IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE

                   CHAPTER 2

               MAKING SENSE OF   

                     IDENTITY 

              

           

In an arresting passage in A Turn in the South, V. S. Naipaul expresses a worry about losing one’s past and one’s historical identity in the melting pot of the present. In 1961, when I was travelling in the Caribbean for my first travel book, I remember my shock, my feeling of taint and spiritual annihilation, when I saw some of the Indians of Martinique, and began to understand that they have been swamped by Martinique, that I had no means of sharing the world view of these people whose history at some stage had been like mine, but who now, racially and in other ways, had become something other.

Concerns of this kind not only indicate an anxiety and a disquiet, but also point illuminatingly to the positive and constructive importance people tend to attach to a shared history and a sense of affiliation based on this history. 

                                 MULTIPLICITY OF IDENTITIES

And yet history and background are not the only way of seeing ourselves and the groups to which we belong. There are a great variety of categories to which we simultaneously belong. I can be, at the same time, an Asian, anIndian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin, and a nonbeliever in an afterlife (and also, in case the question is asked, a nonbeliever in a “before-life” as well). This is just a small sample of diverse categories to each of which I may simultaneously belong—there are of course a great many other membership categories too which, depending on circumstances, can move and engage me.Belonging to each one of the membership groups can be quite important, depending on the particular context. When they compete for attention and priority over each other (they need not always, since there may be no conflict between the demands of different loyalties), the person has to decide on the relative importance to attach to the respective identities, which will, again, depend on the exact context. 

There are two distinct issues here. 

First, the recognition that identities are robustly plural, and that the importance of one identity need not obliterate the importance of others. 

Second, a person has to make choices—explicitly or by implication about what relative importance to attach, in a particular context, to the divergent loyalties and priorities that may compete for precedence.

         Identifying with others, in various different ways, can be extremely important

for living in a society. 

                                        IDENTITY REDUCTIONISM

It has not, however, always been easy to persuade social analysts to accommodate identity in a satisfactory way. In particular, two different types of reductionism seem to abound in the formal literature of social

and economic analysis. 

One may be called “identity disregard,” and it takes the form of ignoring, or neglecting altogether, the influence of any sense of identity with others, on what we value and how we behave. For example, a good deal of contemporary economic theory proceeds as if, in choosing their aims, objectives, and priorities, people do not have—or pay attention to—any sense of identity with anyone other than themselves. John Donne may have warned, “No man is an island entire of itself,” but the postulated human beings of pure economic theory are often made to see themselves as pretty “entire.”

In contrast with “identity disregard,” there is a different kind of reductionism,

which we may call “singular affiliation,” which takes the form of assuming that any person preeminently belongs, for all practical purposes, to one collectivity only—no more and no less. Of course, we do know in fact that any real human being belongs to many different groups, through birth, associations, and

alliances. Each of these group identities can—and sometimes does—give the person a sense of affiliation and loyalty. Despite that, the assumption of singular affiliation is amazingly popular, if only implicitly, among several groups of social theorists.

                       CONSEQUESCES OF UNILATERALISM OF IDENTITY

                                                            OR         

                       CONSEQUENCES OF IDENTITY REDUCTIONISM 

It seems to appeal often enough to communitarian thinkers as well as to those theorists of cultural politics who like to divide up the world population into civilizational categories. The intricacies of plural groups and multiple loyalties are obliterated by seeing each person as firmly embedded in exactly one affiliation, replacing the richness of leading an abundant human life

with the formulaic narrowness of insisting that any person is “situated” in just

one organic pack. To be sure, the assumption of singularity is not only the staple nourishment of many theories of identity, it is also, as I discussed in the first chapter, a frequently used weapon of sectarian activists who want the targeted people to

ignore altogether all other linkages that could moderate their loyalty to the specially marked herd. The incitement to ignore all affiliation and loyalties other than those emanating from one restrictive identity can be deeply delusive and also contribute to social tension and violence.

Given the powerful presence of these two types of reductionism in contemporary social and economic thinking, both deserve serious attention.

     Identity Disregard and the Rational Fool

I begin with “identity disregard,”. The assumption of narrowly self-interestedindividuals has evidently appeared to be “natural” to many modern economists,and the oddity of that presumption has been made more extreme by the further

insistence, which too is rather common, that this is what “rationality”—no less—

invariably demands. There is an argument—an allegedly knockout argument—that we encounter too frequently. It takes the form of asking: “if it is not in your

interest, why would you have chosen to do what you did?” This wise-guy skepticism makes huge idiots out of Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and Nelson Mandela, and rather smaller idiots out of the rest of us, by thoroughly ignoring the variety of motivations that move human beings living in a society, with various affiliations and commitments. The single- minded self-loving human being, who provides the behavioral foundations of a  great many economic theories, has been adorned often enough byelevating nomenclature, such as being called “the economic man,” or “the rational agent.” There have, of course, been critiques of the presumption of single-mindedly self-seeking economic behavior (even Adam Smith, who is frequently taken to be the founding father of “the economic man,” had expressed profound skepticism of such an assumption), but much of modern economic theory tended to proceed as if these doubts were of marginal concern and could be easily

brushed off.

In recent years these general critiques have, however, been supplemented by criticisms coming from results of experimental games and

other behavioral tests, which have brought out serious tensions between the assumption of pure self-seeking with singular affiliation and how people are actually observed to behave. These observations have empirically reinforced conceptual doubts about the coherence and sustainability of the presumed mental makeup of such single-focus people because of the philosophical and psychological limitation involved in not being able to make any effective difference between entirely distinguishable questions: “what shall I do?” “what serves my interest best?” “what choices will best promote my objectives?” “what

should I rationally choose?” A person who acts with impeccable consistency and predictability but can never give different answers to these disparate questions can be taken to be something of a “rational fool.”

It is, in this context, particularly important to try to incorporate the perception and understanding of identity into the characterization of preference and behavior in economics.This has happened in many different ways in the recent literature. The inclusion of considerations of identity with others in a shared group—and the working of what George Akerlof, the economist, calls “loyalty filters”—can powerfully influence individual conduct as well as their interactions, which can take richly divergent forms.

It must, of course, be recognized that the rejection of purely self-interested behavior does not indicate that one’s actions are necessarily influenced by a sense of identity with others. It is quite possible that a person’s behavior may be swayed by other types of considerations, such as her adherence to some norms of acceptable conduct (such as financial honesty or a sense of fairness), or by her sense of duty—or fiduciary responsibility—toward others with whom one does not identify in any obvious sense. Nevertheless, a sense of identity with others can be a very important—and rather complex—influence on one’s behavior which can easily go against narrowly self-interested conduct.

That broad question also relates to another, to wit, the role of evolutionary selection of behavioral norms which can play an instrumentally important part.

If a sense of identity leads to group success, and through that to individual

betterment, then those identity-sensitive behavioral modes may end up being

multiplied and promoted. Indeed, both in reflective choice and in evolutionary

selection, ideas of identity can be important, and mixtures of the two— combining critical reflection and selective evolution—can also, obviously, lead to the prevalence of identity influenced behavior. The time has certainly come to displace the presumption of “identity disregard” from the exalted position it has

tended to occupy in a substantial part of economic theory woven around the concept of “the economic man,” and also in political, legal, and social theory (used in imitative admiration—a sincere form of flattery—of so-called rational- choice economics).

                          Plural Affiliations and Social Contexts

I turn now to the second type of reductionism: the assumption of singular affiliation. We are all individually involved in identities of various kinds in disparate contexts, in our own respective lives, arising from our background, or associations, or social activities. This was discussed in the first chapter, but it is

perhaps worth reemphasizing the point here. The same person can, for example, be a British citizen, of Malaysian origin, with Chinese racial characteristics, a stockbroker, a nonvegetarian, an asthmatic, a linguist, a bodybuilder, a poet, an opponent of abortion, a bird-watcher, an astrologer, and one who believes that God created Darwin to test the gullible. We do belong to many different groups, in one way or another, and each of these collectivities can give a person a potentially important identity. We may have to decide whether a particular group to which we belong is—or is not— important for us. Two different, though interrelated, exercises are involved here:

(1) deciding on what our relevant identities are, and (2) weighing the relative importance of these different identities. Both tasks demand reasoning and choice.

The search for a unique way of classifying people for social analysis is not, of course, new. Even the political grouping of people into workers and nonworkers, much used in classical socialist literature, had this simple feature. That such a two-class partition could be very deceptive for social and economic analysis (even for those with a commitment to the underdogs of society) is now widely acknowledged, and it is perhaps worth recollecting, in this context, that Karl Marx himself subjected this unique identification to severe criticism in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, in 1875 (a quarter century after The Communist Manifesto). Marx’s critique of the German Workers Party’s proposed plan of action (the “Gotha Programme”) included an argument, among others, against seeing workers “only” as workers, ignoring their diversities as human beings:

[U]nequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, e.g., in the present case are regarded only as workers, and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.

The singular-affiliation view would be hard to justify by the crude presumption that any person belongs to one group and one group only. Each of us patently belongs to many. But nor can that view be easily vindicated by

claiming that despite the plurality of groups to which any person belongs, there is, in every situation, some one group that is naturally the preeminent collectivity for her, and she can have no choice in deciding on the relative importance of her different membership categories.

I shall have to come back to the question of multiple memberships and the role of choice in the idea of identity, but before that it is worth noting that in the variation of the relative importance of identities, there may be significant external influences as well: not everything turns specifically on the nature of reasoning and choice. This clarification is needed since the role of choice has to be understood after taking note of the other influences that restrict or restrain the choices one can make. For one thing, the importance of a particular identity will depend on the social context. For example, when going to a dinner, one’s identity as a vegetarian may be rather more crucial than one’s identity as a linguist, whereas the latter may be particularly important if one considers going to a lecture on linguistic studies. This variability does nothing to rehabilitate the assumption of singular affiliation, but it illustrates the need to see the role of choice in a context-specific way. Also, not all identities need have durable importance. Indeed, sometimes an identity group may have a very fleeting and highly contingent existence. Mort Sahl, the American comedian, is supposed to have responded to the intense tedium of a four-hour-long film, directed by Otto Preminger, called Exodus (about the ancient Jewish migration out of Egypt, led by Moses), by demanding on behalf of his fellow sufferers: “Otto, let my people go!” That group of

tormented filmgoers did have reason for fellow feeling, but one can see the massive contrast between such an ephemeral group of “my people” and the wellknit and seriously tyrannized community of people led by Moses—the original subject of that famous entreaty.

To consider the acceptance issue first, classifications can take many different forms, and not all of the categories that can be consistently generated would serve as a plausible basis for an important identity. Consider the set of people in the world who were born between nine and ten in the morning, local time. This is a distinct and quite well-defined group, but it is hard to imagine that many people would get excited about sustaining the solidarity of such a group and the identity it could potentially produce. Similarly, people who wear size 8 shoes are typically not linked with each other with a strong sense of identity on that shoe- size ground (rather important as that descriptive specificity is, when it comes to buying shoes and, more importantly, trying cheerfully to walk around in them).

Classification is certainly cheap, but identity is not. More interestingly, whether a particular classification can plausibly generate a sense of identity or not must depend on social circumstances. For example, if size 8 shoes become extremely difficult to find for some complicated bureaucratic reason (to grasp the intelligibility of such a supply shortage, one might have to place oneself

somewhere in Minsk or Pinsk at the high noon of Soviet civilization), then the need for shoes of that size may indeed become a shared predicament and can give reason enough for solidarity and identity. Social clubs might even be set up (preferably with a liquor license) to exchange information about the availability of size 8 shoes. Similarly, if it were to emerge that people born between 9 and 10 A.M. are, for reasons we do not yet understand, particularly vulnerable to some specific ailment (Harvard Medical School might be marshaled to look into this), then

again there is a shared quandary which can provide a reason for a sense of identity. To consider a different variant of this example, if some authoritarian ruler wants to curb the freedom of people born in that particular hour because of the ruler’s supernatural belief in the perfidy of people born then (perhaps some Macbethian witches have told him that he will be killed by someone born between 9 and 10 A.M.), then again a case for solidarity and identity based on that classificatory unity and persecution may indeed emerge here. Sometimes a classification that is hard to justify intellectually may nevertheless be made important through social arrangements. Pierre Bourdieu, the French philosopher and sociologist, has pointed out how a social action can end up “producing a difference when none existed,” and “social magic can transform people by telling them that they are different.” That is what competitive examinations do (the 300th candidate is still something, the 301st is nothing). In other words, the social world constitutes differences by the mere fact of designing them.

Even when a categorization is arbitrary or capricious, once they are articulated and recognized in terms of dividing lines, the groups thus classified acquire rivative relevance (in the case of the civil service examination, it may involve the difference between having a fine job and having none), and this can be a plausible enough basis for identities on both sides of the separating line. The reasoning in the choice of relevant identities must, therefore, go well beyond the purely intellectual into contingent social significance. Not only is reason involved in the choice of identity, but the reasoning may have to take note of the social context and contingent relevance of being in one category or another.

