Fourth-year Commerce student Miloni Shah can see the Taj Hotel from the window of her home in Mumbai, India. So when she caught word of the attacks in her neighborhood last week, she flipped through every news station, getting few answers and calling her mother in Mumbai every hour to hear updates.
Her brother escaped during the first round of bombing. While on the phone with her mother during the attacks, she heard an explosion that she thinks was a hand grenade.
While no one related to Shah was hurt, family acquaintances were.
“I felt helpless,” she said. ”There’s really no sense behind it.”
To gain a better idea of what occurred during the terrorist attacks last week and what they might mean in retrospect, Shah attended the teach-in panel discussion held at the University yesterday evening. Shah hoped the panel discussion would allow her to hear “what international academics think about the attacks.”
She and other members of the Charlottesville community filled the seats of the Newcomb Hall Art Gallery yesterday afternoon to hear faculty and other experts’ takes on the four-day terrorist seige in Mumbai that captured the world’s attention last week.
The quickly organized teach-in was sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for International Programs, the Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures department and the International Studies Office in an attempt to provide perspective in the aftermath of the attacks.
Daniel Lefkowitz, chairman of the MESALC department and teach-in organizer, described yesterday’s meeting as an educational event as well as a “safe forum for the voicing of emotion that comes from these very tragic and very dramatic events.”
The panel included foreign policy experts, practitioners who mediate conflict situations, Christian and Muslim spiritual leaders and others who provided perspectives about the attacks from their various fields of expertise.
The discussion began with a poem about “coming together,” recited first in Urdu and then in English by Assistant MESALC Prof. Mehr Farooqi.
Panelists covered a range of topics relating to the terrorist attacks, including media coverage, political implications, Pakistan-India relations, origins of terrorism and the question of the night: Why?
Muslim community representative Shaykh Nooruddeen Durkee emphasized the condemnation of terrorism by the Muslim community.
“There is no ‘Islamic terrorism’,” he said. “There is only terrorism.”
Durkee continued, noting that the Western media picks and chooses acts of terror to cover. He noted that less media coverage was given to the 400 Nigerians who were killed earlier this week in a Christian-Muslim conflict in that country.
Assoc. Politics Prof. John Echeverri-Gent, however, emphasized the role of the United States in the attacks, adding that the United States needs to work on “easing the tensions between Pakistan and India,” whose already fragile relations have become more strained since the attacks.
He pointed out that many have called the events in Mumbai “India’s 9/11.”
Shah recalled the same comparison when thinking about the attacks that hit so close to home. While the discussion last night failed to give her much closure and “made the enemy even more unknown,” she said she still felt the gathering was beneficial for the community.
“Even though it’s miles away from here, [the discussion] still keeps the ball rolling,” Shah said.
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