Olivia
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PrōjectBihar
@ProjectBihar
Trying to elevate discourse on Bihar
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Joined July 2019
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The biggest irony of Left-wing protests is that neither the protesters nor their supporters raising this issue of labourers from Bihar and UP in Gujarat and other states, an issue that lies at the core of their own ideology and is far more consequential and legitimate than vote chori (which is just noise with no actual substance).
Neither Bihari pages nor popular personal accounts from Bihar seem to be questioning them or raising this issue loudly enough.
The Left is preoccupied with orchestrating regime change while ignoring the concerns of those who actually matter.
And where are those youthful and energetic Biharis who went to protest in Delhi to bring down the govt? Do the Leftist elites who want to grab power through street power matter more to you than your own people?
This is the reason why modi never want bihar should get industrialize..
Hell yeah
DESTROY THE INTERNET
I'm ready to touch some grass
Don’t stop talking about Punjab but look at Bihar too….
Dry for a decade, Bihar hit by a new lethal high: Drugs & addicts https://t.co/A2Ef9vXczQ via @IndianExpress
Marxist historiography claims to examine history from the perspective of the people, yet it labelled Muḥammad Shāh ‘Rangīlā’.
Such a characterisation can happen only if Mughal Empire is seen from a court-centred perspective.
Muḥammad Šāh (Rangīlā), arguably the most tolerant and pluralistic of the Mughals, is sadly dismissed as a weak, pleasure-seeking monarch.
Yet his rule is unique insofar as the state never executed religious dissidents, banished monastic communities, demolished temples, or forcibly renamed a sacred city.
Muḥammad Šāh (Rangīlā), arguably the most tolerant and pluralistic of the Mughals, is sadly dismissed as a weak, pleasure-seeking monarch.
Yet his rule is unique insofar as the state never executed religious dissidents, banished monastic communities, demolished temples, or forcibly renamed a sacred city.
Bihar's alcohol prohibition has created several serious problems.
It has diverted police resources towards enforcing prohibition, at the expense of other law-enforcement priorities.
Deprived a poverty ridden state of a significant source of tax revenue.
Worse, the longer illicit markets for alcohol and other intoxicating substances is maturing, it would become more difficult to dismantle.
Even if the govt lifts prohibition, it will still have to contend with entrenched illegal supply networks of dry substance.
The decision to ban alcohol was futile.
EXPRESS INVESTIGATION
Bihar banned alcohol. But a new drug crisis is emerging.
Ten years of prohibition. An extraordinary policing effort.
Every day, Bihar Police has seized an average of 8,650 litres of liquor and arrested 196 people for liquor-related crimes. Yes, that’s 196 arrests / day. No typo.
Yet, beneath the crackdown on illicit alcohol, a more insidious trade is taking root.
Heroin. Tablets. Pocket-sized packets. Vials. Drugs hidden in soap boxes and petticoat folds.
From smuggled bottles to a booming underground drug market, Bihar’s battle with addiction is entering a dangerous new phase.
An investigation by The Indian Express.
https://t.co/ZxG2cs4HgU
We still don’t know if impact of AI on growth will be 2% or -2% but latter is gaining credence
Meanwhile, white competency:
CYBERSECURITY ADVISORY ON CRITICAL PHP VULNERABILITIES AFFECTING GOVERNMENT WEBSITES AND WEB APPLICATIONS
#BREAKING: North Korea suffers internet disruptions, .kp domain sites go dark.
Oct 2026 may well be remembered as a watershed moment in digital security, much as the Y2K crisis was in the history of computing.
The PHP patch may not be as effective as we'd hoped. Holy fuck it might actually be over
"You cannot reform a Terrorist. Once they are outside, they will angst out years of anger subdued inside during their time in Jail. A released terrorist is more dangerous to society than a reluctant fundamentalist. Those released from Guantanamo Bay ended up becoming the most dreadest Al Qaeda operatives."
Anyone who speaks of "cutting Assam out of India" deserves same or worse. If Sharjeel Imam is released, @assampolice should give him the treatment they are infamous for.
