Online Venom Spewing Worries Stalks Muslims

Battle Between Sects Of Islam Gets Ugly In Cyberspace. ‘Follow the Sahabi, ignore the Wahabi’, ‘Gutter ki gund, Deoband’ and ‘Sufism is not Islam’. Downright derogatory, these are just a few of the hundreds of community pages spewing venom on social networking sites against subscribers of various Islamic schools of thought, which have angered community elders and scholars. 
    
While the Muslim community has remained divided on different ideologies and busy in establishing one’s superiority over the other, the battle for the first time is now being waged in cyberspace, and the rhetoric of one-upmanship has only become shriller. 
    
The groups embroiled in this ‘holy tussle’ include individuals from the Ahl-e-Sunnat wal Jamaat, Wahabis, Barelvis and Salafis also known as the Ahl-e-Hadith.
    
City intellectuals and clerics have come together to decry this alarming trend, which they say is taking a dangerous turn. This could lead to sectarian violence as seen in Pakistan, they fear. “This is damaging and could spiral out of control leading to violence as in Pakistan which is a bad example of violence between sects. People with limited knowledge are indulging in this,” Mufti Ziauddin Naqshbandi, a leading cleric from the Jamia Nizamia seminary, told TOI. 
    
Surprisingly, many expressed helplessness even as they said little could be done to contain the trouble as content online could not be regulated. They said that it was a natural outcome of social media. 
    
“While there is room for difference in opinion, this is like washing dirty linen in public but we have to get used to this. However, the educated lot is refraining from such things,” Anwar Moazzam, city-based academician, said. 
    

The attacks, however, are not just restricted to schools of thought but are also against noted scholars of Islam subscribing to different ideologies. For instance, videos on Youtube claim to have laid bare the inconsistencies in their arguments. Syed Waseem, an IT professional said: “There are ‘Zakir Naik Exposed’ and ‘Tahir ul Qadri Exposed’ videos on the net which thousands have watched. The comments about them are very offensive and some cannot even be repeated.” 
    
Head of department of Arabic at the English and Foreign Languages University Syed Rashid Naseem Nadwi said since these battles are fought online, they should be quelled online. “A team should be constituted whose job would be to persuade these individuals to give up such dangerous activities by posting in such communities.” 
    
Ideological conflicts have often taken a dangerous turn. Last June, 27-year old Mohammed Abdullah from Moinabad lost his life due to differences with committee members of a mosque. In another incident, tension prevailed at Kurmaguda when a speaker at a mosque allegedly criticized adherents of an opposing school of thought.