[GJM] #855, Re: [CAHS] An Unknown Author on " WHY INDIAN MUSLIMS ARE DIFFERENT."
wesburt at juno.com
wesburt at juno.com
Fri Jan 25 08:29:16 MST 2008
Good Day Friends,
I cannot add to or embellish the message below. It speaks for itself,
as well as the attached Figure 11f.gif speaks for all of us.
Kind regards,
Wes Burt
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Insert Figure 11f.gif ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~ Forwarded Message From An Unknown Author ~~~~~~~~~~
Is it not also that Indian Muslims are still ethnic/racial/cultural
Indians
whereas Middle Eastern Muslims are predominantly Arabs or Near Asians?
The same religion is played out differently among different
cultures/ethnicities/races.
From: Margit Alm <margalm at bigpond.net.au>
To: humanist at topica.com
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:42:14 +1100
Subject: Re: [CAHS] WHY INDIAN MUSLIMS ARE DIFFERENT.
Just look at the Christian religion and the dividing line between
catholics and protestants.
Margit
----- Original Message -----
From: Alan McPhate
To: <humanist at topica.com
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 5:55 PM
Subject: [CAHS] WHY INDIAN MUSLIMS ARE DIFFERENT.
This article is from India.
The person who sent it to me deleted the writer's name.
A beautiful piece of observation. A must read and share article.
*Indian Muslims*
The largest Muslim country in the world is Indonesia and the second
largest is not Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt , or Pakistan. It is India.
With some 150 million Muslims, India has more Muslims than Pakistan.
But here is an interesting statistic from 9/11: There are no Indian
Muslims that we know of in al-Qaeda and there are no Indian Muslims
in America's Guantanamo Bay post-9/11 prison camp. And no Indian
Muslims have been found fighting alongside the jihadists in Iraq.
Why is that? Why do we not read about Indian Muslims, who are a
minority in a vast Hindu-dominated land, blaming America for all
their problems and wanting to fly airplanes into the Taj Mahal or
the British embassy? Lord knows, Indian Muslims have their
grievances about access to capital and political representation. And
interreligious violence has occasionally flared up in India, with
dis astrous consequences. I am certain that out of 150 million
Muslims in India, a few will one day find their way to al-Qaeda ,bif
it can happen with some American Muslims, it can happen with Indian
Muslims. But this is not the norm. Why?
The answer is context and in particular the secular, free-market,
democratic context of India, heavily influenced by a tradition of
nonviolence and Hindu tolerance. M. J. Akbar, the Muslim editor of
the Asian Age, a national Indian English-language daily primarily
funded by non-muslim Indians, put it to me this way: "I'll give you
a quiz question: Which is the only large Muslim community to enjoy
sustained democracy for the last fifty years? The Muslims of India .
I am not going to exaggerate Muslim good fortune in India. There are
tensions, economic discrimination, and provocations, like the
destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya [by Hindu na tionalists in
1992]. But the fact is, the Indian Constitution is secular and
provides a real opportunity for economic advancement of any
community that can offer talent. That's why a growing Muslim middle
class here is moving up and generally doesn't manifest the strands
of deep anger you find in many nondemocratic Muslim states."
Where Islam is embedded in authoritarian societies, it tends to
be come the vehicle of angry protest Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia ,
Pakistan. But where Islam is embedded in a pluralistic democratic
society Turkey or India, for instance those with a more progressive
outlook have a chance to get a better hearing for their
interpretation and a dem ocratic forum where they can fight for
their ideas on a more equal foot ing. On November 15, 2003, the two
main synagogues of Istanbul were hit by some fringe suicide bombers.
I happened to be in Istanbul a few months later, when they were
reopened. Several things struck me. To be gin with, the chief rabbi
appeared at the ceremony, hand in hand with the top Muslim cleric of
Istanbul and the local mayor, while crowds in the street threw red
carnations on them both. Second, the prime minis ter of Turkey,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who comes from an Islamic party, paid a visit
to the chief rabbi in his office the first time a Turkish prime
minister had ever called on the chief rabbi. Lastly, the father of
one of the suicide bombers told the Turkish newspaper Zaman, "We
cannot under stand why this child had done the thing he had done .
.. First let us meet with the chief rabbi of our Jewish brothers.
Let me hug him. Let me kiss his hands and flowing robe. Let me
apologize in the name of my son and offer my condolences for the
deaths . . . We will be damned if we do not reconcile with them."
Different context, different narrative, different imagination.
