continue using public places for their religious activities. 

Repetition, it is said, is the most important ingredient of propaganda. Hitler once said, “All propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas. Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd”. Hitler essentially advocated that the propaganda message must be simple with only a few ingredients and it should be repeated ad-nauseam so the masses effortlessly remember the message.

The 2008 Mumbai attack was one of the deadliest terror attacks that India had ever witnessed. Led by a group of 10 Islamists associated with the Pakistani terror outfit of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), they carried out 12 shooting and bombing incidents, killed 165 civilians and injured 300 others. Iconic places in the city such as the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Leopold Cafe, Cama Hospital, Taj Palace, Nariman House, Oberoi Trident became the target of Islamist attacks. 

Two terms frequently used are dhimmitude and dhimmi, terms whose genesis, consequence  and current state we will be examining here. From this examination, we also hope to make it clear why Hindus can’t take their religious processions through Muslim-majority areas, why Hindus historically never studied Islam, and why they did not mount a spirited, intellectual criticism of Islam, and why Hindus still think Islam is merciful and benevolent in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and most importantly, why even today Hindus refuse to discuss Islam and tell fellow Hindus to shut up if the try to discuss Islam.