Palestinians in Gaza are making preparations for Ramadan in the midst of Israel’s war on the territory, which poses immense challenges for those observing the holy month.
Published On 7 Mar 2024
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Displaced Palestinian children in Gaza have staged a protest march to demand an immediate ceasefire to end the war before Ramadan.
Published On 6 Mar 2024
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For most countries, the first day of fasting is likely to be March 12, depending on the sighting of the new moon.
The first day of fasting for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in Mecca will be Monday, March 11 or Tuesday, March 12, depending on the sighting of the new moon.
Ramadan is determined by the Islamic lunar calendar, which begins with the sighting of the crescent moon. Saudi Arabia and other Muslim-majority countries rely on the testimonies of moon sighters to determine the start of the month.
For the moon to be visible, the crescent must set after the sun. This allows the sky to be dark enough to spot the small slither of the new moon.
After the sun sets on the night of March 10, 29th of Shaaban month in the Hijri calendar, moon sighters face west with a clear view of the horizon for a first glimpse of the crescent moon.
If the moon is sighted, the month of Ramadan begins, with the first fasting day being March 11. Otherwise, Shaaban will complete 30 days, and the first fasting day will be March 12.
In Saudi Arabia, testimonies of people who have spotted the moon are recorded and the Supreme Court makes a decision on when Ramadan should begin.
According to Crescent Moon Watch, a moon tracker run by the United Kingdom’s Nautical Almanac Office, Ramadan’s new moon will begin on March 10 at 17:23 GMT (8:23pm Mecca time), with no sightings of any type expected that night.
On March 10, the new moon should be visible only in the Pacific, near the Hawaiian Islands and parts of French Polynesia. It is unlikely that most of the world, including the Middle East, North America and Europe, will be able to see the new crescent with the naked eye.
The new moon could possibly be seen without optical aid if the skies are clear across most of the world on March 11. Telescopic sightings are likely in southern Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand.
For most countries, the first day of fasting will likely be March 12.
Lunar months last between 29 and 30 days, depending on the sighting of the new moon on the 29th night of each month. If the new moon is not visible, the month lasts 30 days.
Muslims believe that Ramadan is the month in which the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad more than 1,400 years ago.
Throughout the month, observing Muslims fast from just before the sunrise prayer, Fajr, to the sunset prayer, Maghrib.
The fast entails abstinence from eating, drinking, smoking, and sexual relations to achieve greater “taqwa”, or consciousness of God.
Fasting is one of the five pillars of Islam, along with the Muslim declaration of faith, daily prayers, charity, and performing the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca if physically and financially capable.
In many Muslim-majority countries, working hours are reduced, and most restaurants are closed during fasting hours
Various Muslim-majority nations have a personalised greeting in their native languages. “Ramadan Mubarak” and “Ramadan Kareem” are common greetings exchanged in this period, wishing the recipient a blessed and generous month, respectively.
At the end of Ramadan, Muslims celebrate Eid al-Fitr. In Arabic, it means “festival of breaking the fast”.
Depending on the new moon sighting, Eid al-Fitr, which lasts three days, will likely start on April 10 or 11.
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On February 28, 2021, just after 9pm, nine Muslim men removed their shoes, lined up in single file, and knelt quietly for Isha, their faith’s mandatory night prayer, inside a Missouri state prison in the small city of Bonne Terre.
Their action was neither unusual nor provocative. The men had been praying together in the common space of their wing at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center (ERDCC) for several months without incident, up to four times a day, after COVID restrictions put the prison’s chapel off-limits.
They lived in Housing Unit Four or 4-House’s B wing, which was known as the “honour dorm” and was reserved for prisoners with no recent infractions. In other wings of the men’s prison, prisoners were given limited time out of their cells. But in the honour dorm, the men could be out of their cells all day long in the wing’s ground floor common area, heating food that they had purchased at the commissary in the shared microwave, or gathering to talk or play cards or chess at tables bolted to the concrete floors.
