Genocide, Guilt And Gormlessness

I'd like to talk about a subtle but crucially important topic on which many well-meaning people go wrong - the distinction between justifiable and unjustifiable claims.

Let's take this statement: "The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history" [Will Durant, "The Story of Civilization", Vol. 1, Chap. 16]

A statement like this, suitably backed up by research, is a dot on someone's graph. By itself, it may do nothing either useful or mischievous. All utility and mischief arise from the way dots are joined and extrapolated.

Here's a mischievous way in which the dots may be joined. If one misapplies inductive logic to generalise about a group, one could say, "Muslim invaders and rulers massacred hundreds of thousands of Hindus. Therefore, all Muslims are capable of massacring other people." Further, if one then misapplies deductive logic to make inferences about a member of a group, one could say, "All Muslims are capable of massacring other people. Therefore, my neighbour Ahmed, who is Muslim, is capable of massacring other people. I must therefore fear Ahmed." Never mind that poor Ahmed may be a nerdy software engineer with nothing more on his mind than his weekly grocery shopping. He has now been turned into a potential mass murderer and a threat by the simple misapplication of inductive and deductive logic.

This particular kind of mischievous reasoning is called "guilt by association". Guilt by association is very much in the air these days in the wake of frequent violence and terrorist acts committed by people who happen to be Muslim. There is a narrative pushed by the right wing, both overtly and covertly, that all Muslims are suspect because a few Muslims have engaged in acts of violence. The narrative dovetails neatly with the Right's demonisation of immigrants in general on economic and law-and-order grounds. Immigrants have been held responsible for everything from "taking away our jobs", to being parasites on the welfare state, to being responsible for crime. The cocktail of Islamophobia and xenophobia that the Right is brewing has now put tremendous strain on the social fabric in countries with Muslim minorities, especially Muslim immigrant minorities.

Liberals have a hard fight on their hands attempting to reason with the uncommitted majority not to succumb to the Right's specious arguments. Guilt by association cannot become an accepted narrative in a civilised society.

Having said this, here's what the liberals are doing wrong.

Let's try another way to join the dots. We'll start with a hypothesis (no more than a hypothesis, mind you) that since Islamic religious doctrine has severe injunctions against unbelief (especially polytheism, idolatry and apostasy), it could possibly influence devout Muslims into committing acts of violence and aggression upon those they see as unbelievers. We can test this hypothesis by analysing the possible influence of Islamic doctrine on those who had historically committed such acts of aggression against unbelievers to assess if there was a correlation. For historical figures, we would probably study biographies written by sources that are plausibly unbiased. For present day figures, we might be able to rely on their own testimony. Assuming this causal link between doctrine and violence was proven, one could then survey the opinions of Muslim communities in various countries today to assess their degree of belief in Islamic scripture. If the surveys should find that there is an overwhelming belief in literal interpretations of scripture by Muslims today, there would then be reasonable cause to predict a predisposition towards violence and aggression by Muslims against unbelievers even today.

[This isn't just a thought experiment. Muslim biographers from Ziauddin Barani to Abdul Qadir Al Badaoni have embellished the accounts of their masters' conquests (Mohammed bin Tughlaq and Akbar) with their own hate-filled invective against the infidels who were killed or taken into slavery, which certainly points to the influence of doctrine in such savagery. Timur (Tamerlane) himself seems to have claimed that his motives in invading India were as much to gain spiritual merit by fighting infidels as to plunder their wealth. A recent Pew survey on the attitudes of Muslims around the world today shows a disturbingly high proportion in favour of death for the crime of apostasy. This particular approach to joining the dots seems to have a valid basis in fact.]

The subtle point to note is that although the above reasoning seems to arrive at a very similar conclusion to that of our earlier example, this is not guilt by association! It does not imply that my neighbour Ahmed is a potentially dangerous killer. What it is is a nuanced conclusion about the correlation of intolerant attitudes to violent action, arrived at through data and logic. It would no doubt be a very uncomfortable sort of conclusion, but it would be perfectly defensible. It is also the sort of reasoning that makes liberals break out in hives.

