By Joseph Victor Edwin
New Delhi: The Islamic Studies Association has celebrated the “International Day of Human Fraternity” through a webinar.
Craig Considine, a professor at the Department of Sociology in Rice University of the United States was the speaker for the February 4 program on “The Humanity of Prophet Muhammad.”
Considine pointed out that the media have been feeding people around the world a steady diet of Islamophobia since the tragic events of September 11, 2001. This Islamophobic propaganda insists that Islam is incompatible with the western values that are founded on Judeo-Christian world view. Therefore, the Muslim ‘other’ is a threat to Judeo-Christian way of life.
The professor also contends that critical scholarship must counteract this view and turn back the tide of Islamophobia. Through his scholarship, Considine reclaims the view that there is in fact a Judeo-Christian-Muslim theological tradition. By analyzing Prophet Muhammad’s life through the lens of history and sociology, he presented Prophet Muhammad as an egalitarian and an advocate of religious pluralism. Prophet Muhammad was deeply committed to the creation of just societies devoid of racism and ethnocentrism, he added.
Abdur Raheem Kidwai, professor of English and director of the UGC Human Resource Development Centre at Aligarh Muslim University, while introducing Considine, noted that the views of the American professor provide an antidote to Islamophobia.
The Islamic Studies Association was founded in 1979 by a group of scholars and their friends in the framework of Delhi’s Vidyajyoti College of Theology. Since then the association has been at the service of Christian-Muslim relations in the Indian Subcontinent.
Its members teach Islam and interreligious dialogue in a number of universities and academic institutes throughout India. One major ISA publication was the handbook “The Muslims of India: Beliefs and Practices,” edited by late Jesuit Father Paul Jackson. The book focuses on the Indian Muslims by giving the general Islamic background needed for others to understand them better.
The quarterly journal “Salaam” is another important service ISA has been rendering to promote Christian-Muslim relations in the context of pluralistic India for the last 40 years uninterruptedly.