The group of worshippers who gathered to pray at the back of the common area began with three prisoners and had grown to between nine and 14. Qadir (Reginald) Clemons, 52, who usually gave the call to prayer, says he had periodically checked in with the prison chaplain, and the “bubble officer” in the control room, which commanded a view of all four wings, to confirm that there would be no problem with the group praying. Christian prisoners also held communal prayer circles throughout ERDCC, including in the honour dorm.
On this night, however, the kneeling men would be charged at by prison guards. Five of them would be doused with pepper spray until they writhed in pain. Seven would be shackled and, most of them shoeless, marched about 50 metres through the winter mud of a recreation yard to another housing unit where they would be put into solitary confinement, also called administrative segregation, AdSeg, or simply – “the Hole”.
The group’s leader, Mustafa (Steven) Stafford, 58, a short, jovial man whom the others called “Sheikh” due to his commitment to Islam, would be assaulted en route to AdSeg and again once there. After their release from the Hole 10 days later, Stafford and others would face further retaliation.
None of the men – who dubbed themselves the “Bonne Terre Seven” after the incident – were accused of anything aside from disobeying a lieutenant’s orders to stop praying, which their faith dictates they cannot do, except in an emergency. According to the now-retired lieutenant, no prison official was disciplined over the incident.
This account of a peaceful prayer’s violent disruption and its aftermath is based on dozens of in-person and telephone interviews, including with six of the Bonne Terre Seven, eight other prisoners who witnessed the attack and several officers. It is bolstered by accounts from a lawsuit filed in 2022 by Clemons, now amended to include his eight fellow worshippers, who are petitioning the court to declare that the Missouri Department of Corrections (MODOC) cannot deny their religious rights and to award them damages for what they suffered. It also draws on interviews with human and prisoner rights advocates and the men’s lawyers from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The picture that emerges is of a facility, and a larger prison system, that often treats Muslim prisoners, the majority of whom are Black, with suspicion, hostility and racism.
Even against this backdrop, the ERDCC attack stands out for its savagery. “I’ve never seen a case that involves this level of violence,” says Kimberly Noe-Lehenbauer, a CAIR lawyer representing the nine victims.
ERDCC is located on the outskirts of Bonne Terre in the low, rolling hills of the Ozark Plateau, 60 miles (96.6km) south of Missouri’s second-largest city, St Louis.
Bonne Terre is in St Francois County, which is nearly 93 percent white and squarely Republican; 73 percent of voters supported Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Trump signs still proliferate today, along with other markers of local beliefs; a “Jesus Loves You” billboard sits on the side of a state highway, followed soon after by a front door wrapped in the Confederate flag.
ERDCC opened in 2003, bringing a new main industry to the former mining town, whose centre sits atop a large mine that was shuttered in 1962. The city has a population of under 7,000, including the prisoners, which as of July 2020 numbered nearly 2,600 men.
ERDCC is a sprawling D-shaped mixed-security encampment. It has the state’s largest prison population and encompasses 11 housing units, 10 of those with four wings and a control unit or “bubble” in the centre.
The encampment also has a dining hall, a building housing educational programmes and a medical facility, three recreational yards, an intake area, and a small factory where some prisoners produce soap and other cleaning supplies. A visitation room lies in a building just past the prison entrance. That same building houses Missouri’s only execution chamber, though condemned prisoners are held in Potosi, 15 miles (24km) west, and brought to ERDCC shortly before their scheduled execution.
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A Pakistani police officer is being hailed as a hero for negotiating the safe escort of a woman accused of blasphemy by a mob in Lahore. The woman was wearing a dress with Arabic calligraphy that the crowd mistook for verses from the Quran.
Published On 26 Feb 2024
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It’s also Africa’s largest, but critics view the mosque as a vanity project for a former president who named it after himself.
Algeria has inaugurated the world’s third-largest and Africa’s largest mosque, which had been delayed for years amid political shifts, ahead of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.
Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune on Monday officially inaugurated the Grand Mosque of Algiers on the North African nation’s Mediterranean coastline.
