Yoginder Sikand, a scholar whose transnational work on Islamist movements is what I’m most familiar with, has an interesting article on Hindu followers of Imam Husayn. The piece is mostly historical, but the last paragraph is interesting: The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. The younger generation abandoning their ancestral heritage, often now seen as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can a comfortable liminality be sustained, and ambiguous identities seem crushed under the relentless pressure to conform to the logic of neatly demarcated ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities. And…
That’s a great article, and it brings up something I have said often in the past–the sadism that brings people to commit violent acts is prior to any religious or theological concept created to justify it. It’s not that religious people are violent, it’s that violent people have learned to hide behind religion.
I’ve elaborated a bit on my own blog. Incidentally, have you been invited to the Progressive Faith Blog Con?