At 7/11 memorial, a fatwa against terror

What is the place of terror in Islam?’’ It was in response to this question by poet-lyricist Javed Akhtar, a few days after the serial blasts on Mumbai’s local trains

What is the place of terror in Islam?’’ It was in response to this question by poet-lyricist Javed Akhtar, a few days after the serial blasts on Mumbai’s local trains, that Fuzail-ur-Rahman Usmani, Punjab’s chief mufti, issued a fatwa against Terrible Tuesday’s terror.

‘‘There’s a world of difference between Islamic jihad and terrorism,’’ said Usmani, reading out the page-long fatwa at ‘Citizens Against Terror’, a public meeting held at K C College on Thursday evening. ‘‘A jihad secures for people their basic rights and freedoms while terrorism snatches away these very rights and freedoms.’’ Organisers of the event will translate and distribute Usmani’s fatwa in the coming days.

At the meeting, Usmani and Veer Bhadra Mishra, the priest of Varanasi’s Sankatmochan temple that was bombed on March 7 last year, saluted the city’s courage in the face of terror and urged Mumbaikars to maintain religious unity and ensure there’s no repeat of the 1993 communal riots.

As investigators assert that Islamic militant groups are behind the 7/11 bombings so far, speakers at the event were at pains to urge that Islam, indeed no religion, permitted the taking of lives.

An emotionally charged Akhtar told the gathering: ‘‘When I think of the train blasts, I ask myself, what do the people who do these acts look like? Did they see the faces of the people who came and sat in the train beside the bombs they had placed? Did they go home that night and play with their children, talk to their parents, smile at their wives? Could they sleep at night?’’

Mishra recalled the day of the blasts at Sankatmochan temple and the efforts of hardline groups to exploit the resultant outrage to create religious rift. ‘‘It is clear that each religious community will have to address its own hardline fringe,’’ he said. ‘‘Hindus must talk to Hindus and Muslims to Muslims. We are heirs to a great civilisation. We cannot give in to terror.’’

A host of anonymous citizens, largely people who live and work by the train tracks who helped rush the injured to hospitals and retrieved mutilated bodies from the wreckage of the trains, also recalled scenes from 7/11.

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‘‘When we helped the people affected by the bombs, nobody thought what community they belonged to,’’ said Usman Wakaria, who runs a workshop near the Jogeshwari rail tracks. ‘‘Our only message to terrorists is that Indians are one and they cannot win against us by sowing seeds of discord.’’

Teesta Setalvaad said that while nabbing the guilty was important, it was only necessary to ensure that innocents do not suffer at the hands of the state that acted through crude tactics like combing operations. ‘‘An entire community cannot be held guilty for the acts of a deplorable few,’’ she said.