By Yoginder Sikand
A maze of pot-holed lanes winds its way through a squalid
slum at the far end of the sprawling Muslim locality of Zakir Nagar in South Delhi. The lanes are lined with open drains,
clogged with garbage and blanketed with clouds of mosquitoes. Tiny hutments and half-constructed buildings cluster together haphazardly. A muddy by-lane, rendered almost unusable due to the recent rains, leads off towards the Jamuna beyond. Half way along, a tin board nailed on to an unpainted brick wall announces the Rabita Islamic News Agency (RINA).
The brainchild of Maulana Muzzammil al-Haq al-Husaini, a graduate of the Deoband madrasa, and former editor of al-Kifah, the Arabic organ of the Jamiat ul-Ulama-e Hind, RINA was set up in 1987. For more than a decade it functioned in a somewhat perfunctory manner, the amiable middle-aged Maulana tells me, but for the last two years it has been working in a more organized way.
Maulana Muzzammil explains the aims of RINA and the way it functions. ‘We want international news, especially about Muslims and Islam in the other countries, to reach Urdu newspapers. We also want Indian Muslim news to reach papers abroad’. For the former purpose, RINA culls information from a host of Arabic and English websites, newspapers and magazines, translates this into Urdu, and sends it in the form of summarized reports to more than 150 Urdu publications across India. ‘It is otherwise very difficult for many of these papers to access this material. It also saves them the trouble of having to arrange for this material to be translated into Urdu’, he says. These reports are sent through email to some papers, and in the form of a weekly news bulletin, titled ‘Alam-e Islam Ki Khabrein’ (‘News From the Islamic World’), which is sent by post to papers that do not have access to the Internet.
The other major service that RINA provides is news about Indian Muslim affairs to Arabic and English publications, the latter both in India and abroad. ‘Despite the fact that India has such a large Muslim population, people in the Arab world have little or no knowledge of the Indian Muslims’, the Maulana points out. ‘I traveled to the Arab world and I came across people who asked me, in all seriousness, if Muslims are allowed to build mosques in India! Considering the fact that Muslims, as well as others, enjoy considerably more religious freedom in India than in many Arab countries, such lack of knowledge of Indian Muslims in the Arab world is really distressing’, he continues. ‘This is both because the Arab press gives very little coverage to Indian Muslim issues and also because we have done little to tell others about ourselves’. ‘Many Arabs’, he adds, ‘have this much distorted understanding of the conditions of the Indian Muslims. They think that we are all very poor and deprived. Many people go to the Gulf and paint a very sordid picture of the Muslims here in order to seek to garner funds in the name of the community. It is thus important for us to present the facts about ourselves as they are’.
To get the Indian Muslim viewpoint across to an Arabic- and English-knowing readership, RINA has recently launched a features and news service in both languages. It selects material from Indian Urdu papers and gathers reports from its correspondents in different parts of the country and translates them into Arabic and English. This material will shortly be made available on RINA’s website, which is presently under construction, and in the form of printed weekly newsletters. ‘We want to focus on news about Indian Muslims that receive little or no coverage in the English and Arabic press’, the Maulana explains.
Maulana Muzammil of RINA in his office
RINA is one of the few news agencies that focus solely or largely on Indian Muslim issues. It might have more room for improvement, though, particularly in the quality of the news that it sends out. The absence of feature stories is also something that could be addressed. But that said, the Maulana and his enterprising team of four young colleagues—three being graduates of the Deoband madrasa and one from the Nadwat ul-Ulama, Lucknow—exemplify what difference even a small group of dedicated activists, operating from a single room in a squalid slum, with just a fax machine and a computer at their disposal, can make.
For more details about RINA, contact Maulana Muzzammil
al-Haq al-Husaini on [email protected] / Tel: 91-11-26984980