Known locally as the Djamaa El-Djazair, it features the world’s tallest minaret at 265 metres (869 feet), can accommodate 120,000 people, and is the world’s largest mosque only after Islam’s holiest sites in Saudi Arabia’s Mecca and Medina.
It was built over seven years in the form of a modernist structure extending across 27.75 hectares (almost 70 acres), decorated in wood and marble and containing Arab and North African flourishes. It reportedly has a helicopter landing pad and a library capable of housing up to one million books.
The mosque’s official opening allows it to host many public prayers and events during the month of Ramadan, which starts around March 10.
But its inauguration event was largely ceremonial, as it has been open to international tourists and state visitors to Algeria for about five years, and first opened for prayers in October 2020 but without Tebboune as he was suffering from COVID-19.
The vast mosque reportedly cost close to $900m to build and was constructed by a Chinese firm.
Algeria now boasts the largest mosque outside of the holiest sites in Islam, but the project has been marked by years of delays and cost overruns. It has also been criticised for allegedly being built in a seismically risky area, but the government has denied this.
Critics also claim that the mosque was essentially a vanity project for former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was forced to resign in 2019 after 20 years in power.
Bouteflika, who had to step down after popular protests and eventual intervention by Algeria’s military, had named the mosque after himself and planned to inaugurate it in February 2019 but never managed to.
The mosque — along with a major national highway and a million new housing units — was marred by suspicions of corruption during the Bouteflika era, with suspected kickbacks to state officials paid by the contractors.
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The BJP government says the law allowed child marriages, but Muslim leaders allege the move is aimed at polarising voters ahead of election.
The Indian state of Assam, which has a large Muslim population, has repealed a British-era law on Muslim marriage and divorce, prompting anger among the minority community whose leaders say the plan is an attempt to polarise voters on religious lines ahead of the national election.
Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma wrote on X on Saturday that the state has repealed the Assam Muslim Marriages and Divorces Registration Act that was enacted close to nine decades ago.
“This act contained provisions allowing marriage registration even if the bride and groom had not reached the legal ages of 18 and 21, as required by law. This move marks another significant step towards prohibiting child marriages in Assam,” he wrote.
On 23.22024, the Assam cabinet made a significant decision to repeal the age-old Assam Muslim Marriages & Divorces Registration Act. This act contained provisions allowing marriage registration even if the bride and groom had not reached the legal ages of 18 and 21, as required…
— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) February 23, 2024
The legislation, enacted in 1935, laid down the legal process in line with the Muslim personal law. After a 2010 amendment, it made the registration of Muslim marriages and divorces compulsory in the state, whereas registration was voluntary before.
Authorities in the state, which is governed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had called the law “outdated” and alleged it allowed child marriages.
The state government’s crackdown on child marriages, which started last year, has included several thousand arrests under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act in a quest to “eradicate” child marriages by 2026.
But representatives of the Muslim community in the state said the crackdown was largely directed against them.
Assam, which has the highest percentage of Muslims among Indian states at 34 percent, has previously said it wants to implement uniform civil laws for marriage, divorce, adoption and inheritance, as the northern state of Uttarakhand – also governed by the BJP – did earlier this month.
Nationwide, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and other groups follow their own laws and customs or a secular code for such matters. The BJP has promised a Uniform Civil Code.
Assam’s government has said it intends to enact the same law as Uttarakhand. The Reuters news agency quoted Chief Minister Sarma as saying on Sunday the state is “not immediately” engaged in efforts to implement a unified code before the general election, due by May.
Bengali-speaking Muslims comprise the bulk of the Muslim population in Assam, and tensions often rise between them and ethnic Assamese, who are mostly Hindu. Nationalist politicians say a large-scale migration from neighbouring Bangladesh altered the demographic of the northeastern state.
Assam’s decision on the Muslim marriage and divorce law prompted Muslim opposition leaders to accuse the BJP of trying to use the colonial-era law as an election ploy.
“They want to polarise their voters by provoking Muslims, which Muslims will not let happen,” Badruddin Ajmal, a legislator from Assam who heads the All India United Democratic Front that mainly fights for Muslim causes, told reporters on Saturday.
