Bring the Heart Back to Religion
Shabnam Noorhajan on the magzine cover We’re living in a time when religion has become a formidable perpetrator of crimes. It’s a delight then to see someone emerging to bring the heart back to her religion. Shabnam Noorjahan is an assistant professor of Zoology at a college in Kerala. She has been in news recently because she is trying to humanise her religion, Islam, with the help of Sufism. She organised a women’s empowerment programme coupled with Sufism in her college and drew the ire of Muslim clerics who are by and large male chauvinists. I happened to read an interview she gave to a Malayalam magazine which has put her on its cover this month. She discusses and critiques rigid religious frameworks, fundamentalist interpretations and sectarian dogmatism, contrasting them with a more humanistic, spiritual and inclusive perspective. It always thrills me to see people questioning religious straitjackets and fundamentalist tunnel visions. Religious texts can be approac...
