UNLIKE many other Asian countries—and in stark contrast to neighbouring Pakistan—India has never been run by its generals. The upper ranks of the powerful civil service of the colonial Raj were largely Hindu, while Muslims were disproportionately represented in the army. On gaining independence the Indian political elite, which had a strong pacifist bent, was […]
It wasn’t Barack Obama’s doing — at least not fully. The crowds in Paris and Berlin, and the Muslims in Cairo and Karachi, eager to be done with President George W. Bush, took the new standard-bearer of American power as one of their own, a cosmopolitan man keen to break with the embattled certitude of […]
Just over twenty years ago, Hindu militants destroyed the sixteenth-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, northern India, prompting riots around the country that claimed thousands of lives—overwhelmingly Muslim—including nine hundred in Bombay (now Mumbai) alone.* Ten years later, a conflagration of violence in India’s northwestern state of Gujarat killed at least as many Muslims, with the support […]
Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84% of the 2010 world population of […]
Mysteries have surrounded the Muslim Brotherhood since its founding, in 1928. Nobody knows how many members there are, or how much money the organization receives, or where it all comes from. The chain of command is murky; the goals and the guiding philosophy are not clearly stated. The Egyptian revolution, which has rolled and lurched […]
Kasab, the world came to call him, “the butcher”: butcher not because he shot dead 55 women, men and children, Hindu and Muslim at short range with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, but because it denoted his underprivileged southern Punjab caste. For millions of Indians, the man caught on closed circuit television cameras as he walked […]
Many foreign policy mandarins might not like or understand it, but the foreign policy operating environment is changing quickly. When in 2011 the Swedish Foreign Minister, Carl Bildt, was unable to get in touch with his Bahraini counterpart during the heat of the protest movement there, he opted to publicly shame him via Twitter. When General Electric was […]
As the networked world of the internet makes that which is distant seem very local, reality can be both distorted and amplified. The unfortunate “Innocence of Muslims” video served as a catalyst for the dissatisfaction felt by many toward American support of Arab nations. Yet this would not have occurred without the ability to spread […]
Egypt‘s experiment with an Islamist government has passed 100 days. Mohammed Morsi, the second choice of his party, soft-spoken and hardly charismatic, has managed to stay in power and is even seen to be making progress. He has pulled off several tricky political set pieces – successfully challenging the old guard of army generals, hectoring […]
Rage is all the rage. As we all know, radical Muslims are enraged about blasphemous videos and cartoons—so much so that an American ambassador to a country liberated by the United States was murdered by a howling mob in Libya. I worry about that. I worry even more about this administration’s lame response to it. But […]
looking beyond borders 