By Wajahat Ali and Ahmed Rashid

Whilst all fingers are pointed at Pakistan after the Mumbai attacks, eminent Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, and Islam Advance's contributor Wajahat Ali, argue that the Indian government needs to address discrimination of Muslims at home for the lessons of the attack to be learned.

In the aftermath of the Mumbai tragedy, Indian Muslims have been marching overtime on the streets to demonstrate solidarity with fellow citizens and denounce the attacks. At the rallies, such as the 5,000 march by Indian Muslims in Mumbai last week, Indian Muslims held placards that read "Our Country's Enemies are Our Enemies," "Killers of Innocents are Enemies of Islam," and a few believe "Pakistan Be Declared Terrorist State."

As observers of Indian politics know, such declarations are an important act of self-defense in a country where communal tensions between the country's 140 million Muslims and 900 million Hindus periodically flare. Muslims, more often than not, are the targets of these attacks. While international attention has focused on Pakistan, where the attackers hailed from, it's important we don't paper over the iniquities faced by Muslims in India, which spawned home-grown version of al-Qaeda in recent years, and where resentment is growing.

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By Anna Bigelow

On the first day of every month, thousands of Istanbul residents make their way down a narrow street to the swept stone courtyard of the shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. A couple of Turkish lira buys a devotional candle at the entrance, which pilgrims place in sand-filled containers and light as they offer their prayers in the dark interior. Some visitors enter the underground crypt to receive holy water from a small spring, others stand in line to receive the blessings of the Greek Orthodox priest, and still others move around the church visiting the various icons of Mary mother of Jesus, St. George, and other holy figures.

What is startling to realize, especially for a Western observer in the post-9/11 world, is that half of these pilgrims are Christian, the other half Muslim. Far from being unusual, shared devotional spaces like this are common, both in Turkey and elsewhere in the Muslim world. They offer an important reminder that the current vogue for seeing relations between the Christianity and Islam in terms of a "clash of civilizations" is to place a false dichotomy on the past and present, and turn our backs on the lessons of centuries of shared plurality in the region.

At the so-called "First Day of the Month Church," which I visited earlier this year, it is impossible not to appreciate that the Christian man with his hands folded standing next to a Muslim woman with her palms upraised may well have come to the holy place for the same reasons. At these sites, stories about miraculous events circulate within and between social groups, creating webs of meaningful narratives that bind communities together. For example, both Christianity and Islam honor Mary, the mother of Jesus, to whom the First Day of the Month Church is dedicated. From the churches like this in Istanbul to the mountaintop house near Ephesos believed to be Mary's last earthly home, Muslims and Christians pray next to each other for many of the same reasons.

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