IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE

                                                            CHAPTER 1

                     THE VIOLENCE OF ILLUSION

Langston Hughes, the African-American writer, describes in his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, the exhilaration that seized him as he left New York for Africa. He threw his American books into the sea: “[I]t was like throwing a million bricks out of my heart.” He was on his way to his “Africa, Motherland of the negro people!” Soon he would experience “the real thing, to be touched and seen, not merely read about in a book.”1  A sense of identity can be a source not merely of pride and joy, but also of strength and confidence. It is not surprising that the idea of identity receives such widespread admiration, from popular advocacy of loving your neighbor to high theories of social capital and of communitarian self-definition.

                                         And yet identity can also kill—and kill with abandon. A strong—and exclusive—sense of belonging to one group can in many cases carry with it the perception of distance and divergence from other groups. Within-group solidarity can help to feed between-group discord. We may suddenly be informed that we are not just Rwandans but specifically Hutus (“we hate Tutsis”), or that we are not really mere Yugoslavs but actually Serbs (“we absolutely don’t like Muslims”). From my own childhood memory of Hindu- Muslim riots in the 1940s, linked with the politics of partition, I recollect the speed with which the broad human beings of January were suddenly transformed into the ruthless Hindus and fierce Muslims of July. Hundreds of thousands perished at the hands of people who, led by the commanders of carnage, killed others on behalf of their “own people.” Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror. The sense of identity can make an important contribution to the strength and the warmth of our relations with others, such as neighbors, or members of the same community, or fellow citizens, or followers of the same religion. Our focus on particular identities can on enrich our bonds and make us do many things for each other and can help to take us beyond our self-centered lives. The recent literature on “social capital,” powerfully explored by Robert Putnam and others, has brought out clearly enough how an identity with others in the same social

community can make the lives of all go much better in that community; a sense of belonging to a community is thus seen as a resource—like capital.

        (2 )That understanding is important, but it has to be supplemented by a further recognition that a sense of identity can firmly exclude many people even as it warmly embraces others. 

                                 The well-integrated community in which residents

instinctively do absolutely wonderful things for each other with great immediacy and solidarity can be the very same community in which bricks are thrown through the windows of immigrants who move into the region from elsewhere.

The adversity of exclusion can be made to go hand in hand with the gifts of inclusion.

                             The cultivated violence associated with identity conflicts seems to repeat itself around the world with increasing persistence.

                 (3) Even though the balance of power in Rwanda and Congo may have changed, the targeting of one group by another continues with much force. The marshaling of an aggressive Sudanese Islamic identity along with exploitation of racial divisions has led to the raping and

killing of overpowered victims in the south of that appallingly militarized polity. Israel and Palestine continue to experience the fury of dichotomized identities ready to inflict hateful penalties on the other side. Al Qaeda relies heavily on cultivating and exploiting a militant Islamic identity specifically aimed against Western people. And reports keep coming in, from Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, that the activities of some American or British soldiers sent out to fight for the cause of freedom and democracy included what is called a “softening-up” of prisoners in utterly inhuman ways. Unrestrained power over the lives of suspected enemy combatants, or presumed miscreants, sharply bifurcates the prisoners and the custodians across a hardened line of divisive identities (“they are a separate breed from us”). It seems to crowd out, often enough, any consideration of other, less confrontational features of the people on the opposite side of the breach, including, among other things, their shared membership of the human race.

          Recognition of Competing Affiliations

If identity-based thinking can be amenable to such brutal manipulation, where can the remedy be found? It can hardly be sought in trying to suppress or stifle the invoking of identity in general. For one thing, identity can be a source of richness and warmth as well as of violence and terror, and it would make little sense to treat identity as a general evil. Rather, we have to draw on the understanding that the force of a bellicose identity can be challenged by the power of competing identities. These can, of course, include the broad commonality of our shared humanity, but also many other identities that everyone simultaneously has. This leads to other ways of classifying people, which can restrain the exploitation of a specifically aggressive use of one particular categorization. A Hutu laborer from Kigali may be pressured to see himself only as a Hutu

and incited to kill Tutsis, and yet he is not only a Hutu, but also a Kigalian, a Rwandan, an African, a laborer, and a human being. Along with the recognition of the plurality of our identities and their diverse implications, there is a critically important need to see the role of choice in determining the cogency and relevance of particular identities which are inescapably diverse.