                     Contrasting and Noncontrasting Identities

We can also distinguish between “contrasting” and “noncontrasting” identities. The different groups may belong to the same category, dealing with the same kind of membership (such as citizenship), or to different categories (such as citizenship, profession, class, or gender). In the former case, there is some contrast between different groups within the same category, and thus between the different identities with which they are associated. But when we deal with groups classified on different bases (such as profession and citizenship, respectively), there may be no real contrast between them as far as “belonging” is concerned. However, even though these noncontrasting identities are not involved in any territorial dispute as far as “belonging” is concerned, they can compete with each other for our attention and priorities. When one has to do one thing or another, the loyalties can conflict between giving priority to, say, race, or religion, or political commitments, or professional obligations, or citizenship. In fact, we can have plural identities even within contrasting categories. One citizenship does, in an elementary sense, contrast with another in a person’s identity. But as this example itself indicates, even contrasting identities need not demand that one and one only of the unique specifications can survive, overthrowing all the other alternatives. A person can be a dual citizen of, say, both France and the United States. Citizenship can, of course, be made exclusive, as is the case with, say, China or Japan (this was, in fact, the case even with the United States until quite recently). But even when exclusivity is insisted on, the conflict of dual loyalty need not disappear. For example, if a Japanese citizen resident in Britain is unwilling to take British citizenship because she does not want to lose her Japanese national identity, she may still have quite a substantial loyalty to her British attachments and to other features of her British identity which no Japanese court can outlaw. Similarly, an erstwhile Japanese citizen who has given up that citizenship to become a UK citizen may still retain considerable loyalties to her sense of Japanese identity. The conflict between the priorities and demands of different identities can be significant both for contrasting and for noncontrasting categories. It is not so much that a person has to deny one identity to give priority to another, but rather that a person with plural identities has to decide, in case of a conflict, on the relative importance of the different identities for the particular decision in question. Reasoning and scrutiny can thus play a major role both in the specification of identities and in thinking through the relative strengths of their respective claims

                                                     Choice and Constraints 

In each social context, there would be a number of potentially viable and relevant identities which one could assess in terms of their acceptability and their relative importance. In many situations, the plurality may become central because of the widespread relevance of durable and frequently invoked characteristics, such as nationality, language, ethnicity, politics, or profession. The person may have to decide on the relative significance of the different affiliations, which could vary depending on the context. It is quite hard to imagine that a person can really be bereft of the possibility of considering alternative identifications, and that she must just “discover” her identities, as if it were a purely natural phenomenon. In fact, we are all constantly making choices, if only implicitly, about priorities to be attached to our different affiliations and associations. Often such choices are quite explicit and carefully argued, as when Mohandas Gandhi deliberately decided to give priority to his identification with Indians seeking independence from the British rule over his identity as a trained barrister pursuing English legal justice, or when E. M. Forster famously concluded, “[I]f I had to choose between betraying my county and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” It seems unlikely that the thesis of singular affiliation can have any kind of plausibility given the constant presence of different categories and groups to which any human being belongs. It is possible that the often repeated belief, common among advocates of singular affiliation, that identity is a matter of “discovery” is encouraged by the fact that the choices we can make are constrained by feasibility (I cannot readily choose the identity of a blue-eyed teenage girl from Lapland who is entirely comfortable with six-month-long nights), and these constraints would rule out all kinds of alternatives as being nonfeasible. And yet even after that, there will remain choices to make, for example, between priorities of nationality, religion, language, political beliefs, or professional commitments. And the decisions can be momentous: for example, the father, Eugenio Colorni, of my late wife Eva had to weigh the divergent demands of being an Italian, a philosopher, an academic, a democrat, and a socialist, in Mussolini’s fascist Italy in the 1930s, and chose to abandon the academic pursuit of philosophy to join the Italian resistance (he was killed by the fascists in Rome two days before American soldiers arrived there). The constraints may be especially strict in defining the extent to which we can persuade others, in particular, to take us to be different from (or more than) what they insist on taking us to be. A Jewish person in Nazi Germany, or an AfricanAmerican when faced with a lynch mob in the American South, or a rebellious, landless agricultural laborer threatened by a gunman hired by upper-caste landowners in North Bihar may not be able to alter his or her identity in the eyes of the aggressors. The freedom in choosing our identity in the eyes of others can sometimes be extraordinarily limited. This point is not in dispute. Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, one of my teachers, Joan Robinson, a superb professor of economics, told me (during a particularly argumentative tutorial—we used to have many of those): “The Japanese are too polite; you Indians are too rude; the Chinese are just right.” I accepted this generalization immediately: the alternative would have been, of course, to give further evidence of the Indian propensity toward rudeness. But I also realized that no matter what I said or did, the imaging would not quickly change in my teacher’s mind (Joan Robinson, by the way, was very fond of Indians: she thought that they were absolutely fine in a rude kind of way). More generally, whether we are considering our identities as we ourselves see them or as others see us, we choose within particular constraints. But this is not in the least a surprising fact—it is rather just the way choices are faced in any situation. Choices of all kinds are always made within particular constraints, and this is perhaps the most elementary aspect of any choice. As was discussed in the first chapter, any student of economics knows that consumers always choose within a budget constraint, but that does not indicate that they have no choice, but only that they have to choose within their budgets. There is also a need for reasoning in determining the demands and implications of identity-based thinking. It is clear enough that the way we see ourselves may well influence our practical reason, but it is by no means immediate how—indeed in which direction—that influence may work. A person may decide, on reflection, not only that she is a member of a particular ethnic group (for example, a Kurd), but also that this is an extremely important identity for her. This decision can easily influence the person in the direction of taking greater responsibility for the well-being and freedoms of that ethnic group—it can become for her an extension of the obligation to be self-reliant (the self now being extended to cover others in the group with which this person identifies). However, this does not yet tell us whether the person should or should not favor members of this group in the choices she has to make. If, for example, she were to favor her own ethnic group in making public decisions, this could rightly be seen as a case of shady nepotism rather than an example of shining excellence of morality and ethics. Indeed, just as self-denial may be a part of public morality, it can even be argued that a person may have to be particularly diffident in favoring members of a group with which she identifies. There is no presumption that the recognition or assertion of an identity must necessarily be a ground for solidarity in practical decisions; this has to be a matter for further reasoning and scrutiny. Indeed, the need for reasoning is thoroughly pervasive at every stage of identity-based thoughts and decisions. 

      Communitarian Identity and the Possibility of Choice 

I turn now to some specific arguments and claims, beginning with the alleged priority of one’s community-based identity which has been forcefully advocated in communitarian philosophy. That line of thought not only prioritizes the importance of belonging to one particular community group rather than another, but often tends to see community membership as a kind of extension of one’s own self.  Communitarian thinking has been in the ascendancy over the last few decades in contemporary social, political, and moral theorizing, and the dominant and compelling role of social identity in governing behavior as well as knowledge has been widely investigated and championed.  In some versions of communitarian thinking, it is presumed—explicitly or by implication—that one’s identity with one’s community must be the principal or dominant (perhaps even the only significant) identity a person has. This conclusion can be linked to two alternative—related but distinct—lines of reasoning. One line argues that a person does not have access to other community independent conceptions of identity and to other ways of thinking about identity. Her social background, firmly based on “community and culture,” determines the feasible patterns of reasoning and ethics that are available to her. The second line of argument does not anchor the conclusion to perceptual constraints, but to the claim that identity is a matter of discovery anyway, and the communitarian identity will invariably be recognized to be of paramount importance, if any comparisons were to be made. To look, first, at the thesis of severe perceptual limitation, it often takes the form of an amazingly strong assertion. In some of the more fervent versions of the thesis, we are told that we cannot invoke any criterion of rational behavior other than those that obtain in the community to which the person involved belongs. Any reference to rationality yields the retort, “which rationality?” or “whose rationality?” It is also argued not only that the explanation of a person’s moral judgments must be based on the values and norms of the community to which the person belongs, but also that these judgments can be ethically assessed only within those values and norms, which entails a denial of the claims of competing norms on the person’s attention. Various versions of these farreaching claims have been forcefully aired and powerfully advocated. This approach has had the effect of rejecting the feasibility of assessing— perhaps even comprehending—normative judgments about behavior and institutions across cultures and societies, and it has sometimes been used to undermine the possibility of serious cross-cultural exchange and understanding. This distancing sometimes serves a political purpose, for example, in the defense of particular customs and traditions on such matters as women’s unequal social position or the use of particular modes of conventional punishment, varying from amputation to the stoning of allegedly adulterous women. There is an insistence here on splitting up the large world into little islands that are not within intellectual reach of each other. These perceptual claims are certainly worth scrutinizing. There can be little doubt that the community or culture to which a person belongs can have a major influence on the way he or she sees a situation or views a decision. In any explanatory exercise, note has to be taken of local knowledge, regional norms, and particular perceptions and values that are common in a specific community. 13 The empirical case for this recognition is certainly strong. But this does not, in any plausible way, undermine or eliminate the possibility and role of choice and reasoning about identity. This is so for at least two specific reasons. First, even though certain basic cultural attitudes and beliefs may influence the nature of our reasoning, they cannot invariably determine it fully. There are various influences on our reasoning, and we need not lose our ability to consider other ways of reasoning just because we identify with, and have been influenced by membership in, a particular group. Influence is not the same thing as complete determination, and choices do remain despite the existence—and importance—of cultural influences. Second, the so-called cultures need not involve any uniquely defined set of attitudes and beliefs that can shape our reasoning. Indeed, many of these “cultures” contain considerable internal variations, and different attitudes and beliefs may be entertained within the same broadly defined culture. For example, Indian traditions are often taken to be intimately associated with religion, and indeed in many ways they are, and yet Sanskrit and Pali have a larger atheistic and agnostic literature than any other classical language: Greek or Roman or Hebrew or Arabic. When a doctrinal anthology such as the fourteenth-century Sanskrit book Sarvadarshanasamgraha (literally translated as “collection of all philosophies”) presents sixteen chapters respectively sympathetic to sixteen different positions on religious issues (beginning with atheism), the aim is to cater to informed and discerning choice, rather than to indicate incomprehension of each other’s positions. 14 Our ability to think clearly may, of course, vary with training and talent, but we can, as adult and competent human beings, question and begin to challenge what has been taught to us if we are given the opportunity to do so. While particular circumstances may not sometimes encourage a person to engage in such questioning, the ability to doubt and to question is not beyond our reach. The point is often made, plausibly enough, that one cannot reason from nowhere. But this does not imply that no matter what the antecedent associations of a person are, those associations must remain unchallenged, unrejectable, and permanent. The alternative to the “discovery” view is not choice from positions “unencumbered” with any identity (as some communitarian polemicists seem to imply), but choices that continue to exist even in any encumbered position one happens to occupy. Choice does not require jumping out of nowhere into somewhere, but it can lead to a move from one place to another. 

                                Priorities and Reason 

I turn now from the argument based on perceptual limitation to the other possible ground for relying on choiceless identities, to wit, the alleged centrality of discovery in “knowing who you are.” As Michael Sandel, the political theorist, has illuminatingly explained this claim (among other communitarian claims), “[C]ommunity describes not just what they have as fellow citizens but also what they are, not a relationship they choose (as in a voluntary association) but an attachment they discover, not merely an attribute but a constituent of their identity.” 15 However, an enriching identity need not, in fact, be obtained only through discovering where we find ourselves. It can also be acquired and earned. When Lord Byron considered leaving Greece and parting from the people with whom this quintessential Englishman had come to identify so closely, he had reason to lament: Maid of Athens, ere we part, Give, oh, give me back my heart! Byron’s acquired identity with the Greeks vastly enriched his own life while also adding some strength to the Greek struggle for independence. We are not as imprisoned in our installed locations and affiliations as the advocates of the discovery view of identity seem to presume. Perhaps, however, the strongest reason for being skeptical of the discovery view is that we have different ways of identifying ourselves even in our given locations. The sense of belonging to a community, while strong enough in many cases, need not obliterate—or overwhelm—other associations and affiliations. These choices are constantly faced (even though we may not spend all our time articulating the choices we are actually making). Consider, for example, the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s poem “A Far Cry from Africa,” which captures the divergent pulls of his historical African background and his loyalty to the English language and the literary culture that goes with it (a very strong affiliation for Walcott): Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live? Walcott cannot simply “discover” what is his true identity; he has to decide what he should do, and how—and to what extent—to make room for the different loyalties in his life. We have to address the issue of conflict, real or imagined, and ask about the implications of our loyalty to divergent priorities and differentiated affinities. If Walcott wonders what conflict there is between his inseparable attachment to Africa and his love of the English language and his use of that language (indeed his astonishingly beautiful use of that language), that points to broader questions of disparate pulls on one’s life. The presence of conflicting pulls is as real in France, or America, or South Africa, or India, or anywhere else, as it clearly is in Walcott’s Caribbean. The basic seriousness of the disparate pulls—of history, culture, language, politics, profession, family, comradeship, and so on—have to be adequately recognized, and they cannot all be drowned in a single-minded celebration only of community. The point at issue is not whether any identity whatever can be chosen (that would be an absurd claim), but whether we do indeed have choices over alternative identities or combinations of identities, and perhaps more importantly, substantial freedom regarding what priority to give to the various identities we may simultaneously have. 16 To consider an illustration that was discussed in the last chapter, a person’s choice may be constrained by the recognition that she is, say, Jewish, but she still has a decision to make regarding what importance to give to that particular identity over others that she may also have (related for example, to her political beliefs, sense of nationality, humanitarian commitments, or professional attachments). In the Bengali novel Gora by Rabindranath Tagore published a century ago, the problematic hero, also called Gora, differs from most of his friends and family in urban Bengal by strongly championing old-fashioned Hindu customs and traditions and is a staunch religious conservative. However, Tagore places Gora in a big confusion toward the end of the novel when his supposed mother tells him that he was adopted as an infant orphan by the Indian family after his Irish parents had been killed by the rebellious sepoys in the ferocious anti-British mutiny of 1857 (the name Gora means “fair,” and presumably his unusual looks had received attention but no clear diagnosis). At one stroke, Gora’s militant conservatism is undermined by Tagore since Gora finds all the doors of traditionalist temples closed to him—as a “foreignborn”—thanks to the narrowly conservative cause which he himself had been championing. We do discover many things about ourselves even when they may not be as foundational as the one Gora had to face. But to recognize this is not the same as making identity just a matter of discovery. Even when the person discovers something very important about himself or herself, there are still issues of choice to be faced. Gora had to ask whether he should continue his championing of Hindu conservatism (though now from an inescapable distance) or see himself as something else. Gora chooses ultimately, helped by his girlfriend, to see himself just as a human being who is at home in India, not delineated by religion or caste or class or complexion. Important choices have to be made even when crucial discoveries occur. Life is not mere destiny.

                                                CHAPTER 3 

                                CIVILIZATIONAL CONFINEMENT 

The “clash of civilizations” was already a popular topic well before the horrifying events of September 11 sharply added to the conflicts and distrust in the world. But these terrible happenings have had the effect of vastly magnifying the ongoing interest in the so-called clash of civilizations. Indeed, many influential commentators have been tempted to see an immediate linkage between observations of global conflicts and theories of civilizational confrontations. 

                 There has been much interest in the theory of civilizational clash forcefully presented in Samuel Huntington’s famous book.  In particular, the theory of a clash between “Western” and “Islamic” civilizations has frequently been invoked. There are two distinct difficulties with the theory of civilizational clash. 

Looking People distinctly opposite  

The first, which is perhaps more fundamental, relates to the viability and significance of classifying people according to the civilizations to which they allegedly “belong.” 

                      This question arises well before problems with the view that people thus classified into cartons of civilizations must be somehow antagonistic—the civilizations to which they belong are hostile to each other. Underlying the thesis of a civilizational clash lies a much more general idea of the possibility of seeing people primarily as belonging to one civilization or another. 

                        The relations between different persons in the world can be seen, in this reductionist approach, as relations between the respective civilizations to which they allegedly belong. 

                         As was discussed in chapter 1, to see any person preeminently as a member of a civilization (for example, in Huntington’s categorization, as a member of “the Western world,” “the Islamic world,” “the Hindu world,” or “the Buddhist world”) is already to reduce people to this one dimension. 

                      Thus, the deficiency of the clash thesis begins well before we get to the point of asking whether the disparate civilizations (among which the population of the world is neatly partitioned out) must necessarily—or even typically—clash. No matter what answer we give to that question, even by pursuing the question in this restrictive form, we implicitly give credibility to the allegedly unique importance of that one categorization over all the other ways in which people of the world can be classified. 

                        Indeed, even the opponents of the theory of a “civilizational clash” can, in effect, contribute to propping up its intellectual foundation if they begin by accepting the same singular classification of the world population. The heartwarming belief in an underlying goodwill among people belonging to discrete civilizations is, of course, very different from the cold pessimism of seeing only conflict and strife between them. But the two approaches share the same reductionist conviction that human beings around the world can be understood and preeminently characterized in terms of the distinct civilizations to which they belong. The same pallid view of the world divided into boxes of civilizations is shared by both groups—warm and cold—of theorists. For example, in disputing the gross and nasty generalization that members of the Islamic civilization have a belligerent culture, it is common enough to argue that they actually share a culture of peace and goodwill. But this simply replaces one stereotype with another, and furthermore, it involves accepting an implicit presumption that people who happen to be Muslim by religion would basically be similar in other ways as well. 

