The Year of Love Jihad in India

[Voltaire2]

more about the status of religious tolerance in Kerala

In 2011, when Akhila Ashokan was eighteen, she left her home in T. V. Puram, a village in Kerala, for college in Salem, a busy town seven hours to the east. Her father, K. M. Ashokan, was an ex-military man; her mother, Ponnamma, a practicing Hindu. In Salem, Akhila studied homeopathy, boarding with five women, including two Muslim sisters, Jaseena and Faseena, with whom she studied, cooked, and talked. Akhila watched them pray. Soon after—it is unclear when, exactly—Akhila started to read books and watch videos that helped her understand Islam. Feeling the stirrings of a new faith, she began to pray. In 2015, she decided to call herself Aasiya.

To her father, Akhila seemed a changed person in November, 2015, when she returned home for a funeral. She was quiet and reserved, reluctant to join in the rituals. After the funeral, Aasiya resolved to declare her new faith, and returned to school wearing a hijab. Her mother, when she heard of the conversion, told Aasiya that her father had broken his leg and asked her to come home to see him. But Aasiya, wise to the extravagant emotional blackmail of Indian parents, refused. She began a residential program for new converts at Sathya Sarani, a religious institute in Kerala; took yet another name, Hadiya; and registered a profile on waytonikah.com, a Muslim matrimonial site, where she noticed a man, bearded and lean, who worked at a pharmacy in Muscat, Oman. Shafin Jahan played goalkeeper for the F.C. Kerala soccer team, had a sweet smile, quoted Shakespeare, and hashtagged all his posts on Instagram. She met him, and then his family. Jahan’s Instagram went from pictures of food and football to photos of open skies and sunsets.

Even before Hadiya and Jahan got married, last December, Ashokan had taken his concerns to court, arguing that the people behind his daughter’s conversion had “unlimited resources in finances as well as manpower” and were enabling “illegal and forceful conversions.” His counsel argued that Hadiya, then twenty-four, was in “a vulnerable position from which she is necessary [sic] to be rescued and handed over to the petitioner.” Ashokan was convinced that Jahan, who had ties to the radical-Muslim Popular Front of India political party, was sent to disappear his daughter, and was backed by a shadowy organization with links to the Islamic State. (“I can’t have a terrorist in my family,” he said.) The judgment from the Kerala High Court, which came in the last week of May this year, sided with Ashokan. “In the first place, it is not normal for a young girl in her early 20s, pursuing a professional course, to abandon her studies and to set out in pursuit of learning an alien faith and religion,” the judges wrote. They were clearly unimpressed by Hadiya, a “gullible” and “ordinary girl of moderate intellectual capacity,” who had “apparently memorized” Arabic verses. Hadiya’s five-month marriage to Jahan was annulled; Hadiya was put in the care of her parents.

The New Yorker

[yallerdawg]

1. That Kerala documentary about 2,000 years of peaceful religious coexistence...

has really gotten under the skin, hasn't it?

Another OP in support of 'the exception is the rule' - and another example of irreligious intolerance of other viewpoints.

Which is just fine! You are entitled to your opinion!

[MineralMan]

3. Telling truth selectively is still not telling the truth.

At some level, there is peaceful religious coexistence there, and in many other places. You can show Muslim clerics and Christian ministers gathering together for discussions in many cities in the United States on a regular basis. Often, you'll see the mayor and Chief of Police at the same gathering.

If you don't show hate graffiti defacing the local Islamic Center or some radical jihadist Muslim recruiting at that same center, though, you're not telling the entire story. Documentary filmmakers do a good service in many cases, but if their films are designed to tell a particular message, selective truth-telling is often in play.

It's important to use more than one source when profiling something you don't personally know much about. That is happening here, with counter-balancing posts.

[yallerdawg]

4. You didn't watch the video.

Careful - your confirmation bias is showing.

[MineralMan]

5. No. I did not. I used that hour in another way.

My interest in some state in India is minimal, really.

[Lordquinton]

2. "Don't bear false witness"

If you think that means "Don't lie" you may be a biblical literalist!