                                That may be plain enough, but it is important to see that this illusion receives well-intentioned but rather disastrous support from practitioners of a variety of respected—and indeed highly respectable—schools of intellectual thought. They include, among others, dedicated communitarians who take the community identity to be peerless and paramount in a predetermined way, as if by nature, without any need for human volition (just “recognition”—to use a much-loved concept), and also unswerving cultural theorists who partition the people of the world into little boxes of disparate civilizations.

                                In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups—we belong to all of them. A person’s citizenship, residence, geographic origin, gender, class, politics, profession, employment, food habits, sports interests, taste in music, social commitments, etc., make us members of a variety of groups. Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs, gives her a particular identity. None of them can be taken to be the

person’s only identity or singular membership category.

                             Constraints and Freedoms

Many communitarian thinkers tend to argue that a dominant communal identity is only a matter of self-realization, not of choice. It is, however, hard to believe that a person really has no choice in deciding what relative importance to attach to the various groups to which he or she belongs, and that she must just “discover” her identities, as if it were a purely natural phenomenon (like determining whether it is day or night). In fact, we are all constantly making choices, if only implicitly, about the priorities to be attached to our different affiliations and associations. The freedom to determine our loyalties and priorities between the different groups to all of which we may belong is a peculiarly important liberty which we have reason to recognize, value, and defend.

                       The existence of choice does not, of course, indicate that there are no constraints restricting choice. Indeed, choices are always made within the limits of what are seen as feasible. 

                                    The feasibilities in the case of identities will depend on individual characteristics and circumstances that determine the alternative possibilities open to us. This, however, is not a remarkable fact. It is just the way every choice in any field is actually faced. Indeed, nothing can be more elementary and universal than the fact that choices of all kinds in every area are always made within particular limits. For example, when we decide what to buy at the market, we can hardly ignore the fact that there are limits on how much we can spend. The “budget constraint,” as economists call it, is omnipresent. The fact that every buyer has to make choices does not indicate that there is no budget constraint, but only that choices have to be made within the budget constraint the person faces. What is true in elementary economics is also true in complex political and social decisions. Even when one is inescapably seen—by oneself as well as by others—as French, or Jewish, or Brazilian, or African-American, or (particularly in the context of the present-day turmoil) as an Arab or as a Muslim, one still has to decide what exact importance to attach to that identity over the relevance of other categories to which one also belongs.

                                   Convincing Others

However, even when we are clear about how we want to see ourselves, we may still have difficulty in being able to persuade others to see us in just that way. A nonwhite person in apartheid dominated South Africa could not insist that she be treated just as a human being, irrespective of her racial characteristics. She

would typically have been placed in the category that the state and the dominant members of the society reserved for her.

                             Our freedom to assert our personal identities can sometimes be extraordinarily limited in the eyes of others, no matter how we see ourselves. Indeed, sometimes we may not even be fully aware how others identify us, which may differ from self-perception. There is an interesting lesson in an old Italian story—from the 1920s when support for fascist politics was spreading rapidly across Italy—concerning a political recruiter from the Fascist Party arguing with a rural socialist that he should join the Fascist Party instead. “How can I,” said the potential recruit, “join your party? My father was a socialist. My grandfather was a socialist. I cannot really join the Fascist Party.” “What kind of an argument is this?” said the Fascist recruiter, reasonably enough. “What would you have done,” he asked the rural socialist, “if your father had been a murderer and your grandfather had also been a murderer? What would you have done then?” “Ah, then,” said the potential recruit, “then, of course, I would have joined the Fascist Party.”

