Danger! More on Indian Muslims and the Possibility of an "International Communalism"

If what I read in the Wall Street Journal is indicative of things to come, then we're in trouble. A report that should have been innocuous on the Jaipur Literature Festival by journalist and author Sadanand Dhume on Ayaan Hirsi Ali's speech turns into something very sinister. I expected the commentary to briefly mention that she is "controversial" and maybe say a thing or two about her reception. Instead, the title of the article promised much more, purporting to show how "globalization is changing the debate" about Islam in India:
http://www.asianwindow.com/books/indias-groupthink-on-islam/

Alright, let's go. Right off the bat, Dhume is shockingly brazen in asserting that Ms. Hirsi Ali's well-rehearsed screed about the evils of Islam is delivered "with a frankness unfamiliar to most Indians." As Charu Gupta's excellent work on the Hindi public sphere in the early 20th-c. has shown, the stereotype of Muslims as sexually and developmentally backward was entrenched in the earliest formulations of Hindu nationalist identity, and was widely disseminated (see her Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India). Moreover, when respectable Hindu social reformers (like M.G. Ranade in Maharashtra) in the late 19th-c. sought to explain the deplorable state of Indian women under indigenous patriarchy, they firstly and loudly blamed the Muslim invasions for putting an end to the "Golden Age" of women's freedoms under Hinduism. But we don't need to go that far backward and into that much detail. Speak with many educated, "globalised" and "modern" Indians today, or flip through the news channels, and you'll see a picture of Indian Muslims (a disadvantaged minority, after all) quite consistent with Ms. Hirsi Ali's generalisations. Unfamiliar? Hardly.

In a surreal escalation of stupidity, after once more repeating that only with the past 20 years of globalisation is India "starting to grapple with the faith [Islam]" (rendering the past 800 years of coexistence on the subcontinent irrelevant), Dhume claims that the failure to think about Muslims in the way he wants Indians to is due to "the kind of groupthink fostered by decades of socialism." What in the world is he talking about? He cannot possibly mean that the relative absence of serious communal violence during the first few decades of Indian independence, at least when contrasted with the past 20 years (post-Ayodhya, Gujarat), is something we should blame Nehruvian socialism for. Or maybe he means that today's presence of radicalised strains of Islam (i.e. terrorism) had its roots in state socialism's failure to...do what exactly? And how come these radicalisms have proliferated precisely in the era of globalisation he claims is helping Indians "think" better about Islam? Dhume doesn't care to elaborate.

Aha! This is what it's all about: apparently, "mainstream intellectuals...tend to trace the Muslim world's problems almost exclusively to the alleged misdeeds of Israel and the United States." What kind of media is this fellow watching, and what is he smoking all the while? Lest he be accused of unfairness, Dhume admits that the Hindu right isn't all that great because it has a "tendency to group all Muslims together" (tendency?) and its policy "shades into bigotry and religious chauvinism" (shades??). Amazingly, he then claims that Ms. Hirsi Ali is a moderate walking the middle path (whatever you think of her, a moderate of any kind she is not). While she may say bad things about fundamentalism, she also "urged the audience to think of Muslims as 'individuals who are capable of changing their mind.'" My oh my, how charitable of her!

Contradicting the straw man he has himself set up, Dhume lists several authors at the festival who similarly challenge the "mainstream Indian narrative": Tunku Varadarajan, Max Rodenbeck, Lawrence Wright, and Steve Coll. Notice that not only does he not define what this mysterious "mainstream" narrative is, but he can't name a single person who defines it or subscribes to it. Thus, it would seem from his own evidence that the majority of "mainstream intellectuals" (the authors named above come from The Economist, Daily Beast, and the New Yorker) are of his, and Ms. Hirsi Ali's, opinions about Islam.

But the most blatant abuse of journalistic integrity and common sense comes when Dhume attempts to show the "other side." What kinds of arguments might be made against Ms. Hirsi Ali's positions? He cites no academic studies, no political commentaries or respectable authorities who might have intelligent rebuttals. Instead, he refers to "slightly hostile" audience members who are not so "tolerant" (this is just open condescension on his part, as if any kind of contradictory questioning is intolerance). Let's see who he finds:
1) A "young Kashmiri Muslim man" accuses a panel discussing the "Arab-Muslim penchant for conspiracy theories" of "promoting stereotypes" and being "spokespersons for the mainstream media." The way he writes it, we're supposed to think he's crazy. It sounds to me quite reasonable to say they were promoting stereotypes, and the credentials of the panelists indicate they are precisely spokespersons for the mainstream media, no quotes needed.
2) A professor of history at Delhi University "said he would 'defy anyone with the slightest sense of justice' to say what was happening in Palestine was 'fair.'" Tellingly, the professor is not named or interviewed later, as he is the only source with some kind of authority that might destabilize Dhume's argument. Also, this is again presented as a rambling diatribe when in fact it's a very sensible little statement: very few people with a sense of justice would say that what's happening in Palestine is fair. Yet we move on...
3) Javed Akhtar, the great Urdu poet and lyricist, presented as a "writer of Bollywood lyrics" (he's like, their Randy Newman, you see!) says some extreme-sounding things like that all Islamic fudamentalism is supported by the US (this was kind of maybe true until the late 1980s, but obviously stupid to say about today), and that the US is deliberately concealing bin Laden's death. So he's a bit nutty. But Javed Uncle is NOT an authority on policy and shouldn't be the best thing Dhume can muster for his article. That's like running an article about an academic forum on contemporary Jewishness to which Mel Gibson shows up and quoting him as a dissenting view. Pathetic.

In the end, Dhume predicts "the slow but inexorable knitting of India into the mainstream of global discourse on a sensitive subject." He means it as a triumphalist statement, but the state of global discourse on this very sensitive subject is abysmal. Herein lies the danger, and I do not use this word lightly, of this kind of thinking. Dhume's article by itself won't do the damage, but the trend that he is describing (if we notice it to be true) will.
India, a country with ca. 160 million Muslims, has been able to maintain internal religious harmony, with several grievous exceptions. These very exceptions point to its vulnerability; if the Indian public sphere does take on a more strident anti-Muslim tone, as promoted by neoconservative radicals like Ms. Hirsi Ali and the "mainstream" experts admired by the hapless Dhume in the West, disaster would follow. It's easy for the Swiss to fret about four minarets and symbolically punish a few thousand "black sheep." In a country with a long and bloody history of communal violence, rhetoric of this kind is playing with fire. Ayodhya is the test case, so this need not be a hypothetical. Not only would the consequences of escalating mistrust and conflict be grievous for the safety, security and peace of millions of Indian Muslims, it would further radicalise Islamic fundamentalist elements and give rise to more acts of terrorism. India would no longer be a country that knows how to "deal" with its Muslims, which even Ms. Hirsi Ali acknowledges in her speech (though this is too subtle for Dhume to pick up on).

If this odious little piece is to be believed, we may have to worry about more than just the communalism of "khaki shorts and saffron flags," but of a more insidious "international" communalism that seeks to disturb what is, for the moment, a tensely peaceful scene.