WHO SAID MUSLIMS don’t care about people of other faiths or wouldn’t take the first steps to build bridges with other faiths?

Try telling this to the hundreds of Muslims who queued for hours recently to give blood to their Hindu neighbours wounded in the Mumbai train bombings. This was a show of harmony in a city with a long history of rioting between the two communities.

“We don’t care whether it’s a Hindu or a Muslim who gets our blood as long as we can save them,” said Abdul Khan, one of dozens of Muslim men waiting in line at the blood bank at Siddarth Hospital, near one blast site at Jogeshwari station.

Many see the recent bombings as the latest in a campaign of violence over the Indian rule in the disputed region of Kashmir. But such thoughts were far from the minds of Muslims such as Mr Sheikh who flung open the doors of the Islamia Arabia Mosque, a few yards from the tracks near the suburb of Jogeshwari, to offer shelter, food and water to the walking wounded. “People are trying to break our harmony but they have failed,” he said. “Hundreds of Muslims yesterday showed a lot of courage and harmony when they helped out their Hindu neighbours. Hindus and Muslims are together in Mumbai.”

Leaders of India’s hardline Hindu Shiv Sena party said they had been overwhelmed by the Muslim response. “Hindus and Muslims walked hand in hand yesterday,” said Manohar Kargaonkar, a Shiv Sena official. “When you read a newspaper you always find that a Muslim terrorist is behind subversive activity. But these people have shown what brotherhood is.”

“We are getting increasing reports of Hindu-Muslim harmony from Mumbai this year unlike the earlier times", Maulana Jalaluddin Umri, another Imam said. This was further supported by the bomb victims recovering at Mumbai’s hospitals who said they did not worry about the religion of those who donated blood. This is the real Mumbai which cannot be defeated.