This may be a case of fairly reasonable, even benign, attribution, but quite often ascription goes with denigration, which is used to incite violence against the vilified person. “The Jew is a man,” Jean-Paul Sartre argued in Portrait of the Anti-Semite, “whom other men look upon as a Jew; . . . it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.” Charged attributions can incorporate two distinct but interrelated distortions: misdescription of people belonging to a targeted category, and an insistence that the misdescribed characteristics are the only relevant features of the targeted person’s identity. In opposing external imposition, a person can both try to resist the ascription of particular characteristics and point to other identities a person has, much as Shylock attempted to do in Shakespeare’s brilliantly cluttered story: “Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?”

The assertion of human commonality has been a part of resistance to degrading attributions in different cultures at different points in time. In the Indian epic Mahabharata, dating from around two thousand years ago, Bharadvaja, an argumentative interlocutor, responds to the defense of the caste system by Bhrigu (a pillar of the establishment) by asking: “We all seem to be affected by desire, anger, fear, sorrow, worry, hunger, and labor; how do we

have caste differences then?”

The foundations of degradation include not only descriptive misrepresentation, but also the illusion of a singular identity that others must attribute to the person to be demeaned. “There used to be a me,” Peter Sellers, the English actor, said in a famous interview, “but I had it surgically removed.” That removal is challenging enough, but no less radical is the surgical implantation of a “real me” by others who are determined to make us different from what we think we are. Organized attribution can prepare the ground for persecution and burial.

Furthermore, even if in particular circumstances people have difficulty in

convincing others to acknowledge the relevance of identities other than what is marshaled for the purpose of denigration (along with descriptive distortions of the ascribed identity), that is not reason enough to ignore those other identities when circumstances are different. This applies, for example, to Jewish people in

Israel today, rather than in Germany in the 1930s. It would be a long-run victory of Nazism if the barbarities of the 1930s eliminated forever a Jewish person’s freedom and ability to invoke any identity other than his or her Jewishness. Similarly, the role of reasoned choice needs emphasis in resisting the ascription of singular identities and the recruitment of foot soldiers in the bloody campaign to terrorize targeted victims. Campaigns to switch perceived self- identities have been responsible for many atrocities in the world, making old friends into new enemies and odious sectarians into suddenly powerful political leaders. The need to recognize the role of reasoning and choice in identity-based thinking is thus both exacting and extremely important.

               Denial of Choice and Responsibility

If choices do exist and yet it is assumed that they are not there, the use of reasoning may well be replaced by uncritical acceptance of conformist behavior, no matter how rejectable it may be. Typically, such conformism tends to have conservative implications, and works in the direction of shielding old customs

and practices from intelligent scrutiny. Indeed, traditional inequalities, such as unequal treatment of women in sexist societies (and even violence against them), or discrimination against members of other racial groups, survive by theunquestioning acceptance of received beliefs (including the subservient roles of the traditional underdog). Many past practices and assumed identities have crumbled in response to questioning and scrutiny. Traditions can shift even within a particular country and culture. It is perhaps worth recollecting that John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, published in 1874, was taken by many of his British readers to be the ultimate proof of his eccentricity, and as a matter of fact, interest in the subject was so minimal that this is the only book of Mill’s on which his publisher lost money.

However, the unquestioning acceptance of a social identity may not always have traditionalist implications. It can also involve a radical reorientation in identity which could then be sold as a piece of alleged “discovery” without reasoned choice. This can play an awesome role in the fomenting of violence.

                         My disturbing memories of Hindu-Muslim riots in India in the 1940s, to which I referred earlier, include seeing—with the bewildered eyes of a child—the massive identity shifts that followed divisive politics. A great many persons’ identities as Indians, as subcontinentals, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way—quite suddenly—to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities. The carnage that followed had much to do with elementary herd behavior by which people were made to “discover” their newly detected belligerent identities, without subjecting the process to critical examination. The same people were suddenly different.