Let it be clear. Nobody. NOBODY, should ever dare to threaten Northeast people. And we, the people of Assam, across Party lines agree with Government on how they are treating Sharjeel Imam.
Sorry, but anyone empathising with Sharjeel Imam viewpoint is an ISIS Sympathiser. Because every word out of Sharjeel mouth has been seditious, against unity and integrity of India. People like Sharjeel, inspired by Jihadi material within their rooms on internet. Go onto inspire other criminal elements and create lone-wolf attackers. They might sound non-threatening because they are expressing their free speech. But when the speech, itself becomes the greatest tool of religious indoctrination, it does not take formal training to create a Fidayeen.
During my time in Guwahati Jail, I met this 22 year old young boy who was an IIT Guwahati Student. He was a shy kid who hanged around alone inside Guwahati Jail. One day, he came up to me knowing I was the only Lawyer - Jailee inside and wanted to know his legal rights. The Jailer Sir and Jail Superintendent, who observe everything on CCTV asked me to stay away from him, as they believed he was a gone case. I told them, I believe in reformation and let's see what got this boy from a JEE Topper into a IS recruit.
The boy had a very touching story. His dad was a daily wage labourer while mother was a Tailor in a poor locality of Delhi. He was a childhood genius. Studied his way around Government Schools, cracked IIT JEE around 2020 after Delhi Riots. It was during this time, he came across Sharjeel Imam videos. Once he got into IIT, he used the privacy of his hostel room to explore further on chat rooms and dark web. Got in touch with so-called handlers in Bangladesh. He was one stop away from pulling a catastrophe.
I would do my morning walks with him. Engage in debate for hours to feel his pulse. But the absolute religious mindwash of this boy, even after being in jail, was relentless. For him, Indian Constitution is un-Islamic and Constitutional ideals of equality and secularism, untainable. I would even bring examples from Quran like Abu-Bakr and the way Prophet justified equal treatment to slaves. Those principles are somewhere enshrined in Constitution,Article 14, minority religious rights etc. I would always tell him Indian Constitution is not perfect, and yes there are points which can be abused, but still it is the best thing for us. And we should trust in it, as it is drafted by rational men, not an interpretation of word of God.
But this boy, would bring Kashmir in every other argument. Paint plight of Muslims in India in a picture worst than Palestinians in Gaza. And in his head, he still believed that in 1947, the right to choose or franchise was stolen from muslims. And that gives him or others the legitimacy to call for secession. Call us Kafirs.
I loved Jurisprudence, so I would try to negate the grundnorm or source of his arguments. That Indian Constitution gives no right to secession. But he was always adamant on it. And if he lost an argument, he would say, Sharjeel Bhaiya spoke so. So it must be correct! He was a typical Andhbhakt but on the other side of spectrum.
It is one example, there are multiple such examples of such wolves created by Sharjeel across University Campuses through his videos. I told Jailer Sir, I give up. He said, Singh Ji, you are a Guest for few days here. Why get involved with such people who have given up on life and see death as only solitude.
I learnt my lesson. You cannot reform a Terrorist. Once they are outside, they will angst out years of anger subdued inside during their time in Jail. A released terrorist is more dangerous to society than a reluctant fundamentalist. Those released from Guantanamo Bay ended up becoming the most dreadest Al Qaeda operatives
@Lawyer_Kalpana Did u get this FIR from Mumbai police ???
Wow Actual dictator is Devendra fadnavis 💀💀💀
You cannot Criticise Amruta you see
Bro this man needs to resign !!
Death of Democracy in Maharashtra
Oh man Mulle bulao ghar expose mat karo
Can someone recommend a good article or video explaining the eMudhra certificate incident? I suspect its implications are far more consequential than I currently realise, but I haven't yet grasped why. Looking for something that explains both the technical details and the broader significance.
No joint press conference in Mumbai after US Secy of state Rubio & EAM Jaishankar meet in Mumbai, like the one happened in Delhi this year.
Looks like American side was vary of taking question from Indian side on recent instances of racism, anti India rehtoric in US.