I saw a textbook example of liberal outrage last week when I commented on a post appearing on the Facebook site "The Liberal Indians". My comment was in response to a rather typical left/liberal piece that laid the blame for all violence originating from Muslims at the door of the West. It claimed that recent Islamist terror attacks were all in response to the provocations of the West. I challenged this thesis by providing a simple counterexample. I spoke about the experience that India had with Islam. India is not a Western country, and there was no provocation to Islam in the form of an invasion by any Indian king of Muslim lands. Yet, Indian history bears witness to centuries of brutality inflicted by Muslim invaders and conquerors.

As a specific example, I cited the well-known writings of the American historian Will Durant, together with some informed calculations by the modern Belgian political thinker Koenraad Elst. Elst, basing his calculations upon notes chronicled by Muslim scribes in the retinue of conquerors and kings, came up with a figure of 80 million Hindus massacred by Muslims over a period of 500 years. Perhaps, I suggested, there is something in Islamic doctrine itself that provides a motive for violence against unbelievers, and external provocation is not always necessary.

The liberal response was multi-pronged, and this is a sample of the arguments thrown at me.

• I was labelled a right wing Hindu, the classic ad hominem. (Clearly, no one had bothered to read my blog posts or my various on-line battles with Hindutva sympathisers. I guess this is the cross that independent thinkers have to bear - being attacked Left, Right and Centre (see what I did there?))
• I was accused of having a simplistic view of history. My sources were trashed as having a right-wing agenda. Koenraad Elst in particular was described as being "sophisticated but dangerous".
• I was challenged to prove exact numbers (the number of million Hindus who were reportedly killed) and to justify the claim of "largest genocide in human history", with the implication that if the numbers were any less than claimed (say 10 million instead of 50 million or 80 million), then the entire thesis could be safely rejected.
• The massacres of the time were ascribed to the violent nature of the period itself - examples of cruelties by non-Muslim rulers were provided.

The last argument is the only one that I would consider plausible, but it should also lend itself to critical, statistical analysis (assuming we have the relevant numbers to go on).

I am not a Muslim-hater, and I made my comment without mischievous intent, in the spirit of logical enquiry. But the ferocity of the response took me by surprise. The peculiarly personal tone of the attacks suggested to me that not only had I hit a raw nerve but that I may actually have stumbled upon a truth that the liberals are desperate to deny.

The point behind my example was simple. If Muslims could visit large-scale violence upon a non-Muslim populace thanks to scriptural injunction, then not all Islamist violence can be laid at the door of the West, nor be ascribed to external provocation in general. For this line of logic to work, it is not relevant whether the number of deaths was 80 million, 50 million or even 10 million. If sufficiently large numbers of Hindus have died at the hands of Muslim invaders and conquerors, and if the accompanying chronicles associate those killings with the doctrinal injunction against idolaters and polytheists, then this would strongly suggest that a predilection for violence exists within Islam.

Therefore, being hung up on a figure of 50 million or 80 million betrays a desire to win the argument on a technicality and shut down an extremely inconvenient line of thought.

My reading of the situation is that the Right wants to join the dots in a mischievous and self-serving way, while the Left wants to deny the existence of dots in the first place. I wonder - Is there a middle ground between the denial of the Left and the mischief of the Right?

As to the sources I quoted, it is not at all clear why Koenraad Elst should be considered "dangerous", other than for the fact that his writings may be misused by mischievous parties to further a divisive agenda.

Elst himself writes:

What should Hindus say to Muslims when they consider the record of Islam in Hindu lands? It is first of all very important not to allot guilt wrongly. Notions of collective or hereditary guilt should be avoided. Today's Muslims cannot help it that other Muslims did certain things in 712 or 1565 or 1971. (Emphasis mine.) One thing they can do, however, is to critically reread their scripture to discern the doctrinal factors of Muslim violence against Hindus and Hinduism. Of course, even without scriptural injunction, people get violent and wage wars; if Mahmud Ghaznavi hadn't come, some of the people he killed would have died in other, non-religious conflicts. But the basic Quranic doctrine of hatred against the unbelievers has also encouraged many good-natured and pious people to take up the sword against Hindus and other Pagans, not because they couldn't control their aggressive instincts, but because they had been told that killing unbelievers was a meritorious act. Good people have perpetrated evil because religious authorities had depicted it as good.

