The Battle of the Book

The bitterest communal riots since the 1947 partition convulsed much of India last week and spread across the border to Pakistan. At least 23 Hindus and Moslems were dead, another 500 injured. The riots ripped the delicate fabric of peaceful Hindu-Moslem relations and dealt a cruel blow to Prime Minister Nehru's belief that in nine years of the "secular" state the ancient religious animosities of his people had been "healed and forgotten."

The trouble was caused, oddly enough, by an obscure book published in the U.S. 14 years ago. One day last month a rabble-rousing Moslem editor named Ishaq Almi from Kanpur in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, chanced to find on a newsstand a cheap Indian reprint of Living Biographies of Religious Leaders by Henry and Dana Lee Thomas. Inside Almi found a foreword by Uttar Pradesh's Governor Kanialal M. Munshi, director of the Bombay firm which published the book in India, praising it as "worthwhile reading." He also found a biography of Mohammed with the following story:

Mohammed told Khadija, his wife, of his vision of God and asked, "Do you believe it was a good or an evil spirit that revealed itself to me?" Whereupon his practical wife put the matter to an infallible test. She invited Mohammed to sit upon her lap. And when he had sat down, she asked, "Do you still behold the vision?" And when he replied that he did she began seductively to disrobe herself. And then she asked him once more, "Do you still see the vision?" "I can no longer see it. The vision has fled in bashfulness at our intimacy." "Then rejoice," cried Khadija, "for by the Lord it was an angel and no devil that you have beheld."

"Take Up the Challenge!" PROPHET INSULTED IN GOVERNOR MUNSHl's PUBLICATION, shrieked the headline in Editor Almi's anti-Hindu newspaper Siyaset* "Has the Moslem world become so docile that it cannot take up the challenge?" Almi asked. Kanpur's Moslems, all too eager to blame Hindus for their frustrations and poverty, took up the challenge. Thousands who had not read the book trotted through the streets carrying signs that demanded: "Ban the Religious Leaders Book" and "Down with Governor Munshi." In Aligarh students of the Moslem University snaked through the college grounds with a chant: "Long live Pakistan! Death to India!" In neighboring Bhopal rioters burned Munshi in effigy.

Hastily, Munshi ordered the book withdrawn from sale and tendered an official apology: "I have the greatest regard for the Prophet." But the wave of wrath rolled on through India's 36 million Moslems. From the Ganges to the Indus, Moslem villagers stabbed Hindus, looted Hindu shops, stoned Hindu temples. Hindu townspeople fought back. In industrial Jubbulpore seven Hindus, Moslems and police died and 50 were wounded in one sanguinary knifing melee. In Khamgaon rioting Hindus broke into Moslem shops and fought with police; when the police opened fire five died. Some Hindu extremists, organizing a boycott of Moslem rug dealers and lockmakers, shouted that Pakistani agents had "cooked up the whole thing" to embarrass Nehru on the eve of his departure to visit King Saud in the Moslem holy land. Police, some of them dressed as Moslem women, prowled the mosques and bazaars and arrested 500 Moslems.

Deck Him with Shoes! At week's end the trouble crossed into Pakistan. In Karachi, 15,000 students and hired stooges of Moslem League politicos recently fallen from power marched through the streets. "War with India," they shouted, and "Down with Nehru's Tyranny!" Students bore Nehru's picture through the city, garlanded with old shoes, an extreme sign of disrespect to Hindus. By noon the mob had forced shops to close. broken the windows of the Indian bank, stoned school buses and stopped all traffic in Bunder Road, Karachi's main street. The East Pakistan legislature, not content with Governor Munshi's apologies, demanded that the governments of India and the U.S. formally ban the book.

Calling a mass meeting in New Delhi, Nehru laughed off "the special honor I've been paid in Karachi," but warned gravely against rumors of "communal troubles" and "spy stories" spreading through the bazaars. "Our ears are too sensitive," he said, and announced that the government would speedily put through "legislation that will curb those opportunists who are fanning communal passions."

* This story jibes essentially with the earliest and standard account of Mohammed's life (by Ibn Ishaq--8th century), but the tone of the book's 16-page biography might well give offense to devout Moslems.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.