We are preparing representations to @GoI_MeitY, @IndianCERT and @ccaindiapki on the compromise of the private keys of eight eMudhra (emSign) intermediate certification authority certificates. Given the scale of the issue, Cabinet Minister @AshwiniVaishnaw must issue a public statement and outline the steps being taken to address it.
Islamism and the Left
> "Since the late 1970s, and particularly in the last decade, this stimulant is working most powerfully in the Islamic world. From Pakistan to Nigeria, and in parts of Europe, too, Islam today is a religion capable of inspiring large numbers of men and women, mostly men, to kill and die on its behalf. So the Islamic revival is a kind of testing moment for the left: can we recognize and resist “the possibility of tyranny?”"
> "I am afraid of Hindutva zealots in India, of messianic Zionists in Israel, and of rampaging Buddhist monks in Myanmar. But I admit that I am most afraid of Islamist zealots because the Islamic world at this moment in time (not always, not forever) is especially feverish and fervent. Indeed, the politically engaged Islamist zealots can best be understood as today’s crusaders."
> "I know that there is a “jihad of the soul” in addition to the “jihad of the sword,” and that Mohammed famously declared the first of these to be the greater jihad."
> "I frequently come across leftists who are more concerned with avoiding accusations of Islamophobia than they are with condemning Islamist zealotry."
> "Most leftists, whatever problems they have understanding religion, have no difficulty fearing and opposing Hindu nationalists, zealous Buddhist monks, and the messianic Zionists of the settler movement (the phrase “no difficulty” is a gross understatement in this last case). And, of course, no one on the left makes common cause with Islamist militants who kidnap schoolgirls, or murder heretics, or tear down the ancient monuments of rival civilizations."
> "The left has always had difficulty recognizing the power of religion. Aren’t all religions the ideological tools of the ruling class? And aren’t all millenialist and messianic uprisings the ideologically distorted response of subaltern groups to material oppression?"
> "All these left responses to Islamist zealots—identification, support, sympathy, apology, tolerance, and avoidance—look very strange if we consider the actual content of their ideology. Jihadi opposition to “the West” should provoke serious worry on the left before any other response."
> "In recent years, Russia and China have sometimes claimed to oppose both Western imperialism and Western values, but these two countries look more like rival imperial powers than opponents of imperialism. While their leaders occasionally resort to value arguments (as when Chinese rulers endorse the Confucian ideal of “harmony”), they don’t seem strongly committed to the values they proclaim. But the Islamists are definitely committed. They have their own large ambitions, but these are highly idealistic ambitions, which leave little room for material interests. Their zealotry is a value zealotry, theologically driven, and it is a real challenge to “Western” values."
—Michael Walzer : American political theorist and public intellectual, professor emeritus at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and former editor of the left-wing political magazine
@DissentMag
🧵(1/4)
Islamism and the Left
Most leftists have no difficulty opposing Hindu nationalists, zealous Buddhist monks, and the messianic Zionists of the settler movement. Why won’t they take a firm stance against Islamists?
"UN experts are oxymoron", says Marco Rubio when asked about UN Special Rapporteur comments on India protests
Vdo ctsy: Fox Raw Live Now
(4/4) What would a genuinely leftist movement against oppression and poverty look like? First of all, it would be a movement of the oppressed, a mobilization of men and women, previously passive, inarticulate, and frightened, now able to speak for themselves and defend their human rights. Second, its aim would be the liberation or, better, the self-emancipation of those same people. And its driving force would be a vision, no doubt partially shaped by the local culture, of a new society whose members, men and women alike, would be more free and more equal and whose government would be responsive and accountable. That’s not an unusual description of left aspiration. So it’s a mystery that anyone anywhere can seriously believe that any Islamist group belongs to the global, or any other, left.