This is material for a no-nonsense dialogue between Hindus and Muslims. But before Hindus address Muslims about this, it is imperative that they inform themselves about this painful history. Apart from unreflected grievances, Hindus have so far not developed a serious critique of Islam's doctrine and historical record. Often practising very sentimental, un-philosophical varieties of their own religion, most Hindus have very sketchy and distorted images of rival religions. Thus, they say that Mohammed was an Avatar of Vishnu, and then think that they have cleverly solved the Hindu-Muslim conflict by flattering the Prophet (in fact, it is an insult to basic Muslim beliefs, which reject divine incarnation, apart from indirectly associating the Prophet with Vishnu's incarnation as a pig). Instead of the silly sop stories which pass as conducive to secularism, Hindus should acquaint themselves with real history and real religious doctrines.

Another thing which we should not forget is that Islam is ultimately rooted in human nature. We need not believe the Muslim claim that the Quran is of divine origin; but then it is not of diabolical origin either, it is a human document. The Quran is in all respects the product of a 7th-century Arab businessman vaguely acquainted with Judeo-Christian notions of monotheism and prophetism, and the good and evil elements in it are very human. Even its negative elements appealed to human instincts, e.g. when Mohammed promised a share in the booty of the caravans he robbed, numerous Arab Pagans took the bait and joined him. The undesirable elements in Islamic doctrine stem from human nature, and can in essence be found elsewhere as well. Keeping that in mind, it should be possible to make a fair evaluation of Islam's career in India on the basis of factual history.

I think Elst makes very sensible suggestions here, both for a clear-headed understanding of history and for an inter-faith dialogue without blame or rancour.

The prevalent attitude among Indian liberals today seems to be to avoid this hard-headed approach altogether and to comfort themselves with visions of a relatively benign encounter of cultures. Their intentions are the best (i.e., to let sleeping dogs lie), but this is not an approach that will work when there is a mischievous Right eager to stir the pot for its own nefarious ends.

Liberal gormlessness has resulted in a political vacuum that is now occupied by the Right. Just because liberals are engaged in a conspiracy of silence regarding the possible links between Islamic scripture and violence by Muslims, it does not mean everyone is silent. The absence of honest debate has left the field open to the dishonest to manipulate facts as they please. It would be far better if liberals could seize the bull by the horns and understand the distinction between a people (individual Muslims) and an ideology (the Islamic religion and its teachings). It is possible to fight to protect the rights of marginalised people even as they challenge illiberal ideas in an ideology.

I explore these ideas further in another post.

The Dangers Of Selective Liberalism

Abstract: 

The unwillingness of liberals to confront illiberal ideas in Islam with the same spirit that they attack right wing bigotry and the excesses of capitalism is an example of intellectual dishonesty. Their consequent loss of credibility only strengthens the Right. This is as true of India as it is true of the West.

A reformation within Islam is overdue, but the form it will take depends on the actions of all players today.

If liberals can emphasise the distinction between Islam as an ideology and Muslims as fellow human beings, they can play a constructive role in nudging Muslims towards creating a more progressive society for themselves, a society that will also coexist amicably with others. Abdicating this challenge only vacates the stage for a mischievous and divisive right wing narrative that conflates ideology with people and demonises an entire community. Such a narrative will paradoxically strengthen the more regressive forces within Muslim society and perpetuate hatred and social conflict for decades to come.

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With the atrocities of Boko Haram and the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Islam today occupies centre stage in world affairs, and not in a good way. In spite of widespread condemnations of these atrocities from many Muslims and their organisations, such opinion is hardly unanimous. There is more outrage over the Charlie Hebdo cartoons than over the killing. In the recent past as well, the attitude of many Muslims has been to demand acquiescence from the world in enshrining Islam's special status, exempt from all criticism, even as the killing of perceived cultural enemies is applauded. A girl who achieved worldwide fame after her shooting is being vilified in her own country. Stories of the ill-treatment of women and minorities in Muslim countries has grown common, with the latest outrage being the ISIS pamphlet documenting scripturally sanctioned ways to treat female slaves. And in the background is the constant theme of terrorism, with depressingly regular attacks that kill perceived aggressor and innocent victim alike. The image of Muslims worldwide has never been lower.