“It’s a first step towards bringing a Uniform Civil Code, but this is how the BJP government will come to an end in Assam.”
Other opposition parties also criticised the decision.
“Just before the election, the government is trying to polarise the voters, depriving and discriminating against Muslims in some fields, like repealing the registration and divorce act, saying that it is a pre-independence act of 1935,” said Abdur Rashid Mandal of the main opposition Indian National Congress party.
Mandal dismissed assertions that the law allows for child marriage, adding that it was “the only mechanism to register the marriages of Muslims” in the state.
“There is no other scope or institution and it is also as per the constitution of India. It is the personal law of the Muslims that can’t be repealed.”
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The Calcutta High Court this week told the government of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal to consider renaming two lions in a zoo-cum-animal reserve after a Hindu nationalist organisation called Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) found their names rather catty.
Starting on Tuesday, the court heard the plea requesting a change of name for a lioness called Sita, named after a Hindu deity. Until recently, Sita shared an enclosure at Bengal Safari Park with a lion named Akbar, partly the reason for the outrage. Here’s what it’s all about.
The lion Akbar shares its name with a 16th-century Mughal emperor who is widely seen as having been a beacon of secularism. He had a Hindu wife, and many of his key advisers were Hindu, too. But like all emperors of the Mughal dynasty, which ruled over much of the Indian subcontinent, Akbar, too, is largely a hate figure among Hindu nationalists.
“Sita cannot stay with the Mughal Emperor Akbar,” VHP official Anup Mondal said on Sunday.
Members of the VHP, which is affiliated with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), also said they received complaints about hurt religious sentiments from all over India, deeming the naming of the big cats blasphemous, in the petition written by VHP’s West Bengal secretary Lakshman Bansal.
The lions arrived in West Bengal under an exchange programme involving Sepahijala Zoological Park in the neighbouring state of Tripura, governed by the BJP. The VHP alleged that Akbar was initially named Ram – a Hindu deity and Sita’s husband – and was renamed by the West Bengal authorities, the opposition Trinamool Congress party.
West Bengal authorities have denied this claim and insisted that the lions came with their names from Tripura.
After the petition was filed, the lions were moved to separate enclosures, apparently to ensure that a “Muslim” lion doesn’t mate with a “Hindu” lioness in a country that has been gripped by Hindu nationalist sentiment in recent years under the BJP.
“What is shocking to me, actually, is the fact that it is a court case now. I find that alarming,” said Moumita Sen, an associate professor of culture studies at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society.
“What is dangerous in this is that this will be setting precedent in a quarter of law,” Sen said, warning caution, citing examples of previous incidents where seemingly trivial matters became punishable offences in India.
Sen talked about how American academic Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus, was said to hurt religious sentiment and set off nationwide incidents of book burning and resulted in the book being banned in India.
Now, it appears that some Hindu majoritarian groups believe lions are susceptible to their conspiratorial concept of “love jihad”.
Love jihad is a conspiracy theory mostly pushed by Hindu nationalists in India that accuses Muslim men of trying to woo Hindu women to convert them to Islam.
This theory was on the rise in 2021, when several states in India introduced anti-conversion legislation, and the police started cracking down on Muslim men and interfaith couples.
Indian cyberspace, particularly X and Instagram, has exploded with memes and AI art commenting and poking fun at the row.
“I do think that when you make a meme, you say a thousand words with one image,” said Sen, who is originally from Calcutta and has researched Islamophobic memes in India. She described memes as a potent form of political communication, breaking away language and literacy barriers.
One meme resembles a film poster with a lineup of hijab-clad panthers on it. This image makes reference to the film, The Kerala Story, which sparked controversy in India in 2023. The film is about women and girls in India’s Kerala state who are converted to Islam to be recruited into the armed group ISIL (ISIS). While the filmmakers said the film was based on real events, fact-checking groups said little evidence was found to back up these claims.
