Background
On April 25, 1977, SIMI was founded in Aligarh, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, with Mohammad Ahmadullah Siddiqi as its founding president. (Siddiqi currently serves as a Professor of English and Journalism at Western Illinois University in Macomb, IL.)
SIMI originally emerged as a student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH) in an effort to revitalize the Students Islamic Organisation (SIO) established in 1956. In 1981, SIMI activists protested against PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s visit to India, and greeted him with black flags in New Delhi. Young SIMI activists viewed Arafat as a Western puppet, while the senior JIH leaders saw Arafat as a champion of the Palestinian cause. The JIH also became uncomfortable with SIMI's support of the Iranian Revolution and oriented itself towards the SIO as its student wing. When SIMI sought self governance and independence of operation from JIH, JIH declined. SIMI separated from JIH and continued as a hard line Islamic Organization.
Read more about this topic: Students Islamic Movement Of India
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)