Mumbai: Since the day an editor of the Lucknow-based Urdu daily Awadhnama reproduced the cover of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, she has been on the run with FIRs being filed against her on a daily basis across the state.
Shireen Dalvi, 46, mistakenly reproduced an old cover showing a caricature of a bearded man in tears, covering his face and lamenting, “It's hard to be loved by idiots”, with the headline ‘Muhammed overwhelmed by fundamentalists'.
Her editorial clearly said that since no image exists of Prophet Muhammed, Muslims shouldn't take Charlie Hebdo's caricatures as representing the Prophet.
“There exists no image of him, so how can we infer that this picture is a caricature of him?”
Later when chaos over her editorial prevailed she issued a front page apology the next morning.
She also wrote an editorial blaming Charlie Hebdo for provoking Muslims, but she advised Muslims to reply to such provocations with knowledge and wisdom, not violence. She reminded her readers that Islam had been spread by good deeds and love.
Since she published this editorial, she hasn't been able to meet her two children. They have even stopped attending college.
Reportedly a subeditor had warned her not to carry the Charlie Hebdo cover, and alleged that she had dismissed the warning saying, “One should be broad-minded; at best a few hundred copies will be burnt.”
Shireen Dalvi was the country's only woman editor of an Urdu daily.