                             Aside from all the difficulties in defining civilizational categories as disparate and disjunctive units (on which more presently), the arguments on both sides suffer, in this case, from a shared faith in the presumption that seeing people exclusively, or primarily, in terms of the religion based civilizations to which they are taken to belong is a good way of understanding human beings. Civilizational partitioning is a pervasively intrusive phenomenon in social analysis, stifling other—richer—ways of seeing people. It lays the foundations for misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world, even before going on to the drumbeats of a civilizational clash.

  Singular Visions and the Appearance of Depth 

NARROW UNDERSTANDING BASED ON CIVILIZATIONAL CLASH

If clashing civilizations is a remarkably grand thesis about conflicts, there are lesser, but also influential, claims that relate contrasts of cultures and identities to the conflicts and the profusion of atrocities we see in different parts of the world today. Instead of one majestically momentous partition that splits the world population into contending civilizations, as in Huntington’s imagined universe, the lesser variants of the approach see local populations as being split into clashing groups with divergent cultures and disparate histories that tend, in an almost “natural” way, to breed enmity toward each other. Conflicts involving, say, Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Albanians, Tamils and Sinhalese, are then reinterpreted in lofty historical terms, seeing in them something that is much grander than the shabbiness of contemporary politics. 

                        Modern conflicts, which cannot be adequately analyzed without going into contemporary events and machinations, are then interpreted as ancient feuds which allegedly place today’s players in preordained roles in an allegedly ancestral play. 

                            As a result, the “civilizational” approach to contemporary conflicts (in grander or lesser versions) serves as a major intellectual barrier to focusing more fully on prevailing politics and to investigating the processes and dynamics of contemporary incitements to violence. 

                          It is not hard to understand why the imposing civilizational approach appeals so much. It invokes the richness of history and the apparent depth and gravity of cultural analysis, and it seeks profundity in a way that an immediate political analysis of the “here and now”—seen as ordinary and mundane—would seem to lack. If I am disputing the civilizational approach, it is not because I don’t see its intellectual temptations. I am, in fact, reminded of an event fifty years ago, shortly after I first arrived in England from India, as a student at Cambridge University. A kindly fellow student, who had already acquired a reputation for insightful political analysis, took me to see the recently released film Rear Window, where I encountered a canny but crippled photographer, played by James Stewart, observing some very suspicious events in the house opposite. Like James Stewart, I too, in my naive kind of way, became convinced that a gruesome murder may have been committed in the apartment that could be seen from the rear window. However, my theorist companion explained to me (amid whispered protests from neighbors urging him to shut up) that there was, he was certain, no murder at all, and that the whole film, I would soon discover, was a serious indictment of McCarthyism in America, which encouraged everyone to watch the activities of other people with great suspicion. “This is a robust critique,” he informed this novice from the third world, “of the growing American culture of snooping.” Such a critique, I could readily see, could have yielded quite a profound film, but I kept wondering whether it was, in fact, the film we were watching. Later on, I remember, I had to make a strong cup of coffee for my disappointed guide to Western culture to reconcile him to the shallow and trivial world in which the murderer got his mundane comeuppance. What must be similarly asked is whether in the world in which we live we are actually watching a grand clash of civilizations or something much more ordinary which merely looks like a civilizational clash to determined seekers of depth and profundity. The depth that civilizational analysis seeks is not, however, exclusive to the high road of intellectual analysis. In some ways, civilizational analysis mirrors and magnifies common beliefs that flourish in not particularly intellectual circles. The invoking of, say, “Western” values against what “those others” believe is rather commonplace in public discussions, and it makes regular headlines in tabloids as well as figuring in political rhetoric and antiimmigrant oratory. In the aftermath of September 11, the stereotyping of Muslims came often enough from people who are no great specialists, if I am any judge, on the subject. But theories of civilizational clash have often provided allegedly sophisticated foundations of crude and coarse popular beliefs. Cultivated theory can bolster uncomplicated bigotry. 

Two Difficulties of Civilizational Explanations What, then, are the difficulties of explaining contemporary world events by invoking civilizational categories? 

MULTIPLE DIVERSITY REDUCED TO SINGULAR IDENTITY

Perhaps its most basic weakness lies, as was suggested in chapter 1, in its use of a particularly ambitious version of the illusion of singularity. To this has to be added a second problem: the crudeness with which the world civilizations are characterized, taking them to be more homogeneous and far more insular than tends to emerge from empirical analyses of the past and the present. The illusion of singularity draws on the presumption that a person not be seen as an individual with many affiliations, nor as someone who belongs to many different groups, but just as a member of one particular collectivity, which gives him or her a uniquely important identity. The implicit belief in the overarching power of a singular classification is not just crude as an approach to description and prediction, it is also grossly confrontational in form and implication. A uniquely divisive view of the world population goes not only against the oldfashioned belief that “people are much the same the world over,” but also against the important and informed understanding that we are different in many diverse ways. Our differences do not lie on one dimension only. The realization that each of us can and do have many different identities related to different significant groups to which we simultaneously belong appears to some as a rather complicated idea. But, as was discussed in the last chapter, it is an extremely ordinary and elementary recognition. In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups: we belong to all of them. The fact that a person is a woman does not conflict with her being a vegetarian, which does not militate against her being a lawyer, which does not prevent her from being a lover of jazz, or a heterosexual, or a supporter of gay and lesbian rights. Any person is a member of many different groups (without this being in any way a contradiction), and each of these collectivities, to all of which this person belongs, gives him or her a potential identity which— depending on the context—can be quite important. The incendiary implications of crude and singular classifications were discussed earlier, and will be pursued further in the subsequent chapters. The conceptual weakness of the attempt to achieve a singular understanding of the people of the world through civilizational partitioning not only works against our shared humanity, but also undermines the diverse identities we all have which do not place us against each other along one uniquely rigid line of segregation. Misdescription and misconception can make the world more fragile than it need be. 

                         In addition to the unsustainable reliance on the presumption of a singular categorization, the civilizational approach has tended to suffer also from ignoring the diversities within each identified civilization and also from overlooking the extensive interrelations between distinct civilizations. The descriptive poverty of the approach goes beyond its flawed reliance on singularity. On Seeing India as a Hindu Civilization Let me illustrate the issue by considering the way my own country, India, is treated in this classificatory system.  In describing India as a “Hindu civilization,” Huntington’s exposition of the alleged “clash of civilizations” has to downplay the fact that India has many more Muslims than any other country in the world with the exception of Indonesia and very marginally Pakistan. India may not be placed within the arbitrary definition of “the Muslim world,” but it is still the case that India (with its 145 million Muslims—more than the whole British population and the entire French population put together) has a great many more Muslims than nearly every country in Huntington’s definition of “the Muslim world.” Also, it is impossible to think of the civilization of contemporary India without taking note of the major roles of Muslims in the history of the country. It would be, in fact, quite futile to try to have an understanding of the nature and range of Indian art, literature, music, films, or food without seeing the range of contributions coming from both Hindus and Muslims in a thoroughly intermingled way. 3 Also, the interactions in everyday living, or in cultural activities, are not separated along communal lines. While we can, for example, contrast the style of Ravi Shankar, the magnificent sitarist, with Ali Akbar Khan, the great sarod player, on the basis of their particular mastery over different forms of Indian classical music, they would never be seen specifically as a “Hindu musician” or a “Muslim musician” respectively (even though Shankar does happen to be a Hindu and Khan a Muslim). The same applies to other fields of cultural creativity, including Bollywood—that great field of Indian mass culture—where many of the leading actors and actresses, as well as directors, come from a Muslim background (along with others with non-Muslim ancestry), and they are much adored by a population of which more than 80 percent happen to be Hindu. Further, Muslims are not the only non-Hindu group in the Indian population. The Sikhs have a major presence, as do the Jains. India is not only the country of origin of Buddhism; the dominant religion of India was Buddhism for over a millennium, and the Chinese often referred to India as “the Buddhist kingdom.” Agnostic and atheistic schools of thought—the Carvaka and the Lokayata—have flourished in India from at least the sixth century B.C. to the present day. There have been large Christian communities in India from the fourth century—two hundred years before there were substantial Christian communities in Britain. Jews came to India shortly after the fall of Jerusalem; Parsees from the eighth century. It is obvious that Huntington’s characterization of India as a “Hindu civilization” has many descriptive difficulties. It is also politically combustible. It tends to add some highly deceptive credibility to the extraordinary distortion of history and manipulation of the present realities that Hindu sectarian politicians have tried to champion in trying to promote a “Hindu civilization” view of India. Huntington is indeed frequently quoted by many leaders of the politically active “Hindutva” movement, and this is hardly surprising given the similarity between his seeing India as a “Hindu civilization” and the promotion of a “Hindu view” of India that is so dear to the political gurus of Hindutva. As it happens, in the general elections held in India in the spring of 2004, the coalition led by the Hindu activist party suffered a severe defeat, with fairly comprehensive reversals across the board. In addition to being headed by a Muslim president, the secular Republic of India now has a Sikh prime minister and a Christian president of the ruling party (not bad for the largest democratic electorate in the world with more than 80 percent Hindu voters). However, the threat of a renewed promotion of the Hindu sectarian conception of India is ever present. Even though the political parties committed to a Hindu view of India have received considerably less than a quarter of the votes (a smallish fraction of the Hindu population), political attempts at seeing India as a “Hindu civilization” will not easily die away. A simplistic characterization of India along an artificially singular religious line remains politically explosive, in addition to being descriptively flawed. On the Alleged Uniqueness of Western Values The portrayal of India as a Hindu civilization may be a crude mistake, but coarseness of one kind or another is present in the characterizations of other civilizations as well. Consider what is called “the Western civilization.” Indeed, the champions of “the clash of civilizations,” in line with the belief in the unique profundity of this singular line of division, tend to see tolerance as a special and enduring feature of Western civilization, extending way back into history. Indeed, this is seen as one of the important aspects of the clash of values that underpins the supposed clash of civilizations. Huntington insists that the “West was West long before it was modern.”  He cites (among other allegedly special features such as “social pluralism”) “a sense of individualism and a tradition of individual rights and liberties unique among civilized societies.” This increasingly common way of looking at civilizational divisions is not really as rooted in traditional cultural analysis in the West as it is sometimes supposed. For example, the characterization of Western culture in a world of other—very different—cultures that was presented by Oswald Spengler in his widely influential book The Decline of the West did make explicit room for heterogeneities within each culture and for the cross-cultural similarities that can be clearly observed. In fact, Spengler argued, “there is nothing preposterous in the idea of Socrates, Epicurus, and especially Diogenes, sitting by the Ganges, whereas Diogenes in a Western megalopolis would be an unimportant fool.” 5 Huntington’s thesis is, in fact, very hard to sustain empirically. Tolerance and liberty are certainly among the important achievements of modern Europe (leaving out some aberrations like Nazi Germany, or the intolerant governance of the British or French or Portuguese empires in Asia and Africa). But to see a unique line of historical division there—going back over the millennia—is quite fanciful. The championing of political liberty and of religious tolerance, in their full contemporary forms, is not an old historical feature of any country or civilization in the world. Plato and Aquinas were no less authoritarian in their thinking than was Confucius. This is not to deny that there were champions of tolerance in classical European thought, but even if this is taken to give credit to the whole Western world (from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Vikings and the Ostrogoths), there are similar examples in other cultures as well. For example, the Indian emperor Ashoka’s dedicated championing of religious and other kinds of tolerance in the third century B.C. (arguing that “the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another”) is certainly among the earliest political defenses of tolerance anywhere. The recent Bollywood movie Ashoka (made, as it happens, by a Muslim director) may or may not be accurate in all its details (there is, for one thing, fulsome use of Bollywood’s fascination with singing, romancing, and economically dressed dancing), but it rightly emphasizes the importance of Ashoka’s ideas on secularism and tolerance 2,300 years ago and their continuing relevance in the India of today. When a later Indian emperor, Akbar, the Great Mughal, was making similar pronouncements on religious tolerance in Agra from the 1590s onward (such as, “[N]o one should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him”), the Inquisitions were quite extensive in Europe, and heretics were still being burned at the stake. Global Roots of Democracy Similarly, democracy is often seen as a quintessentially Western idea which is alien to the non-Western world. That civilizational simplification has received some encouragement recently from the difficulty that is being experienced by the U.S.-led coalition in establishing a democratic system of government in Iraq. However, there is a real loss of clarity when the blame for the difficulties in postintervention Iraq is not put on the peculiar nature of the underinformed and underreflected military intervention that was precipitately chosen, but placed instead on some imagined view that democra cy does not suit Iraqi, or Middle Eastern, or non-Western cultures. That, I would argue, is a completely wrong way to try to understand the problems we face today—in the Middle East or anywhere else. Doubts are often expressed that the Western countries can “impose” democracy on Iraq, or on any other country. However, to pose the question in that form—centering on the idea of “imposition”—implies a proprietary belief that democracy belongs to the West, taking it to be a quintessentially “Western” idea which has originated and flourished only in the West. This is a thoroughly misleading way of understanding the history and the contemporary prospects of democracy. There can, of course, be no doubt at all that the modern concepts of democracy and public reasoning have been deeply influenced by European and American analyses and experiences over the last few centuries, particularly by the intellectual force of the European Enlightenment (including the contributions of such theorists of democracy as the Marquis de Condorcet, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill). But to extrapolate backward from these comparatively recent experiences to construct a quintessential and long-run dichotomy between the West and non-West would be very odd history. In contrast with the specious history of redefining the long-run past on the basis of short-run experiences, there is an alternative—historically more ambitious—line of reasoning that focuses specifically on ancient Greece. The belief in the allegedly “Western” nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece, especially in Athens. The pioneering departure in ancient Greece was indeed momentous, but the jump from ancient Greece to the thesis of the allegedly “Western”—or “European”—nature of democracy is confusing and confounded for at least three distinct reasons. 

RACIAL DIVISION IS WRONG

First, there is the classificatory arbitrariness of defining civilizations in largely racial terms. In this way of looking at civilizational categories, no great difficulty is seen in considering the descendants of, say, Goths and Visigoths as proper inheritors of the Greek tradition (“they are all Europeans,” we are told). But there is great reluctance in taking note of the Greek intellectual links with other ancient civilizations to the east or south of Greece, despite the greater interest the ancient Greeks themselves showed in talking to ancient Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the ancient Ostrogoths). 