How should the left respond to those Islamist groups—assuming, as I believe, that a critical response is necessary? I am not going to consider military responses here. There is an international brigade of Islamist zealots fighting in Iraq and Syria, but there is no chance of recruiting an international brigade of leftist fighters, so there is no point thinking about where we might send them. Leftists will have to support (though many won’t) military efforts specifically aimed at stopping the massacre of infidels and heretics. After that, I am more inclined to consider a policy focused on the containment of Islamism rather than a war (or a series of wars) to destroy it. This is a fever that will have to burn itself out. But there is a deep difficulty with this view: many people will suffer in the burning, and leftists ignore that suffering at our moral peril. How to help those who are targeted by Islamist forces is a question that we will have to address again and again. But we should begin with the ideological war.
In that war, we need first to distinguish between Islamist zealotry and Islam itself. I doubt that we will get any credit for doing that. Writers like Paul Berman and Meredith Tax have made the distinction with great care in everything they have written against Islamism, and their critics have mostly managed not to notice. No one else’s care is likely to be noticed, but the distinction is still important. We should insist particularly on the difference between the writings of zealots like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb in Egypt or Maulana Maududi in India and the work of the great rationalist philosophers of the Muslim past and the liberal reformers of more recent times. We should do this in exactly the same way as we would distinguish between the preachers and sermons of the Christian crusades and Scholastic theology.
We should also engage cooperatively with Muslim, and also lapsed Muslim, opponents of zealotry—and give them the support they ask for. There are a lot of these anti-zealots, and some of them, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, started on the left and then moved rightwards in part because they found so few leftist friends. Paul Berman has written a withering critique of the treatment of Hirsi Ali by leading liberal/left intellectuals,20 and Katha Pollitt, writing in the Nation, wondered, courageously, whether “we leftists and feminists need to think a bit more self-critically about how the AEI [American Enterprise Institute, a neo-conservative think tank] . . . managed to win over this bold and complex crusader for women’s rights.”
We needn’t imitate Hirsi Ali’s fierce anger, which reaches from Islamism to Islam itself and derives from experiences none of us have had. But we would benefit greatly from a study of her trajectory, in which the left’s fear of Islamophobia played a large part. There is a strange unwillingness among leftists to welcome atheists emerging from the Muslim world in the same way we would welcome atheists emerging, say, from the Christian world.
Second, we have to acknowledge that the academic theory (which was also a left theory) that predicted the inevitable triumph of science and secularism isn’t right—at least, its time horizon isn’t right. Leftists have to figure out how to defend the secular state in this “post-secular” age and how to defend equality and democracy against religious arguments for hierarchy and theocracy. The appeal of religious doctrine and practice is obvious today, and we need to understand it if we are to persuade people that religious zealotry is frighteningly unappealing.
Third, we should recognize the power of the zealots and the extent of their political reach. We should clearly name the zealots our enemies and commit ourselves to an intellectual campaign against them—that is, a campaign in defense of liberty, democracy, equality, and pluralism. I am not arguing that leftists should join the famous “clash of civilizations.” All the great religious civilizations are capable, and probably equally capable, of producing violent fanatics and peace-loving saints—and everything in between. So we shouldn’t think about the struggle with Islamists in civilizational but rather in ideological terms. There are many devout Muslims who support the universal values of the “West” and the left, and who search in Islamic texts, just as other religious leftists search in Hindu, Jewish, and Christian texts, for alternative sources and buttressing support for these values.
The organization Women Living under Muslim Laws (WLUML), which works in many Muslim majority countries, is effectively engaged in just this search, with special regard to gender equality. These women are our friends, and some of them have shown remarkable strength in what are often hostile environments; they deserve more support than they have gotten from today’s leftists. Consider the following statement of WLUML at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre:
Fundamentalist terror is by no means a tool of the poor against the rich, of the Third World against the West, of people against capitalism. It is not a legitimate response that can be supported by the progressive forces of the world. Its main target is the internal democratic opposition to [its] theocratic project . . . of controlling all aspects of society in the name of religion . . . When fundamentalists come to power, they silence people; they physically eliminate dissidents and they lock women “in their place,” which, as we know from experience, ends up being a strait jacket.21
This sounds like an appeal against Halliday’s “jihadism of fools,” and I would bet that there were foolish people at the World Social Forum who accused WLUML of Islamophobia. The secular left responds with appropriate hostility to some forms of religious extremism, but its response to Islamist extremism has been weak. Let me ask again and for the last time: why is this so? The terrible fear of Islamophobia is the first reason, and I have suggested a paired set of additional, related, reasons: because Islamists oppose the West, and because we have to respect the way “they” do things over there (no matter what they do). There are probably other reasons. This question should be of critical interest to leftists wherever they live, but it hasn’t received anything like the attention it deserves. A number of secular feminists in the United States and the UK have mobilized against religiously motivated misogyny—including the Islamists’ irrational fear of women: see, for example, the website of the Center for Secular Space. The Italian left magazine and website Reset has also been intelligent, informative, and critical in its discussions of the Muslim world. Here are voices that the rest of the left should listen to and join.
