Divya Nawale

Modi Opens a Giant Temple, a Triumph Toward a Hindu-First India. ~ NYT Curious how the headline is worded. Would the NY Times ever care to call any Middle-Eastern country 'Islam-first'? Because they absolutely are. No Muslim will ever understand the importance of the sacredness of a particular spot unless it comes to their own holy spots in Mecca, Medina. The entire point of constructing the mosque on that spot was to make the pilgrimage town desolate. To strip Ayodhya of its sacredness. It’s a saptarishi, one of the seven holy cities in Hinduism. The Nawabs of Lucknow made their capital right beside it in Faizabad to turn Ayodhya into a ghost town. It was literally called Majid-e-Janmasthaan, meaning “Mosque at the birthplace”. The invaders who destroyed it didn’t even make any effort to hide it and wanted to deliberately rub it in the face of the Hindus. Muslims have little room to complain anyway, muslims turned others' holy sites into mosques whenever they could, or into rubble in the case of "pagan" idols, like the Afghan Buddhas of Bamiyan. And not just in the past. Only in 2020, Erdogan turned the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. The Hagia Sophia was a Byzantine Christian church, that was turned into a mosque after Ottoman colonialization, and conquest, then turned into a museum in 1935 after Turkey secularized, and now Erdogan turned it into a mosque again to fellate the radicals dicks). The site where this temple was built has long been the reason for religious conflict in India. The site was one of the holiest places for Hinduism at par with the Vatican for Christians or Mecca for Muslims. But later with Arabic empires establishing in India, a mosque was built there. And because of this, there were years of religious violence there. To resolve this there was a case that was contested in court for almost a decade and extensive research was done on whether the place was actually the original holy place that Hindus claimed to be. And note that researchers not only consisted of Hindu scholars but Muslim scholars too who also concluded that the place indeed was an original holy place for Hindus and hence the Supreme Court gave the verdict to build this temple. Even though it was ruled that the place that originally had a mosque be given to build this temple at the same time another land was also given to Muslims so that they too could build a new mosque which is going to be the largest one in India there not far from the original place. The infrastructure that was used to build this temple will now also help to build the same new mosque. There couldn't have been a more democratic way to resolve this decades-long religious issue. Kashi and Mathura are next.