Muttaqi's Deoband visit and the soft power lesson it holds for India

At a time when the Islamic world is searching for models of faith compatible with modernity, India’s experience—where Muslims live within a constitutional democracy and a multi-religious culture—has unmatched persuasive value.

When Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi visited the Darul Uloom Deoband on Saturday, the image was quietly historic: a representative of Afghanistan's Islamist regime paying homage to a seminary inside secular India. Two decades earlier, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, chief of Pakistan's Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F), had made a similar pilgrimage to the same campus. These encounters, separated by years and politics, converge on a single truth—Deoband still commands moral and theological authority across the Muslim world, and India has barely begun to recognise it as