Members of the Muslim Youth League, affiliated with the opposition Indian Union Muslim League party, set up what they call evidence collection counters in all 14 districts of Kerala, offering the reward of 10 million rupees ($122,280) to anyone who would provide evidence of the claims. The film was released in May 2023.
Next item loading….
Directed by Vivek Agniho3
Cast
Lion Akbar: Akshaya Kumaran
Lionesses Sita: Konakona Ronawat pic.twitter.com/yknbXuKAzQ— Mr.Ponnengadan (@MhdShafeekPk2) February 17, 2024
A visual that is surfacing is different renditions of AI art shows a lion, presumably Akbar, in regal, beaded Mughal attire. Next to him is what seems to be Sita, dressed like Hindu royalty against the backdrop of a royal court.
Lo bhai correct kar liya 😭 pic.twitter.com/megZdWu1VG
— محمد فیصل 🇵🇸 Proud Converted (@2witter_dot_com) February 18, 2024
Akbar the Lion and Sita the lioness are facing love jihad at Kolkata high court pic.twitter.com/pt0nB9tqRV
— ALI . S (@wiselunatic) February 18, 2024
Another visual that surfaced was of a supposed Muslim lion and Hindu lioness behind bars.
The Hindu Group VHP moves to High Court against keeping Lioness ‘Sita’ with Lion ‘Akbar’ at Bengal Safari Park. VHP thinks housing ‘Sita’ with ‘Akbar’ is an insult to the Hindu Religion. @10DowningStreet @POTUS @JustinTrudeau @EmmanuelMacron @GiorgiaMeloni @markrutte @BBCBreaking pic.twitter.com/OV26oiv8aC
— M M Abraham (@MMAbraham522577) February 19, 2024
The memes about Akbar and Sita have mostly been created by critics of the Hindu nationalist movement. Some supporters of the VHP’s petition have taken offence to the memes too.
This in itself is “an indication of what can be joked about in this country any more,” said Pratiksha Menon, who has worked as a journalist in India and is pursuing her PhD at the University of Michigan. “Political humour is taken very seriously if it is considered to be hurting Hindu religious sentiments”.
Menon has researched and written about how online Islamophobic humour shapes popular memory. She added that the outcry about Akbar and Sita is a regular part of the “very well-oiled Hindutva propaganda system which maintains itself through regular outrage”. Hindutva is the Hindu majoritarian philosophy that the BJP, VHP and their allies subscribe to.
Menon explained that “If any ideology or any group has to make a claim that it’s victimised, then it needs to, on a regular basis, come up with examples of how it’s being victimised”.
Calcutta High Court Justice Saugata Bhattacharyya questioned the naming of the lions.
He said that animals should not be named after gods, mythological heroes, influential figures or freedom fighters. He added that not only is it problematic to name a lioness Sita, but it is also not ideal to name a lion Akbar after a successful, secular Mughal emperor.
In the New Delhi zoo a white tigress is named Sita and in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park, a cheetah is named Agni after the Hindu deity of fire.
West Bengal advocate Joyjit Choudhury told the court that it was not West Bengal that named the lions, but Tripura, and the zoo authorities were considering renaming them.
The case has been reclassified as public interest litigation, which means the bench will not be hearing the matter any more.
Sen described the spat as the “politics of ridiculousness”. Even the king of the jungle is no longer immune from it.
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Kolkata, India – At the three-storey building of Sarada Shishu Vidya Mandir, a school for grades five to 10 in Uluberia town in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, students gather every day at the prayer hall 15 minutes before their classes begin.
The walls in the prayer hall are bedecked with colourful posters of Hindu deities, saints, mythological figures, ancient Indian scholars, kings and Hindu religious practices. The prayer starts with the Saraswati Vandana, a chant praising Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge.
The same routine is followed at Sarada Shishu Mandir, the preprimary school for children to grade four which stands next to it.
When students enter the classrooms after the prayers, they encounter the same ancient figures yet again – in a series of books called Sanskriti Bodhmala, or cultural awareness manuals, published in English, Hindi and several other Indian languages. The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are mandatory for the students of classes four to 12, who also have to take a nationally coordinated annual test based on these books.
