Srinagar, July 5 -- By Mudasir Ali

Before the Prophet Muhammad [PBUH]'s mission reached Arabia, a father could bury his infant daughter alive and face no social cost for it.

Mothers absorbed shame simply for producing a girl. Women held no inheritance, legal standing, or claim on their own survival.

Historians describe a society where this practice was seen as normal.

Islam put an end to it, giving daughters inheritance rights, legal recognition, and the respect they had long been denied.

That correction is one of the sharper moral interventions in religious history, and Kashmir, a place that holds its Islamic identity close, inherited it directly.

The numbers coming out of Jammu and Kashmir today complicate the comfort of that inhe...