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Learning is a good thing, and with enough of it reasonable people figure out that simple narratives like "the war against civilization" select and deflect a lot of reality. The Mumbai events are clearly getting more MSM coverage than recent Hindu fundamentalist attacks on Muslims and Christians in India. Indian Muslims lag behind other groups economically (perhaps--I don't know--along the sort of Weberian lines that until recently made French Catholics lag in Canada). But I sense a reluctance among many left-wing academics to apply the same standards to Islam that they apply to right-wing Zionists or to evangelical Christians. As Alan Krueger documented in his recent book on terrorism, it is not poverty per se that drives terrorism, but rather highly motivated and often educated young men who have no experience in their countries with religious tolerance and freedom of speech. Mumbai is a criminal act, just as 9/11 was. It is best treated as such--with no excuse-making by well-intentioned leftists and with no provocation to a holy war by the West or by Hindu nationalists.
With nearly 200 million Muslims in India, if even a tiny fraction of them are actively engaged in radicalism it's quite a scary future. I think may who look to the Koran for totality want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that support free inquiry. Thus a dilemma: either abandon this religion of totality (a totality which the Koran seems to demand), or they can remain in the rear of technical advance. Neither alternative is very appealing and the tension between a desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by explosion - that is, embracing evil in the name of good.
Islam is undergoing a civil war, and we should all hope the "liberals" win.
Jonathan