It seems that many South Indian Muslims are “Urdufying.” It’s interesting to reflect that if Partition hadn’t happened; the same thing might have happened to East Bengal.
The Muslims of India rallied under the banner of Islam, which was a catch-all term, but instead they could have easily made a linguistic argument for Urdu & Persianate culture.
@DailyTurkic Percentage of adults who pray five times a day in the “Stan” countries, according to the Pew Research Center.
Pakistanis of course, being good Hindus, are careful to do daily Puja. Namaz of course has the same cognate root as “namaste.”
The Persianate inflected cultures (Tajikistan and Afghanistan) are far more religious than the Turkic kin.
By new Precedent, ceasefires are lifted by default, and maintained only where a commenter requests one on Online Safety grounds, as K has (BB – RNJ – 0M).
We argued in “The Patriarchy Survives Everything” that has no religion.
Over the last month, in order not to be Islamophobic, a line was surreptiously moved. The proposition that women should be confined to the home and kept out of higher education stopped being an outrage to be dismantled in public and became a “perspective” to be weighed.
Silence on the right of a woman to leave her own house, and called the silence respect. A space loud for one liberty and mute on another has not been even-handed; it has been captured. That is the moment the emperor lost his clothes and the courtiers agreed not to mention it.
How a country starts eating halal
RNJ consistently brings up Nassim Taleb’s seminal piece on “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.” Continue reading Is Pakistan primitive?
Kabir’s claim, is that much of the Saffroniate comes to Brown Pundits for one purpose: to litigate Pakistan, and to litigate the Muslim. Take that fixture away and the room goes quiet. The post on Hindustani classical music sinks without a ripple. The translated short story draws three comments and dies. Only the threads that arm the two camps against each other run to hundred+.
Is he right?
There is one fault line under everything that happens here, and it is old. Pakistan stands, whether it wishes to or not, as the proxy for the Muslims of the subcontinent, and India as the proxy for its non-Muslims. This is not a quarrel of the last election or the last war. It is a wound more than a thousand years old, set running when Muhammad bin Qasim landed in Sindh in 711, and it has been arguing with itself in the subcontinental subconscious ever since. Every thread on this site is a small, late episode of that argument.
There is a scene in The Devil Wears Prada, the cerulean one, where a colour chosen by Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) at the summit of fashion is followed down the seasons, runway to department store to clearance bin, until Andy (Anne Hathaway), who fishes it out is sure her choice owed nothing to any of it.
The subcontinent’s argument works the same way. Bin Qasim’s landing in 711 was a decision taken at the top of history, and it has filtered down through thirteen centuries of conquest, doctrine and memory into a comment thread, where two strangers swapping insults are certain the quarrel is about this week. It is not. It was chosen for them a thousand years ago, and they are wearing it without knowing the name of the colour.
What is new is that the argument is going quiet, and quiet is worse than loud. The subcontinent is partitioning itself a second time, in the mind. Indians increasingly talk only to Indians, Pakistanis only to Pakistanis, each inside a feed built to agree with them. The 1947 line cut the map; the algorithm is cutting the conversation. Against that, the value of Brown Pundits is simple and almost embarrassing to state. It is one of the few open places left where the two sides still argue with each other in public and mean it. That is worth defending even when the argument is ugly, because the alternative is not a calmer argument. It is no argument, and two rooms that never open the door.
Is BP sui generis on the Internet?
I have often noticed something distinctive that Brown pundits—especially Pakistani Muslim commentators—bring to the table.
I will highlight two or three comments from previous posts that shed light on an important aspect often missing from Indian discourse.
One comment by Kabir from about 25 days ago stated:
“Muslims tend to be more intransigent vis-à-vis conversion of a spouse.” Sharia is very clear on this point. A Muslim man may marry a Christian or Jewish woman without her converting. A Muslim woman, however, cannot marry a non‑Muslim man; there are no exceptions for women. Of course, Kareena Kapoor married Saif Ali Khan without converting to Islam, but that was not a nikaah. Under Islamic law, they are not considered married—though I doubt either of them is concerned about that.
Another important comment by Kabir was:
Continue reading The saffron and the crescent – why BP matters
Two comments are worth picking up on, and one claim worth interrogating.
N disagrees that contact ameliorates ties. EK suggests the only Islamicate voices the Indian RW respects are those who have “debased their own civilizational integrity.” We do not know who he is shadow-tweeting. It could be us, the Founders of this blog, who are Islamicate by heritage and recognisably friendly to Hindu right-wing readings. Either way, the framing is off. And then there is Q, on the thread as we write, claiming Pakistanis “will eventually take over the Islamicate world.“
The cost of distance
The dominant idea of the last decade is that less contact means more security. Fewer visas. Less trade. No cricket. No artistic exchange. Reduced diplomatic warmth. This is sold as realism. It is, in large part, self-harm.
Distance does not produce clarity. It produces mythology. When people stop meeting one another, they begin imagining one another. The imagined neighbour is always simpler, darker, and easier to hate than the real one.
He is also, as Dhurandhar showed, sexier. Hatred and desire run on the same current. The more villainous the Pakistani on screen, the more the Indian audience leans in.
