On a quiet evening in Zurich more than a century ago, a young Serbian physicist named Mileva Marić calculated side by side with her fellow student, Albert Einstein.
Her name, like those of so many women who shaped modern science, is barely mentioned in schoolbooks.
Erase a name, and you weaken the memory of what humanity can achieve.
But truth is stubborn; it waits for patient readers to rediscover it.
The same pattern repeats across cultures.
In India today, Hindutva ideologues loudly claim that Muslim rule brought only darkness, that centuries of shared history were nothing but invasion and oppression.
Yet the stones of Delhi’s observatories still record the calculations of Mughal astronomers; the arches of Fatehpur Sikri still whisper of architects who fused Persian precision with Indian artistry; the libraries of medieval Kerala still preserve Arabic treatises on medicine and navigation.
You can rename streets, rewrite textbooks, and silence teachers—but you cannot unbuild the monuments of mathematics, medicine, and music left by Indian Muslims.
Globally, a similar erasure fuels Islamophobia.
News headlines shout when a criminal claims Islam, but fall silent when Muslim doctors lead vaccine campaigns, when Muslim engineers write the code that drives space probes, or when Muslim scholars preserved Greek philosophy and invented algebra while Europe wandered through its Dark Ages.
Hatred thrives on forgetting; knowledge survives by remembering.
Why does this matter?
Because a society that denies the contributions of its own people cannot truly develop.
Erasing Muslim scientists does not make India stronger; it only narrows the minds of the next generation.
Labeling two billion Muslims as a threat does not make the world safer; it blinds us to alliances for climate action, medical innovation, and peace.
Real development is more than highways or GDP.
It is the courage to face history without fear, to honour every builder of civilisation—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, or atheist.
It is the humility to say that truth belongs to everyone, not to any one party, religion, or government.
Those who trade in hatred may win a headline, but they cannot erase the call to prayer that still echoes in old Indian cities, the Arabic numerals that count the world’s wealth, or the universal longing for justice that beats in every human heart.
Truth waits.
It outlives kings and ideologies.
And it will outlive Hindutva, Islamophobia, and every other attempt to bury it.
Comments
Post a Comment