The Ummah for we, but not for thee

How geopolitics enabled India’s gambit in Kashmir:

“Saudi Arabia has traditionally been close to Pakistan, but over the past several decades India and Pakistan have diverged economically to where India’s economy is now about eight times larger than Pakistan’s,” he says. “The Saudis can’t ignore that” for the sake of Kashmir.

The philosopher of science Rudolf Carnap once said that the distance from him to Karl Popper was small. But the distance from Popper to Carnap was large. What Carnap meant by this is that Popper perceived the distance to be much further between his position, and that of Carnap, than Carnap did.

I feel that the distance from Pakistanis to Iranians and Arabs, their “fellow Muslims”, is small. In fact, this may generalize to some extent to all South Asian Muslims (when I visited Bangladesh in 2004 random people would want to get into an argument about the Palestinians with me). But the distance and affinity from Arabs and Iranians to South Asians is large and minimal.

Here is what West Asians think of South Asians: Indian student went to join the Islamic State, but all he got was this lousy job cleaning toilets.

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VijayVan
4 years ago

Someone mentioned, during Saddam Hussiem days, in the Baghdad airport immigration , one line for Ummah and one for Non-Ummah. Ummah line was for Arabic countries.
Don’t know whether it still continues

Ali Choudhury
Ali Choudhury
4 years ago

There is usually a separate line for GCC citizens at Arab airports.

Lot of cluelessness about this, I’ve seen people ask when Saudi was going to start oil-boycotting India.

Prats
Prats
4 years ago

“Lot of cluelessness about this, I’ve seen people ask when Saudi was going to start oil-boycotting India.”

On the other hand Saudi Aramco just bought a 20% stake in Reliance’s petrochemical business for around $15 billion.

Not an expert and don’t know what it means from a geo-political point of view.
But considering a lot of India’s refineries are on the west coast in Gujarat, close to Pakistan, Saudi financial interest would seem to be in minimizing misadventures from the Gernails.

In the longer run, I hope we eschew oil entirely. India needs a national man-on-moon kind of a project to wean off its oil dependency.

Some of our best brains ought to work on energy security.

Pscv
Pscv
4 years ago

I’d be sceptical about that toilet cleaning story. A lot of ISIL POWs claim to have only done menial jobs at the caliphate. It was always someone else who committed the murder, enslavement, and rapine.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
Reply to  Pscv

“A lot of ISIL POWs claim to have only done menial jobs at the caliphate. It was always someone else who committed the murder, enslavement, and rapine.”

Makes sense. +1.
Someone with a high IQ should have noticed this themselves. 😉

Amey
Amey
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

That was a ruse. The dude definitely did more clean toilets for them. Here’s the detailed story:

https://fountainink.in/reportage/the-war-he-saw-

Karan
Karan
4 years ago

I wonder how much of a rude awakening many of these ummah nationalists of south asian extraction get when they visit middle eastern countries.

Brown
Brown
4 years ago

When indian muslims go to gulf broadly 3 things happen.
1. chance to pray 5 times a day. this becomes a peer pressure after some time.
2. realisation that arabs don’t care for them.
3. any residue love for pakistan and pakistanis will evaporate. their profile is less that that of indians across all classes.

Vikram
4 years ago

Any common nationality between Muslims is a non-starter because the elites speak different languages and are immersed in different classical literatures.

The only common elite language possible is English, and that would put Pakistani elites in a dominant position, hence their enthusiasm for the idea.

H. M. Brough
H. M. Brough
4 years ago

Joke: religious solidarity

Woke: THICC oil money

thewarlock
thewarlock
4 years ago

Habibis have chosen to tamally maak Hindus over Haleems.
May peace be upon whomever ever brings long term peace and prosperity.

Jai Shri Ameen

PS. I suggest Razib start a specific blog just for Kashmir. He can call it

Whitepandits

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago

By and large the observation of this post are right on the money. The pining for ummah is much more intense in pak than the other way round.

I wonder what other such cases of unrequited love exist in the world. Turkey has always longed to be seen as a European country, only to be be shunned by Europe repeatedly. (Though this has changed quite a bit under Erodogan. Now Turkey seems comfortable just being Turkey.)

Also, a bunch of sahel belt countries of Africa (Chad, Niger, Mauritania etc) fancies themselves as Arabs. Not sure if the Arabs of Arabian peninsula accepts them as such.

Also closer home, distance from Nepal to India seems quite large than the opposite way. Thin skinned Nepalese forever trying to run away from the suffocating embrace of their big brother 🙂

Brown Pundits