NEGLECTING OTHER SOCIETIES

The second issue concerns the follow-up of the early Greek experience. While Athens certainly was the pioneer in getting balloting started, there were many regional governments which went that way in the centuries to follow. There is nothing to indicate that the Greek experience in electoral governance had much immediate impact in the countries to the west of Greece and Rome, in, say, what is now France or Germany or Britain. In contrast, some of the contemporary cities in Asia—in Iran, Bactria, and India—incorporated elements of democracy in municipal governance in the centuries following the flowering of Athenian democracy. For example, for several centuries the city of Susa (or Shushan) in southwest Iran had an elected council, a popular assembly, and magistrates who were proposed by the council and elected by the assembly. 

DEMOCRATIC TRADITIONS - GOVERNMENT BY DISCUSSION

Third, democracy is not just about ballots and votes, but also about public deliberation and reasoning, what—to use an old phrase—is often called “government by discussion.” While public reasoning did flourish in ancient Greece, it did so also in several other ancient civilizations—sometimes spectacularly so. For example, some of the earliest open general meetings aimed specifically at settling disputes between different points of view took place in India in the so-called Buddhist councils, where adherents of different points of view got together to argue out their differences. Emperor Ashoka, referred to earlier, who hosted the third—and largest—Buddhist council in the third century B.C. in the then capital of India, viz. Pataliputra (what is now Patna), also tried to codify and propagate what were among the earliest formulations of rules for public discussion (some kind of an early version of the nineteenth-century “Robert’s rules of order”). The tradition of public discussion can be found across the world. To choose another historical example, in early seventh-century Japan, the Buddhist prince Shotoku, who was regent to his mother, Empress Suiko, insisted in “the constitution of seventeen articles,” promulgated in A.D. 604: “Decisions on important matters should not be made by one person alone. They should be discussed with many.” This, as it happens, is six hundred years earlier than the Magna Carta signed in the thirteenth century. The Japanese constitution of seventeen articles went on to explain the reason why plural reasoning was so important: “Nor let us be resentful when others differ from us. For all men have hearts, and each heart has its own leanings. Their right is our wrong, and our right is their wrong.” 6 Not surprisingly, some commentators have seen in this seventh-century constitution Japan’s “first step of gradual development toward democracy.”  There is a long history of public discussion across the world. Even the allconquering Alexander was treated to a good example of public criticism as he roamed around in northwest India around 325 B.C. When Alexander asked a group of Jain philosophers why they were neglecting to pay any attention to the great conqueror (Alexander was clearly disappointed by these Indian philosophers’ lack of interest in him), he received the following forceful reply: King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’s surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others! . . . You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of the earth as will suffice to bury you.  Middle Eastern history and the history of Muslim people also include a great many accounts of public discussion and political participation through dialogues. In Muslim kingdoms centered around Cairo, Baghdad, and Istanbul, or in Iran, India, or for that matter Spain, there were many champions of public discussion (such as Caliph Abd al-Rahman III of Córdoba in the tenth century, or Emperor Akbar of India in the sixteenth). I shall come back to this issue in the next chapter when discussing the systematic misinterpretation of Muslim history that can be found in the pronouncements both of religious fundamentalists and of Western cultural simplifiers. 

                  The Western world has no proprietary right over democratic ideas. While modern institutional forms of democracy are relatively new everywhere, the history of democracy in the form of public participation and reasoning is spread across the world. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1835 in his classic book on democracy, while the “great democratic revolution” which he observed taking place in America could be seen, from one point of view, as “a new thing,” it could also be seen, from a broader perspective, as a part of “the most continuous, ancient, and permanent tendency known to history.” Although Tocqueville confined his historical examples to Europe’s past (pointing, for instance, to the powerful contribution toward democratization made by the admission of common people to the ranks of the clergy in “the state of France seven hundred years ago”), his general argument has immensely broader relevance. In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela describes how influenced he was, as a young boy, by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the local meetings held in his African hometown: Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer.  Mandela’s quest for democracy did not emerge from any Western “imposition.” It began distinctly at his African home, though he did fight to “impose” it on “the Europeans” (as the white rulers in apartheid-based South Africa, it may be recollected, used to call themselves). Mandela’s ultimate victory was a triumph of humanity—not of a specifically European idea. 

                       Western Science and Global History

 It is similarly important to see how so-called Western science draws on a world heritage. There is a chain of intellectual relations that link Western mathematics and science to a collection of distinctly non-Western practitioners. For example, the decimal system, which evolved in India in the early centuries of the first millennium, went to Europe at the end of that millennium via the Arabs. A large group of contributors from different non-Western societies—Chinese, Arab, Iranian, Indian, and others—influenced the science, mathematics, and philosophy that played a major part in the European Renaissance and, later, the Enlightenment. Not only is the flowering of global science and technology not an exclusively Western-led phenomenon, there were major global advances in the world that involved extensive international encounters far away from Europe. Consider printing, which Francis Bacon put among the developments that “have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.” Every one of the early attempts at developing the art of printing in the first millennium occurred far away from Europe. They were also, to a considerable extent, linked with the deep commitment of Buddhist intellectuals to public reading and the propagation of ideas, and indeed all the attempts at early printing in China, Korea, and Japan were undertaken by Buddhist technologists. Indian Buddhists, who tried to develop printing, in the seventh century, were less successful in this, but they did contribute the material that constituted the first dated printed book in the world, a Buddhist Sanskrit classic (Vajracchedikaprajnaparamita) popularly known as the Diamond Sutra, which was translated by a half-Indian, half-Turkish scholar from Sanskrit into Chinese in A.D. 402. When the book was printed in Chinese in A.D. 868, it carried a motivational preface to the effect that it was being printed “for universal free distribution.”  It is right that there should be adequate acknowledgment of the tremendous progress of ideas and knowledge in Europe and America over the last few centuries. The Occident must get full credit for the major achievements that occurred in the Western world during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, which have transformed the nature of human civilization. But the presumption that all this is the result of the flowering of an entirely sequestered “Western civilization,” developing in splendid isolation, would be a serious illusion. Praising an imagined insularity does little justice to the way learning and thinking tend to progress in the world, drawing on developments in different regions. Ideas and knowledge cultivated in the West have, in recent centuries, dramatically changed the contemporary world, but it would be hard to see it as an immaculate Western conception. Botched Abstractions and Foggy History Reliance on civilizational partitioning is thoroughly flawed for at least two distinct reasons.

First, there is a basic methodological problem involved in the implicit presumption that a civilizational partitioning is uniquely relevant and must drown—or swamp—other ways of identifying people. It is bad enough, though scarcely surprising, that those who foment global confrontations or local sectarian violence try to impose a prechosen single and divisive identity on people who are to be recruited as the “foot soldiers” of political brutality, but it is really sad to see that this blinkered vision gets significantly reinforced by the implicit support the anti-Western fundamentalist warriors get from theories bred in the Western countries of singular categorization of people of the world. 

The second difficulty with civilizational partitioning used in this approach is that it is based on extraordinary descriptive crudeness and historical innocence. Many of the significant diversities within each civilization are effectively ignored, and interactions between them are substantially overlooked. These twin failures produce a remarkably impoverished understanding of different civilizations and their similarities, connections, and interdependence in science, technology, mathematics, literature, trade, commerce, and political, economic, and social ideas. The foggy perception of global history yields an astonishingly limited view of each culture, including an oddly parochial reading of Western civilization. 

                                                     CHAPTER 4 

                     RELIGIOUS AFFILIATIONS AND MUSLIM HISTORY

Recent theses about clashing civilizations have tended to draw much on religious difference as a central characteristic of differing cultures. However, aside from the conceptual flaw in seeing human beings in terms of only one affiliation and the historical mistake of overlooking the critically important interrelations between what are assumed to be largely detached and discrete civilizations (both problems were discussed in the last chapter), these civilizational theories also suffer from having to overlook the heterogeneity of religious affiliations that characterize most countries and, even more, most civilizations. The last problem can be quite a big one, too, since people of the same religion are frequently spread over many different countries and several distinct continents. For example, as was mentioned earlier, India may be seen by Samuel Huntington as a “Hindu civilization,” but with nearly 150 million Muslim citizens, India is also among the three largest Muslim countries in the world. Religious categorization cannot be easily fitted into classifications of countries and civilizations. This last problem can be overcome by classifying people not into lumpy civilizational units with religious correlates (like “Islamic civilization,” “Hindu civilization,” and such as in Huntington’s categorization), but directly in terms of the religious groupings of people. This would lead to a neater and less defective classification, and it has, not surprisingly, appealed to many. Viewing individuals in terms of their religious affiliations has certainly become quite common in cultural analysis in recent years. Does this make the religioncentered analysis of the people of the world a helpful way of understanding humanity? I have to argue that it does not. This may be a more coherent classification of the people of the world than civilized categorization, but it makes the same mistake of attempting to see human beings in terms of only one affiliation, viz. religion. In many contexts, such a classification can be rather helpful (for example, in determining the choice of religious holidays, or ensuring the safety of places of worship), but to take that to be the overarching basis of social, political, and cultural analysis in general would amount to overlooking all the other associations and loyalties any individual may have, and which could be significant in the person’s behavior, identity, and self-understanding. The crucial need to take note of the plural identities of people and their choice of priorities survives the replacement of civilizational classifications with a directly religious categorization. Indeed, the increasingly common use of religious identities as the leading—or sole—principle of classification of the people of the world has led to much grossness of social analysis. There has been, in particular, a major loss of understanding in the failure to distinguish between (1) the various affiliations and loyalties a person who happens to be a Muslim has, and (2) his or her Islamic identity in particular. The Islamic identity can be one of the identities the person regards as important (perhaps even crucial), but without thereby denying that there are other identities that may also be significant. What is often called “the Islamic world” does, of course, have a preponderance of Muslims, but different persons who are all Muslims can and do vary greatly in other respects, such as political and social values, economic and literary pursuits, professional and philosophical involvements, attitude to the West, and so on. The global lines of division can be very differently drawn for these “other affiliations.” To focus just on the simple religious classification is to miss the numerous—and varying —concerns that people who happen to be Muslim by religion tend to have. The distinction can be extremely important, not least in a world in which Islamic fundamentalism and militancy have been powerful and in which Western opposition to them is often combined with a significant, if vaguely formulated, suspicion of Muslim people in general. Aside from the conceptual crudity reflected in that general attitude, it also overlooks the more obvious fact that Muslims differ sharply in their political and social beliefs. They also differ in their literary and artistic tastes, in their interest in science and mathematics, and even in the form and extent of their religiosity. While the urgency of immediate politics has led to a somewhat better understanding in the West of religious subcategories within Islam (such as the distinction between a person’s being a Shia or a Sunni), there is a growing reluctance to go beyond them to take adequate note of the many nonreligious identities Muslim people, like other people in the world, have. But the ideas and priorities of Muslims on political, cultural, and social matters can diverge greatly.

                             Religious Identity and Cultural Variations 

here can also be vast differences in the social behavior of different persons belonging to the same religion, even in fields often thought to be closely linked with religion. This is easy to illustrate in the contemporary world, for example, in contrasting the typical practices of traditionalist rural women in, say, Saudi Arabia and those of Muslim women in urban Turkey (where head scarves are rare, with dress codes that are often similar to those of European women). It can also be illustrated by noting the vast differences in the habits of socially active women in Bangladesh and the less outgoing women in more conservative circles in the very same country, even though the persons involved may all be Muslim by religion. These differences must not, however, be seen simply as aspects of a new phenomenon that modernity has brought to Muslim people. The influence of other concerns, other identities, can be seen throughout the history of Muslim people. Consider a debate between two Muslims in the fourteenth century. Ibn Battuta, who was born in Tangier in 1304 and spent thirty years in various travels in Africa and Asia, was shocked by some of the things he saw in a part of the world that now lies between Mali and Ghana. In Iwaltan, not far from Timbuktu, Ibn Battuta befriended the Muslim qadi, who held an important civic office there. Ibn Battuta records his disgust with the social behavior in the qadi’s family: One day I went into the presence of the qadi of Iwaltan, after asking his permission to enter, and found with him a young and a remarkably beautiful woman. When I saw her I hesitated and wished to withdraw, but she laughed at me and experienced no shyness. The qadi said to me: “Why are you turning back? She is my friend.” I was amazed at their behaviour. 1 But the qadi was not the only one who shocked Ibn Battuta, and he was particularly censorious of Abu Muhammad Yandakan al-Musufi, who was a good Muslim and had earlier on actually visited Morocco himself. When Ibn Battuta visited him at his house, he found a woman conversing with a man seated on a couch. Ibn Battuta reports: I said to him: “Who is this woman?” He said: “She is my wife.” I said: “What connection has the man with her?” He replied: “He is her friend.” I said to him: “Do you acquiesce in this when you have lived in our country and become acquainted with the precepts of the Shariah?” He replied: “The association of women with men is agreeable to us and a part of good conduct, to which no suspicion attaches. They are not like the women of your country.” I was astonished at his laxity. I left him and did not return thereafter. He invited me several times, but I did not accept. 2 Note that Abu Muhammad’s difference from Ibn Battuta does not lie in religion —they were both Muslim—but in their decision about right lifestyles.

                                          Muslim Tolerance and Diversity

 I turn now to a more political issue. Varying attitudes to religious tolerance have often been socially important in the history of the world, and much variation can be found in this respect among different persons all of whom are Muslim by religion. For example, Emperor Aurangzeb, who ascended to the Mughal throne in India in the late seventeenth century, is generally regarded as being rather intolerant; he even imposed special taxes on his non-Muslim subjects. And yet a very different attitude can be seen in the life and behavior of his elder brother Dara Shikoh, the eldest son (and legitimate heir) of Emperor Shah Jahan, and of Mumtaz Mahal, in whose memory the Taj Mahal would be built. Aurangzeb killed Dara to grab the throne. Dara was not only a student of Sanskrit and serious scholar in the study of Hinduism, it is his Persian translation, from Sanskrit, of the Hindu Upanishads which was for a century or more one of the main foundations of European interest in Hindu religious philosophy. Dara and Aurangzeb’s great-grandfather, Akbar, was extremely supportive of religious tolerance (as was discussed earlier), and he made it a recognized duty of the state to make sure that “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.” In line with his pursuit of what he called “the path of reason” (rahi aql), Akbar insisted in the 1590s on the need for open dialogue and free choice, and also arranged recurrent discussions involving not only mainstream Muslim and Hindu thinkers, but also Christians, Jews, Parsees, Jains, and even atheists. 3 Aside from Dara, Aurangzeb’s own son, also called Akbar, rebelled against his father, and joined hands in this enterprise with the Hindu kingdoms in Rajasthan and later the Hindu Marathas (though Akbar’s rebellion was ultimately crushed by Aurangzeb). While fighting from Rajasthan, Akbar wrote to his father protesting at his intolerance and vilification of his Hindu friends. 4 Faced with such diversity among Muslims, those who can see no distinction between being a Muslim and having an Islamic identity would be tempted to ask: “Which is the correct view according to Islam? Is Islam in favor of such tolerance, or is it not? Which is it really?” The prior issue to be faced here is not what the right answer to this question is, but whether the question itself is the right one to ask. Being a Muslim is not an overarching identity that determines everything in which a person believes. For example, Emperor Akbar’s tolerance and heterodoxy had supporters as well as detractors among the influential Muslim groups in Agra and Delhi in sixteenth-century India. Indeed, he faced considerable opposition from Muslim clerics. Yet when Akbar died in 1605, the Islamic theologian Abdul Haq, who was sharply critical of many of Akbar’s tolerant beliefs, had to conclude that despite his “innovations,” Akbar had remained a good Muslim. 5 The point to recognize is that in dealing with this discrepancy, it is not necessary to establish that either Akbar or Aurangzeb was not a proper Muslim. They could both have been fine Muslims without sharing the same political attitudes or social and cultural identities. It is possible for one Muslim to take an intolerant view and another to be very tolerant of heterodoxy without either of them ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason. This is not only because the idea of ijtehad, or religious interpretation, allows considerable latitude within Islam itself, but also because an individual Muslim has much freedom to determine what other values and priorities he or she would choose without compromising a basic Islamic faith.

