Mumbai: Saif Ali Khan has always given little importance to norms drawn up on religious or cultural grounds when it came to his personal life. In 1991, Khan tied the knot with his first wife, Amrita Singh, who was a Hindu (while Khan is a member of a royal Muslim family) and also twelve years older than him. After more than a decade together, the couple divorced in 2004 and Khan then married Kareena Kapoor in 2012, who is also a Hindu.
Khan, who was born to a Hindu mother and the Muslim father, said that he grew up listening to stories of how religious differences interfered in his parents’ marriage and as a child he was only taught to believe in one God, adding that he doesn’t believe that inter-religious marriages were any form of ‘jihad’.
Khan also argued that just because you loved someone who follows a different religion didn’t mean you had to give up your own and said the law of the land was higher than that of religion. He also said that he knew many people who were afraid of marrying their daughters of Muslims because they feared conversion, quick divorces and multiple marriages which favoured men over women.
All this is undoubtedly outdated. A lot of Islam needs to modernise and renew itself in order to be relevant. We also need a loud moderate voice to separate the good from the evil,” Khan wrote.
Bureau Report
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