Page 67 - Non-violence and peace-building

Non-violence and Peace-building in Islam

a city or town. But the language and style that some
of our writers and commentators use create the wrong
impression that the whole country or an entire city is
torn apart by communal violence.
Whenever communal violence breaks out, it does
not happen all across the country or even in every part
of a particular city. In India, such violence happens
more in the north than elsewhere. Likewise, in the city
of Aligarh, inter-communal violence sometimes breaks
out in the Old City, but rarely, if ever, in the relatively
new Civil Lines area. Similarly, the older parts of
Hyderabad are more vulnerable to communal violence
than the newer parts.

Our leaders are engrossed in the falsehood of
generalizations. And that is the greatest reason why
they have failed to find a proper solution to this very
sensitive problem of violence between communities.
Because some of them claim that the entire country or
a whole city is drowned in communal violence, they do
not see those parts of the country or of a city that are
not affected by such violence. If they could see these
parts, too, they might be able to investigate what had
kept these parts free of violence. And then they could
seek to evolve appropriate solutions, based on this
knowledge, to address communal violence in those
parts of the country or of a city that are affected by such
violence.
It is worth thinking about what leads some parts of
a city to be rocked by communal violence at the same
time as other parts of the city remain violence-free. The
lessons one draws from this sort of analysis can be very

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