Lecture by French research scholar

Karachi
Stephane Dudoignon, a research scholar from France and lecturer at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, Paris, will be delivering a lecture at the Alliance Francais, Karachi, on Wednesday.
The topic of his lecture will be, “Interaction between the Iranian and Indian worlds in the field of religion”.
Addressing members of the Karachi Pressing Club and giving a brief resume of the subject matter of the forthcoming lecture, he talked of the religious influences that had travelled from the Indian subcontinent into Iran and Central Asia.
He said Islamic reform in the former Soviet Union bore strong influences of the Deobandi, Naqshbandi, schools of thought and the philosophy of Allama Iqbal.
He mentioned the Sunni revival in Iran in the 13th century and, in this context, he especially talked of Balochistan, especially Iranian Balochistan.
He also talked of the religious sects and influences in Kashmir which had found their way into the central Asian Republics and the former Soviet Union. He said that these influences were also particularly visible in eastern Iran.
Talking further about the influences of religion from South Asia to Iran, he said political framework often impacted on religion.
The Sunni faith, he said, had become a unifying factor for minorities in Iran.
After 1999, he said, local governments in Iran came to be elected, which, up until then, was not the case, and this brought forth a local Baloch population to the fore.
This emancipation, he said brought a Sunni woman to the fore as the mayor of the city of Sarbaz, a town in the eastern part of Iranian Balochistan.
Many Sunnis, he said, voted for the current president, Hassan Rouhani, and Rouhani nominated many Sunnis to public posts. His report and views conflicted widely with what the Western media and press reports have to say about Iran, just projecting it as a country where religious tolerance is unknown.
He said that the Sunnis in Iran had developed a strong sense of patriotism and had a strong sense of solidarity and better integration in Iran.