Ummah – Brown Pundits

Links on My Browser Right Now – Open Thread

A few pieces I’ve been reading this week:

The Lies America Tells Itself About the Middle East: (Foreign Affairs) – On how U.S. narratives obscure its own role in the region.
Don’t Overestimate the Autocratic Alliance: (Foreign Affairs) – A counterpoint: authoritarian states may not be as cohesive as advertised.
The Four Humours: Our 2,500-Year-Old Mania for Personality Types: (BBC Future) – Why these frameworks endure and what that says about how societies interpret character.
Can We Hear God? (Bahá’í Teachings) – A reflection on divine communication and perception.
The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society: (James Marriott, Substack) – On how screens and AI are reshaping reading and writing itself. Thanks Kabir for the suggestion.

Reflections

On the Ummah: Muslims have often failed to concede ground in internal debates, which has left them politically boxed in. One reform across all denominations would be to return directly to the Quran as the primary authority. That alone would dissolve many cultural accretions, halal (animals should be stunned before slaughter), hijab (a Sassanian trait), and other practices, into something more adaptive.

And here’s a more speculative question: if the “Satanic Verses” were reconsidered if Al-Lat, Al-Uzzah, and Al-Manat were understood as sacred divinities at the threshold of the Lote Tree, would that make Islam more fluid, especially for minority-majority dynamics?

On Kabir: I’m not moderating him out, but readers should be aware that he frames everything through Muslim-rights activism. Engage, but don’t get gaslit into endless provocations. Everyone is entitled to their nationalisms — but they can’t claim liberalism at the same time. That tension makes it worth examining how plurality is treated within the Hindu fold itself. Dharma, unlike the Abrahamic Faiths, tends to all for multiple truths co-existing with each other (Buddhism and indigenous East Asian religions).

👉 Over to you. I’m retreating from heavy moderation — I see BP’s strength in letting the commentariat lead. Biases are fine. Gratuitous abuse is not.

“In March 1998 the Indian PM Gujral, told … “Pakistan was not capable of making atomic bombs.” he had been convinced by Indian Intelligence and Dr Raja Raman, the head of Indian Atomic Energy Commission, who had publicly claimed that nuclear weapon were beyond Pakistan’s reach.”

The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

🕌 Reflections on Kabir, Afridi, and the Compact of Coexistence

The recent incident involving Kabir / Bombay Badshah / Honey Singh, and the orchestrated drama around his entrapment has, quite unexpectedly, become a catalyst for deeper discussion on Brown Pundits. While none have chosen to focus on analytics (“2,000 daily visitors”—thank you very much:-), the real story lies in how this drama has exposed, yet again, the deep ideological fissures within South Asian identity; especially in the India-Pakistan-Muslim triad.

Let’s begin by being honest: Brown Pundits, for all its digressions into Sri Lanka, Nepal, or Bangladesh, is still primarily a blog about India and Pakistan, and more crucially, about Indian and Pakistani Muslims. This is a feature, not a bug. The origins of the blog lie in the Sepia Mutiny, a scattered band of intellectually independent thinkers questioning dogma from every direction (which started in 2004 and if we are a “daughter blog” that we means have 20+yrs of intellectual antecedents on the Brownet), and it has now matured into one of the few platforms willing to wrestle with the ideological ambiguities at the heart of the subcontinent.

🧕 Kabir’s Point: Brotherhood, Boundaries, and the Big Choice

Kabir made an astute, if difficult, observation: that he views Indian Muslims as “brothers”, but does not feel the same about Pakistani non-Muslims.

This sounds contradictory until one understands the emotional exhaustion of watching Muslims oscillate between claiming ummah-hood when convenient, and weaponizing liberal values when needed. It’s a cognitive dissonance that creates what I can only call the moral coexistence trap: the idea that Muslims, especially in India, demand maximum accommodation, of their food (their nauseating right to murder Gau Mata on Bharat’s sacred soil itself), Faith, festivals, and foreign affiliations, while rarely extending the same pluralistic courtesy in return.

And then there’s that infamous Shahid Afridi clip, the one where he smashed his television after watching an Aarti, being performed. To many of us, that wasn’t just a cringe-inducing moment of bigotry; it begged a real question: Why do Indian cricketers continue to shake hands with Hinduphobes Hindu-hating men like Afridi and his ilk (the Pakistan cricket team)? At what point does tolerance become indulgence?

🚩 The Compact of Indian Minorities: Understand It or Leave It

Continue reading The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

The Pakistani Inferiority Complex

These excellent tweets exhibit a painful pattern that many of us see but few want to name.

Pakistanis, particularly its establishment and elite classes, exhibit a deep inferiority complex towards white (light) Muslims; Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Afghans. These groups are valorized, romanticized, and used as benchmarks for identity and belonging. Meanwhile, other Asian groups, especially within South Asia and Southeast Asia, are seen as lesser. This manifests not only in foreign policy but in pop culture, education, and internalized social hierarchies.

This is why, even if Partition had to happen (and it was undeniably disastrous), Pakistan still could have been something else. It could’ve been a GCC meets Pahlavi Iran construct—a sleek, semi-modernist, high-income Asian Muslim republic with cultural gravitas and economic depth.

Instead, as others have rightly pointed out, Pakistan today has one of the lowest HDIs in its region. Karachi didn’t become Dubai. Lahore didn’t become Paris. Islamabad remains a ghost town of beautiful boulevards and hollow institutions. The promise wasn’t just broken; it was never even understood.

In some ways, Pakistan inherited the worst of both its imagined lineages: neither the intellectual cosmopolitanism of Persianate high culture, nor the industrious civic ambition of Indian civilizational continuity.

This is why tweets like those from @MrFreeFighter land so hard. They expose the psychic dissonance at the heart of the Pakistani state’s anxieties; its hatred of Pashtuns, its paranoia about “Afghanism,” and its inability to deal with its own peripheral ethnic groups as anything but threats.

Meanwhile, Indian Muslims like bombaybadshah, though deeply patriotic to India, often voice critiques of Pakistan with a clarity born of disappointment. They represent what Pakistan could have cultivated: a civic Islam, grounded in identity but untethered to ethnic obsession.

The final irony? South East Asia, Thailand, Cambodia, even Bali, retains more civilizational Dharma than most of Pakistan. Religion is irrespective of that elusive civilisational quality of Dharma, thus the true borders of Bharat lie eastward, not northwest.

Pakistan is not the enemy of India. It is the shattered mirror. And what it reflects, feudalism, insecurity, bigotry, and colonial hangover, is what the entire subcontinent must transcend. Again anyone who reads this can see I’m not saying this from a place of hate but love.