As I’ve already acknowledged, there is no chance that an international brigade of leftist fighters will join any of today’s military battles. My friends and neighbors are not ready to enlist; many of them won’t acknowledge the dangers posed by Islamist zealotry. But there are dangers and the secular left needs defenders. So here I am, a writer, not a fighter, and the most helpful thing I can do is to join the ideological wars. I can claim comrades in many nations, but not yet anywhere near enough of them. There is an international brigade of left intellectuals still waiting to take shape.
—Michael Walzer : American political theorist and public intellectual, professor emeritus at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and former editor of the left-wing political magazine @DissentMag
🧵(1/4)
Islamism and the Left
Most leftists have no difficulty opposing Hindu nationalists, zealous Buddhist monks, and the messianic Zionists of the settler movement. Why won’t they take a firm stance against Islamists?
(3/4) So the critique of Islamism from the left is constrained these days; Islamophobia, however, seems to be growing, and not only on the populist or nationalist right. Why is this happening? The new Islamophobia Studies Journal (a bi-annual publication sponsored by Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender), in an editorial in its second issue, identifies the source of the trouble:
For some, rising anti-Muslim sentiments are immediately explained away as a “natural” outcome of the many violent events in the Muslim world and “terrorism” in general. However, we maintain that the rising negative sentiments may have to do with the presence of a well-organized and well-funded Islamophobic industry that has managed to invade and capture civil society and public discourses without serious contestation. Up to this point, anti-racist and progressive voices have not been effective in challenging this industry, nor have they been able to provide the needed resources to mount regional and national responses.
This is nicely self-serving: more resources for the Journal would certainly be a big help in combating the Islamophobic industry. But notice the reluctance to engage with “the many violent events in the Muslim world.”
One can find a similar reluctance in a series of otherwise excellent articles published in a special issue of the Nation in July 2012. Jack Shaheen’s “How the Media Created the Muslim Monster Myth” is an example of an argument very much like that of the editors of the Islamophobia Studies Journal. The novelist Laila Lalami in “Islamophobia and its Discontents” recognizes that “retrograde blasphemy laws” and “unfair divorce laws” may have something to do with hostility to Islam but rightly refuses to treat these as excuses for the harassment she has lived with here in the United States. Nor would “violent events in the Muslim world” provide any such excuse. Islamist zealotry should never be used to justify or “explain” European and American prejudice. But the entirely legitimate desire to avoid prejudice isn’t a reason to avoid those “violent events.” I don’t mean to single out the Nation here, whose editors organized that useful special issue; so far as I can tell, no leftist magazine or website has attempted a serious engagement with Islamist zealotry.
Most leftists, whatever problems they have understanding religion, have no difficulty fearing and opposing Hindu nationalists, zealous Buddhist monks, and the messianic Zionists of the settler movement (the phrase “no difficulty” is a gross understatement in this last case). And, of course, no one on the left makes common cause with Islamist militants who kidnap schoolgirls, or murder heretics, or tear down the ancient monuments of rival civilizations. Acts like these, insofar as they are noticed, are routinely condemned. Well, not quite routinely: Nikolas Kozloff, in an excellent article, “A Tale of Boko Haram, Political Correctness, Feminism, and the Left,” has documented the strange unwillingness of a number of leftist writers to blame Muslim zealots for the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls.8 Less outrageous, but bad enough, is the unwillingness of many more leftists who do recognize such crimes to attempt a generalizing analysis and an encompassing critique of Islamist zealotry. What stands in the way of analysis and critique?
