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| - Fact Check: This photo of a madrasa teacher showing Islam as 'superior' to Hinduism is fake
An image showing an Uttar Pradesh madrasa teacher comparing Islam and Hinduism -- and apparently underlining the 'superiority' of the first -- is fake, an India Today TV Viral Test has revealed.
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India Today Fact Check
The original photo was taken at the Darul Uloom Husainia madrasa in Gorakhpur. The man standing beside the blackboard was teaching Sanskrit.
An image showing an Uttar Pradesh madrasa teacher comparing Islam and Hinduism -- and apparently underlining the 'superiority' of the first -- is fake, an India Today TV Viral Test has revealed.
The original photo was taken at the Darul Uloom Husainia madrasa in Gorakhpur. And it turns out that the man standing beside the blackboard was teaching Sanskrit.
The photoshopped image, however, shows a very different blackboard. Here, there are two columns below the words 'Hinduism' and 'Islam'. In the first one, yoga, 'janeu' (sacred thread) and 'mangalsutra' (a necklace worn by married women) are marked with crosses. In the second, there are tick marks for 'halala' (a kind of marriage), 'khatna' (circumcision) and 'burqa'.
This image was available on several Facebook pages, including 'We Support Amit Shah Modi Mission 2019'.
How did India Today TV determine that it was fake? Well, a reverse image search revealed that a similar photo was published by ANI, a news agency, on April 9. The madrasa was in the news that month for its efforts to teach Sanskrit.
The photoshopped picture is a cropped version of the original, with the contents of the blackboard changed.
"We have about 450 students in the madraasa, and we teach them science, Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic and maths, amongst other subjects," Nazre Alam Qadri, the madrasa's principal, told India Today TV.
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But why Sanskrit? "We think education is not bound by languages, and that we must teach all for the holistic development of the child...We have a modern madrassa for a new India."
Qadri said he wasn't aware of the existence of the fake image.
"I haven't seen any such image. The original photograph must have been taken when the media had come to cover us in the first week of April for teaching Sanskrit."
Anisul Hasan, the teacher who was photographed, didn't know about it either.
"I don't use the Internet at all. I am shocked to hear about this," he said.
"I teach basic Sanskrit to students. I have been teaching them for two years now. The student sitting in the front row is Shikha Bano. The photoshopped image is a conspiracy to tarnish the image of madrasas. I strongly disapprove of it."
Click here for more fact-checking stories like this one.
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