Vice President Hamid Ansari, who has often flagged issues relating to pluralism, today said India's experience of a large Muslim minority living in secular polity having a composite culture could be a model for others to emulate.
"The Indian experience of a large Muslim minority living in secular polity having a composite culture could even be a model for others to emulate," he said.
Quoting Algerian-French philosopher Mohammed Arkoun, the Vice President said "it was the challenge of our times to rethink modernity" so that, critical thought, anchored in modernity but criticising modernity itself and contributing to its enrichment through recourse to the Islamic example could open up a new era in social movements.
Ansari also suggested that thinking minds should look beyond questions of identity and dignity in a defensive mode and explore how both can be furthered in a changing India and a changing world.
He was speaking at a function to releasing the book 'Fikr' brought out by National Institute of Faith Leadership.
Ansari said the book is an effort to remove the popular and prejudiced impressions about Islam as a faith and Muslims as a people.
He said that he felt that there is a crying need to look at the unexplored or inadequately explored requirements of all segments of the community particularly women, youth, and non-elite sections who together constitute the overwhelming majority and remain trapped in a "vicious circle of a culturally defensive posture that hinders self advancement and well-being."
"This would necessitate sustained and candid interaction with fellow citizens without a syndrome of superiority or inferiority and can be fruitful only in the actual implementation of the principles of justice, equality and fraternity inscribed in the Preamble of the Constitution and the totality of fundamental rights," he said.
Lauding the National Institute of Faith Leadership, Ansari said it has undertaken this, to reiterate traditional values which are of contemporary relevance and reposition them in a secular, plural and national context.
"It seeks to mould the students-clerics and scholars into faith leaders of tomorrow by providing them with the required guidance, tools and technology. The aim is to celebrate Islam, rooted in its core values and expressing them in their inherent flexibility, progression, reception and interaction," he said.
Stating that libraries continue to play a central role
in providing open and free access to information and ideas, the Vice President said explosion of information now being produced in digital format has dramatically changed expectations about the production as well as the use of knowledge.
"By providing equitable and affordable access to knowledge and information to larger numbers in society, they can allow a larger proportion of society to participate in the knowledge driven growth," he said.
"Social networks and social media have become more important in people's learning strategies. Changing paradigms of knowledge production, expanding sources and modes of dissemination, faster and broader accessibility to a growing range of information - also have the ring of opportunity," he said.
Libraries must transform and avail these opportunities to remain vital forces of knowledge dissemination in the years ahead, Ansari added.
"We are living in the information age and this implies that the main sector of economic productivity is changing from agriculture and manufacturing to creation and processing of information and knowledge", he said.
The Vice President also pointed out that in the present context libraries have the obligation to act as equalisers.