                                  Nonreligious Concerns and Diverse Priorities 

Given the present disaffection between Arab and Jewish politics, it is also worth remembering that there is a long history of mutual respect between the two groups. It was mentioned in the first chapter that when the Jewish philosopher Maimonides was forced to emigrate from an intolerant Europe in the twelfth century, he found a tolerant refuge in the Arab world. His host, who gave him an honored and influential position in his court in Cairo, was none other than Emperor Saladin, whose Muslim credentials can hardly be doubted, given his valiant role in the Crusades in fighting for Islam (Richard the Lionheart was one of his distinguished opponents). Maimonides’ experience was not, in fact, exceptional. Indeed, even though the contemporary world is full of examples of conflicts between Muslims and Jews, Muslim rulers in the Arab world and in medieval Spain had a long history of trying to integrate Jews as secure members of the social community whose liberties—and sometimes leadership roles—were respected. For instance, as María Rosa Menocal has noted in her book The Ornament of the World, by the tenth century the achievement of Córdoba in Muslim-ruled Spain in being “as serious a contender as Baghdad, perhaps more so, for the title of most civilized place on earth” was due to the constructive influence of the joint work of Caliph Abd al-Rahman III and his Jewish vizier, Hasdai ibn Shaprut. 6 Indeed, there is considerable evidence, as Menocal argues, that the position of Jews after the Muslim conquest “was in every respect an improvement, as they went from persecuted to protected minority.” 7 Our religious or civilizational identity may well be very important, but it is one membership among many. The question we have to ask is not whether Islam (or Hinduism or Christianity) is a peace-loving religion or a combative one (“tell us which it is really?”), but how a religious Muslim (or Hindu or Christian) may combine his or her religious beliefs or practices with other features of personal identity and other commitments and values (such as attitudes to peace and war). To see one’s religious—or “civilizational”—affiliation as an all-engulfing identity would be a deeply problematic diagnosis. There have been fierce warriors as well as great champions of peace among devoted members of each religion, and rather than asking which one is the “true believer” and which one a “mere impostor,” we should accept that one’s religious faith does not in itself resolve all the decisions we have to make in our lives, including those concerning our political and social priorities and the corresponding issues of conduct and action. Both the proponents of peace and tolerance and the patrons of war and intolerance can belong to the same religion, and may be (in their own ways) true believers, without this being seen as a contradiction. The domain of one’s religious identity does not vanquish all other aspects of one’s understanding and affiliation. If being a Muslim were the only identity of anyone who happens to be Muslim, then of course that religious identification would have to carry the huge burden of resolving a great many other choices a person faces in other parts of his or her life. But being Islamic can hardly be the only identity a Muslim has. Indeed, the denial of plurality as well as the rejection of choice in matters of identity can produce an astonishingly narrow and misdirected view. Even the current divisions around the events of September 11 have placed Muslims on all sides of the dividing lines, and instead of asking which is the right Islamic position, we have to recognize that a Muslim can choose among several different positions on matters involving political, moral, and social judgments without ceasing to be, for that reason, a Muslim. 

                                Mathematics, Science, and Intellectual History 

 There have been many discussions of the fact that a great many Muslims died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. As persons working there, they did not evidently regard that to be an evil expression of Western civilization. The World Trade Center did, of course, have symbolic significance, with its massive height and advanced technology (using the new tubular concept of structural engineering), and could be seen—in politically bellicose eyes—as an expression of Western audacity. It is interesting, in this context, to recall that the principal engineer behind the tubular concept was Fazlur Rahman Khan, the Chicagobased engineer from Bangladesh, who did the basic work underlying the innovation and later on also designed several other tall buildings, such as the 110-story Sears Tower and the 100-story John Hancock Center in Chicago, and also the Hajj Terminal in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. As it happens, he also fought for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971 and wrote a very readable Bengali book on that war. The fact that Muslims are on different sides of many cultural and political divides should not be at all surprising if it is recognized that being a Muslim is not an all-engulfing identity. It is also important to recognize that many intellectual contributions of Muslims which made a major difference to global knowledge were not in any sense purely Islamic contributions. Even today, when a modern mathematician at MIT or Princeton or Stanford invokes an “algorithm” to solve a difficult computational problem, she helps to commemorate the contributions of the ninth-century Arab mathematician al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term “algorithm” is derived (the term “algebra” comes from his book Al-Jabr wa alMuqabalah). Many other major developments in the history of mathematics, science, and technology were carried out by the Muslim intelligentsia. Many of these developments reached Europe only at the beginning of the second millennium, when translations from Arabic to Latin became quite common. However, some influences on Europe came earlier through the Muslim rulers of Spain. To consider one example of technological advance, Muslim engineers, both Arab and Berber, were responsible for the development and use of the technology of irrigation in the form of acequias in Spain, drawing on the innovations they had introduced earlier in the dry lands in the Middle East. This allowed, more than a thousand years ago, the cultivation of crops, fruits and vegetables, and the pasturing of animals on what had earlier been completely dry European land. Indeed, Muslim technologists were in charge of this admirable technical job over many centuries. 8 Furthermore, Muslim mathematicians and scientists had a significant role in the globalization of technical knowledge through the movement of ideas across the Old World. For example, the decimal system and some early results in trigonometry went from India to Europe in the early years of the second millennium, transmitted through the works of Arab and Iranian mathematicians. Also, the Latin versions of the mathematical results of Indian mathematicians Aryabhata, Varahamihira, and Brahmagupta, from their Sanskrit treatises produced between the fifth and seventh centuries, appeared in Europe through two distinct steps, going first from Sanskrit to Arabic and then to Latin (I shall return to such multicultural transmissions in chapter 7). As leaders of innovative thought in that period in history, Muslim intellectuals were among the most committed globalizers of science and mathematics. The religion of the people involved, whether Muslim or Hindu or Christian, made little difference to the scholarly commitments of these Muslim leaders of mathematics or science. Similarly, many of the Western classics, particularly from ancient Greece, survived only through their Arabic translations, to be retranslated, mostly into Latin, in the early centuries of the second millennium, preceding the European Renaissance. The Arabic translations were originally made not, obviously, for preservation, but for contemporary use in the Arabic-speaking world—a world of some considerable expanse at the turn of the first millennium. But the global as well as domestic consequences that ultimately resulted from this process are entirely in line with what could be expected from the reach and catholicity of the scholarship of those who were leaders of world thought over those decisive centuries.

                              Plural Identities and Contemporary Politics 

There are several reasons for which it is critically important today to pay attention to the distinction between (1) seeing Muslim people exclusively—or predominantly—in terms of their Islamic religion and (2) understanding them more broadly in terms of their many affiliations, which would certainly include their Islamic identity, but which need not crowd out the commitments that follow from their scientific interests, professional obligations, literary involvements, or political affiliations. The first reason, of course, is the value of knowledge—the importance of knowing what is happening. Clarity of understanding has significance on its own, and can also have far-reaching consequences for thoughts and actions. For example, even when a gang of activists claim that their terrorist pursuits are particularly ordained by Islamic injunctions, thereby trying to extend radically the reach of religious commands, we can certainly question whether that is indeed the case. It would be an obvious and gross mistake to go along with their failure to see the distinction between an Islamic identity and the identity of being a dedicated terrorist in what they see as the cause of Islam. To see this distinction does not, of course, foreclose the intellectual possibility of debating whether Islamic injunctions can be interpreted in this way, but the debate cannot even begin if the very distinction between an Islamic identity and a Muslim person’s many identities were entirely missed. As it happens, most Muslim scholars would entirely reject the claim that Islamic injunctions can require or sanction or even tolerate terrorism, even though many of them would also argue, as will be discussed presently, that a person would not cease to be a Muslim even if he were to interpret his duties differently (in the view of their critics, mistakenly) so long as he adhered to the core Islamic beliefs and practices. The first issue, however, is not to confuse the role of a particular religious identity and the various priorities a person of that particular religion may choose to have (for a variety of other reasons). Second, the distinction is of significance in the battle against the politicization of religion, exemplified not only by the rapid growth of political Islam, but also by the vigor with which the politicization of other religions have proceeded (exemplified by the political reach of “born-again” Christianity, or of Jewish extremism, or of the Hindutva movement). The world of practice—indeed sometimes very nasty and brutally sectarian practice—is systematically fed by the confusion between having a religion and ignoring the need for reasoning— and for freedom of thought—in deciding on matters that need not be “locked up” by religious faith. The process of misbegotten politicization can be seen, to varying extents, in the increasingly polarized world, and it can vary from contributing directly to recruitment for active terrorism to enhancing vulnerability to such recruitment or encouraging tolerance of violence in the name of religion. For example, the “creeping Shariahi-zation of Indonesia,” which the Indonesian Muslim scholar Syafi’i Anwar has described with much alarm, not only is a development of religious practice, but involves the spread of a particularly pugnacious social and political perspective in a traditionally tolerant —and richly multicultural—country. 9 A similar thing can be said about a number of other countries, including Malaysia, which have experienced a rapid promotion of a confrontational culture in the name of Islam, despite their history of cultural diversity and political breadth. To resist political polarization, this foundational distinction has to be pressed, since the exploitation of a religious (in this case, Islamic) identity is such a big part of the cultivation of organized conflicts of this kind. 10 Third, the distinction allows us to understand more fully what is going on internally in countries that are placed by outsiders in some religious box, such as the so-called Islamic world, as if that identification could comprehensively explain current intellectual developments there. It is important to recognize that many countries that are formally Islamic states have ongoing political struggles in which many of the protagonists, even when they are devout Muslims by religion, do not draw their arguments only from their Islamic identity. Consider Pakistan, which is certainly an Islamic state, and has Islam as its state religion with various political implications (for example, a non-Muslim could not be elected president of the country no matter how many votes he or she could get). And yet the civil society in that intellectually active country makes room for many commitments and pursuits that are not derived primarily —or at all—from religion. For example, Pakistan has a dedicated, and in many ways highly successful, Human Rights Commission, which appeals not just to Islamic entitlements but also to more broadly defined human rights. Even though, unlike the Human Rights Commission of India or South Africa, which are recognized bodies with legal power, the commission in Pakistan has no legal or constitutional standing (indeed it is formally no more than an NGO), yet under the stewardship of visionary leaders of civil society such as Asma Jahangir and I. A. Rehman, it has done much to fight for the freedoms of women, minorities, and other threatened people. Its qualified success has been based on the use of Pakistan’s civil laws (to the extent that they have not been maimed by extremist reform), the courage and commitment of civil dissidents, the fairmindedness of many upright members of the judiciary, the presence of a large body of socially progressive public opinion, and, last but not least, the effectiveness of the media in drawing attention to inhumanity and violation of civil decency. In fact, Pakistan’s media, like the Bangladeshi press, has also been very active in directly investigating and prominently reporting cases of abuse and in raising humane—and often secular—issues for the attention of a reflective public. 11 These recognitions do not reduce in any way the need to deal with “the depths of Pakistan’s problem with Islamic extremism,” as Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Sri Lanka, has put it. It is critically important to pay attention to the diagnosis Haqqani has presented persuasively that “the disproportionate influence wielded by fundamentalist groups in Pakistan is the result of state sponsorship of such groups,” and to his warning that “an environment dominated by Islamist and militarist ideologies is the ideal breeding ground for radicals and exportable radicalism.” 12 These issues have to be addressed at different levels, and call for the reforming of governance and the military, the pressing for democratic rights, giving more freedom of operation to the nonreligious and nonextremist political parties, and dealing with training grounds and fundamentalist schools that incline students toward confrontation and militancy. But attention must also be paid to the ongoing struggle within Pakistan in which its strong intellectual community has been playing a valuable, often visionary, role. Indeed, Husain Haqqani’s own penetrating analysis is part of this richly constructive movement. The American-led “war on terror” has been so preoccupied with military moves, interstate diplomacy, intergovernment dialogues, and working with rulers in general (across the world, not just in Pakistan) that there has tended to be a serious neglect of the importance of civil society, despite the critically important work that it does in very difficult circumstances. Indeed, humanist pursuits of broad reach have a rich history in Pakistan, and this tradition deserves celebration and support. It has already produced muchadmired results that have received global attention in other contexts. For example, the human development approach to understanding economic and social progress (judging progress not merely by the growth of gross national product but by the enhancement of people’s living conditions) has been pioneered in the world by a Pakistani economist and former finance minister, Mahbub ul Haq. 13 The approach has been widely used internationally, including in Pakistan, to assess the deficiencies of public policies (the critique has often been blistering), and it still remains one of the mainstays of the United Nations’ constructive efforts in economic and social development. It is important to recognize that A. Q. Khan’s clandestine nuclear wares are not the only things Pakistan has exported abroad. Momentous nondenominational contributions of this kind draw on the broad visions of the persons involved, not specifically on their religiosity. And yet this fact did not make Mahbub ul Haq any less of a Muslim. His faith in religion in its proper domain was strong, as I can confirm, having had the privilege of knowing him as a close friend (from our days together as undergraduates at Cambridge in the early 1950s to his sudden death in 1998). The distinction between the broad variety of commitments of Muslims and their narrowly defined Islamic identity in particular is extraordinarily important to understand. The fourth reason for emphasizing the importance of this distinction is that it is significantly—and sometimes entirely—missed in some of the “battles against terrorism” that are currently being waged. This can, and I believe already does, have very counterproductive effects. For example, attempts to fight terrorism through recruiting religion “on one’s side” has not only been quite ineffective, they also suffer, I would argue, from a serious conceptual disorientation. This subject clearly deserves a fuller discussion.

