New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a petition seeking the deletion of some verses from the Quran and imposed costs of Rs 50,000 fine on the petitioner, former UP Shia Waqf Board chairman Syed Wasim Rizvi.“This is an absolutely frivolous writ petition,” Justice R.F. Nariman said while dismissing the petition. When the matter began, the judge had asked counsel for the petitioner if it was a serious petition. “Are you pressing the petition? Are you seriously pressing the petition?” Justice Nariman had asked, according to LiveLaw.Rizvi had claimed that certain verses of the Quran preached violence against non-believers and thus needed to be removed. Senior advocate R.K. Raizada, appearing for Rizvi, had said that children should not be “indoctrinated” at madrasas or told to engage in violence.The verses in question have led to ridicule of the entire global Muslim community because of their extreme interpretation, Rizvi’s petition had said. Since the fundamental tenets of Islam were equity, equality, forgiveness and tolerance, extreme interpretations of such verses were meant Islam was straying from its basic tenets, he argued.Even before the Supreme Court’s dismissal, Rizvi’s petition had been widely criticised. As Shahrukh Alam wrote in The Wire,“The petition that the canonical text be assessed for propriety and accordingly changed by an independent arbiter is made more to debase believers, than in any spirit of engagement with the canon. Evidently, the petitioner has very little sense of the critical scholarship on the Quran, or of different socio-political contexts in which dogma has developed, or even of the constantly shifting meanings that the Quran takes in the lives of Muslims across the world: from scholarly canon to amulet.”