Deepa Kumar’s book, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire,9 suggests one possible answer to this question: what stands in the way is the fact that Islamists today are opponents of “the West,” that is, of Western, really American, “imperialism”—bases in Saudi Arabia, the two Iraq wars, the Libyan intervention, support for Israel, drone strikes in Somalia, and so on. I would argue that this list requires a selective response: opposition in some cases, certainly, but also agreement in others. I dare say that the overthrow by Islamist zealots of the regimes the United States has supported in the Middle East, bad as some of them are, would not be terribly helpful to the people of the region. But leftist opponents of imperialism don’t usually make selective judgments, and neither do the Islamists. So “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” We watched this maxim being acted out in last August’s demonstration in London, sponsored by the UK Stop the War Coalition, which was attended by vocal supporters of Hamas including secular leftists and religious Muslims (some of them fundamentalist, some not). The secular leftists were fierce opponents of Islamophobia, though they were not entirely free of other phobias.
But there is another reason for the reluctance to condemn Islamist crimes, and that is the great eagerness to condemn the crimes of the West. The root cause of religious zealotry is not religion, many leftist writers insist, but Western imperialism and the oppression and poverty it has bred. So, for example, David Swanson, first on the War Is A Crime website and then on the Tikkun website (with a nervous but only partial disclaimer from the editor), asks “What to do about ISIS?” and answers: “Start by recognizing where ISIS came from. The U.S. and its junior partners destroyed Iraq . . .”10 That’s right; there would be no ISIS in Iraq without the U.S. invasion of 2003, although if Saddam had been overthrown from within, the same religious wars might well have started. For ISIS doesn’t “come from” the U.S. invasion; it is a product of the worldwide religious revival, and there are many other examples of revivalist militancy. Swanson might offer a similar explanation for all of them, but the explanation loses plausibility as the instances multiply.
The left has always had difficulty recognizing the power of religion. Aren’t all religions the ideological tools of the ruling class? And aren’t all millenialist and messianic uprisings the ideologically distorted response of subaltern groups to material oppression? Religious zealotry is a superstructural phenomenon and can only be explained by reference to the economic base. These ancient convictions are particularly obfuscating today. Parvez Ahmed, a Florida professor who is fully cognizant of the “scourge” of Boko Haram, provides a typical example in a recent blog. He argues that “much of the violence [committed] in the name of Islam is less motivated by faith and more so by poverty and desperation.”11 Similarly, Kathleen Cavanaugh from the National University of Ireland, writing on the Dissent website, insists that “the violent and oppressive actions [of ISIS] have little to do with religion per se,” but rather are “underpinned” by material interests.12 But is this right? Why don’t poverty, desperation, and material interests produce a leftist rather than an Islamist mobilization? In fact, the religious revival, not only among Muslims but around the world, among Jews and Christians, Hindus and Buddhists, has enlisted supporters from all social classes, and the driving motive of revivalist activity seems, incredibly, to be religious faith (Fawaz Gerges’s Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy provides ample evidence of religion’s power).13
There are also people on the left who believe that Islamist zealotry is not only produced by Western imperialism but is a form of resistance to it. Whatever groups it actually attracts, it is fundamentally an ideology of the oppressed—a version, though a little strange, of left politics. Think of the leftist writers who described the Sunni and Shi’ite militias fighting against the U.S. occupation of Iraq as “the resistance”—deliberately invoking the French Resistance to the Nazis in the Second World War. But nothing about the Islamist militias was leftist except for the fact that they were fighting against Americans. This example was featured by Fred Halliday in a 2007 article in Dissent called “The Jihadism of Fools.”14 That’s a good tag, but it didn’t stick, as we can see from Slavoj Žižek’s claim the following year that Islamic radicalism is “the rage of the victims of capitalist globalization.” I have to acknowledge that Žižek is not afraid to be called Islamophobic; he advocates a “respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless” critique of Islam and of all other religions.15 But he won’t get the critique right so long as he thinks that the object of Islamist rage is the same as the object of his own rage.
