चंद शब्दों में

Myth: Muslims have always been fundamentalists and are ‘more religious’ than followers of other religions.

Reality: Recent history shows that this is a lie, and also exposes where current “Muslim fundamentalism” comes from. Just forty to sixty years ago, in most of the major regions of the world with high Islamic populations – Indonesia, the Middle East, north Africa – the strongest political forces were secular leftists. This took many forms: the Indonesian Communist Party, the Nasserite and Baa’thist regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, the Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh, etc. In these countries, especially in the Middle East, it was the United States and its client states (such as Saudi Arabia) that sponsored, financed and armed right wing and religious fundamentalist organisations, precisely in order to counter the strength of the secular leftists whom they opposed. Israel’s role in propping up Hamas to counter the PLO is also well known. This reached its height in the 1980s with the war in Afghanistan, with the US bankrolling and training the people who later founded Al Qaeda. It was during this period as well that the US financed and supported the Zia regime in Pakistan in its “Islamisation” drive. The current strength of the Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Middle East is a result of American strategy, which involved finishing off all leftist resistance while tolerating and encouraging Islamic fundamentalism.

Above all, to repeat the key point, Islamic fundamentalism is a political phenomenon created by a particular history – just like Hindutva, Christian fundamentalism and every other form of right wing movement. The myth of the inherently fundamentalist Muslim owes a lot to European mythmaking around the Crusades and subsequent efforts to prop up their empire in India. But people continue to recycle colonial self-justifications as if they are true.
 

Myth: Hindus do not kill based on their religion. Only Muslims do, because their religion requires them to.

Reality: In Gujarat in 2002, in Delhi and other cities in 1984, in Bhagalpur in 1989, and in most other riots, the overwhelming majority of those who died were from minority communities (Muslims, Sikhs, etc.) Then we have the recent instances of bomb blasts by Hindutva organisations. The majority of the killers in all of these incidents were Hindus, and the organisations that drove the killings called on them to kill non-Hindus. Would it be accurate to say they killed because Hinduism required them to do so? No, clearly, in all those instances, the attackers and the organisers were political groups seeking political goals (and dressing them up as religious goals). This is exactly what far right Muslim groups do too.

Every religion has groups that urge conflict with other religions, and holy texts in every religion contain things that endorse atrocities (just look at the the Manu Smriti says about women and Dalits, or the Old Testament of the Bible says about massacres of non-Jews). This does not mean that followers of those religions follow those texts literally. The vast majority of Muslims, like the vast majority of Hindus, Christians, or any other group, have never killed anyone and never will.
 

Myth: The government favours Muslims and pampers them.

Reality: On the contrary, official data indicates systematic discrimination against Muslims.  The Sachar Committee found that availability of bus stops, roads, bank branches etc. is lower in Muslim majority areas, even when compared to nearby villages with a Hindu majority. Muslims on average received only 2/3 the loan amounts disbursed to other minorities.  The proportion of Muslims living in pucca houses is lower than the general population, both in cities and in villages, even if compared to others at their level of poverty.  Muslims form less than 3% of the IAS officers and 4% of IPS officers, even though their population is about 13% of the total. Overall, the Sachar Committee concluded that on average Muslims are at roughly the same socioeconomic level as Dalits and adivasis.

Similarly, in a study published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2007, the authors responded to 548 job advertisements from private sector companies with three identical applications – one with a high caste Hindu name, one with a Dalit name, and one with a Muslim name. Even though the applications were otherwise identical, the Dalit name was approximately one third less likely to get called for an interview, and the Muslim name was two thirds less likely. In both the public and the private sectors, Muslims are denied opportunities across the board.
 

Myth: The Muslim population is increasing faster than the Hindu population, especially because Muslim men can have many wives. Their aim is to become the majority.

Reality: The National Family Health Survey has found that young Muslim women have the same fertility rate as young Hindu women of the same economic level. The slightly higher growth rate for Muslims overall is due to the fact that, on average, Muslims are poorer than Hindus. Common sense would also indicate this. Kerala, which has a Muslim population of approximately 25%, also has the lowest population growth rate of any State in the country. Poverty and lack of facilities are far more important than religion in deciding how many children you have. The fertility rate of Muslims in States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala is far below that of Hindus in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Rajasthan, for instance.

As for Muslim men marrying many wives, it is blindingly obvious that this can make no difference to population growth, since if one Muslim man has two wives, that means some other man will have no wife (given that the populations of men and women are roughly equal). Meanwhile, the NFHS found (in the only survey that looked at this) that approximately 5.8% of Hindu men have multiple wives, while only 5.73% of Muslim men do.