The Right has responded to these developments with glee. Attacks on civil liberties, jingoism and xenophobia, a systematic demonisation of Muslim communities both in their home countries and in others - all form a consistent pattern. Under the guise of protecting the freedom of the majority, the rights of all have begun to be eroded. Muslims have begun to be seen as the hated and feared "other".

But from the start, the Left, the traditional champion of civil rights, has done nothing to call out the illiberalism within Islam, nor did it ever begin a fearless investigation into the causes of such illiberalism. Had liberals done so in an even-handed manner from the start, a firm yet hate-free critique of the good and bad in Islam could have been presented to civil society as a whole, and the terms of the dialogue could have been framed in a more constructive form. Alas, liberals have abdicated their role.

It is true that Muslims conflate criticism of their religion with attacks on themselves as people. Their defensiveness is perhaps understandable. But what is not acceptable is that liberals (who should definitely know better) have fallen victim to the same fallacy. By seeing any critique of Islam as the "oppression of an already marginalised community", they conflate the ideology of Islam with Muslims as a people.

I have liberal views, and I dislike illiberal ideas anywhere. I don't understand the reluctance among liberals to point out the illiberalism in Islam, mainly in the following areas:

• Intolerance towards unbelievers of all stripes, including apostates from Islam
• Poor treatment of women
• Poor treatment of animals (e.g., ritual bleeding to death of animals during slaughter, injunctions to kill geckos on sight, etc.)

I have separately described a particular example of how liberals vociferously attempt to shut down uncomfortable questions. They seem unaware that right-wing bigots are merrily spreading their own simplistic and self-serving answers to these very questions.

How to make liberals see sense? As my own experience in a liberal forum demonstrated, a non-Muslim's critique of Islam is deemed to be Islamophobia or motivated by right-wing ideology (whether consciously or unconsciously imbibed). I think what liberals need is a figurative kick in the pants from a person belonging in some sense to the Muslim community (even if not a practising Muslim).

Indeed, this is what Sufian Ahmed has brilliantly done. Just substitute "Indian" for "White" in his post and it will be completely relevant to India.

Ouch! That's got to hurt.

For a movement that has historically been associated with revolution, I think the Left/Liberal side has become timid and forgotten to think big.

What we should be calling for is nothing short of an Islamic Reformation. In the 21st century, this is overdue, but it appears that only a minority within the Muslim community is thinking along these lines, with Egypt's military leader the only public figure to openly call for it. The Right does not have a viable plan to deal with Islam, because their prescriptions will lead to unending strife without resolution. The Left seems to naively believe in business as usual, when the political temperature is rising. An Islamic Reformation is the last thing on anyone's mind. Everyone seems to believe that an ideology that has not changed in 1400 years can never change. Not true. The fact that Islamic doctrine has remained unchanged is what has resulted in the decline of Muslim society, and a tipping point has either been reached or is imminent. Something has to give, and the best outcome would be a peaceful reformation within Islam itself rather than a war of civilisations. The Left can help bring about such a peaceful outcome, but first they need to get their collective heads out of the sand and learn to think big again.

I am not alone in criticising liberals for their lack of courage. "Dear Fellow Liberals" is a particularly candid one that makes the same criticism of American liberals over their lack of courage in dealing with Islam. How To Be An Islamist Apologist is even more scathing. And in the Indian context, the charge has been made that liberals don't really support freedom of expression.

It seems clear to everyone but the liberals that their pusillanimity in confronting illiberal thought in Islam has seriously damaged their credibility in the eyes of the undecided majority. This is why they are losing the argument to a newly-belligerent Right that has no compunctions about drawing false equivalences between illiberal ideologies and the communities that nominally identify with them. If the liberals abandon the discourse to the Right, bigotry will take over and we will see increased strife over the coming years.

If liberals want to avoid such a dystopian future, they need to be able to tell uncomfortable home truths about Islam just as they do with every other ideology.

Kashmiris Should Beware The Exasperation Of The Liberal Indian

"Beware the fury of the patient man", said John Dryden a long time ago.

I'm one of the most liberal-humanist specimens one could find, subscribing as I do to a near-libertarian philosophy (I only draw the line at gun rights) and a deep and abiding suspicion of governments, corporations and society itself as forces inimical to the individual.

Still, Kashmir vexes me. If I can blurt my feelings out in one short sentence, it is that Kashmiris should stop being so precious.