Judith Butler makes a similar mistake when she insists that “understanding Hamas [and] Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.”16 She said that in 2006 and then repeated it with interesting amendments in 2012: Hamas and Hezbollah belong to the global left because they are “anti-imperialist,” but she doesn’t support every organization on the global left, and she specifically doesn’t endorse the use of violence by those two. I am grateful for that last amendment, but the left identification was as wrong in 2012 as it was in 2006—usefully wrong, perhaps, since it helps explain why so many leftists support or won’t actively oppose groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. The only thing that makes these organizations “leftist” is that they are fighting against Israel, which stands in here for imperial America.
The postmodernists haven’t done any better than the anti-imperialists with regard to Islamist zealotry. Remember Michel Foucault’s apology for the brutality of the Iranian revolution: Iran doesn’t “have the same regime of truth as ours.”17 This version of cultural relativism has become a commonplace, as we can see in the case of Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, a lovely account of cultural subversion in an Islamist state. In exile in the United States, Nafisi told an interviewer in Boston: “I very much resent it in the West when people from—maybe with all the good intentions or from a progressive point of view—keep telling me, ‘It’s their culture.’ . . . It’s like saying, the culture of Massachusetts is burning witches. . . . There are aspects of culture which are really reprehensible. . . . We shouldn’t accept them.”18 Those well-intentioned and progressive people were probably advocates of a radical multiculturalism, which might well allow the burning of witches so long as it didn’t happen in Massachusetts.
The strongest postmodern defense of Islamic radicalism comes from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who argue that Islamism is itself a postmodern project: “The postmodernity of fundamentalism has to be recognized primarily in its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony—and in this regard Islamic fundamentalism is indeed the paradigmatic case.” And again: “Insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful rejection of the world market, we might think of it as the first postmodern revolution.”19 Is it cruel of me to point out how eager the Iranians are these days to rejoin the world market?
All these left responses to Islamist zealots—identification, support, sympathy, apology, tolerance, and avoidance—look very strange if we consider the actual content of their ideology. Jihadi opposition to “the West” should provoke serious worry on the left before any other response. Boko Haram began with an attack on “Western-style” schools, and other Islamist groups have undertaken similar attacks, especially on schools for girls. Values that the zealots denounce as “Western” are very much in contention here: individual liberty, democracy, gender equality, and religious pluralism. No doubt, Westerners don’t always live in accordance with these values and often fail to defend them when they need defense, but these are values to which Western hypocrisy pays tribute—and which some of us Westerners struggle to uphold. In recent years, Russia and China have sometimes claimed to oppose both Western imperialism and Western values, but these two countries look more like rival imperial powers than opponents of imperialism. While their leaders occasionally resort to value arguments (as when Chinese rulers endorse the Confucian ideal of “harmony”), they don’t seem strongly committed to the values they proclaim. But the Islamists are definitely committed. They have their own large ambitions, but these are highly idealistic ambitions, which leave little room for material interests. Their zealotry is a value zealotry, theologically driven, and it is a real challenge to “Western” values.
But individual liberty, democracy, gender equality, and religious pluralism aren’t really Western values; they are universal values that first appeared in strong, modern versions in Western Europe and the Americas. These are the values that pretty much define the left, which also first appeared in its strong, modern version in Western Europe and the Americas. The left is an eighteenth-century invention, an invention of the secular Enlightenment. There were, of course, people who held potentially leftist positions in all the major religious traditions—pacifists, communitarians, proto-environmentalists, advocates for the poor, even people who believed in equality or, better, who believed in the equal standing before God of all believers (I should probably say, of all male believers). But nothing like the classic left ever existed among Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, or Christians. And the values of the left are those “Western” values, taken very seriously. So the opposition to those values is really something that the left should confront—and the strongest opposition right now comes from Islamist radicals. And this is the very reason that many leftists are reluctant to confront the Islamist radicals.
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