I am keenly aware of the imperfections of Indian democracy,
starting with the oppressive caste system. Nevertheless, to have
sustained a functioning democracy with all its flaws for more than
fifty years in a country of over one billion people, who speak
scores of different languages, is something of a miracle and a great
source of stability for the world. Two of India's presidents have
been Muslims, and its current president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, is
both a Muslim and the father of the Indian nuclear missile program.
While a Muslim woman sits on India's Supreme Court, no Muslim woman
is allowed even to drive a car in Saudi Arabia. Indian Muslims,
including women, have been governors of many Indian States and the
wealthiest man in India today, high on the Forbes list of global
billionaires, is an Indian Muslim: Azim Premji, the chairman of
Wipro, one of India's most important technology companies. I was in
India shortly after the United States invaded Afghanistan in late
2001, when Indian television carried a debate between the country's
leading female movie star and parliamentarian Shabana Azmi, a
Muslim woman-- and the imam of New Delhi's biggest mosque. The imam
had called on Indian Muslims to go to Afghanistan and join the jihad
against America and Azmi ripped into him, live on Indian TV,
basically telling the cleric to go take a hike. She told him to go
to Kandahar and join the Taliban and leave the rest of India's
Muslims alone. How did she get away with that? Easy. As a Muslim
woman she lived in a context that empowered and protected her to
speak her mind even to a leading cleric.
Different context, different narrative, different imagination.
This is not all that complicated: Give young people a context where
they can translate a positive imagination into reality, give them a
context in which someone with a grievance can have it adjudicated in
a court of law without having to bribe the judge with a goat, give
them a context in which they can pursue an entrepreneurial idea and
become the richest or the most creative or most respected people in
their own country, no matter what their background, give them a
context in which any com plaint or idea can be published in the
newspaper, give them a context in which anyone can run for office
and guess what? They usually don't want to blow up the world. They
usually want to be part of it.
A South Asian Muslim friend of mine once told me this story: His
Indian Muslim family split in 1948, with half going to Pakistan and
half Staying in Mumbai. When he got older, he asked his father one
day why the Indian half of the family seemed to be doing better than
the Pakistani half. His father said to him, "Son, when a Muslim
grows up in India and he sees a man living in a big mansion high on
a hill, he says, 'Father, one day I will be that man.' And when a
Muslim grows up in Pakistan and sees a man living in a big mansion
high on a hill, he says, 'Father, one day I will kill that man.'"
When you have a pathway to be the Man or the Woman, you tend to
focus on the path and on achieving your dreams. When you have no
pathway, you tend to focus on your wrath and on nursing your memories.
India only twenty years ago, before the triple convergence, was
known as a country of snake charmers, poor people, and Mother
Teresa. Today its image has been recallibrated. Now it is also seen
as a country of brainy people and computer wizards. Atul Vashistha,
CEO of the outsourcing consulting firm NeoIT, often appears in the
American media to defend outsourcing. He told me this story: "One
day I had a problem with my HP printer the printing was very slow. I
was trying to figure out the problem. So I call HP tech support.
This guy answers and takes all my personal information down. From
his voice it is clear he is somewhere in India. So I start asking
where he is and how the weather is. We're having a nice chat. So
after he is helping me for about ten or fifteen minutes he says,
'Sir, do you mind if I say something to you?' I said, 'Sure.' I
figured he was going to tell me something else I was doing wrong
with my com puter and was trying to be polite about it. And instead
he says, 'Sir, I was very proud to hear you on Voice of America. You
did a good job. ...' I had just been on a VOA show about the
backlash against globalization and outsourcing. I was one of three
invited guests. There was a union of ficial, an economist, and
myself. I defended outsourcing and this guy heard it."
Remember: In the flat world you don't get just your humiliation
dished out to you fiber-optically. You also get your pride dished
out to you fiber-optically. An Indian help-line operator suddenly
knows, in real time, all about how one of his compatriots is
representing India half a world away, and it makes him feel better
about himself.
The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Indian
democracy, and even e-bay are all based on social contracts whose
dominant feature is that authority comes from the bottom up, and
people can and do feel self-empowered to improve their lot. People
living in such contexts tend to spend their time focusing on what to
do next, not on whom to blame next.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Discussion list of the Council of Australian Humanist
Societies~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ End An Unknown Author ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ TOP
and TWP are cognoscible by sixth graders from Fig. 7-9.gif on Dr.
W. Curtiss Priest's web site:
<http://www.epie.org/cyber-soc/default.htm> TOP = 100% Capitalism --- TWP
= 0 to 50% Capitalism
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