Meet Sultan Shahin - a virtual warrior who takes on Muslim fundamentalists through his web-magazine NewAgeIslam.com. His one of the mission is to encourage people all across the globe to rethink Islam. He says Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance and wish to reclaim Islam from the clutches of jihadists and petrodollar funded Salafist-Wahhabis.
Sultan Shahin operates from a small room East Delhi’s Patparganj, and spends most of his waking hours at his computer. Through his website
Newageislam.com, Sahin ideologically fights the muslim fundamentalists including the tyrannical Taliban and its sympathizers as well as the many Islamic supremacists who claim that Islam alone is Allah’s chosen path to paradise. “My fight is against petrodollar Islam,” Sahin declares. “I am creating a forum that will lead us to the understanding of a pluralistic, inclusive, tolerant Islam.” And Islam, he adds, is not a new religion. “The Quran says this. It is a reiteration and re-validation of earlier religions,” he avers, seated at his study stacked with scholarly tomes, including several copies of the commentaries on the Quran.
How did all this begin? Few years back, in an interview with Yoginder Sikand, Sultan Shahin said," I have been writing on Muslim issues since the very beginning of my journalistic career in1972. But a note of urgency about the dangers from Islamic radicalism came into my thinking a little later. It began back in the mid-80s, when I was staying at a Pakistani friend’s home in Nottingham in Britain. One day, I overheard the kids of this family conversing with a friend of theirs about Islam. This friend belonged to the Ahl-e Hadith sect, who are known for their stern literalism, being almost identical to the Saudi Wahhabis. This is a sect massively promoted by petrodollars and may even be termed Petrodollar Islam. I heard him telling the kids that the Ahl-e Hadith alone were true Muslims and that the other Muslims were not just really non-Muslims but that, in fact, they were the biggest and the first enemies of Islam. I asked him what he proposed to do with the “first and the foremost enemies of Islam,” that is something like 99 percent of Muslims who are not Ahl-e-Hadees. He said: “Kill them!!!”
You can imagine my horror at hearing this! Here was a bunch of Pakistani youth, who could easily have a bright future in Nottingham University, but who, instead, were discussing hatred, murder and things like that ... I was fearful that if these radical teachings were allowed to spread, they would destroy the Muslims themselves, consuming them in the fires of hatred and violence.
That is why I decided to start writing about these issues, to counter extremist and radical misinterpretations of Islam and to present what I felt were the true teachings of the faith.
His website
NewAgeIslam.com seeks to promote rethinking on various aspects of traditional Muslim thought so as to enable Muslims to integrate in today’s world. The web magazine discusses fundamental issues as what Islam actually is, who or what a ‘Muslim’ is, what the notion of a ‘practicing Muslim’ is or should be, what Islam actually says about such issues as women’s rights, freedom, democracy, nationalism, peace, justice, war, politics and relations with the state.
In retrospect, Sultan says, he had faintly realized such truths even as a teenager. Born in a village in Bihar, he used to take the cattle out for grazing which gave him ample time to reflect. The thinker in him made him argue with his father: "Why do you want me to pray to a God I don't understand?" He stopped doing namaaz (prayers) but promised his father that he would study all religions, particularly Islam, and choose the one that most convinced him.