The fuss they make about an Indian prime minister visiting the state! Shutting down an entire state in protest?

Kashmiris (and by that I mean the Muslim separatist agitators) need to take a long hard look at themselves, their environment, and their choices.

An independent Kashmir is not what Pakistan has been fighting for, and the people of Kashmir will experience a frying-pan-to-fire situation if they ever find themselves out of the Indian union. True independence is easier dreamt about than achieved.

Kashmir as an independent state is unlikely to be viable, in either an economic or social sense. Kashmir is a landlocked state that will depend on the goodwill of its neighbours to survive economically, and that goodwill is going to prove a scarce commodity since both India and Pakistan will be put offside by Kashmiri independence. Socially too, as Mirwaiz Umar Farooq himself admitted, the Kashmiri Muslim populace is itself divided into Wahabi, Salafi, Barelvi and Deobandi sects, not to mention the Shias of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. Not to put too fine a point on it, Muslim sects have shown time and again that they will turn on one another with murderous ferocity the moment they are left alone with no external enemy to unify them. Iraq and Syria are the latest tragic examples. Kashmiris should be careful what they wish for. The killings will not stop after independence. Only their ability to blame the Indian army will.

Who is it in Kashmir who wants independence anyway? Only Muslims in the Kashmir valley. The Buddhists of Ladakh and the Hindus of Jammu know better than to trust their fate to the tender mercies of a Muslim majority, and would opt to stay with India. The examples of Pakistan and Bangladesh serve as a reminder, if one is required, of what happens to religious minorities in Muslim states. If it comes to a plebiscite, India will play its cards so that Kashmir is splintered even further. After all, the will of the people is the will of the people, and if the Ladakh and Jammu regions vote for India, who can deny them their choice?

Lastly, as economies go, India is ramping up while Pakistan is winding down (although the terrorist state may take another decade to finally sputter and die). If Kashmiris are smart, they will try and latch on to one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, because that is what India is projected to be.

India has had enough of the Kashmiri stalemate, and it's not just Hindu right-wingers who want to see an end to the special status of Jammu and Kashmir as codified in Article 370 of the Indian constitution. The move to repeal Article 370 has broad support across all Indians, and it will happen sooner or later. Pakistan is not in a position to stop any Indian moves within its own territory, and the world (i.e., the West, Russia and China) has no more sympathy for Muslim separatist movements. It's only the Muslim world that could back Kashmiri separatism, but even this support is hardly likely to be unanimous or whole-hearted. Middle Eastern regimes are wary of extremist monsters like the ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), so the Indian government could receive covert support even from many nominally Muslim countries in its face-off with Kashmiri separatists.

All in all, the Kashmir issue has festered for too long. Pakistan needs to disappear (which it will) and the Kashmiris need to set aside their juvenile ideas of independence and come to the party. The Indian juggernaut cannot be stopped, because things have reached a stage when even liberals have had enough.

I'm Neither Christian Nor Gay, Just Humanist

By now, many of you would have read the article "I'm Christian, Unless You're Gay" that's doing the rounds of the Internet. You may even have read some of the responses to it.

I'm neither Christian nor gay, and my own journey towards forming a sympathetic view of homosexuality may hold learnings for other people, so let me post about it here. I guess my upbringing in India has been indirectly influenced by the prudery of centuries of foreign rule. Certainly the Kama Sutra and the stone carvings at the temples of Khajuraho and Konarak show that Hindu civilisation was not in itself prudish. But four centuries of Muslim rule and two centuries of rule by a largely Victorian Britain changed the character of Indian middle class society. I could hardly talk to my parents about sex when I was growing up, much less about homosexuality. It would have embarrassed all of us.

I need to thank the Indian soft porn magazine Debonair (that I used to read on the sly as a teenager and a young man) for its many articles by psychologists and others that convinced me that there was no shame in sex or masturbation, and that these were natural, even positive things. I learnt to believe that sexual activity in itself was not immoral. Harm to others was what was immoral. For example, the evil in rape is not in the sex but in the coercion. It's thanks to Debonair that I unshackled my mind from the stifling attitudes of middle-class Indian society. Freedom from sexual guilt right from my teenage years has been one of the blessings of my life.

My personal life is boringly conservative (and I like it that way) but my views are shockingly liberal :-).

