Danyal Saeed

“The first Muslims to reach India were not the warriors who followed Mohamed Bin Kasim to Sind (A.D. 712). Muslim sailors and traders had visited India and settled on the coast of Kerala much earlier. The first Muslims in India were the newly converted Arab traders of Muscat and Ormuz who came and made their homes on the Malabar coast.”
― K. L. Gauba, Passive Voices: A Penetrating Study of Muslims in India

“The Muslim community over the years has suffered by assuming that secularism in theory and practice means the same thing.”
― K. L. Gauba, Passive Voices: A Penetrating Study of Muslims in India

“As to the technique employed at Ahmedabad Girish Mathur gave the following description:

“What happened in Ahmedabad was not a communal riot in the ordinary sense. Rachi, Rourkela, Calcutta were put to shame by Ahmedabad. There more people were burnt alive than died of stabbings or as a result of clashes, and they were burnt alive not because they were caught in the fire. The technique was to set fire to a group of houses belonging to the minorities and, as men and women and children rushed out they were caught hold of, their hands and feet were tied and then they were thrown into the fire. This could not have been the spontaneous action of an angry mob. And the largest number of cases of arson and this type of murder took place during the curfew hours, which can mean only one thing, that the curfew was ineffective.”

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s shock with pain over what she saw and heard in Ahmedabad could be seen on her face as she stepped out of her plane at Palam on her return to Delhi. A dog feeding on a half-burnt corpse in the midst of the ruins of buildings razed to the ground; five thousand refugees confined without food or even drinking water in a small chawl stinking with human excreta, there being no lavatories nearby; scores of young and old men, women and children rushing towards her crying, some with folded hands–“Indraben, I have lost all my children, I have lost my parents, my wife was cut to pieces, they caught hold of my son and threw him into the burning house; now at least save us, for God’s sake, save us, may you live long.”
― K. L. Gauba, Passive Voices: A Penetrating Study of Muslims in India

“Perhaps the most remarkable geological observation ever made by a Muslim scientist, however, is al-Birūni's identification of the Ganges Plain in India as a sedimentary deposit. After studying extensively all aspects of India including its natural forms al-Birūni wrote in his unique work Taḥqīq mā li'l-hind (India): 'One of these plains is India, limited in the south by the above-mentioned Indian Ocean, and on three sides by lofty mountains, the waters of which flow down to it. But if you see the soil of India with your own eyes and meditate on its nature, if you consider the rounded stones found in the earth however deeply you dig, stones that are huge near the mountains and where the rivers have violent current, stones that are of smaller size at a greater distance from the mountains and where the streams flow more slowly, stones that appear pulverized in the shape of sand where the streams begin to stagnate near their mouths and near the sea — if you consider all this, you can scarcely help thinking that India was once a sea, which by degrees had been filled up the alluvium of the streams.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Science : An Illustrated Study