                             Civilizational Incarceration

A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in the basic classificatory idea that serves as the intellectual background to the much-discussed thesis of“the clash of civilizations,” which has been championed recently, particularly following the publication of Samuel Huntington’s influential book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with this approach begins with unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash—or not—is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which as it happens closely follows religious divisions to which singular attention is paid. Huntington contrasts Western civilization with “Islamic civilization,” “Hindu civilization,” “Buddhist civilization,” and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of one dominant and hardened divisiveness. In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other systems of partitioning, each of which has some—often far-reaching— relevance in our lives: such as nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to “the Islamic world,” “the Western world,” “the Hindu world,” “the Buddhist world,” the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all

submerged by this allegedly primal way of  eeing the differences between people.

The difficulty with the thesis of the clash of civilizations begins well before we come to the issue of an inevitable clash; it begins with the presumption of the

unique relevance of a singular classification. Indeed, the question “do civilizations clash?” is founded on the presumption that humanity can be preeminently classified into distinct and discrete civilizations, and that the relations between different human beings can somehow be seen, without serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations. The basic flaw of the thesis much precedes the point where it is asked whether civilizations must clash. This reductionist view is typically combined, I am afraid, with a rather foggy

perception of world history which overlooks, first, the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories, and second, the reach and influence of interactions—intellectual as well as material—that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations (more on this in chapter 3). And its power to befuddle can trap not only those who would like to support the thesis of a clash (varying from Western chauvinists to Islamic fundamentalists), but also those who would like to dispute it and yet try to respond within the straitjacket of its prespecified terms of reference.

                    The limitations of such civilization-based thinking can prove to be just as treacherous for programs of “dialogue among civilizations” (something that seems to be much sought after these days) as they are for theories of a clash of civilizations. The noble and elevating search for amity among people seen as amity between civilizations speedily reduces many-sided human beings into one dimension each and muzzles the variety of involvements that have provided rich and diverse grounds for cross-border interactions over many centuries, including the arts, literature, science, mathematics, games, trade, politics, and other arenas of shared human interest. Well-meaning attempts at pursuing global peace can

have very counterproductive consequences when these attempts are founded on a fundamentally illusory understanding of the world of human beings.

           More than a Federation of Religions

Increasing reliance on religion-based classification of the people of the world also tends to make the Western response to global terrorism and conflict peculiarly ham-handed. Respect for “other people” is shown by praising their religious books, rather than by taking note of the many-sided involvements and achievements, in nonreligious as well as religious fields, of different people in a globally interactive world. In confronting what is called “Islamic terrorism,” in the muddled vocabulary of contemporary global politics, the intellectual force of Western policy is aimed quite substantially at trying to define—or redefine— Islam.

However, to focus just on the grand religious classification is not only to miss other significant concerns and ideas that move people, it also has the effect of generally magnifying the voice of religious authority. The Muslim clerics, for example, are then treated as the ex officio spokesmen for the so-called Islamic world, even though a great many people who happen to be Muslim by religion have profound differences with what is proposed by one mullah or another.

Despite our diverse diversities, the world is suddenly seen not as a collection of people, but as a federation of religions and civilizations. In Britain a confounded view of what a multiethnic society must do has led to encouraging the development of state-financed Muslim schools, Hindu schools, Sikh schools, etc., to supplement preexisting state-supported Christian schools, and young children are powerfully placed in the domain of singular affiliations well before they have the ability to reason about different systems of identification that may compete for their attention. Earlier on, state-run denominational schools in Northern Ireland had fed the political distancing of Catholics and Protestants

along one line of divisive categorization assigned at infancy, and the same predetermination of “discovered” identities is now being allowed and, in effect, encouraged to sow even more alienation among a different part of the British population. Religious or civilizational classification can, of course, be a source of belligerent distortion as well. It can, for example, take the form of crude beliefs well exemplified by U.S. Lieutenant General William Boykin’s blaring—and by

now well-known—remark describing his battle against Muslims with disarming coarseness: “I knew that my God was bigger than his,” and that the Christian

God “was a real God, and [the Muslim’s] was an idol.”

