On 26/11 my husband was trapped inside the Taj. As we prayed In His Name for his safety and that of the other hostages, the killers inside professed to slaughter In His Name, too. The biggest hostage of religious man is God; He’s been implicated in some of history’s worst atrocities, which madmen claim to commit In His Name.

There is another face of Islam, so heavily veiled at present that it is all but invisible. The Face of Love, not Hatred. It is the Sufi face of Islam. Last year, I did a play on Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi with my mother, Amrit Kent. We used Rumi’s Farsi ghazals, set to an original music score, and wove some of his poetry into our dialogues, translated into English. Our play enjoyed a successful run, both in India and in London. I was surprised that audiences as young as 16, with no background of Sufism, were so moved by it.

Rumi, a 13th century Muslim theologian and jurist giving lectures on the Quran and the Hadeeth, became the greatest of Sufi mystics. His poetry is appreciated in America today and it is read not just by Muslims. The immense popularity of his work (including the Mathnawi and the Divan-e-Shams) speaks of people’s growing hunger for spiritual truth. Rumi’s message, the Sufi message, is one of love: ‘Where’s the ladder on which I may climb to heaven? It is love. Love that cannot be caged in words. Love, the rope of God.’ India has a 1000-year-old tradition of Sufism, including spiritual giants such as Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya and Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer, who wrote: ‘Love towards All, Malice towards None’. Their legacy of love and service to the people regardless of caste or creed survives in the number of Hindu devotees who flock to their dargahs. By their inclusive attitude, Indian Sufis helped to lay the secular foundations of the modern Indian state.

Fear is the stuff of politics. Love is the stuff of God and should be the basis of religion. The Pakistani terrorists were young men. They always are. Their handlers carefully harness the undefined anger of youth for their own malicious ends. The issue of Palestine is, of course, a flashpoint and the world should give them a homeland, just as they created Israel for the Jews. But suicide is haram in Islam, explains a contemporary Sufi of the Chishtia order. Such bodies cannot be buried in consecrated burial grounds.

What was the point of the Partition if India still has to suffer terrorist attacks from Pakistan? Most Pakistanis have not travelled out to India. Instead, they believe the propaganda of their political masters. I wish the terrorists had read Rumi instead.

Rumi wrote: ‘I am the servant of the Quran as long as I have life. I am dust on the path of Mohammad, the Chosen One.’ But he also wrote: ‘I am neither Christian nor Jew, neither Zoroastrian nor Muslim. I have chased out duality; One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.’ Today, Rumi is loved by millions. When there is no Other, where’s the question of judgement, hatred, conversion by the sword? People want hope, not death. They want to be uplifted, not mowed down by a machine gun In His Name.

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