                       Fighting Terrorism and Understanding Identities 

The confusion between the plural identities of Muslims and their Islamic identity in particular is not only a descriptive mistake, it has serious implications for policies for peace in the precarious world in which we live. There is a great deal of anxiety in the contemporary world about global conflicts and terrorism. This is as it should be, since the threats are real and the need to do something to overcome and subdue these dangers is urgent. The actions taken in recent years have included military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are important subjects for public debate (I must confess that I have been totally skeptical of the policies chosen by the coalition partners for the Iraq operation in particular), but my focus here will be on another part of the global approach to conflicts and terrorism, involving public policies related to cultural relations and civil society. As was discussed in the first chapter, this book is especially concerned with the conceptual framework within which these confrontations are seen and understood, and how the demands of public action are interpreted. A confusing role is played here by the reliance on a single categorization of the people of the world. The confusion adds to the flammability of the world in which we live. The problem I am referring to is much more subtle than the crude and abusive views that have been expressed about other cultures by people in the West, like the irrepressible Lieutenant General William Boykin of the U.S. Army (whose claim that the Christian God was “bigger than” the Islamic God was discussed in the first chapter). It is easy to see the obtuseness and inanity of views of this kind. What, however, can be seen as a bigger and more general problem (despite the absence of the grossness of vilification) are the possibly terrible consequences of classifying people in terms of singular affiliations woven around exclusively religious identities. This is especially critical for understanding the nature and dynamics of global violence and terrorism in the contemporary world. The religious partitioning of the world produces a deeply misleading understanding of the people across the world and the diverse relations between them, and it also has the effect of magnifying one particular distinction between one person and another to the exclusion of all other important concerns. In dealing with what is called “Islamic terrorism,” there have been debates on whether being a Muslim demands some kind of strongly confrontational militancy, or whether, as many world leaders have argued in a warm—and even inspiring—way, a “true Muslim” must be a tolerant individual. The denial of the necessity of a confrontational reading of Islam is certainly appropriate and extremely important today, and Tony Blair in particular deserves much applause for what he has done in this respect. But in the context of Blair’s frequent invoking of “the moderate and true voice of Islam,” we have to ask whether it is at all possible—or necessary—to define a “true Muslim” in terms of political and social beliefs about confrontation and tolerance, on which different Muslims have historically taken, as was discussed earlier, very different positions. The effect of this religion-centered political approach, and of the institutional policies it has generated (with frequent announcements of the kind, to cite one example, “the government is meeting Muslim leaders in the next vital stage designed to cement a united front”), has been to bolster and strengthen the voice of religious authorities while downgrading the importance of nonreligious institutions and movements. The difficulty with acting on the presumption of a singular identity—that of religion—is not, of course, a special problem applying only to Muslims. It would also apply to any attempt to understand the political views and social judgments of people who happen to be Christian, or Jewish, or Hindu, or Sikh, by relying mainly—or only—on what their alleged religious leaders declare as spokesmen for their “flocks.” The singular classification gives a commanding voice to the “establishment” figures in the respective religious hierarchy while other perspectives are relatively downgraded and eclipsed. There is concern—and some astonishment—today that despite attempts to bring in the religious establishment of Muslims and other non-Christian groups into dialogues about global peace and local calm, religious fundamentalism and militant recruitment have continued to flourish even in Western countries. And yet this should not have come as a surprise. Trying to recruit religious leaders and clerics in support of political causes, along with trying to redefine the religions involved in terms of political and social attitudes, downplays the significance of nonreligious values people can and do have in their appropriate domain, whether or not they are religious. The efforts to recruit the mullahs and the clergy to play a role outside the immediate province of religion could, of course, make some difference in what is preached in mosques or temples. But it also downgrades the civic initiatives people who happen to be Muslim by religion can and do undertake (along with others) to deal with what are essentially political and social problems. Further, it also heightens the sense of distance between members of different religious communities by playing up their religious differences in particular, often at the cost of other identities (including that of being a citizen of the country in question), which could have had a more uniting role. Should a British citizen who happens to be Muslim have to rely on clerics or other leaders of the religious community to communicate with the prime minister of his country, who has been particularly keen to speak through the religious leaders? It should not be so surprising that the overlooking of all the identities of people other than those connected with religion can prove to be a problematic way of trying to reduce the hold of religious sectarianism. This problem also arises sharply in dealing with the more difficult—and more turbulent—political situation in battle-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. The elections and referendum in Iraq in 2005 can be seen as a considerable success within their own criteria of assessment: the elections did occur, a fairly high proportion of the electorate did vote, and violent interruptions did not mar the entire effort. And yet in the absence of opportunities for open and participatory dialogue beyond what was provided by religious institutions, the voting process was predictably sectarian, linked with religious and ethnic denominations. The participation of people from different denominations (Shia, Sunni, Kurd) seemed to be rigidly intermediated by the spokesmen for the respective denominations, with the general citizenship roles of those people being given little opportunity to develop and flourish. Despite many achievements of the Karzai government in Kabul (certainly much has been accomplished), there is a somewhat similar, if less intense, problem in Afghanistan as well, with the attempted reliance in official policy on gatherings of tribal leaders and councils of clerics, rather than on the more exacting, but critically important, cultivation of open general dialogues and interactions that could go beyond religious politics. To see religious affiliation as an all-engulfing identity can take a considerable political toll. Given the tremendous challenges the Afghan leadership faces, it is necessary to be patient with the approaches it is trying out, but the likely long-run difficulties of taking this narrow route have to be articulated without compromising the admiration for what the Karzai government has achieved. As for the global challenge of terrorism, we have reason to expect, from the world leaders working against it, rather greater clarity of thought than we are currently getting. The confusion generated by an implicit belief in the solitarist understanding of identity poses serious barriers to overcoming global terrorism and creating a world without ideologically organized large-scale violence. The recognition of multiple identities and of the world beyond religious affiliations, even for very religious people, can possibly make some difference in the troubled world in which we live.

                                            Terrorism and Religion 

I was privileged to know Daniel Pearl a little. He came to a talk of mine in Paris in the summer of 2000, and we had a longish conversation afterward. He knew then that he was soon going to be based in Bombay (or Mumbai, as it is now called), reporting for the Wall Street Journal on the subcontinent. Later, early in February 2001, I saw him again in Bombay, and I had the opportunity of continuing our conversation. I was struck not only by Pearl’s remarkable intelligence, but also by his commitment to pursue the truth and, through that means, to help create a better—and less unjust—world. We also discussed, particularly during our first meeting, how violence in the world is often sown by ignorance and confusion, as well as by injustices that receive little attention. I was moved, intellectually as well as emotionally, by Daniel Pearl’s dedication to fight for peace and justice through the advancement of understanding and enlightenment. It was that dedication to investigate and explore that would ultimately cost him his life, when the terrorists would capture and execute him in Pakistan the year after I last met him. Daniel’s father, Judea Pearl, who is the president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which is dedicated to intercultural understanding, recently expressed his frustration in a moving—and also enlightening—article about the outcome of an important meeting of Muslim scholars in Amman in Jordan. The conference, to which 170 Islamic clerics and experts had come from forty countries, tried to define “the reality of Islam and its role in the contemporary society.” The final communiqué of the Amman conference, issued on July 6, 2005, stated categorically: “It is not possible to declare as apostates any group of Muslims who believes in Allah the Mighty and Sublime and His Messenger (may Peace and Blessings be upon him) and the pillars of faith, and respects the pillars of Islam and does not deny any necessary article of religion.” 14 Judea Pearl felt disappointed, though he is too gentle and tolerant to express anger, with the conclusion that “belief in basic tenets of faith provides an immutable protection from charges of apostasy.” He points out that this implies that “bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the murderers of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg will remain bona fide members of the Muslim faith, as long as they do not explicitly renounce it.” Judea Pearl’s disappointment reflected a hope he had clearly entertained that the horrible acts of terror would not only receive denunciation from Muslim scholars (which they, in fact, did, in no uncertain terms), but would also be a sufficient ground for religious excommunication. But no excommunication occurred, and given the way the demands of being a Muslim are foundationally defined in Islam, it could not have. In Judea Pearl’s case, the personal disappointment is entirely natural, but when the same expectation is used in the strategy of fighting terrorism at the global level, it can legitimately be asked whether Western strategists have good reason to expect that a religion itself can be recruited to fight terrorism through declaring the terrorists to be apostates. That expectation was dashed in Amman, but was it a reasonable expectation for strategists to entertain? As was discussed earlier, we have to ask whether it is at all possible to define a “true Muslim” in terms of beliefs about confrontation and tolerance, on which Islam does not dictate and on which different Muslims have taken widely different positions over many centuries. This freedom allowed, of course, King Abdullah II of Jordan to firmly assert, as he did during the very same conference, that “the acts of violence and terrorism carried out by certain extremist groups in the name of Islam are utterly contradictory to the principles and ideology of Islam.” But that diagnosis—and indeed reprimand—still does not take us to a position by which the persons thus criticized must be seen as “apostate,” and it is that central point that the Amman declaration by Muslim scholars affirmed. Apostasy is a matter of basic religious belief and specified practice; it is not a matter of the correctness in interpreting social or political principles, or of the rightness of civil society, or even of identifying what most Muslims would see as terrible civil conduct or abominable political behavior.

                                       Richness of Muslim Identities 

If a Muslim person’s only identity were that of being Islamic, then of course all moral and political judgments of the person would have to be specifically linked with religious assessment. It is that solitarist illusion that underlies the Western —particularly Anglo-American—attempt to recruit Islam in the so-called war against terrorism. 15 The unwillingness to distinguish between (1) a Muslim person’s variety of associations and affiliations (these can vary widely from person to person) and (2) his or her Islamic identity in particular has tended to tempt Western leaders to fight political battles against terrorism through the exotic route of defining—or redefining—Islam. What needs to be recognized is not only that this solitarist approach has accomplished little so far, but also that it cannot really be expected to achieve much given the distinction between religious issues, on the one hand, and other matters on which Muslims, no matter how religious, have to take their own decisions. Even though the borderline between the two domains may be hard to delineate, the domain of religious excommunication and apostasy cannot be extended much beyond the wellestablished central tenets of Islamic canons and identified practice. Religion is not, and cannot be, a person’s all-encompassing identity. 16 It is, of course, true that the so-called Islamic terrorists have repeatedly tried to extend the role of religion very far into other spheres, contrary (as King Abdullah rightly noted) to the generally accepted principles and domain of Islam. It is also true that the recruiters for terrorism would like Muslims to forget that they have other identities too and that they have to decide on many important political and moral matters and take responsibility for their decisions, rather than being led by the recruiters’ advocacy based on their uncommon reading of Islam. The mistaken presumptions involved in such efforts can certainly be scrutinized and criticized. But the strategy of trying to stop such recruitment by declaring the recruiters to be “apostate” would also—I fear in a somewhat singularist way—extend the reach of religion beyond its established domain. The basic recognition of the multiplicity of identities would militate against trying to see people in exclusively religious terms, no matter how religious they are within the domain of religion. Attempts to tackle terrorism through the aid of religion has had the effect of magnifying in Britain and America the voice of Islamic clerics and other members of the religious establishment on matters that are not in the domain of religion, at a time when the political and social roles of Muslims in civil society, including in the practice of democracy, need emphasis and much greater support. What religious extremism has done to demote and downgrade the responsible political action of citizens (irrespective of religious ethnicity) has been, to some extent, reinforced, rather than eradicated, by the attempt to fight terrorism by trying to recruit the religious establishment on “the right side.” In the downplaying of political and social identities as opposed to religious identity, it is civil society that has been the loser, precisely at a time when there is a great need to strengthen it.

                                                CHAPTER 4 

     RELIGIOUS AFFILIATIONS AND                      MUSLIM HISTORY 

RELIGION TREATED AS SINGLE IDENTITY FOR CIVILAZATION AND ITS DRAWBACKS: Recent theses about clashing civilizations have tended to draw much on religious difference as a central characteristic of differing cultures. However, aside from the conceptual flaw in seeing human beings in terms of only one affiliation and the historical mistake of overlooking the critically important interrelations between what are assumed to be largely detached and discrete civilizations (both problems were discussed in the last chapter), these civilizational theories also suffer from having to overlook the heterogeneity of religious affiliations that characterize most countries and, even more, most civilizations. The last problem can be quite a big one, too, since people of the same religion are frequently spread over many different countries and several distinct continents. For example, as was mentioned earlier, India may be seen by Samuel Huntington as a “Hindu civilization,” but with nearly 150 million Muslim citizens, India is also among the three largest Muslim countries in the world. Religious categorization cannot be easily fitted into classifications of countries and civilizations. This last problem can be overcome by classifying people not into lumpy civilizational units with religious correlates (like “Islamic civilization,” “Hindu civilization,” and such as in Huntington’s categorization), but directly in terms of the religious groupings of people. This would lead to a neater and less defective classification, and it has, not surprisingly, appealed to many. 

Viewing individuals in terms of their religious affiliations has certainly become quite common in cultural analysis in recent years. Does this make the religioncentered analysis of the people of the world a helpful way of understanding humanity? I have to argue that it does not. This may be a more coherent classification of the people of the world than civilized categorization, but it makes the same mistake of attempting to see human beings in terms of only one affiliation, viz. religion. In many contexts, such a classification can be rather helpful (for example, in determining the choice of religious holidays, or ensuring the safety of places of worship), but to take that to be the overarching basis of social, political, and cultural analysis in general would amount to overlooking all the other associations and loyalties any individual may have, and which could be significant in the person’s behavior, identity, and self-understanding. 

The crucial need to take note of the plural identities of people and their choice of priorities survives the replacement of civilizational classifications with a directly religious categorization. Indeed, the increasingly common use of religious identities as the leading—or sole—principle of classification of the people of the world has led to much grossness of social analysis. There has been, in particular, a major loss of understanding in the failure to distinguish between (1) the various affiliations and loyalties a person who happens to be a Muslim has, and (2) his or her Islamic identity in particular. 

The Islamic identity can be one of the identities the person regards as important (perhaps even crucial), but without thereby denying that there are other identities that may also be significant. What is often called “the Islamic world” does, of course, have a preponderance of Muslims, but different persons who are all Muslims can and do vary greatly in other respects, such as political and social values, economic and literary pursuits, professional and philosophical involvements, attitude to the West, and so on. 

The global lines of division can be very differently drawn for these “other affiliations.” To focus just on the simple religious classification is to miss the numerous—and varying —concerns that people who happen to be Muslim by religion tend to have. The distinction can be extremely important, not least in a world in which Islamic fundamentalism and militancy have been powerful and in which Western opposition to them is often combined with a significant, if vaguely formulated, suspicion of Muslim people in general. Aside from the conceptual crudity reflected in that general attitude, it also overlooks the more obvious fact that Muslims differ sharply in their political and social beliefs. They also differ in their literary and artistic tastes, in their interest in science and mathematics, and even in the form and extent of their religiosity. 

While the urgency of immediate politics has led to a somewhat better understanding in the West of religious subcategories within Islam (such as the distinction between a person’s being a Shia or a Sunni), there is a growing reluctance to go beyond them to take adequate note of the many nonreligious identities Muslim people, like other people in the world, have. But the ideas and priorities of Muslims on political, cultural, and social matters can diverge greatly.

