Page 98 - Non-violence and peace-building

Lessons for Conflict-Resolution

If you see things from a communal perspective, you
do not distinguish between right and wrong. You only
see things in terms of your community versus another
community. And when a communal riot happens, you
blindly support your community and start abusing the
other community. This approach has been decried
in the Hadith as asabiyyah, a form of tribal prejudice,
which, in Islam, is utterly false and condemnable.
The other way to look at the question of riots is
the Islamic way. The Islamic way is based on certain
principles, and not on communal basis. When we
analyze the Bhiwandi riots from the Islamic perspective,
the first question that arises is: What was the issue or
complaint which so angered Muslims that they took
to angry demonstrations against the Shiv Sena and its
leader?

Muslims said that the issue that had so incensed
them was that, so they alleged, the Shiv Sena leader
had demanded a ban on the Quran and insulted the
Prophet. But facts revealed that this allegation was
entirely false. The Shiv Sena leader did not say this at
all.
The Shiv Sena leader was at that time in Mumbai.
Yet, prior to the riots, no Muslim group went to meet
him to find out if the allegations that Muslims were
making against him were true nor not. No Muslim
even bothered to contact him on the telephone in this
regard. The so-called Muslim leaders, who stir into
action in the aftermath of riots, did nothing at all to
investigate these allegations before the riots broke out.
The only thing that happened was that a Mumbai-based

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