[While this has only an indirect relationship to the topic of this post, my attitudes towards sex in general kept evolving as I grew older: In later years, I realised with a pleasant shock that porn was, ironically, probably the only movie genre that wasn't sexist, because it depicted men and women in completely equal terms. Today, I'm an unabashed supporter of pornography, specifically the category called Non-Violent Erotica (NVE). I realise that lots of people, especially women, consider pornography to be demeaning to women or something that incites violence against women. I haven't found that to be the case. Such opinions probably belong in the same category as "masturbation makes you blind" and need to be revisited with an open mind.]

Well, however liberal I became in my attitudes towards sex in general, on the topic of homosexuality, I still retained a knee-jerk response until fairly recently. It may be fair to say that I was personally repulsed by the idea. And my education in a scientific discipline like engineering made me question whether homosexuality was even natural! After all, gays couldn't reproduce, so that "proved" to me that homosexuality was an aberration from what was natural. I believed it was a disease or a mental condition that needed to be cured. However, I should point out that I never at any time thought of it as 'evil'. I just considered it unnatural, not a crime or a sin. No one was being harmed, after all. I believed homosexuality was no more a crime than (voluntary) prostitution and needed to be decriminalised.

My last reservations about the 'naturalness' of homosexuality fell away rather dramatically, and it happened not on a personal or emotional level, but at an intellectual level, since that was the level on which my position was based.

I read somewhere (I can't remember the source now, but here's a similar one) that between 7% and 10% of the individuals in any mammalian species are homosexual. All of a sudden, what had seemed unnatural to me became natural, and I realised I had no reason to consider gays abnormal anymore. Ever since I read Desmond Morris's book The Naked Ape, I had learnt to think of man as just another animal. [In fact, as an amusing exercise, I would look at people and try to see them as primates. I could see people as monkeys, with their eyes, ears, facial hair and even their expressions and mannerisms appearing very simian.] So suddenly, I realised I had no reason to consider human gays abnormal in any respect, because their existence was entirely consistent with the existence of gays in every other mammalian species. There was nothing to be "cured", after all. My liberal-humanist philosophy took over at that point, and that is how I became a supporter of gay rights.

It also helps that I am strongly anti-organised religion. So when I read about the Westboro Baptist Church and their slogans like "God hates fags", I know who the bad guys are.

This is an honest, warts-and-all account of my personal journey. Parts of the narrative may not appeal to all, but it's the truth. I guess a description of my position today could be "I'm humanist, unless you're religious". Just kidding ;-).

Come Back, Peter Costello, All Is Forgiven

One hardly knows who is doing what to whom in the Liberal Party these days. I like many of the things Malcolm Turnbull stands for (e.g., ETS, the Republic), but I suspect his autocratic and idiosyncratic style will turn off voters just as it's turning off many of his party colleagues. I wouldn't trust either Joe Hockey or Tony Abbott with ten cents, the former because he comes across as somewhat shifty (on TV at least), the latter because he's a religious nut.

I must say I'm fairly satisfied with Kevin Rudd at the moment, although I question his resolve against illegal immigration (Howard was actually much better there) and I have increasing misgivings about his and Wayne Swan's commitment to bringing the budget back into surplus. I don't think these guys really get it on this fundamental economic principle.

So while I don't believe Australia is in a leadership crisis yet, it would be good for the Liberals to get their house in order. It's too late for 2010, because the psephologists tell us the swing to Labor in 2007 was a two-election swing, meaning that 2013 is the earliest the Liberals can hope to make it back. But the earlier they start, the better.

So who do I think is the best leader for the Liberals?

Peter Costello.

I think Peter Costello's journey to the very top has been a series of missed opportunities. He'd been repeatedly stiffed by John Howard who failed (we're told) to honour his promise to stand aside at some stage, and he (Costello) announced his retirement just when things were getting interesting. But who knows, he could yet be persuaded to come out of retirement and take charge.

He's one guy who understands the value of a surplus budget. Heck, he's the only guy in recent history who delivered one. And he took a strong stand in favour of cultural integration as opposed to weak-kneed laissez-faire multiculturalism. I'd vote for him, and definitely if the Labor jokers don't demonstrate serious intentions of fixing the budget soon.