AHMADABAD, India, March 3 -- When Aslam Pathan returned to his religiously mixed neighborhood this afternoon to survey the destruction wrought by rampaging Hindus, his first stop was not his one-room house, which had been looted and torched, but the mosque just down the street.
In 1992, when religious riots last engulfed this city of 5 million in western India, the mosque, with its green walls and spacious prayer area, was spared. But last week, as Hindu mobs sought revenge for a Muslim attack on Hindu train passengers in a city east of here, the mosque was not so lucky.
Ten Korans were set alight, pulled out of the metal boxes in which they were stored. An adjoining religious school was demolished. And the walls around the compound were darkened with soot, suggesting that arsonists tried to burn down the entire concrete structure.
As he walked through the darkened building and surveyed the pile of ash that used to be copies of the Koran, Pathan, a large man with a thick black beard, began to sob. "How could they do this to us?" he asked.
With the mosque unfit for prayer, his house gutted and stick-wielding Hindu mobs still prowling the dirt streets of his neighborhood, Pathan said he had no plans to return home, as he did after the 1992 riots. He said that he and his family felt much safer in a nearby all-Muslim neighborhood, where they are squeezed into a school compound with 300 other families forced from their homes.
As four days of sectarian fighting in Gujarat state began to ebb today with legions of soldiers and police officers patrolling the streets, Muslims and Hindus began to confront the aftermath of India's worst religious violence in almost a decade.
The clashes, which have claimed 499 lives, began Wednesday night, when a Muslim mob torched a train carrying Hindus who had been rallying to build a temple at the site of a destroyed mosque in northern India. Rampaging throngs of Hindus quickly retaliated by killing Muslims and burning thousands of their homes, businesses and vehicles.
But even after the dead are mourned and burned-out homes rebuilt, neighborhoods like Pathan's may never be the same. Muslims and Hindus alike said they have become too fearful to live next to each other and would prefer to reside in religiously homogeneous enclaves.
"Now either they can live here or we can live here," said Sand Kumar, a Hindu who was moving his family's possessions out of a predominantly Muslim area in central Ahmadabad. "We both can no longer live here. The divisions are too deep."
Hindu and Muslim leaders said they expected the strife to lead to a redrawing of demographic maps in Ahmadabad, Gujarat's capital, and other places in the state. Although India, a predominantly Hindu but officially secular nation, has a long history of sectarian tension and divisions, these leaders said the intensity of last week's fighting would translate into new religious segregation.
Muslim leaders said they were shocked by the scale of the revenge attacks, particularly the assiduous effort to flush out Muslims from Hindu areas.
"Right now in Ahmadabad, you will not find any Muslims living in a non-Muslim community," said Shakeel Ahmed, a doctor who is a trustee of Gujarat's Islamic Relief Committee, a private aid organization.
In Pathan's neighborhood, where Muslims and Hindus used to visit the same shops, go to the same schools and mingle on the street, the young Hindu men patrolling the street said they did not plan to allow Muslims to move back. "We will butcher them to death if they return," said Dinesh Tharkur, a mechanic. "I'll make meat out of them."
Aside from Pathan's brief visit to the mosque, Muslims stayed away from the neighborhood today. Others said they were too afraid to return, even to fish out a few charred possessions.
Streets chockablock with Muslim homes were eerily quiet, the silence broken only by goats ambling by in search of garbage to eat. Other parts of the city, which was overwhelmed by fighting on Thursday and Friday, were similarly calm, largely because of a curfew enforced by soldiers and police. Roads were devoid of vehicles and most shops remained closed.
Anwar Ansari, who lives in an all-Muslim neighborhood of 50,000 people, accused government officials of abetting efforts to keep Muslims out of Hindu areas by doing little to prevent the revenge attacks. "They want us to live separately," said Ahmed of the Islamic Relief Committee. "They want to enforce a system of religious apartheid here."
But senior government officials said they eventually hope to reintegrate divided communities through a series of confidence-building measures, including hosting meetings between religious leaders. The country's powerful home minister, L.K. Advani, who visited Ahmadabad today, said the government "must remove any feeling of insecurity in the hearts of the common man." Advani also said he was confident that "the situation has been tapering down."
The state's health minister, Ashok Bhatt, said isolating Muslims would increase poverty and lead to more children studying in religious schools, leading to a radicalization of the Muslim community. "We're interested in seeing these two communities come together, not move apart," he said.
Muslim leaders said that could happen only if hard-line Hindus did not succeed in building a temple to the god Ram on the site of a 16th century mosque that was razed by Hindus in 1992 in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya. The destruction of the mosque sparked riots across India in which 2,000 people died.
"Hindus and Muslims have gotten along for years, but if they forcibly build a temple there, it will be the beginning of a process where the communities will be unable to live with each other," Ahmed said.
Although the all-Muslim neighborhood near Pathan's house suffered comparatively little damage in the rioting -- about 50 homes were burned but residents were not forced to leave -- Ahmed said he did not think religious enclaves would be good for Muslims. "In the short term, we may have more safety, but there's no way a minority community can live in complete segregation," he said. "We need to go to school with Hindus. We need to work with Hindus. We want to be a part of India."
But Pathan said the idea of moving back into his old neighborhood was too painful to contemplate. Although Hindus contend that "outside elements" were responsible for the attack on Muslims in the area, Pathan said he recognized several of the assailants as his erstwhile neighbors.
"How can we live next to the people who did this to us?" he said. "We forgave them in 1992. But now it is no longer possible. We don't trust them anymore."