For more than two centuries, millions of Indians, especially Hindus, have long read about the ideas and philosophies attributed to ancient scholars from what is known as the Vedic era (1500 BC to 500 BC), when many of the religion’s scriptures were written.
But under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, many of these concepts have made their way into India’s vast formal schooling system, blurring the lines between religious Hindu beliefs on the one hand and established history and science on the other.
In a country where half the population is younger than 25, this, say critics, has given Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their Hindu majoritarian partners the ability to use pedagogy to influence the minds of millions of young Indians – many of whom will be voting for the first time in national elections expected to be held between March and May.
Vedic-era philosopher Kanada was the world’s first atomic scientist, say the books meant for the students of classes four and six.
Kanada, in his book Vaisheshika Darshan, did write about anu (atoms) being the smallest particles of substances that cannot be further divided. But the substances he listed – prithvi (earth), jala (water), tejas (fire), vayu (air), akasha (ether), kala (time), dik (space), atma (soul) and manas (mind) — make it clear, say scientists, that he was speaking in philosophical or metaphysical terms.
The class five textbook tells them that Vedic sage Bharadwaja, who is credited with writing the book Vymaanika Shastra (Science of Aeronautics), was the “father of aviation”. The class five and class 12 books call ancient Indian physician Sushruta “the inventor of plastic surgery”.
The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are not approved by the government. But they have been taught in addition to the state-approved syllabus for decades in a large chain of schools run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the far-right ideological mentor of the BJP.
The schools are formally operated by Vidya Bharati, the education wing of the RSS, which controls more than 12,000 such schools catering to nearly 32 million students across India. The schools are affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) or the government education boards of the states they are located in.
In recent years, unsubstantiated historical and scientific claims – being taught in Vidya Bharati schools – have made their way into the formal syllabus of state-run schools.
The claims of Kanada’s atomic theory and Sushruta’s plastic surgery are already a part of the curriculum of the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) – an education board controlled by the federal government. The NIOS describes itself as “the largest open schooling system in the world with a cumulative enrolment of 4.13 million [during last five years]” students.
The NIOS curriculum also encourages students to find out about Vedic mathematics – another subject taught specifically at RSS schools.
The National Council of Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) new module on India’s moon mission says the book Vymaanika Shaastra “seemingly reveals that our civilisation had the knowledge of flying vehicles”.
The NCERT is the apex body advising the federal and state governments on school education, including model textbooks. However, various state education boards may differ from NCERT’s advice and pursue their own syllabus. Among federal government boards, CBSE had 1.2 million students appearing in the grade 12 exams and 1.8 million students appearing in the grade 10 exams in 2020.
In 2019, federal Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal said, “Our scriptures mentioned the concept of gravity much before Newton discovered it.” Sanskriti Bodhmala books say the same, one of its books attributing it to fifth-century mathematician Aryabhatta and another to 12th-century mathematician Bhaskaracharya.
“The Sanskriti Bodhmala books have no conflict with the formal syllabus, as the history presented here is entirely missing in the existing formal syllabus, which thoroughly neglects India’s pre-Mughal history. That is where we stress on,” Proloy Adhikary, in charge of Uluberia’s Sarada Vidya Mandir, told Al Jazeera.
He said the National Education Policy (NEP) that the Modi government has introduced had been implemented in Vidya Bharati schools for several years now.
“The NEP has taken some of our schools’ practices to the broader sphere,” he said, hoping for more information from the Sanskriti Bodhmala books to find their way into the formal national school syllabus.
Vidya Bharati says its cultural awareness examination for students was introduced in their schools “with a view to transmitting a glorious culture to the new generation”.
Debangshu Kumar Pati, a Vidya Bharati official in West Bengal, claimed the contents of their books are well-researched. “We inform students of the history that the colonialist and Marxist historians have suppressed to make generations of Hindus feel inferior,” he told Al Jazeera.
But historians – not just Marxists among them – as well as scientists and other critics have accused the Modi government of altering school syllabi to suit their Hindu nationalist agenda.
