Two comments overnight exposed different sides of the the same problem.
You Can’t Weaponise Islamophobia and Then Kneecap Hinduism
Kabir tried to circulate a link around Manu Pillai’s Gods, Guns and Missionaries, a serious book, framed around whether Hinduism was, in some sense, constructed. The question is legitimate. All traditions are constructed. All identities consolidate under pressure.
But Hinduism and Islam are pari passu in this respect. The nineteenth century shaped both. Colonial enumeration shaped both. Reform movements reshaped both. Romila Thapar, Wendy Doniger, Sheldon Pollock; the literature on Hindu consolidation is vast. So is the literature on Islamic reform: Wahhabism emerging from Najd in the 1740s, Deoband crystallising in 1867 directly in response to 1857, Barelvism as counter-movement to both. All traditions have formation moments. All traditions modernise under pressure.
To apply the deconstructive lens to Hinduism while leaving Islamic historiography untouched is not intellectual rigour. It is asymmetry. Kabir, who deploys “Islamophobia” as a first-strike weapon with the hair-trigger of a seasoned litigator, has never shown the slightest inclination to subject his own tradition to equivalent scrutiny. If the lens is universal, use it universally. If it is selective, say so.
Anything else is prosecution dressed up as scholarship.
Pakistan’s Literacy Problem Is Real. The Comparison to India Is Useless. Continue reading Double Standards, Modi’s Gamble, and Why Ramadan Gets It Right
