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Port of Call |
LAST UPDATE July 12, 2005
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| January 17, 2004 |
Mumbai, India |
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On the second day of Peace Boat's visit to India, a group of 25 curious participants joined a tour to study the country's religious diversity. Staff from the Center for Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS), a Mumbai-based NGO, made significant contributions to our educational experience throughout the day. In India, a multi-religious and multi-lingual country, communalism as well as ethnic and religious conflicts have emerged as major threats to peace. This has been especially true since India won independence from British colonial rule in 1947 as hostility between the majority Hindu community and the Muslim community has tainted the course of India's domestic affairs, and its relationship with neighbouring countries such as Pakistan.
It was for his concern over the rise of destabilizing tendency toward communalism that Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer founded CSSS together with notable personalities from different religious and academic backgrounds in 1993. The three places that the participants visited with CSSS staff were the Mahalakshmi Temple (Hindu), the Haji Ali Mosque (Muslim), and the Mahion Church (Christian), all of which are located in Mumbai. |
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| Haji Ali Mosque in the center of Mumbai attracts many non-Muslim visitors |
Coming from Japan, where many hesitate to practise religion expressively, most of the participants witnessed religions in practice and saw for the first time, how religion can influence the lives of ordinary people. Yet despite their relative newness to the ideas, they displayed a vigorous curiosity to learn more about this new, and for them, different culture |
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| CSSS staff and Peace Boat staff exchanging gifts |
Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, who believes that human beings are peace lovers by nature but sometimes go in the opposite direction because of propaganda, rumours, and political manipulation, shared his faith that religions should be forces to unite us with each other and with our creator. He repeatedly emphasized that it is not religion that makes us fight, but rather, the deliberate misuse of religion as a means to achieve evil-spirited ends which is the problem. Inheriting the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Engineer proudly declared that "most religious people in the world are the ones who attempt to spread peace" because of their faith in humanity. |
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