              Religious Identity and Cultural Variations 

There can also be vast differences in the social behavior of different persons belonging to the same religion, even in fields often thought to be closely linked with religion. This is easy to illustrate in the contemporary world, for example, in contrasting the typical practices of traditionalist rural women in, say, Saudi Arabia and those of Muslim women in urban Turkey (where head scarves are rare, with dress codes that are often similar to those of European women). It can also be illustrated by noting the vast differences in the habits of socially active women in Bangladesh and the less outgoing women in more conservative circles in the very same country, even though the persons involved may all be Muslim by religion. These differences must not, however, be seen simply as aspects of a new phenomenon that modernity has brought to Muslim people. The influence of other concerns, other identities, can be seen throughout the history of Muslim people. Consider a debate between two Muslims in the fourteenth century. Ibn Battuta, who was born in Tangier in 1304 and spent thirty years in various travels in Africa and Asia, was shocked by some of the things he saw in a part of the world that now lies between Mali and Ghana. In Iwaltan, not far from Timbuktu, Ibn Battuta befriended the Muslim qadi, who held an important civic office there. Ibn Battuta records his disgust with the social behavior in the qadi’s family: One day I went into the presence of the qadi of Iwaltan, after asking his permission to enter, and found with him a young and a remarkably beautiful woman. When I saw her I hesitated and wished to withdraw, but she laughed at me and experienced no shyness. The qadi said to me: “Why are you turning back? She is my friend.” I was amazed at their behaviour. 1 But the qadi was not the only one who shocked Ibn Battuta, and he was particularly censorious of Abu Muhammad Yandakan al-Musufi, who was a good Muslim and had earlier on actually visited Morocco himself. When Ibn Battuta visited him at his house, he found a woman conversing with a man seated on a couch. Ibn Battuta reports: I said to him: “Who is this woman?” He said: “She is my wife.” I said: “What connection has the man with her?” He replied: “He is her friend.” I said to him: “Do you acquiesce in this when you have lived in our country and become acquainted with the precepts of the Shariah?” He replied: “The association of women with men is agreeable to us and a part of good conduct, to which no suspicion attaches. They are not like the women of your country.” I was astonished at his laxity. I left him and did not return thereafter. He invited me several times, but I did not accept. 2 Note that Abu Muhammad’s difference from Ibn Battuta does not lie in religion —they were both Muslim—but in their decision about right lifestyles

                                   Muslim Tolerance and Diversity 

I turn now to a more political issue. Varying attitudes to religious tolerance have often been socially important in the history of the world, and much variation can be found in this respect among different persons all of whom are Muslim by religion. For example, Emperor Aurangzeb, who ascended to the Mughal throne in India in the late seventeenth century, is generally regarded as being rather intolerant; he even imposed special taxes on his non-Muslim subjects. And yet a very different attitude can be seen in the life and behavior of his elder brother Dara Shikoh, the eldest son (and legitimate heir) of Emperor Shah Jahan, and of Mumtaz Mahal, in whose memory the Taj Mahal would be built. Aurangzeb killed Dara to grab the throne. Dara was not only a student of Sanskrit and serious scholar in the study of Hinduism, it is his Persian translation, from Sanskrit, of the Hindu Upanishads which was for a century or more one of the main foundations of European interest in Hindu religious philosophy. Dara and Aurangzeb’s great-grandfather, Akbar, was extremely supportive of religious tolerance (as was discussed earlier), and he made it a recognized duty of the state to make sure that “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.” In line with his pursuit of what he called “the path of reason” (rahi aql), Akbar insisted in the 1590s on the need for open dialogue and free choice, and also arranged recurrent discussions involving not only mainstream Muslim and Hindu thinkers, but also Christians, Jews, Parsees, Jains, and even atheists. 3 Aside from Dara, Aurangzeb’s own son, also called Akbar, rebelled against his father, and joined hands in this enterprise with the Hindu kingdoms in Rajasthan and later the Hindu Marathas (though Akbar’s rebellion was ultimately crushed by Aurangzeb). While fighting from Rajasthan, Akbar wrote to his father protesting at his intolerance and vilification of his Hindu friends.  Faced with such diversity among Muslims, those who can see no distinction between being a Muslim and having an Islamic identity would be tempted to ask: “Which is the correct view according to Islam? Is Islam in favor of such tolerance, or is it not? Which is it really?” The prior issue to be faced here is not what the right answer to this question is, but whether the question itself is the right one to ask. Being a Muslim is not an overarching identity that determines everything in which a person believes. For example, Emperor Akbar’s tolerance and heterodoxy had supporters as well as detractors among the influential Muslim groups in Agra and Delhi in sixteenth-century India. Indeed, he faced considerable opposition from Muslim clerics. Yet when Akbar died in 1605, the Islamic theologian Abdul Haq, who was sharply critical of many of Akbar’s tolerant beliefs, had to conclude that despite his “innovations,” Akbar had remained a good Muslim.  The point to recognize is that in dealing with this discrepancy, it is not necessary to establish that either Akbar or Aurangzeb was not a proper Muslim. They could both have been fine Muslims without sharing the same political attitudes or social and cultural identities. It is possible for one Muslim to take an intolerant view and another to be very tolerant of heterodoxy without either of them ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason. This is not only because the idea of ijtehad, or religious interpretation, allows considerable latitude within Islam itself, but also because an individual Muslim has much freedom to determine what other values and priorities he or she would choose without compromising a basic Islamic faith.

                       Nonreligious Concerns and Diverse Priorities 

Given the present disaffection between Arab and Jewish politics, it is also worth remembering that there is a long history of mutual respect between the two groups. It was mentioned in the first chapter that when the Jewish philosopher Maimonides was forced to emigrate from an intolerant Europe in the twelfth century, he found a tolerant refuge in the Arab world. His host, who gave him an honored and influential position in his court in Cairo, was none other than Emperor Saladin, whose Muslim credentials can hardly be doubted, given his valiant role in the Crusades in fighting for Islam (Richard the Lionheart was one of his distinguished opponents). Maimonides’ experience was not, in fact, exceptional. Indeed, even though the contemporary world is full of examples of conflicts between Muslims and Jews, Muslim rulers in the Arab world and in medieval Spain had a long history of trying to integrate Jews as secure members of the social community whose liberties—and sometimes leadership roles—were respected. For instance, as María Rosa Menocal has noted in her book The Ornament of the World, by the tenth century the achievement of Córdoba in Muslim-ruled Spain in being “as serious a contender as Baghdad, perhaps more so, for the title of most civilized place on earth” was due to the constructive influence of the joint work of Caliph Abd al-Rahman III and his Jewish vizier, Hasdai ibn Shaprut.  Indeed, there is considerable evidence, as Menocal argues, that the position of Jews after the Muslim conquest “was in every respect an improvement, as they went from persecuted to protected minority.” 

                           Our religious or civilizational identity may well be very important, but it is one membership among many. The question we have to ask is not whether Islam (or Hinduism or Christianity) is a peace-loving religion or a combative one (“tell us which it is really?”), but how a religious Muslim (or Hindu or Christian) may combine his or her religious beliefs or practices with other features of personal identity and other commitments and values (such as attitudes to peace and war). To see one’s religious—or “civilizational”—affiliation as an all-engulfing identity would be a deeply problematic diagnosis. There have been fierce warriors as well as great champions of peace among devoted members of each religion, and rather than asking which one is the “true believer” and which one a “mere impostor,” we should accept that one’s religious faith does not in itself resolve all the decisions we have to make in our lives, including those concerning our political and social priorities and the corresponding issues of conduct and action. Both the proponents of peace and tolerance and the patrons of war and intolerance can belong to the same religion, and may be (in their own ways) true believers, without this being seen as a contradiction. The domain of one’s religious identity does not vanquish all other aspects of one’s understanding and affiliation. If being a Muslim were the only identity of anyone who happens to be Muslim, then of course that religious identification would have to carry the huge burden of resolving a great many other choices a person faces in other parts of his or her life. But being Islamic can hardly be the only identity a Muslim has. Indeed, the denial of plurality as well as the rejection of choice in matters of identity can produce an astonishingly narrow and misdirected view. Even the current divisions around the events of September 11 have placed Muslims on all sides of the dividing lines, and instead of asking which is the right Islamic position, we have to recognize that a Muslim can choose among several different positions on matters involving political, moral, and social judgments without ceasing to be, for that reason, a Muslim. 