Civility is built by proximity. Not sainthood. Habituation. When people share space, study, trade, marriage, and culture, the room for fantasy narrows. One can still dislike the other side. But one dislikes actual people, not cartoons.
N’s response to this is that contact theory is “akin to blaming a victim for not engaging with the perpetrator.” That feels like the Israeli security story applied to the Indian Sub-continent. It assumes Pakistanis are a permanent terror-source requiring permanent counter-violence.
Pakistan obliges the narrative by behaving badly enough often enough to keep it alive. India obliges the frame by treating every bad actor as the median Pakistani. Both governments are now invested in the loop.
Pakistanis no longer defend hybrid Islamicate culture Continue reading India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves
We were at our favourite Persian restaurant. A young woman two tables away, not Persian herself, was telling her Persian father about her female friend in continental Europe.
The friend was Pakistani-origin. She had started dating a Latino man. The Pakistani friend’s mother, somehow, had a dream. In the dream, her daughter had lost her virginity.
The dream was the trigger.
The mother went into a spiral. The father, it was said, lost his job. The mother had a nervous breakdown. A trip back to the Muslim homeland was arranged. The daughter refused to board until she saw the return flight in her hand. Only then did she get on the plane. When she returned to the Muslim country, they told her she wasn’t going back to Europe.
We lost the rest of the story, and, over the rest of the meal, we thought about Sana Cheema.
What Sana Cheema Saw
Sana Cheema was a twenty-six-year-old Italian-Pakistani who had lived in Brescia since 2002. She wanted to marry a second-generation Italian-Pakistani man of her own choosing. Her father took her back to Gujrat, in Punjab, under the pretext of a visit.
She was strangled the day before her return flight to Italy. Her neck was broken. Her hyoid bone dislocated. Her father, her brother, and her uncle were charged. They had buried her quickly, without autopsy, and told relatives she had died of natural causes. The body had to be exhumed on a magistrate’s order after Italian media forced the case into daylight.
Qandeel Baloch, in the Same Line Continue reading Why is Pakistani Culture obsessed with Policing Female Virginity?
Dissent Must Have a Home
The parent post set out why the house speaks in the plural and why pruning widens the room. This post sets out the harder discipline. A plural voice that cannot bind itself is not a voice. It is a whip. And a forum that cannot bind its Founders is not a forum. It is their salon.
The Crescent anchor.
When Brown Pundits was revived, two commentators returned before anyone else. Kabir was one of them. sbarrkum was the other. That mattered more than any traffic number. A forum lives by the return of people willing to argue in public, under their own names or their settled masks, on a schedule that does not flinch.
Kabir matters for a second reason. The Centre gathers quietly and often overlaps with the Saffron bench in instinct or historical frame. The Crescent bloc on this site is essentially held together by Kabir. Remove him and the others do not regroup under a new flag. They drift.
Without Kabir, Brown Pundits will become a site where Muslims are written about more than they are written by.
This is a Brown Pundits Precedent Post.
We have been asked, repeatedly and in good faith, why Brown Pundits appears to handle criticism of India with more care than it handles criticism of Pakistan. The charge is that we hold a double standard. It deserves a direct answer.
The answer is that we do hold a distinction, and we are not embarrassed by it, but it is not the distinction the charge assumes.
The Distinction
Pakistan is roughly seventy-nine years old as a sovereign state. India as a sovereign state is roughly seventy-nine years old as well. As nation-states under international law, as signatories to the United Nations, as entities with currencies and armies and foreign ministries, the two are pari passu. We treat them that way and we will continue to treat them that way. On every question that applies to nation-states as nation-states, the two sit at the same table and get the same scrutiny.
But India is not only a nation-state. India is also a civilisation, and the civilisation is not seventy-nine years old. The civilisation is, give or take the archaeological argument one prefers to have, somewhere around five thousand years old. It stretches from the Indus Valley through the Dravidian-Aryan synthesis, through the Vedic period, through the great classical flowering, through the medieval syntheses, through the colonial rupture, and into the present. One can argue the exact nature of the continuity. One cannot plausibly argue that the continuity is not there. It is there in the same way it is there for China. It is there in the same way it is there for Egypt. It is there.
This is not a claim about superiority. It is a claim about category. Pakistan is a sovereign state. India is a sovereign state and a civilisation. The two facts do not cancel. They coexist.
The Civilisational Peer Group Is Short
How short is short. At the level of a nation-state that is co-terminus with a multi-millennial civilisation, the peer group is essentially India and China. Two entries. Iran and Egypt have the civilisational depth but have been transformed by the Greco-Arab conquest, in an unalterable fashion. Greece has the civilisational depth but the modern Greek state is a nineteenth-century construction with limited political continuity to the ancient polis; the Ottoman interlude was equally determinative. Israel is a unique case and we will come to it.
That leaves India and China. Two countries on the planet where the nation-state is also the civilisation, where the sovereign political entity today is a recognisable continuation of the same cultural-linguistic-religious matrix that produced its earliest texts, and where the ordinary citizen, with some education, can read something written two or three thousand years ago in a language that is still a living vehicle of the culture.
That is not a small claim. It is also not a nationalist claim. It is simply a descriptive one.
The Indian Exception Continue reading India That Is Bharat: The Exceptional Uniqueness and the Dual Identity
