Editorial

Abstract

Can we justify scholarship in apocalyptic times? “Across the world, genocidal states are attacking Muslims,” reads the title of an opinion piece by sociologist Arjun Appadurai, “Is Islam really their target?”1 “As Israel incarcerates Palestinians and Myanmar drives out its Rohingyas, a reflection on the predicament of ethnic and racial biominorities,” reads the by-line. Welcome to the club, I thought. For decades, this has been the question Muslims have asked themselves. The piece ends with little great insight, but it is the banality of the observation, one made by an Indian-American sociologist, not an al-Qaeda operative ready to blow things up in revenge, that caught my attention. The banality of Muslim blood, that is. Palestine is being shot and bled to death by a fanatic ethno-religious, nationalist, colonizing, apartheid state. We are Palestine. The Rohingya are being burned, raped, and annihilated by another ethno-religious, nationalist state. Rohingyan mothers are birthing en masse the children of their Myanmar rapists. We are Rohingya. The Kashmiris and millions of Indian Muslims are being deprived daily of their dignity, humanity, and life by yet another religiously-inspired ethnic nationalism. We are Kashmiris. In China, Uighur Muslim men are being exterminated, held in torture and brainwashing camps, while their women are forced to cohabitate with Chinese men.2 In all four cases, an ancient religion has been conscripted to provide identity, unity, passion, and even the narrative to justify the carnage, some bordering on genocide. A secular, enlightened Europe is pulverizing its Muslim minorities, minorities that are there only because their lands were invaded, exploited, divided, and left to rot under ruined institutions and puppet regimes propped up by the very same Europeans who cannot tolerate Muslims in their midst. And now, China, the emerging superpower, surpasses them all in its systematic extermination of its Muslim population or identity. We Muslims (ought to) know better than to blame all Jews, ...