                          Mathematics, Science, and Intellectual History 

There have been many discussions of the fact that a great many Muslims died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. As persons working there, they did not evidently regard that to be an evil expression of Western civilization. The World Trade Center did, of course, have symbolic significance, with its massive height and advanced technology (using the new tubular concept of structural engineering), and could be seen—in politically bellicose eyes—as an expression of Western audacity. It is interesting, in this context, to recall that the principal engineer behind the tubular concept was Fazlur Rahman Khan, the Chicagobased engineer from Bangladesh, who did the basic work underlying the innovation and later on also designed several other tall buildings, such as the 110-story Sears Tower and the 100-story John Hancock Center in Chicago, and also the Hajj Terminal in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. As it happens, he also fought for Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971 and wrote a very readable Bengali book on that war. The fact that Muslims are on different sides of many cultural and political divides should not be at all surprising if it is recognized that being a Muslim is not an all-engulfing identity. It is also important to recognize that many intellectual contributions of Muslims which made a major difference to global knowledge were not in any sense purely Islamic contributions. Even today, when a modern mathematician at MIT or Princeton or Stanford invokes an “algorithm” to solve a difficult computational problem, she helps to commemorate the contributions of the ninth-century Arab mathematician al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term “algorithm” is derived (the term “algebra” comes from his book Al-Jabr wa alMuqabalah). Many other major developments in the history of mathematics, science, and technology were carried out by the Muslim intelligentsia. Many of these developments reached Europe only at the beginning of the second millennium, when translations from Arabic to Latin became quite common. However, some influences on Europe came earlier through the Muslim rulers of Spain. To consider one example of technological advance, Muslim engineers, both Arab and Berber, were responsible for the development and use of the technology of irrigation in the form of acequias in Spain, drawing on the innovations they had introduced earlier in the dry lands in the Middle East. This allowed, more than a thousand years ago, the cultivation of crops, fruits and vegetables, and the pasturing of animals on what had earlier been completely dry European land. Indeed, Muslim technologists were in charge of this admirable technical job over many centuries. 8 Furthermore, Muslim mathematicians and scientists had a significant role in the globalization of technical knowledge through the movement of ideas across the Old World. For example, the decimal system and some early results in trigonometry went from India to Europe in the early years of the second millennium, transmitted through the works of Arab and Iranian mathematicians. Also, the Latin versions of the mathematical results of Indian mathematicians Aryabhata, Varahamihira, and Brahmagupta, from their Sanskrit treatises produced between the fifth and seventh centuries, appeared in Europe through two distinct steps, going first from Sanskrit to Arabic and then to Latin (I shall return to such multicultural transmissions in chapter 7). As leaders of innovative thought in that period in history, Muslim intellectuals were among the most committed globalizers of science and mathematics. The religion of the people involved, whether Muslim or Hindu or Christian, made little difference to the scholarly commitments of these Muslim leaders of mathematics or science. Similarly, many of the Western classics, particularly from ancient Greece, survived only through their Arabic translations, to be retranslated, mostly into Latin, in the early centuries of the second millennium, preceding the European Renaissance. The Arabic translations were originally made not, obviously, for preservation, but for contemporary use in the Arabic-speaking world—a world of some considerable expanse at the turn of the first millennium. But the global as well as domestic consequences that ultimately resulted from this process are entirely in line with what could be expected from the reach and catholicity of the scholarship of those who were leaders of world thought over those decisive centuries. Plural Identities and Contemporary Politics There are several reasons for which it is critically important today to pay attention to the distinction between (1) seeing Muslim people exclusively—or predominantly—in terms of their Islamic religion and (2) understanding them more broadly in terms of their many affiliations, which would certainly include their Islamic identity, but which need not crowd out the commitments that follow from their scientific interests, professional obligations, literary involvements, or political affiliations. The first reason, of course, is the value of knowledge—the importance of knowing what is happening. Clarity of understanding has significance on its own, and can also have far-reaching consequences for thoughts and actions. For example, even when a gang of activists claim that their terrorist pursuits are particularly ordained by Islamic injunctions, thereby trying to extend radically the reach of religious commands, we can certainly question whether that is indeed the case. It would be an obvious and gross mistake to go along with their failure to see the distinction between an Islamic identity and the identity of being a dedicated terrorist in what they see as the cause of Islam. To see this distinction does not, of course, foreclose the intellectual possibility of debating whether Islamic injunctions can be interpreted in this way, but the debate cannot even begin if the very distinction between an Islamic identity and a Muslim person’s many identities were entirely missed. As it happens, most Muslim scholars would entirely reject the claim that Islamic injunctions can require or sanction or even tolerate terrorism, even though many of them would also argue, as will be discussed presently, that a person would not cease to be a Muslim even if he were to interpret his duties differently (in the view of their critics, mistakenly) so long as he adhered to the core Islamic beliefs and practices. The first issue, however, is not to confuse the role of a particular religious identity and the various priorities a person of that particular religion may choose to have (for a variety of other reasons). Second, the distinction is of significance in the battle against the politicization of religion, exemplified not only by the rapid growth of political Islam, but also by the vigor with which the politicization of other religions have proceeded (exemplified by the political reach of “born-again” Christianity, or of Jewish extremism, or of the Hindutva movement). The world of practice—indeed sometimes very nasty and brutally sectarian practice—is systematically fed by the confusion between having a religion and ignoring the need for reasoning— and for freedom of thought—in deciding on matters that need not be “locked up” by religious faith. The process of misbegotten politicization can be seen, to varying extents, in the increasingly polarized world, and it can vary from contributing directly to recruitment for active terrorism to enhancing vulnerability to such recruitment or encouraging tolerance of violence in the name of religion. For example, the “creeping Shariahi-zation of Indonesia,” which the Indonesian Muslim scholar Syafi’i Anwar has described with much alarm, not only is a development of religious practice, but involves the spread of a particularly pugnacious social and political perspective in a traditionally tolerant —and richly multicultural—country. 9 A similar thing can be said about a number of other countries, including Malaysia, which have experienced a rapid promotion of a confrontational culture in the name of Islam, despite their history of cultural diversity and political breadth. To resist political polarization, this foundational distinction has to be pressed, since the exploitation of a religious (in this case, Islamic) identity is such a big part of the cultivation of organized conflicts of this kind. 10 Third, the distinction allows us to understand more fully what is going on internally in countries that are placed by outsiders in some religious box, such as the so-called Islamic world, as if that identification could comprehensively explain current intellectual developments there. It is important to recognize that many countries that are formally Islamic states have ongoing political struggles in which many of the protagonists, even when they are devout Muslims by religion, do not draw their arguments only from their Islamic identity. Consider Pakistan, which is certainly an Islamic state, and has Islam as its state religion with various political implications (for example, a non-Muslim could not be elected president of the country no matter how many votes he or she could get). And yet the civil society in that intellectually active country makes room for many commitments and pursuits that are not derived primarily —or at all—from religion. For example, Pakistan has a dedicated, and in many ways highly successful, Human Rights Commission, which appeals not just to Islamic entitlements but also to more broadly defined human rights. Even though, unlike the Human Rights Commission of India or South Africa, which are recognized bodies with legal power, the commission in Pakistan has no legal or constitutional standing (indeed it is formally no more than an NGO), yet under the stewardship of visionary leaders of civil society such as Asma Jahangir and I. A. Rehman, it has done much to fight for the freedoms of women, minorities, and other threatened people. Its qualified success has been based on the use of Pakistan’s civil laws (to the extent that they have not been maimed by extremist reform), the courage and commitment of civil dissidents, the fairmindedness of many upright members of the judiciary, the presence of a large body of socially progressive public opinion, and, last but not least, the effectiveness of the media in drawing attention to inhumanity and violation of civil decency. In fact, Pakistan’s media, like the Bangladeshi press, has also been very active in directly investigating and prominently reporting cases of abuse and in raising humane—and often secular—issues for the attention of a reflective public. 11 These recognitions do not reduce in any way the need to deal with “the depths of Pakistan’s problem with Islamic extremism,” as Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Sri Lanka, has put it. It is critically important to pay attention to the diagnosis Haqqani has presented persuasively that “the disproportionate influence wielded by fundamentalist groups in Pakistan is the result of state sponsorship of such groups,” and to his warning that “an environment dominated by Islamist and militarist ideologies is the ideal breeding ground for radicals and exportable radicalism.” 12 These issues have to be addressed at different levels, and call for the reforming of governance and the military, the pressing for democratic rights, giving more freedom of operation to the nonreligious and nonextremist political parties, and dealing with training grounds and fundamentalist schools that incline students toward confrontation and militancy. But attention must also be paid to the ongoing struggle within Pakistan in which its strong intellectual community has been playing a valuable, often visionary, role. Indeed, Husain Haqqani’s own penetrating analysis is part of this richly constructive movement. The American-led “war on terror” has been so preoccupied with military moves, interstate diplomacy, intergovernment dialogues, and working with rulers in general (across the world, not just in Pakistan) that there has tended to be a serious neglect of the importance of civil society, despite the critically important work that it does in very difficult circumstances. Indeed, humanist pursuits of broad reach have a rich history in Pakistan, and this tradition deserves celebration and support. It has already produced muchadmired results that have received global attention in other contexts. For example, the human development approach to understanding economic and social progress (judging progress not merely by the growth of gross national product but by the enhancement of people’s living conditions) has been pioneered in the world by a Pakistani economist and former finance minister, Mahbub ul Haq. 13 The approach has been widely used internationally, including in Pakistan, to assess the deficiencies of public policies (the critique has often been blistering), and it still remains one of the mainstays of the United Nations’ constructive efforts in economic and social development. It is important to recognize that A. Q. Khan’s clandestine nuclear wares are not the only things Pakistan has exported abroad. Momentous nondenominational contributions of this kind draw on the broad visions of the persons involved, not specifically on their religiosity. And yet this fact did not make Mahbub ul Haq any less of a Muslim. His faith in religion in its proper domain was strong, as I can confirm, having had the privilege of knowing him as a close friend (from our days together as undergraduates at Cambridge in the early 1950s to his sudden death in 1998). The distinction between the broad variety of commitments of Muslims and their narrowly defined Islamic identity in particular is extraordinarily important to understand. The fourth reason for emphasizing the importance of this distinction is that it is significantly—and sometimes entirely—missed in some of the “battles against terrorism” that are currently being waged. This can, and I believe already does, have very counterproductive effects. For example, attempts to fight terrorism through recruiting religion “on one’s side” has not only been quite ineffective, they also suffer, I would argue, from a serious conceptual disorientation. This subject clearly deserves a fuller discussion. Fighting Terrorism and Understanding Identities The confusion between the plural identities of Muslims and their Islamic identity in particular is not only a descriptive mistake, it has serious implications for policies for peace in the precarious world in which we live. There is a great deal of anxiety in the contemporary world about global conflicts and terrorism. This is as it should be, since the threats are real and the need to do something to overcome and subdue these dangers is urgent. The actions taken in recent years have included military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are important subjects for public debate (I must confess that I have been totally skeptical of the policies chosen by the coalition partners for the Iraq operation in particular), but my focus here will be on another part of the global approach to conflicts and terrorism, involving public policies related to cultural relations and civil society. As was discussed in the first chapter, this book is especially concerned with the conceptual framework within which these confrontations are seen and understood, and how the demands of public action are interpreted. A confusing role is played here by the reliance on a single categorization of the people of the world. The confusion adds to the flammability of the world in which we live. The problem I am referring to is much more subtle than the crude and abusive views that have been expressed about other cultures by people in the West, like the irrepressible Lieutenant General William Boykin of the U.S. Army (whose claim that the Christian God was “bigger than” the Islamic God was discussed in the first chapter). It is easy to see the obtuseness and inanity of views of this kind. What, however, can be seen as a bigger and more general problem (despite the absence of the grossness of vilification) are the possibly terrible consequences of classifying people in terms of singular affiliations woven around exclusively religious identities. This is especially critical for understanding the nature and dynamics of global violence and terrorism in the contemporary world. The religious partitioning of the world produces a deeply misleading understanding of the people across the world and the diverse relations between them, and it also has the effect of magnifying one particular distinction between one person and another to the exclusion of all other important concerns. In dealing with what is called “Islamic terrorism,” there have been debates on whether being a Muslim demands some kind of strongly confrontational militancy, or whether, as many world leaders have argued in a warm—and even inspiring—way, a “true Muslim” must be a tolerant individual. The denial of the necessity of a confrontational reading of Islam is certainly appropriate and extremely important today, and Tony Blair in particular deserves much applause for what he has done in this respect. But in the context of Blair’s frequent invoking of “the moderate and true voice of Islam,” we have to ask whether it is at all possible—or necessary—to define a “true Muslim” in terms of political and social beliefs about confrontation and tolerance, on which different Muslims have historically taken, as was discussed earlier, very different positions. The effect of this religion-centered political approach, and of the institutional policies it has generated (with frequent announcements of the kind, to cite one example, “the government is meeting Muslim leaders in the next vital stage designed to cement a united front”), has been to bolster and strengthen the voice of religious authorities while downgrading the importance of nonreligious institutions and movements. The difficulty with acting on the presumption of a singular identity—that of religion—is not, of course, a special problem applying only to Muslims. It would also apply to any attempt to understand the political views and social judgments of people who happen to be Christian, or Jewish, or Hindu, or Sikh, by relying mainly—or only—on what their alleged religious leaders declare as spokesmen for their “flocks.” The singular classification gives a commanding voice to the “establishment” figures in the respective religious hierarchy while other perspectives are relatively downgraded and eclipsed. There is concern—and some astonishment—today that despite attempts to bring in the religious establishment of Muslims and other non-Christian groups into dialogues about global peace and local calm, religious fundamentalism and militant recruitment have continued to flourish even in Western countries. And yet this should not have come as a surprise. Trying to recruit religious leaders and clerics in support of political causes, along with trying to redefine the religions involved in terms of political and social attitudes, downplays the significance of nonreligious values people can and do have in their appropriate domain, whether or not they are religious. The efforts to recruit the mullahs and the clergy to play a role outside the immediate province of religion could, of course, make some difference in what is preached in mosques or temples. But it also downgrades the civic initiatives people who happen to be Muslim by religion can and do undertake (along with others) to deal with what are essentially political and social problems. Further, it also heightens the sense of distance between members of different religious communities by playing up their religious differences in particular, often at the cost of other identities (including that of being a citizen of the country in question), which could have had a more uniting role. Should a British citizen who happens to be Muslim have to rely on clerics or other leaders of the religious community to communicate with the prime minister of his country, who has been particularly keen to speak through the religious leaders? It should not be so surprising that the overlooking of all the identities of people other than those connected with religion can prove to be a problematic way of trying to reduce the hold of religious sectarianism. This problem also arises sharply in dealing with the more difficult—and more turbulent—political situation in battle-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. The elections and referendum in Iraq in 2005 can be seen as a considerable success within their own criteria of assessment: the elections did occur, a fairly high proportion of the electorate did vote, and violent interruptions did not mar the entire effort. And yet in the absence of opportunities for open and participatory dialogue beyond what was provided by religious institutions, the voting process was predictably sectarian, linked with religious and ethnic denominations. The participation of people from different denominations (Shia, Sunni, Kurd) seemed to be rigidly intermediated by the spokesmen for the respective denominations, with the general citizenship roles of those people being given little opportunity to develop and flourish. Despite many achievements of the Karzai government in Kabul (certainly much has been accomplished), there is a somewhat similar, if less intense, problem in Afghanistan as well, with the attempted reliance in official policy on gatherings of tribal leaders and councils of clerics, rather than on the more exacting, but critically important, cultivation of open general dialogues and interactions that could go beyond religious politics. To see religious affiliation as an all-engulfing identity can take a considerable political toll. Given the tremendous challenges the Afghan leadership faces, it is necessary to be patient with the approaches it is trying out, but the likely long-run difficulties of taking this narrow route have to be articulated without compromising the admiration for what the Karzai government has achieved. As for the global challenge of terrorism, we have reason to expect, from the world leaders working against it, rather greater clarity of thought than we are currently getting. The confusion generated by an implicit belief in the solitarist understanding of identity poses serious barriers to overcoming global terrorism and creating a world without ideologically organized large-scale violence. The recognition of multiple identities and of the world beyond religious affiliations, even for very religious people, can possibly make some difference in the troubled world in which we live. Terrorism and Religion I was privileged to know Daniel Pearl a little. He came to a talk of mine in Paris in the summer of 2000, and we had a longish conversation afterward. He knew then that he was soon going to be based in Bombay (or Mumbai, as it is now called), reporting for the Wall Street Journal on the subcontinent. Later, early in February 2001, I saw him again in Bombay, and I had the opportunity of continuing our conversation. I was struck not only by Pearl’s remarkable intelligence, but also by his commitment to pursue the truth and, through that means, to help create a better—and less unjust—world. We also discussed, particularly during our first meeting, how violence in the world is often sown by ignorance and confusion, as well as by injustices that receive little attention. I was moved, intellectually as well as emotionally, by Daniel Pearl’s dedication to fight for peace and justice through the advancement of understanding and enlightenment. It was that dedication to investigate and explore that would ultimately cost him his life, when the terrorists would capture and execute him in Pakistan the year after I last met him. Daniel’s father, Judea Pearl, who is the president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which is dedicated to intercultural understanding, recently expressed his frustration in a moving—and also enlightening—article about the outcome of an important meeting of Muslim scholars in Amman in Jordan. The conference, to which 170 Islamic clerics and experts had come from forty countries, tried to define “the reality of Islam and its role in the contemporary society.” The final communiqué of the Amman conference, issued on July 6, 2005, stated categorically: “It is not possible to declare as apostates any group of Muslims who believes in Allah the Mighty and Sublime and His Messenger (may Peace and Blessings be upon him) and the pillars of faith, and respects the pillars of Islam and does not deny any necessary article of religion.” 14 Judea Pearl felt disappointed, though he is too gentle and tolerant to express anger, with the conclusion that “belief in basic tenets of faith provides an immutable protection from charges of apostasy.” He points out that this implies that “bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the murderers of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg will remain bona fide members of the Muslim faith, as long as they do not explicitly renounce it.” Judea Pearl’s disappointment reflected a hope he had clearly entertained that the horrible acts of terror would not only receive denunciation from Muslim scholars (which they, in fact, did, in no uncertain terms), but would also be a sufficient ground for religious excommunication. But no excommunication occurred, and given the way the demands of being a Muslim are foundationally defined in Islam, it could not have. In Judea Pearl’s case, the personal disappointment is entirely natural, but when the same expectation is used in the strategy of fighting terrorism at the global level, it can legitimately be asked whether Western strategists have good reason to expect that a religion itself can be recruited to fight terrorism through declaring the terrorists to be apostates. That expectation was dashed in Amman, but was it a reasonable expectation for strategists to entertain? As was discussed earlier, we have to ask whether it is at all possible to define a “true Muslim” in terms of beliefs about confrontation and tolerance, on which Islam does not dictate and on which different Muslims have taken widely different positions over many centuries. This freedom allowed, of course, King Abdullah II of Jordan to firmly assert, as he did during the very same conference, that “the acts of violence and terrorism carried out by certain extremist groups in the name of Islam are utterly contradictory to the principles and ideology of Islam.” But that diagnosis—and indeed reprimand—still does not take us to a position by which the persons thus criticized must be seen as “apostate,” and it is that central point that the Amman declaration by Muslim scholars affirmed. Apostasy is a matter of basic religious belief and specified practice; it is not a matter of the correctness in interpreting social or political principles, or of the rightness of civil society, or even of identifying what most Muslims would see as terrible civil conduct or abominable political behavior. Richness of Muslim Identities If a Muslim person’s only identity were that of being Islamic, then of course all moral and political judgments of the person would have to be specifically linked with religious assessment. It is that solitarist illusion that underlies the Western —particularly Anglo-American—attempt to recruit Islam in the so-called war against terrorism. 15 The unwillingness to distinguish between (1) a Muslim person’s variety of associations and affiliations (these can vary widely from person to person) and (2) his or her Islamic identity in particular has tended to tempt Western leaders to fight political battles against terrorism through the exotic route of defining—or redefining—Islam. What needs to be recognized is not only that this solitarist approach has accomplished little so far, but also that it cannot really be expected to achieve much given the distinction between religious issues, on the one hand, and other matters on which Muslims, no matter how religious, have to take their own decisions. Even though the borderline between the two domains may be hard to delineate, the domain of religious excommunication and apostasy cannot be extended much beyond the wellestablished central tenets of Islamic canons and identified practice. Religion is not, and cannot be, a person’s all-encompassing identity. 16 It is, of course, true that the so-called Islamic terrorists have repeatedly tried to extend the role of religion very far into other spheres, contrary (as King Abdullah rightly noted) to the generally accepted principles and domain of Islam. It is also true that the recruiters for terrorism would like Muslims to forget that they have other identities too and that they have to decide on many important political and moral matters and take responsibility for their decisions, rather than being led by the recruiters’ advocacy based on their uncommon reading of Islam. The mistaken presumptions involved in such efforts can certainly be scrutinized and criticized. But the strategy of trying to stop such recruitment by declaring the recruiters to be “apostate” would also—I fear in a somewhat singularist way—extend the reach of religion beyond its established domain. The basic recognition of the multiplicity of identities would militate against trying to see people in exclusively religious terms, no matter how religious they are within the domain of religion. Attempts to tackle terrorism through the aid of religion has had the effect of magnifying in Britain and America the voice of Islamic clerics and other members of the religious establishment on matters that are not in the domain of religion, at a time when the political and social roles of Muslims in civil society, including in the practice of democracy, need emphasis and much greater support. What religious extremism has done to demote and downgrade the responsible political action of citizens (irrespective of religious ethnicity) has been, to some extent, reinforced, rather than eradicated, by the attempt to fight terrorism by trying to recruit the religious establishment on “the right side.” In the downplaying of political and social identities as opposed to religious identity, it is civil society that has been the loser, precisely at a time when there is a great need to strengthen it