Shankaracharya, Imam share dais on global warming, nuclear disarmament

By Mumtaz Alam Falahi, TwoCircles.net,

New Delhi: In a first, Shankaracharya Swami Jayendra Saraswati, Kanchi Peeth, and Maulana Umair A. Ilyasi, President, All India Imams Organization came together to denounce global warming and pitch for nuclear disarmament – the subjects a sadhu or imam finds hard to open mouth on.


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At the one and half hours long program, organized by Bureaucracy Today periodical edited by Suhaib A. Ilyasi at India International Centre today in New Delhi, they were of the view that “in order to protect nature, it is not enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrents; not even an opposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of the society.”

The program was organized in the context of proposed Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December this year.



Maulana Umair A Ilyasi said: “Global warming is real. It is happening already and the anticipated consequences are unacceptable. Nuclear weapons are means of mass destruction regardless of who wields them. They are weapons of genocide. Early nuclear disarmament is essential as a crucial link in the struggle for an egalitarian, socially just society and world.”

Politicians and diplomats both at the regional and global level have failed to deliver tangible results on these two major issues of human concern. Even civil society with plenty of activism is yet to deliver, he said.

“It is time for religious and spiritual leaders to get together to resolve these two most burning problems the humanity at large is facing,” Maulana Ilyasi said.

Good intentions and large banner on the issue on the stage aside, many things confused one about the purpose of the program.



For the two vast topics of the world today a 1.5-hour-long program was organized –and about 30 minutes of it was devoted to shawl awarding ceremony. The Imam presented dozens of people with the shawls on which were encrypted some Hindu religious mantra. The shawls were brought by the shankaracharya.

Those given the shawl also included some foreigners and Suhaib A Ilyasi, the chief Editor of Bureaucracy Today, a new periodical and the organizer of the function.

Moreover, the program, though on issues not religious in traditional terms, looked like a Hindu religious program. The earthen lamp was burning all through the proceeding — a Hindu ritual to inaugurate a program — before the shankaracharya and the Imam.

After donning mantle of All India Imams Organization recently (after the death of his father Maulana Jamil Ahmed Ilyasi) this was the first public program for Maulana Umair A. Ilyas. The organization is alleged to have leaning towards BJP.

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