Sep 22, 2006 :: Muslim enthusiasm for Sanskrit

The Hindu today has a story on Murthuzaviya Educational and Cultural Foundation, a Muslim organisation in Chennai’s Triplicane area, which has been offering Sanskrit language courses for 30 years. In that time, over a 1,000 have enrolled for the course and over 200 have gone on to pass the Kovidh examination conducted by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Several of them are Muslims, especially girls. One of them, Misbah Fathima has a master’s degree in Mathematics but wants to teach Sanskrit.

In the light of Muslims’ recent protests about compulsory singing of Vande Mataram because of its idolatrous tone, this enthusiasm for Sanskrit shows that it belongs no one religion exclusively nor that it has only ecclesiastical use. The full story