Hilal Ahmed, associate professor of history at New Delhi’s Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies (CSDS), told Al Jazeera no one can be blamed for telling new histories “as the discovery of the past always lies in the future – as long as proper historiographical methods are followed”.
“Since history writing is a complex process, serious historians have evolved methods and protocols, including the requirements to verify the veracity of the sources, introducing the sources, and explaining how the information is being interpreted and connections are being made. But these schools don’t follow the protocol of citing serious history,” he said.
Ahmed thinks the Sanskriti Bodhmala textbooks present history as if they have discovered “the final truth of the past”, calling them “anti-student”.
“They introduce a kind of pedagogy that would not allow the students to draw their own meanings of the past. The students would be hostile to other renditions of history. They are being prevented from thinking of the past afresh in the future,” he said.
Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, one of India’s best-known cosmologists, debunked many such claims in his 2003 book, The Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist from Vedic to Modern Times. Most claims about modern scientific discoveries having a Vedic origin “do not stand up to scientific scrutiny”, Narlikar wrote, adding: “That they were curious about the universe is beyond doubt. But that they knew what modern science talks about today cannot be accepted.”
In 2023, when Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief S Somanath claimed that major scientific developments in branches like metallurgy, astrology, astronomy, aeronautical sciences, and physics took place in ancient India and were later taken to Europe by the Arabs, Breakthrough Science Society (BSS) issued a statement, asking, “If superior knowledge in astronomy, aeronautical engineering, etc., is available in the ancient texts in Sanskrit, why isn’t the ISRO using them?”
“Can he [Somanath] show one piece of technology or theory that ISRO has taken from the Vedas and applied to make a rocket or a satellite?” the statement asked. The BSS is a Kolkata-based group of rationalist scientists.
Vidya Bharati’s role in pushing a certain kind of history is part of a larger project of what critics have called the “saffronisation” of education, after the favoured colour of the Hindu right. It is a process pursued by the Modi government and the institutions controlled by it.
The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are published by Vidya Bharati Sanskriti Shiksha Sansthan, whose former president, Govind Prasad Sharma, served on the BJP government’s National Curriculum Framework’s steering committee formed in 2021.
Of the 25 focus groups the state-run NCERT formed to develop the National Curriculum Framework, based on which new textbooks for government schools were written, five had Vidya Bharati officials as members.
According to Vidya Bharati’s national president D Ramakrishna Rao, “senior and retired teachers” of their schools were being picked up as resource people in many Indian states for writing textbooks for government schools.
“Vidya Bharati has been putting its all-out efforts and providing unstinted support to the government at the [education] policy preparation stage for almost five years,” Rao wrote in a column for a right-wing website in 2021.
Some of their schools’ principals and office bearers are members of the committee for the development of the National Professional Standards for Teachers, and almost every state task force for the implementation of the NEP included their representatives who “actively monitor” the process, Rao added.
Between 1999 and 2004, when the BJP formed its first-ever federal government, a similar effort to change school curriculum was made.
A key name to emerge for that project was Dinanath Batra, then Vidya Bharati’s general secretary. Shortly after Modi came to national power in 2014, his home state Gujarat made Batra’s books mandatory in government schools.
Batra is a pioneer among Hindu nationalist historians, even though globally acclaimed historians such as Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib accuse him of turning both history and geography into fantasy.
Journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, who has authored several books on Hindu nationalism, and has a biography of Modi, told Al Jazeera the Vidya Bharati schools are part of the RSS’s larger strategy of creating hegemony over all walks of life, including education.
Mukhopadhyay said the idea behind the RSS operating such a large network of schools across the country is to “catch the Hindu minds young and instil the idea of ancient Hindu invincibility, a past when Hindu India was the dominant race all over the world and that the golden bird of Indian civilisation was destroyed by thousands of years of slavery, first in the hands of Muslims and then the [Christian] colonial powers”.
He said Modi’s rule has given the Hindu nationalists “their best chance to restore that ancient glory of global Hindu superiority”.
