About What I Would Expect in The New York Review of Books

There's a review by Pankaj Mishra of The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future by Martha C. Nussbaum. I don't claim to have any expertise in Indian history, but I can tell a dishonest representation when a review tries to put the blame for the Hindu/Muslim rioting on the recent growth in power of "right-wing Hindu extremists" who are also generally more laissez-faire than the Indian tradition.

Something like 500,000 people died in the intercommunal rioting that accompanied independence and partition into Pakistan and India. One of my wife's professors, an Indian, vividly recalls having to walk through endless rows of bodies to try and find the remains of family members after those riots. The net result of partition was what became the Hindu-dominated, but relatively tolerant state of India, and the Muslim-dominated state of Pakistan (still West and East Pakistan).

Significantly, the Pakistani civil war that turned East Pakistan into Bangladesh involved entirely Muslims killing and raping Muslims. Everywhere in the world where you find Muslims in large numbers, you find nauseatingly brutal violence, and it doesn't matter if this is Muslims vs. Hindus (in India), or Muslims vs. Christians (in Indonesia, East Timor, Russia, the Western world, southern Sudan), or Muslims vs. Muslims (Darfur, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia), or Muslims vs. animists (southern Sudan). I can't claim to have any enthusiasm for the Hindu nationalists, who do seem quite willing to respond to Muslim atrocities in kind, but the common factor in terrorism everywhere in the world turns out to be Islam. Even the IRA, in spite of having its origins in a Catholic vs. Protestant struggle, was funded for a number of years by a Muslim crazy--Mommamar Khadaffi.

Of course, this review tries to turn the entire struggle inside India into something that can be blamed on the U.S.:

Gujarat's pro-business chief minister, Narendra Modi, an important leader of the BJP, rationalized and even encouraged the murders. The police were explicitly ordered not to stop the violence. The prime minister of India at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, seemed to condone the killings when he declared that "wherever Muslims are, they don't want to live in peace." In public statements Hindu nationalists tried to make their campaign against Muslims seem part of the US-led war on terror, and, as Nussbaum writes, "the current world atmosphere, and especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States, have made it easier for them to use this ploy."

Vajpayee is making a statement of fact: large numbers of Muslims are not prepared to live in peace, because the Islamist factions assert that any society that is not Muslim is contrary to God's will, and they are prepared to use whatever levels of brutality are necessary to achieve a Muslim society.

Her interviews with prominent right-wing Hindus yield some shrewd psychological insights, particularly into Arun Shourie, an economist and investigative journalist who, famous initially for his intrepid exposés of corruption, became a cabinet minister and close adviser to BJP prime minister Vajpayee. She suggests that the anti-Muslim views of Shourie, who is otherwise capable of intelligent commentary, may owe to "something volatile and emotionally violent in his character...something that lashes out at a perceived threat and refuses to take seriously the evidence that it might not be a threat."

Gee, why would anyone think that Islam might be a threat to a peaceful India?

Even as the dead are still being counted in India's worst terrorist attack in more than a decade, suspicion has already fallen on Islamic terrorists — though not al-Qaeda. India is home to a Muslim insurgency in Kashmir, and earlier in the day militants killed eight people and injured 30 in five separate bomb attacks in the capital, Srinagar. And while no one said those same insurgents carried out Tuesday's rush-hour train attacks in Bombay — which police said killed at least 130 people and injured 260 — security sources told TIME they suspected a shadowy alliance of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) working with indigenous Indian Muslims from the banned Student Islamic Movemement of India (SIMI).

SIMI detonated a total of nine bombs in Bombay during the course of 2003, killing close to 80 people and injuring hundreds more. The same loose grouping of Islamic radicals are also suspected of being behind a series of attacks in India in the last year that included three blasts in New Delhi last October that killed 60 and three more in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi in March this year, which killed 20, as well as smaller attacks in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

I really, really want to believe that Islam can live in peace with other religions. But so far, the evidence is lacking. I've worked with Muslims who were decent and peaceful people, and I am prepared to believe that a majority of Muslims in the U.S. are in that category. But what does it tell you when a survey of American Muslims finds that 8% believe that suicide bombing can be justified "Often/sometimes," 5% have a favorable view of al-Qaeda, and only 40% believe that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attacks? (Although to be fair, I'm not sure that the numbers would be much different if the survey took place at a faculty meeting in many American universities.)