Terror and Taboos

POLITICS REACTS TO RELIGION with warped morality, certainly when gods descend, flanked by armed custodians, on these fraught times. Take post-Gaza protest streets and campuses of Trump’s America and you get a fair picture of how ancient prejudices are dusted up to be deployed against the new aggressors, and how the burden of ideology influences the definitions of good and evil. Trump’s exorcism of American universities, which his administration thinks are a hotbed of anti-Semitism, and the resistance by the oldest and the greatest of them, is a good example of the backlash against the cult of hate. The war born from the genocidal rampage of Hamas on Israeli soil has become, when it crossed time zones, a Jewish war on Islam. Hamas could not have hoped for a more apt endorsement. On Ivy League campuses, the romance of protest found its enemy in Jewish students, who have been sloganised as outcasts. Trump’s war on academia may have gone beyond his pledge to rid American universities of the woke virus and turned into an attack on academic freedom itself. But the liberal morality of bestowing victimhood on the perpetrators of the most horrifying anti-Jewish rage after the Holocaust, of interchanging crime and punishment, is a political trait shared elsewhere as well.

It’s there in the word Islamophobia. It has become a liberal invocation after 9/11, when radical Islam, a term Barack Obama refused to use as a precaution against putting an entire religion on trial, entered the glossary of evil in the post-communist world. When the Islamic State’s campaign for the alternative of a neo-Caliphate on the ruins of the West peaked (before its inevitable defeat), radicalisation of the Islamic mind was a topic liberals chose to evade. And those who added an Islamic prefix to the terror against humanity have earned the epithet of Islamophobe. It had the effect of a civilisational slur as some writers dared to trace the seeds of jihad to the scriptures and their most faithful readers in power. An honest discussion of our times’ most heinous expressions of bloodlust sanctioned by an empowered faith became nearly impossible without being indexed by Islamophobia. Still, writers like Naipaul and Houellebecq dared— and survived. Even as killers from the sandy remoteness of Arabia to the buzzy streets of Paris pleaded for the global acknowledgement of their Islamic credentials, liberal ire was directed against the semantics of the anger against terror. The new radical built the cult of death; his portrait, liberal morality insisted, should exclude the fundamentals of his existence. The accusation of Islamophobia is moral censorship enforced by the condescending guardians of a ‘faith under attack’.

Come to Pahalgam. Some of us are very cautious about categorising the attack, bringing the word Islam into the description. And some even resorted to the cliché of terror-has-no-religion. The nature of the terror, and its provenance, left no room for the exclusion of Islam from the horror. Islam is the reason why Pakistan was born, and it is what continues to define the country as the visible and invisible promoter of scriptural resistance against the power of faithlessness. Islam alone provided the bargaining power with which Pakistan gained a permanent place in the West’s war on terror. The paradox was glaring: Islamist terror’s patron state could also play a role as the West’s—read America’s—frontline ally in the fight against terror. This dual role—as patron and partner—has given Pakistan the kind of freedom no other terror sponsor could afford. For Iran, the Islamic war against the Great Satan is a revolutionary necessity as long as Israel and America exist. For Pakistan, jihad is a cause and an investment. India serves the first part; America the second. Periodic Pahalgams keep the cause alive.

Why is it that Pahalgam evokes only hesitant anger in some? Why is it that Islamism is being kept out of the analysis? Islamism, in which the spiritual and the political become one volatile pursuit, may not require the protection of liberal condescension. Islam is not as fragile a religion as they imagine. Still, they are out there, as the defenders of a faith under attack, too eager to banish those who add the adjective ‘ Islamic’ to terror as Islamophobes. The liberal caution on Pahalgam is moral condescension as well as intellectual evasion. In the end it reduces the dehumanising horror of faith to a crime without a context. And what makes it an untenable argument is the muted part: In an over-Hinduised India, one should have seen it coming. In the thicket of liberal sophistry, the religion of the crime is taboo.

ideologiesIslamPahalgampoliticstaboosterror