“If you instil such thoughts in children’s minds, they will grow up with a tremendous amount of anger against Muslims and Christians. Such information attempts to create a constant state of paranoia in Hindu minds about the entire world being a conspirator against Hindu supremacy,” he said.
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Nearly two-thirds of American Jews feel less secure in the United States than they did a year ago, according to a new national survey.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC), a prominent advocacy organisation, conducted the survey just as Israel’s war on Gaza began on October 7. The number of American Jews who say they feel less secure in the US jumped 22 percent since last year’s survey.
“This year’s study shows us very clearly that anti-Semitism that was really just a simmering flame is now, especially since October 7, a five-alarm fire,” Ted Deutch, CEO of AJC, told The Associated Press news agency.
The survey released on Tuesday found one-quarter of American Jews said they have been the target of anti-Semitism in the past year. Almost half of American Jews responding to the survey said they had altered their behaviour during the past year to avoid anti-Semitism – changing what they wore, what they posted online or where they went so other people would not know they were Jewish.
“I live in a rural area and my home is most likely the only Jewish home in a 30-mile radius,” a 62-year-old woman was quoted as saying in the survey report. “We don’t tell people and outside the home do not show that we are Jewish.”
That reticence is “an enormous challenge for the Jewish community,” Deutch said. “But it really represents a challenge for all of our society.”
The survey comes as Jewish and Muslim civil rights and advocacy groups have reported large increases in harassment, bias and physical attacks against their members in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.
Brian Levin, founding director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, said he has seen a surge in anti-Jewish and Islamophobic internet searches since last year, including “eliminationist” and homicidal language.
Levin, who is not affiliated with the AJC survey, said anti-Jewish hate crimes hit a record high last year in several big cities. “As Jews are understandably feeling more insecure, police and social science data back up why,” he said.
The AJC began its survey five years ago, after the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack on American soil. Since then, most Jews and more than half of Americans say they think anti-Semitism has increased, according to the AJC.
This year’s primary survey collected data from 1,528 Jewish adults in the US, while its companion survey collected data from 1,223 American adults. The surveys, conducted by the polling firm SSRS, had margins of error of 3.5 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively.
Jews aged between 18 and 29 were more likely to report being the victim of anti-Semitism. As universities grapple with anti-Semitism, about a quarter of Jewish college students or recent graduates reported hiding their Jewish identity or refraining from speaking about Israel on campus.
Most American Jews (85 percent) say the statement “Israel has no right to exist” is anti-Semitic. A 52-year-old male respondent is cited in the report as saying, “Criticising Israel’s political policies [ex: treatment of non-Jews in the country, Palestinians for example] is not anti-Semitic. Saying that Israel should not exist, as a result of these practices, is anti-Semitic.”
Most Americans who witnessed anti-Semitism saw it online or on social media, but only 5 percent said they reported it. More than one in five American Jews said an online incident made them feel physically threatened.
“So it’s not just some of the memes or jokes,” said Holly Huffnagle, the AJC’s US director for combatting anti-Semitism. “This is real, vitriolic anti-Semitism that’s affecting them, that’s making them feel physically unsafe.”
There is a growing awareness of anti-Semitism. Most American Jews and three-fourths of the general public now believe anti-Semitism is a problem in the US, according to the AJC. That number increases for non-Jews who know someone who is Jewish. About 90 percent of Americans said everyone is responsible for fighting anti-Semitism.
“That’s a good news piece,” Huffnagle said. “I think the question is, ‘How do we empower the general public who sees the problem now in ways they hadn’t four years ago?’”
Last year, the Biden administration released a national strategy to combat anti-Semitism, and the AJC is encouraging further action on those recommendations. Deutch, a former Democratic member of Congress, said they will keep working with the government to implement the national strategy.
“But ultimately,” Deutch said, “we’re really looking to our friends, our allies in other faith communities, in our places of work, in our schools, to stand with us, to understand how we feel and to work together to fight anti-Semitism and in turn to fight hatred of all kinds.”
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