                    The idiocy of such dense bigotry is, of course, easy to diagnose, and for this reason there is, I believe, comparatively limited danger in the uncouth hurling of such unguided missiles. There is, in contrast, a much more serious problem in the use in Western public policy of intellectual “guided missiles” that present a superficially nobler vision to woo Muslim activists away from opposition through the apparently benign strategy of defining Islam appropriately. They try  to wrench Islamic terrorists from violence by insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, and that a “true Muslim” must be a tolerant individual (“so come off it and be peaceful”). The rejection of a confrontational view of Islam is certainly

appropriate and extremely important at this time, but we must also ask whether it is at all necessary or useful, or even possible, to try to define in largely political terms what a “true Muslim” must be like.

           Muslims and Intellectual Diversity

A person’s religion need not be his or her all-encompassing and exclusive identity. In particular, Islam, as a religion, does not obliterate responsible choice for Muslims in many spheres of life. Indeed, it is possible for one Muslim to take a confrontational view and another to be thoroughly tolerant of heterodoxy

without either of them ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason alone. The response to Islamic fundamentalism and to the terrorism linked with it also becomes particularly confused when there is a general failure to distinguish between Islamic history and the history of Muslim people. Muslims, like all other people in the world, have many different pursuits, and not all of their priorities and values need be placed within their singular identity of being Islamic (I shall go more into this issue in chapter 4). It is, of course, not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in favor of being only Islamic. But it is extremely odd that those who want to overcome the tensions and conflicts linked with Islamic fundamentalism also seem unable to see Muslim people in any form other than their being just Islamic, which is combined with attempts to redefine Islam, rather than seeing the many-dimensional nature of diverse human beings who happen to be Muslim. People see themselves—and have reason to see themselves—in many different ways. For example, a Bangladeshi Muslim is not only a Muslim but also a Bengali and a Bangladeshi, typically quite proud of the Bengali language, literature, and music, not to mention the other identities he or she may have connected with class, gender, occupation, politics, aesthetic taste, and so on. Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan was not based on religion at all, since a Muslim identity was shared by the bulk of the population in the two wings of undivided Pakistan. The separatist issues related to language, literature, and politics.

                   Similarly, there is no empirical reason at all why champions of the Muslim past, or for that matter of the Arab heritage, have to concentrate specifically on religious beliefs only, and not also on science and mathematics, to which Arab and Muslim societies have contributed so much, and which can also be part of a Muslim or an Arab identity. Despite the importance of this heritage, crude classifications have tended to put science and mathematics in the basket of “Western science,” leaving other people to mine their pride in religious depths. If the disaffected Arab activist today can take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique prioritization of religion, shared by warriors on both sides, plays a major part in incarcerating people within the enclosure of a singular identity.

               Even the frantic Western search for “the moderate Muslim” confounds moderation in political beliefs with moderateness of religious faith. A person can have strong religious faith—Islamic or any other—along with tolerant politics. Emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the twelfth century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the sixteenth century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including

religious freedom for all. The point that needs particular attention is that while Akbar was free to pursue his liberal politics without ceasing to be a Muslim, that liberality was in no way ordained—nor of course prohibited—by Islam. Another Mughal emperor,

Aurangzeb, could deny minority rights and persecute non-Muslims without, for that reason, failing to be a Muslim, in exactly the same way that Akbar did not terminate being a Muslim because of his tolerantly pluralist politics.

              THE FLAMES OF CONFUSION

The insistence, if only implicitly, on a choiceless singularity of human identity not only diminishes us all, it also makes the world much more flammable. The alternative to the divisiveness of one preeminent categorization is not any unreal claim that we are all much the same. That we are not. 

                        HOPE FOR HARMONY

Rather, the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of uniquely powerful categorization. Perhaps the worst impairment comes from the neglect—and denial—of the role of reasoning and choice, which follows from the recognition of our plural identities. The illusion of unique identity is much more divisive than the

universe of plural and diverse classifications that characterize the world in which we actually live. The descriptive weakness of choiceless singularity has the effect of momentously impoverishing the power and reach of our social and political reasoning. The illusion of destiny exacts a remarkably heavy price.

                     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. 1 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. 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 religionbased 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 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? 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. 2 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.” 4 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 democracy 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. 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). 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. 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.” 7 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. 8 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.” 9 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. 10 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.” 11 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