India awakens to its other pariahs: Muslims
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After partition, Muslims won the right to devise their own educational system. But that system is now failing, Anees says, and with few government schools in Muslim-dominated areas to fall back on, Muslims are failing with it.
The primary school at the local mosque has declined notably, he says. Twenty years ago, it was his school, and Anees's conversation is evidence of the high quality of his education. He speaks English effortlessly, weaving snatches of history and current events into any topic.
Yet today, he will not send his children there. "Every year, the results are going down," he says, peering through his rectangular glasses with a scholarly air.
So he pays 900 rupees per child a month – 30 times what the mosque school costs – to send his two elementary-age children to a school on the opposite side of town.
Many families within the walled Old City, which is heavily Muslim, don't have that kind of money. Other children are rejected, as the demand for places in Indian schools vastly exceeds supply.
In some respects, there are signs of progress. Community leaders say the sense of guilt associated with partition has passed. "During the past 10 years, there has been a big change," says Sayyed Khadir, a Muslim activist in Hyderabad. The young generation "is in the competition" for jobs, he says.
The young generation itself offers another observation. "We do not think, 'He is a Muslim, he is a Sikh,' " says Habeeb al-Aidroos, one of the seven friends and cousins who has come along with Mohsin for the interview in a Hyderabad hotel. "We think that we are together."
At times, that can be difficult. As the only one of the eight men who shows his faith in his appearance, with a long beard and skull cap, Mr. Aidroos speaks of prejudice most strongly. "They think that Muslims are terrorists," he says.
To some degree, this has been the perception since partition, when Indian Muslims were cast as traitors and Pakistani sympathizers. Terrorist campaigns to free India's Muslim-majority Kashmir only increased tensions. Yet it has been recent developments – the rise of a more aggressive Hindu nationalism and the war on terror – that weigh most on Muslims.
Standing along a residential side street in Hyderabad, dressed in the skull cap and knee-length white shirt typical of many devout Indian Muslims, Zubair says people sometimes call him "Osama bin Laden." It's a joke, says Zubair, who runs a taxi service and uses only one name, but it is an unwelcome one.
"If you go on branding [Muslims], they will one day become what they are branded to be," he says, calmly but with evident concern.
The strength of Indian Muslims in resisting the call of global terrorism is their Indian character, he and others say. Indian Muslims have marinated in the country's multicultural masala for centuries and have become part of the recipe, adapting its tongues, traditions – and tolerance. And though Muslims and Hindus have long rioted, murdered, and waged war against each other, they remain – at their core – indelibly bound by a love of their home.
"We are Muslims, but we are Indian Muslims," says Zubair. "Even though I have lost most of my stake, I still feel that my future lies in India."
